By Rev. Norman Lade, M.A.
[Address delivered to the Adelaide Round Table Sociological Society at Parkin College, June 7, 1935]
Introduction.
To discuss adequately, and to appraise fairly, the social effects of any religious movement demands, as a preliminary condition, some investigation of the historical roots from which the particular movement sprang. History cannot be divided arbitrarily into well-defined sections whose boundaries can be accurately ascertained. Life itself is rather, to use a Bergsonian analogy, a swift flowing stream which reflective thought has conventionally congealed into solid forms for the purpose of historical criticism. In examining that part of the stream we define as the Evangelical Movement of John Wesley, we must realize that whatever fresh elements and quality it may reveal in its composition, it bears much cargo from higher up the historical stream, and its source probably lies back at least two centuries. To take cognizance of its antecedents and their influence upon its life is not in any way to disparage the definitely original elements in its contribution to the life of England, but rather will ensure that the Methodist Revival does not receive more than its due share of the criticism justly levelled at the Church of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for its amazing lack of a sense of social justice.
From the earliest age Christianity has inherited from its Founder a conviction that the love and service of God were inextricably bound up with the love and service of His human family, that the ills of body and estate were definitely hostile to the purpose of the Father, and that the Kingdom of Heaven, whose establishment was the goal of Christ's mission, involved the full development, the physical as well as the spiritual healing of mankind. The conversion of individuals and the reform of the social order can neither of them be realized without the other, and the two processes must be pursued side by side. To set them in antithesis and insist that one or the other is the Christian's sole concern, is to fall into serious error. Such a conviction, however, as Canon C. E. Raven points out,* though a platitude to us, is in reality somewhat of a novelty. "It is indeed a consequence," he says, "a sadly delayed consequence of that greatest of landmarks in man's secular history — the Industrial Revolution." Yet this conviction is not altogether a novelty. In the Middle Ages it expressed itself in devoted service to the afflicted, and in a real and not unsuccessful effort to secure social justice; to prevent the exploitation of the weak, to regulate the conditions and control the rewards of industry, to direct the relationships and emphasise the responsibilities of all classes in the community. The feudal system, at its zenith, was an attempt to order human society upon a Christian basis. However strongly we may criticise, says Raven, the moral failure of the hierarchy and the corruption of Pre-Reformation churchmanship, the insistence upon the need for corporate righteousness and the efforts of multitudes of Christians to conform to its demands are worthy of study and of admiration.
At the Reformation, however, the religious change reflected, to some extent, the rise of a new social order. The belief in individual liberty, giving rise on the religious side to the movement for toleration, and on the economic side to the acquiescence in unrestricted competition, gradually demolished the ancient fabric. "Liberty," says Raven, "tended to overshadow the other two members of the democratic triad, Equality and Fraternity. The rights of man were interpreted from a strongly individualistic point of view."
At the time of Wesley and the industrial revolution, the idea of social justice had been restricted to an insistence upon certain principles of personal morality. The attempt to enforce Christian standards in corporate life was abandoned implicity by the mass of citizens, and avowedly by their spokesmen, the advocates of "laisser faire." The typical mental attitude of the early eighteenth century was that of acceptance as distinct from wonder —curiosity—challenge. "The sense of strain or tension between man and his environment was markedly absent," says Dimond,* "from the consciousness of the aristocracy, and, in the main also, from the mind of the intellectual and literary classes." For Dr. Johnson and his contemporaries the world was good enough, and their aim was to preserve, not to enlarge or improve it. The middle classes cultivated a very individualistic form of Protestantism, based on Bible and sermon reading and private prayer, which they found quite compatible with the best sort of worldliness. Above them floated a sceptical aristocracy. Below lay a neglected heathendom, the peasants and working classes, these showing a certain docility and submissiveness under the crass injustice of their political and economic disabilities.
I The Church and Social Ethics in the Eighteenth Century.
We may now turn to an examination of the general attitude of the Churches of England to social conditions at the time of the Methodist Revival. R. H. Tawney, both in his "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" and his "Acquisitive Society," makes a very scathing criticism of the Church, which seems generally justified by the testimony of most students of this century. He maintains that it is almost superfluous to examine the teaching of the Church of England as to social ethics, "For it brings no distinctive contribution, and, except by a few eccentrics, the very conception of the Church as an independent moral authority whose standards may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions has been abandoned." Deprived of its own vitality by its loss of independence, it had allowed its officers to become, by the eighteenth century, the servile clients of a half-pagan aristocracy to whose contemptuous indulgence they looked for preferment. Apart from certain groups and certain questions the Church accepted the prevalent social philosophy and adapted its teaching to it. The age in which political theory was cast in the mould of religion had yielded to one in which religious thought was no longer an imperious master but a docile pupil. It ceased for some 200 years to speak its mind, and, as a natural consequence it ceased to have a mind to speak. As an organisation for common worship it survived. As an organ of collective thought and of a common will it became negligible.
Tawney then goes on to say that had the Nonconformist societies taken up the testimony which the Church of England had dropped, the Christian tradition of social ethics might have continued to find an organ of expression. Among individual Puritans such as Baxter it did survive. But the very "circumstances of their origin disposed them to lay only a light emphasis upon the social aspects of Christianity. They had grown up as the revolt of the spirit against an overgrown formalism —an artificial and insincere unity. They drew their support largely from the earnest and sober piety of the trading and commercial classes. Individualist in their faith, they were individualist in their interpretation of social morality. Insisting that the essence of religion was the contact of the individual soul with its Maker, they regarded the social order and its consequences, not as the instrument through which grace is mediated, nor as steps in the painful progress by which the soul climbs to a fuller vision, but as something external—alien and irrelevant— something at best indifferent to personal salvation, and at worst the sphere of the letter that killeth and of reliance on works which ensnares the spirit into the slumber of death."
II The Individualism of the Revival.
Such was the general attitude of the Church when the Methodist Revival, under Wesley, swept through England, and it must be confessed that the immediate movement itself did little directly to effect a change. Methodism inherited the individualism of the century, and as far as the content of its gospel was concerned still failed to emphasise the corporate aspect of religious life in its relation to the conditions of human society and environment. But it was essentially a movement among the masses of people—the depressed classes of England which the economic effects of the Industrial Revolution were making more numerous and more depressed, and it consequently drastically challenged the social order, although it may have had no direct remedies for the ghastly sores and sicknesses of that order. It forced upon the privileged classes a sense of some responsibility towards the lower orders by the preaching of the universality of the Gospel and the inherent worth of every personality in the sight of God, a responsibility which issued in a burst of philanthropy, illustrated by the lives, for example, of John Howard and William Wilberforce. The Evangelical Movement cannot be accused of merely a weak and apathetic compromise with the injustices and inequalities of the social system, but rather of a one-sided view of human personality, which resulted in what to us seems an amazing other-worldliness with its natural indifference to an earthly and temporal environment.
It began as a mission to the neglected masses of the people of England, a mission devoted to the personal redemption of the individual. The preachers of the Revival saw thousands of God's children dying in sin, with no hope of eternal life. Their pressing business was to "preach Scriptural holiness" throughout the land, to save souls. They saw the diseased souls rather than diseased bodies; they saw men forfeiting by their sin and ignorance the glories of an eternal world, rather than the frightful and appalling degradation of their earthly home. This exaggerated emphasis upon the salvation of the individual to the neglect of the awful social conditions in which the individual concerned might be living was certainly a very partial appreciation of the true significance of the message of the Founder of Christianity who taught us to pray, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This Gospel of the Evangelical Revival, emptied of most of its social content, led to an amazing toleration by some of its best Christians of the abuses and cruelties of the time.
J. L. and B. Hammond, in their classic works on the social conditions of the fifty years before the first Reform Bill in 1832, trenchantly expose the puzzling complacency, of even famous humanitarians such as Wilberforce himself, with which the wretched conditions of the lower orders were regarded. In "The Town Labourer" they note that "the resignation of the upper class world to the torture of children and the frank renunciation of all hope of a decent or civilized life on this side of the grave for the majority of people in the new industrial towns, are not to be attributed solely to the atmosphere of capitalists and landlords, engrossed in their achievements or their gains, or to a blinding theory of wealth or to the incapacity of a race bewildered by new and stupendous problems. We must take into account the way in which men and women, capable of self-devotion and sympathy, were brought through the associations of religion and the inspiration of the Evangelical Revival to regard the world about them."
III The Conscience of the Rich.
In a chapter, "The Conscience of the Rich," the authors of the above volume very closely analyse the particular spirit in social politics produced by the Evangelical Movement in its relation to the attitude and general conduct of the upper-class world.
The devout Christian, confronted with the spectacle of wrong and injustice, may draw either of two contrary conclusions:—
(1) "In the eyes of his religion the miner or weaver is just as important as the landlord or the cotton-lord. Clearly, then, one will argue, it is the duty of the Christian State to prevent any class, however obscure and trivial, from sinking into degrading conditions of life. If society is so organised as to impose such conditions, the Christian will demand the reform of its institutions. For such minds Christianity provides a standard by which to judge government, the industrial and economic order, the life of society, and the way in which it distributes its wealth and opportunities."
Generally speaking, this is the position to which the Christian Church has arrived today, if somewhat tardily and hesitatingly.
(2) "But some minds drew a different moral from the equality that Christianity teaches, namely, that every human soul is a reality, but the important thing about a human soul is its final destiny, and that destiny does not depend on the circumstances of this life. The world has been created on a plan of apparent injustice by a Providence that combined infinite power with infinite compassion. The arrangements that seem so capricious are really the work of that Power. But the same Power has given to the men and women who seem to live in such bitter surroundings an escape from its cares by the exercise of their spiritual faculties. It is those faculties that make all men equal. Here they stand, in Marcus Aurelius's phrase, for a brief space between the two eternities, and no misery nor poverty can prevent a soul from winning happiness in the world to come."
In such a point of view is revealed the cause of that amazing lack of a sense of social justice discovered in the churchmen and philanthropists of this period of England's history. For them, so often, Christianity was not a standard by which to judge the institutions of society, but a reason for accepting them. For them Christianity meant not the criticism but the support of current economic teaching and principles of government. They regarded Christianity as presenting not a charter for improving the conditions of life of the masses, but a call to teach the people to read their Bibles and to prepare themselves with rejoicing for the better world beyond the grave.
A striking illustration of this attitude among the religious and devout souls of the upper classes who were influenced by the Revival, may be seen in the lives of William Wilberforce and Hannah More.
In 1779 Wilberforce urged the sisters More to attempt the moral reclamation of certain villages. They started Sunday schools and Women's Benefit Clubs in several villages. These they managed despotically, and they used to pay periodical visits to see that their teachers and pupils had not lapsed from virtue and Bible reading, and to address the villagers in a series of charges. The "Mendip Annals" give illustration after illustration of the exploitation that was proceeding of the mass of a race by the classes holding political and economic power. Hannah More speaks in her writings of wages, 1s. per diem; 200 people in 19 hovels, "not even able to raise a sixpence or provide a cup of broth to save a life." The remarkable fact is that these women put themselves to great trouble and discomfort out of pity for these villages, and yet there is not a single reflection on the persons or system responsible for these conditions. It never seemed to cross the minds of these philanthropists that it was desirable that men and women should have decent wages or decent homes, or that there was something wrong with the arrangements of a society that left the mass of people in this plight. The employers and gentry are blamed only for their want of sympathy with the efforts of the More sisters to teach religion; but nowhere in these writings are they blamed for ill-treating their dependants.
In the world of politics the same attitude is apparent. For a man like Wilberforce, who devoted his life and gifts to a great humane cause, Christianity was simply one of the sanctions of the existing order. He was largely responsible, claim the Hammonds, for the degradation of industrial life, due to the savage measures taken by the upper classes to prevent working men from protecting their standards of living by defensive organisations, e.g., the Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800, in which Wilberforce took a leading part.
In his work, "A Practical View of the System of Christianity," which was immensely popular, he has something to say on the relation of religion to the economic circumstances of society. There he explains that "Christianity makes the inequalities of the social scale less galling to the lower orders, that it teaches them to be diligent, humble, patient; that it reminds them 'that their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God' —that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the present state of things is very short; that the objects about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are not worth the contest; that the peace of mind which religion offers indiscriminately to all ranks affords more true satisfaction than all the expensive pleasures, which are beyond the poor man's reach; that —in this view the poor have the advantage—if their superiors enjoy more abundant comforts, they are also exposed to many temptations from which the inferior classes are happily exempted; that 'having food and raiment they should be there with content,' since their situation in life, with all its evil, is better than they have deserved at the hand of God; and, finally, all human distinctions will soon be done away, and the true followers of Christ will all, as children of the same Father, be alike admitted to the possession of the same heavenly inheritance. Such are the blessed effects of Christianity on the temporal well-being of political communities." Wilberforce, writing to Pitt about this book, described this chapter as "the basis of all politics."
It was perhaps not unnatural, comments Hammond, that a religion that seemed to reconcile men and women to the hardships of life by promising them a happiness that, far from being prejudiced was actually enhanced by their disadvantages in this world, came to be thought of by the upper classes when the French Revolution broke into their peace of mind as designed for this very purpose. One distinguished churchman affirmed that the poor were really much better off than the rich, even allowing for religion, which smooths all inequalities because it unfolds a prospect which makes all earthly distinctions nothing.
In 1793 Paley, the moralist, wrote "Reasons for Contentment," addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public. In this paper Paley showed, to his own satisfaction, that there was scarcely any respect in which the poor were not more fortunate than the rich.
Their apparent disadvantages were unreal. "Frugality," he says, "is a pleasure—the exercise of attention and contrivance which, whenever it is successful, produces satisfaction." In 1798 Arthur Young published a paper, "An Inquiry into the State of Mind among the Lower Classes," to plead for the building of more churches. "Where are the poor to learn the doctrines of that truly excellent religion which exhorts to content and to submission to the higher powers?"
All such and similar writings that might be quoted seem to the modern religious mind which has grasped, however imperfectly, something of the social implications of the Christian Gospel just cant and nauseating humbug. These writers, lived in an age when one Englishman in seven was a pauper, and yet they agreed that more churches must be built to preach submission to the higher powers, and the poor must be taught their duties by Combination Laws, etc.
IV Positive Social Effects
We have discussed at length the negative effects of the Evangelical Revival upon the social system of the century, especially in regard to the conscience of the rich. It produced, also, certain positive effects through the very individualistic emphasis of its preaching, an emphasis which has been shown to be so tragically one-sided. It set out to revive personal religion, to make better men and women, and it succeeded, with the result that there was in the latter half of the eighteenth and in the early part of the nineteenth century a marked awakening of the humanitarian spirit. Men were produced who, though like Wesley they might enjoin obedience to the higher powers, and like Wilberforce uphold the social status quo, yet from the sheer individualistic goodness and uprightness of their hearts sought to bring relief and amelioration to many of the social sores of their day. It is true that philanthropy cannot always be equated with social justice. "Though I give my goods to feed the poor, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing." It is true, also, that the philanthropy of the rich helped to reconcile the conscience of the upper classes to a servile standard for the poor. Nevertheless, the Methodist Revival was the chief inspiration of the immense philanthropic enterprise which is so characteristic of our modern times. It raised hospitals and endowed charities. It produced John Howard and the movement in 1774 which reformed the atrocious conditions of the prisons. It started that stream of missionaries to Africa and Asia which is flowing still. It accomplished the abolition of the slave trade. It has been the mainspring of the general improvement in the moral standards of society and of the movements for social reform in many directions. With its emphasis upon the equal value of every individual in the eyes of God, though temporarily regarding that value as belonging to the next world rather than this, it succeeded in challenging class or racial superiority as a permanent principle in God's universe. We may admit the challenge has often been half-hearted, timorous and compromising, but the challenge was implicit in the message of John Wesley, and later generations have made the challenge explicit, more direct and more inevitable.
V The Revival and the People.
We have seen the social effects of the revival from the point of view of, and in regard to, the attitude of the class that possessed political and economic power in England. I desire to devote the remaining pages of this paper to the effect of the revival on the people to whom its message was most directly addressed, insofar as that effect produced certain social changes. Through the preaching of the Wesleys, Whitefield and their co-workers, religion became the possession and the absorbing province of the masses. "It is not surprising," says Hammond "that the sleepy and good-natured Establishment of the eighteenth century, with its languid and polite piety, its sensible and conventional sermons, and its free pagan life, dreaded and resented this outburst of passionate preaching in the fields and streets." Macaulay has given us a vivid picture of the timber or coal-heaver who, on finding salvation, determined to devote his life to the teaching of religion, and learning that there was no place for him in the Establishment, left a Church with whose beliefs and government he had no quarrel to found a little Bethel on a little Ebenezer. And for the miner or the weaver the chapel, with its appeal to the emotions, and its preachers who drew on the resources of the Scriptures for their vivid and passionate pictures, perhaps above all with its hymns and congregational singing, took the place that the theatre, literature, operas occupied in the lives of others.
Thus a new interest was created for the victims of an unjust and oppressive social order. Having accepted such order as inevitable in this life, they centred their aspirations and ideals in another and more glorious realm, where the redeemed child of God would walk in freedom, unshackled by the obvious chains of a very poor and unsatisfying world of labour and tears. To that end they ordered their spiritual life, and a new community arose, a community of redeemed souls. They met in class-meetings and societies for the mutual culture of their lives. Simple people who had no say in the political government of the country learned, however, the art of community self-government, and their class leaders and local preachers were the forbears of the Trade Union leaders of the days to come.
At first, of course, their acquiescence in the political status was disappointing to the more eager heralds of reform, and the Methodists were often regarded by early Trades Unionists as stumbling-blocks in the way of industrial and political emancipation. Certainly they were alarmed at the violence of the French Revolution, and their particular contribution to the English character was in the direction of stability rather than rebellion. It is probable that the distinctive nature of the Revival did much to settle the seething discontent of the masses in England by the provision of new outlets for their legitimate but suppressed instincts, and so saved England from the bloody violence of the French uprising. This is not to say that the Evangelical Revival was the enemy of social change, but simply that the social implications of the Christian Gospel had not been realized at that time, and are not fully recognised by many even in our day. The influence of the movement for political reform was not immediate, but it was indirect and ultimate. Later, many of the Methodists who had received their training in leadership and self-expression in the class-meeting became effective leaders in the Trades Union movement. Moreover, whilst the expression, "the soul of transformation is the transformation of the soul" is a half-truth and can be made the excuse of the Church's neglect of social problems, the problem of environment and community relationships, it is still half the truth. There is no doubt that there has been no permanent reformation of social conditions which has not sprung from the religious experience of individuals.
VI The Implication for Today.
However impatient we may be with the tardy recognition of religion as the very inspiration and standard of social life and corporate effort, that recognition is the inevitable swing of the pendulum from the tremendous revival of personal religion effected by the Evangelical movement. Whilst regretting the tragic delay of the swing back, we must be grateful for the fact of the initial swing in religious life from the dead centre to the amazing renewal of healthy, vigorous, holy living. Without that initial movement the later political and social reforms of the nineteenth century would not have been possible.
To what extent the rise of democracy in England and elsewhere, the philanthropic movements, the new interest in education, the sense of responsibility and trusteeship witnessed in Empire government, to what extent these developments owe their inspiration to the Methodist Revival of the eighteenth century it will always be difficult to compute. It is certain that in them can be witnessed that heightened sense of the value of the human personality and of the equality of men in the sight of God and of the importance of human redemption and freedom which the Revival brought to the English-speaking race. It is for us then in our day, whose pressing social complexities have challenged us to implement in community life the principles of that personal religion which John Wesley revived, it is for us to complete his work and to seek a Kingdom of God which will include the whole life of His children—a Kingdom of God whose will shall be done not only in heaven but on earth.
—— •"Social Justice," "Outline of Christianity," , vol. iv, p. 134.
—— * "Psychology of the Methodist Revival.
Australian Christian Commonwealth (SA 1935, )
No comments:
Post a Comment