The Social Drift in Modern Life.

 LECTURE BY REV. CANON PIKE.

By modern life I mean, in these remarks, the life of the European Civilisation from about the middle of the latter half of the 18th century, down to the present ; and by the Social Drift, I mean the general tendency of  social life during that period and at present. I shall venture to circumscribe the subject a little further. In certain European countries the leading tendencies of progress are not being displayed in any degree that is likely to help us. They would enter into a discussion of this sort mainly as illustrations of deficiency, rather than as examples of the principles I hope to set before you; and they belong to an order of things, really outside the range of the progressive forces of modern life. The countries I mean are those debouching on the Mediterranean Sea, countries which, from being the centre and pivot of the world's activities for many centuries have gradually fallen into a subordinate place in men's affairs. It is to the races of north-western Europe and of North America, that the task has devolved of carrying on aggressively the advance work of human society; and in the Anglo-Saxon branch the forces operating have their freest play.

 The beginning of an epoch in the world's life is marked by the liberation into the active affairs of men of certain principles of pure thought. By way of illustrating this fact allow me to refer you to the greatest epoch in the world's history. The Christian era was ushered in by the spread of certain new principles of thought, and corresponding ideals of life. A new standard of conduct, based upon the idea of the infinite value of the human soul, and the proclamation of the brotherhood of man, backed by a sanction of extraordinary strength; these are the starting points of that unprecedented uplifting of mankind, and the secret of those unparalleled advantages enjoyed by the races now associated with the name of the Christian Religion. Similarly, after the great upheaval of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, known as the Reformation, there came to be liberated into the life of the active and energetic people of Northern Europe, philosophic principles, which being ultimately accepted by influential bodies of men exercised a profound determinative effect upon the life of the world. For the sake of convenience, and because their names stand out most prominently as giving identity to two opposite systems of pure thought, Emmanuel Kant and David Hume may be accepted as the directing minds of the new movements and forces. Of course it is impossible to compress the systems of these great thinkers into the space at our disposal just now; but a sufficiently clear idea of them may be gathered from a brief statement to enable us to recognise them as they display their influence in the social life of our time. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, in his treatise on " Human Nature" conceives the contents of that nature to consist simply and solely of sensations which stand related to nothing but what is comprehended within the range of experiences. In other words, man is what the past of the individual and the race has made him, no more and no less. The impressions made by Nature upon the senses and the recollections of these impressions, these things added up are the full account of human life. His own words are: " We are nothing but the series of our impressions and ideas." We have no direct concern with the philosophical consequences of such a doctrine as this, except that we must try to understand its bearings upon the social movement to which it gave force. You will see, however, that it means that any human being living in the present with all his faculties and instincts, however mean or however magnificent, is what he is simply because his progenitors bequeathed to him the nervous system which he now possesses. The explanation of him is to be found in the past; he is an aggregation of survivals. What we call his morals, his ideas of right and wrong, are the result of calculation as to what is likely to prove useful his own interests, well-understood, and regarded in an enlightened way, are the standard of conduct. Whatever contributes to the advancing of these interests is right; whatever fails to do that, is wrong. Hume's words are: "Whatever produces satisfaction is virtue; everything which gives uneasiness in human actions is called vice." He throws these principles into the social centre by saying that in the case of that "injustice which is so far away from our own interests as to in no way affect us, it still displeases us because we consider it as prejudicial to human society ;" but that still leaves our own sensations, our interests, our pleasures or displeasures, " what we consider," as the final court of appeal in moral questions. It makes Pain and Pleasure the dictators of what we ought or ought not to do ; and it was quite logical for one of Hume's successors to say that " the talisman of arrogancy, indolence, and ignorance," "an authoritative impostor," was the word " ought," as understood to imply the rights of Conscience. Hume had to deal with human nature on its social side, with man as a gregarious animal, living in communities, organised into societies, states, and nations. Here again his theory of human nature applies. The community has no real existence, for it " is simply the sum of the interest of the several members who compose it." The individual members are by nature quite independent of each other, being connected together by a mere accidental juxtaposition; and they are therefore in nature driven to maintain their independence and rights at all costs. The interests of society are no more than the interests of its component members for the time being; and the ruling factor of social life is the rivalry of interests between those members. In other words economics is the essence of all life and progress.

 Emmanuel Kant stands out as the great exponent of a quite opposite theory of life, the influence of which is in many directions neutralising the effect of Hume's doctrines. He, also, began with an analysis of Human Nature. He distinguished in it a quality or conviction which belongs to an order of things far beyond the range of things seen or experienced, and therefore outside the limits of man's understanding. This quality or conviction is to be regarded as having truth for its basis, and also as being a vital factor in the determination of our conduct as regards the interests with which we are surrounded. This is the uplifting factor of human life. Man is constituted by something altogether outside mere experiences past or present, and is related to ends quite beyond his own interests. What Hume calls our impressions and the recollections of these impressions and which we know by the common name of experiences, are not Kant tells us, received upon the mind like writing on a blank tablet. The mind itself contributes to every impression it receives. There is something in the mind which meets this something falling into it. Our experiences are not merely the result of an inherited nervous system. They are created by the co-operation of the native contents of the mind, and the impressions which come to us. In the moral realm he finds that the mind contains a "categorical imperative," an absolute authority which bids us do or forbear. An unrestrained "Thou shalt," or "Thou shalt not," which knows no "if" or " but," speaks the thing that man is bound to do ; and every individual act is the expression of this universal principle of duty. So far does he carry this principle of the moral " must," that he says the mind informs us that it ought to be absolutely triumphant in us, we should yield it perfect obedience, and be perfectly virtuous. But, as in this life man never is, nor can be this, we must be immortal ; and so stand related to Infinity, which is God. The social bearings of these doctrines are manifold, but two outstanding points must be noticed. The exceeding great demand put upon man by his moral nature, that he shall become perfectly virtuous, can only be met under conditions of freedom. Any limitation put upon freedom is of the nature of a hindrance to the fulfilment of the great "Ought," the discharge of the infinite responsibility. Men must always be at full liberty to strive after and attain the highest virtue and the greatest happiness, virtue being the condition of which happiness is the crown. Freedom, therefore, is the constant factor of that Social State which flows out from the Kantian philosophy, in regard to its moral bearings. But Kant also conceives man as being related to the Infinite, which is God; and his relationship is the overmastering and dominating one. Society is constituted through it. It is no aggregation, or accidental correlation of individual interests which may war against each other and of which the strongest takes the palm. It is grounded upon a supreme responsibility to the Eternal. Our social relationships and duties are no shrewd calculations of personal interests; but solemn duties owed to one another and to the Infinite Personality. Kant founds his theory of Society upon three fundamental principles: Freedom, Immortality, and God.

 Quite another school of social teaching draws its vitality from these principles of warring interests. Germany is the home of this development, too; and the writings of Nietzsche fairly represent its trend. He draws sword on behalf of the upper classes, just as Marx leads the proletariat. The real masters, the caste designed by nature to rule, have, he says, been robbed of their rights by the sentimental philanthropy and religion to which they have submitted. To have allowed themselves to surrender power into the hands of their inferiors, and to have trifled with the notion of a pretended equality is in the last degree absurd. He would have the ruling classes renounce the Christian religion, and to emancipate themselves from its narcotic morality. It has enabled the serf to enlist sympathy, to obtain votes, to gain the upper hand. All the talk about Christian sympathy and brotherly love has resulted in the mawkish, contemptible consideration of a superior for his natural inferiors. The State is fast becoming a specious arrangement by which the best men are kept out of their own. Let us have no more of it. " A new commandment I give an to you; Become hard, my brethren.'' Put away parleying about the rights of man, which are the empty phrases of an effete religion. " We are in possession, we are the strong ; the best belongs to me and mine, and if men give us nothing, then we take them; the best food, the purest sky, the strongest though the fairest women." Evidently Hume's and Mill's postulates and axioms can be made to do service in more directions than one. Both the Marxean Socialism and this recent Nietzschian individualism proceed from identical premisses, which account for man as a series of impressions and ideas, for society as an arrangement by which the unrestrained pursuit of enlightened self-interest is to bring about harmony between the interests of the individual and those of the State. This war of interests with all it has involved, good and bad, is a characteristic of the social drift in modern life.

 Another and apparently opposing force has been at work collaterally and co-incidently. At scarcely any moment have the principles of Utilitarianism been permitted their full logical embodiment in practice. There is a class of facts for which unrestrained competition makes no provision, and which is left out of reckoning by the doctrine that the State should restrict its intervention in matters of business to the narrowest limits. Unrestricted private enterprise was itself the cause of a great mass of the suffering which Mill thought was so unpleasant to behold. It has been found that business will always adjust itself to the level of those qualities which contribute most directly to success under the conditions of unregulated competition. A suppositional case will illustrate my meaning. Ten men compete in tne market for the supply of cotton. Nine of them have a profound regard for those moral considerations which forbid such things as the employment of child labor, the overworking of employees, and the giving of a wage below the living standard. But the tenth man has no moral sense. He looks after nothing but large sales, good profits, and a broad market. What is the result? He comes into free competition with the others, and as buyers only trouble about qualify and prices, the nine can choose between losing the market, and adopting the immoral man's methods. Since the accepted utilitarian standard of conduct demands no consideration for any interests but one's own, there is nothing in the nature of free competition to forbid them. And thus business tends to be dragged down to the lowest level. I need not tell you that this is no imaginary thing, nor need I dilate upon the terrible social evils to which it gave rise. The growth of those evils to proportions calculated to alarm the most phlegmatic, marked the utter failure of the teachings of the school of Mill to bring about that fixed and unchanging state of things in which there would be an equilibrium between the interests of the individual and of the State, an equilibrium of perfected happiness for all. As wealth increased men continued to decay.

 Very early in the century the principle of non-intervention was violated in obedience to another imperative demand. In the year 1802 the State forbad the employment of apprenticed pauper children for more than twelve hours a day. Nothing was said about an age limit for child workers, nor in fact was anything done for any but those of the pauper class. It took nearly twenty years for the State to muster up courage enough to forbid the employment of children under nine years of age, and to fix a twelve hours' day for all workers under sixteen years of age. In the thirties, the Manchester capitalists vigorously and successfully protested against State intervention in the direction of regulating the conditions of free adult labour. But from that time down to the present a long list of measures have marked the State's sense of its right to interfere in the relations between labour and capital. That is not the only important change that has taken place. Perhaps the most striking result of the development of the principle of voluntary association for social ends which was so strongly advocated by John Stuart Mill, has been the growth of trades-unionism. These organisations are in theory voluntary associations; and they have brought to bear upon the competitive spirit of the time the whole force of the combined will of the working classes. Following out the utilitarian rule, they have pursued the interests of the labourer in competition and struggle against the interests of the employer, with a view to raising the standards of living. For a great many years this principle was followed, with the result that frequent strikes, lock-outs, and other attendant circumstances, indicated the war of interests that always raged in the existing social order. Within the past few years the trades-unions have ceased to confine their attention to the voluntary method. They have largely adopted the principle of State intervention for this purpose of procuring their ends, and have consequently entered the arena of politics with a view to capturing the forces of the State to enable them to better their conditions. In that transition they have crossed the boundary line that separates free competition from State interference.

 Two other forms of the application of the principle of unrestricted private enterprise need to be noticed before we have in view the gigantic forces with which the principle opposed to the Utilitarian doctrine has to grapple. Acting on the lines of voluntary association these have been formed, in several great commercial countries, but especially in the United States, great combinations of capital for the purpose of controlling the whole of some particular industrial and commercial activity; and so to form a virtual monopoly. The first of these was the Standard Oil Trust, organised in 1882; and since then most of the great industries of the world have been drawn more or less into the vortex. The aim of these combines is to prevent the waste of competition, to control markets to become possessed of the world's living resources for the benefit of the wealthier classes. It is a voluntary association in the interests of a class, unconsciously obeying the new commandment of Nietzsche. The owners of the millions of capital involved are in the business solely for the purpose of making all the money they can. I need not say to what extent such combinations may become able to direct the forces of the State. It is significant that hitherto all the efforts made in the United States to check their growth have failed ; and we have the result of monopolies existing for the exploiting of the people, in defiance of cities and states. One writer, an experienced United States politician, says: "I see enough every day to satisfy me that the petitions, prayers, protestations, and profanity of sixty millions of people are not as strong to control legislative action as the influence and effort of the head of a single combine with fifty million dollars at his back."

 That the drift of things indicated by the existence of these great associations is not calculated to end in the amelioration of the conditions against which the social legislation of England has been directed, will become more apparent when we remember that the competitive agencies of trade and commerce are rapidly overleaping international boundaries. The Lancashire cotton spinner is competing in the world's market with the cheap labour of India. Japan is rapidly being brought into the arena, and is entering the lists in China, against the world's industries. What the international aspect of this question implies may be faintly seen in the light of one small matter. The coaling of a Japanese trading steamship in its home ports is done by young girls. A fringe of rising platforms four or five in number surrounds the ship, the lowest being just above the level of the sampan which brings the coal alongside. On the platforms stand girls, in lines of steps above. The coal is filled into baskets, and these are passed from girl to girl until they reach their destination. The work is done with such rapidity and skill that between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon a thousand tons of coal will pass from the sampans to the ship. There you have the international aspects of free competition in a nutshell; and a fair basis for the settlement of such questions as Freetrade, Preferentialism, White Australia, and many other social problems.

 I spoke just now, of the beginnings of those violations of the principle of non-intervention by the State which have gone so far to better the conditions, and raise the standards, of life in Europe. The mere narration of its history is not a matter that need engage our attention. We are more concerned with the forces and causes that lay behind it. It has brought about a condition of things of which hardly any one in these days openly disapproves. No matter which way a man's personal interests might lie he is ready enough when speaking in the hearing of his fellow men, to agree that the movement that has brought women out of coal mines, has prohibited infant labour, has regulated the working day so as to bring it within reasonable limits, has made sweating offensive to every respectable citizen, and the sweater an object of contempt amongst men, not to mention a multitude of other changes of the same kind, has proved a priceless benefit to society. It is a movement which is still in progress, and which will be the more effectively directed the better it is understood.

 For the principles which have underlain the forces of the movement we must look to the doctrines of Emmanuel Kant, and the general teachings of the Christian religion. Kant's conception of man as a being standing related, not merely to his own past, a series of impressions and ideas, but to infinite and eternal things, sheds upon him a dignity, and opens to him the vision of a destiny, quite beyond the range of mere personal interests. The haunting sense of responsibility to these infinite and eternal things has been a great fund of social force for man's uplifting. Gleamings of immortality have visited the minds of men, and have brought the significance of this infinite relationship within the bounds of immediate duties to be done. These natural contents of the human mind have been ratified and endorsed by those teachings of Christianity which have brought men's spirits into communication with the Eternal God. And the consequence has been that wherever that religion has been really understood and applied, it has deepened the sense of responsibility, stimulated the desire for freedom, softened and developed the sympathies, and created a rich reserve of social energy.

 It has been popularly imagined that no concession has ever been made by the ruling classes to those beneath them until it has been wrung from them by fear. I say nothing of the reluctance with which they have sometimes surrendered their prescriptive privileges; but, had their determination to hold them been as brutal as is sometimes represented, it must be remembered that they could have remained fortified and invincible to this day. The passing of the Reform Bill of 1833 may be cited as an almost classical Instance of this confusion. The Bill was opposed by the Lords until the London mob demonstrated its seriousness by pulling down Hyde Park railings; and it is argued that the surrender of the Upper House showed their fear of their own lives. Now the ruling classes of that time were the masters of all the material forces in England, and could command them at will. Two thousand years ago the uprising of a mob would have been suppressed at all costs by the use of these material forces, and it would have been found that the classes identified with the rebels, instead of having their burdens lightened or their freedom widened, would have felt an extra turn of the screw which held them down. What made the difference ? The position in 1833 confronting the rulers of England was either to surrender the demand for Reform, or call out the military forces. The latter course involved consequences from which every man shrank in horror. The softening of character, the sense of responsibility to a higher Power, had undermined the power of selfishness, so that when the grim alternative came to be faced, the opposition to the people's wishes melted away. The party in power was rendered incapable of wielding its strength in its own interests by its own repugnance to suffering, misery, wrong, and degradation. The history of the social legislation of our times, which is recognised as progressive, is " simply a history of concessions demanded and obtained by that party which is through its position inherently the weaker from the party which as the holder of power is unmistakably stronger. There is no break in the series; no exception to the rule."

 I am sure you will immediately recognise the entire compatibility between the doctrines I have associated with the name of Kant and the movements of social reform in the past; and you will find it impossible to reconcile those movements with the teachings of the other school. In fact, so violently are the Utilitarian principles opposed to the forces of the movement, that even such men as Cobden and Bright, the leaders of the Manchester school in politics, rigorously and uncompromisingly resisted the factory legislation of the forties. The very apostles of Free trade bitterly opposed the amelioration of the conditions of labour; and for the same reasons as they advocated the opening of the ports. Free corn meant cheap labor; and graphic pictures of starving people touched the heart of England. But, the Factory Acts increased the cost of manufacture, and thus came to be strenuously opposed. The same voice which pleaded for the hungry multitude that it might be fed, cried out that the same well-fed multitude should be worked sixteen hours a day, should be put into the factories at nine years of age, and should be paid for its labor any price it could manage to get. But anything is grist that comes to the Utilitarian mill! There were other voices, however, which appealed to the heart of England, aroused her conscience, and stirred her to undertake the responsibility of lifting from the worker all but the necessary burdens of life. Not from any one section of the people did the response come to the needs of the time. Most of the leaders of the Radical Party in England have been members of the ruling class, men of gentle birth and breeding. Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Arnold, Arnold Toynbee, the Earl of Shaftesbury, these men, foremost in the battle for reform, belonged to the educated and privileged classes. The lines of social and political cleavage have struck right through the strata of English society, leaving people of all ranks on either side. These men have been moved by no narrow ideal of enlightened selfishness, nor attracted by any pursuit of personal advantage. In all their writings, speeches, and acts there throbs the pulse of a strenuous devotion to duty, the warm glow of enlightened sympathy goes out towards their less fortunate fellow creatures, the spirit of noble sacrifice grows out of the sense of their responsibility to the Infinite God; and in their minds there always burned the inspiration of a confident hope that what they did might hasten the coming of the Kingdom of God. Little by little they have struck away the fetters that bound the people. Inch by inch they have widened the areas of freedom. Slowly, and persistently have they striven to endowment and equip the masses of their fellow men with those qualities which will enable them to maintain their freedom, and hold fast the liberty wherewith they have been made free.

 So much for the drift in modern society down to the present. The sketch has been slight, but enough to show the set of the current. You will not expect me to play the part of the prophet. But one or two things are sure. Having set in motion social forces, man loses control of them at once. They are under a law quite independent of human volition. Man becomes their servant, not their master. Thus, the tendencies already existing will continue. The concentric theories of Hume, Bentham, the Mills, and Herbert Spencer stand for permanent facts in life. I do not believe in their philosophies, which are one-sided, narrow, and materialistic. But the gigantic and intense struggle which has been identified with the principle of free competition in trade, but which may go on independently of that principle, is an indispensable factor in human progress. All other things being equal the most strenuous people, classes, races, will rise, while these who display lesser energy will fall in the descending order of their declining effort. If competition is a necessary spur to strenuousness, then without doubt the dominant future lies with the keenest competitors. One thing that emerges from the study of history is that progress is only possible amongst those people who are for ever attempting what lies just beyond their reach ; the attempt strengthens their vitalities, their success spurs them on to higher things. We may devise schemes which will appear to do away with the necessity for the struggle for existence; we may even succeed in so far lessening the necessity for that struggle as to obtain for ourselves comparative ease, and the achievements of the desired ends of life without travail and stress. But no deadlier blow could be struck at our stability than that. The doom of that race is sealed which refuses, for whatever reason, to continually and unremittingly put out the sum total of all its greatest capacities for the accomplishment of some task lying beyond its immediate realizations.

 That is only another way of saying that the meaning and goal of human life lie far beyond itself. During the Christian era there has been liberated into society a vast fund of force which is represented by the word "Duty." The " Ought;" the sanction, of this transcends the material and passing interests of mankind. The strident railing of Bentham, and all the protestations of the Mills, have vainly spent themselves against it. It still remains the supreme incentive to energy. As the years pass by it becomes more closely allied with sympathy, benevolence, and philanthropy. The sternness of the sense of duty is tempered by compassion and softened by the humane feelings. The drift in this direction is unmistakable, and its continuance is assured. A great philosopher has recently said that " truth is the net resultant of contending forces." One is hardly ready to accept such a definition without first submitting it to a searching investigation. As an indication of the probable lines of progress, or the social drift in the immediate future, it is probably not far wide of the mark. The war of contending interests is nowadays very much a thing of class and will probably become more so for a generation or so. The parties tend to sharper divisions, to more definite schemes of crystallization upon extreme principles. But, neither side will get its own way. 'When the critical battles of the campaign are fought, it is likely that the neutralising effect of the struggle will be seen, and the disintegrated forces gathered up in the sweep of those higher movements of feeling, of sympathy, of philanthropy, of justice, and of righteousness, which are becoming more and more the determinative factors of social life. Though every man and every class and community will be compelled to strenuous life, the conditions of the struggle will be such that the door of opportunity will never be barred against any, while every amelioration of needless hardship will bring into the conflict a zest and incentive that will make it a joy. The old world is young yet, and it is writing off the sins of its past. Its eye is bright with hope, beaming with tenderness, clear in the sense of complete reliance upon the Infinite and Eternal God.

Burrangong Argus (NSW : 1904) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article247711006

The Social Effects of the Methodist Revival of the Eighteenth Century

 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, )

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article215837278

Liberalism and Protestantism

 ROOT CAUSES OF "SOCIAL QUESTION" :: LIBERALS REPUDIATE DIVINE AUTHORITY IN SOCIAL LIFE.

Unchristian liberalism began in England and spread to the Continent where it paved the way for the French Revolution. It is the direct outcome of the principles of Protestantism and repudiates divine authority in public and social life, which, according to its ideals, should be organised and conducted as if God did not exist. Liberal teaching rejects or ignores the whole supernatural order, including divine revelation, a divinely instituted Church and man's predestination to eternal life.

BY E. CAHILL, S.J.

Unchristian Liberalism is a direct outcome of the principles of Protestantism. Beginning in England, it spread into France where it prepared the way for the Revolution (1789), after which it gradually impressed itself on the public life of nearly every country in Europe and America. Liberal principles and policy are the root causes of the evils comprised under what is usually called the "Social Question"; and are at present the greatest obstacle to social prosperity and peace. Resting on an assumption of man's innate independence of any authority or rule of conduct outside himself, Liberal teaching rejects or ignores the whole supernatural order, including divine revelation, a divinely instituted church, and man's predestination to eternal life. Without formally committing themselves to a positive denial of God's existence or His possible claims on men in their individual capacity, Liberals repudiate all divine authority in public and social life, which, according to their ideals, should be organised and conducted as if God did not exist; much less will they take account of the teaching of our Divine Lord, or acknowledge the authority of the church which He founded. Absolute and unlimited freedom (and by freedom the Liberals mean licence) including freedom of thought, of religion and of conscience; unchecked freedom of speech and of the Press, freedom in political and social institutions, is according to Liberal principles man's inalienable right. These un-Christian principles, which, by their repudiation of divine authority are in opposition even to the natural law, are applied by Liberals to the moral, political and economic spheres. Modern systems of statecraft, of civic organisation, of international relations, etc., have been shaped largely under the influence of their principles. Hence Liberalism tends strongly to reproduce in society the most repulsive features of pagan civilisation.

"Put Out the Lights of Heaven."

Freemasonry, permeated and reinforced by international Judaism, has been the strongest driving force behind the Liberalist movement during the past two centuries. Socialism, which is opposed to many of the economic and political principles of Liberalism, is in harmony with it in its materialistic view of life, and in its assumption of man's emancipation from a supernatural or divine law. The Catholic Church, with its hierarchical constitution, and its God-given power of authoritative teaching, forms the only effective barrier against the progress of Liberalism. This fact has always been frankly recognised by the Liberal leaders. Voltaire's impious cry: "Ecrasez l'Infame" (Crush and destroy the unsightly monster, viz., the Catholic Church) has been re-echoed down to our own day by Voltaire's disciples, who openly proclaim it their aim to "put out the lights of Heaven," and who would fain believe that Catholic principles and authority, even in Ireland, are doomed to the fate of "icebergs in warm water." The words of Charles Bradlaugh (d. 1891), a professed atheist and one of the founders of the present secularist or extreme Liberalist movement in Britain, are equally significant: — "One element of danger in Europe is the approach of the Roman Catholic Church towards meddling in political life . . . There is danger to freedom of thought, to freedom of speech, to freedom of action. The great struggle in this country (England) will not be between Free Thought and the Church of England . . . but between Free Thought and Rome."

Vague and Intangible.

In order to convey a general but connected idea of modern Liberalism which, like Protestantism, is often vague and somewhat intangible, partaking more of the nature of a spirit permeating modern society than of a definite and consistent system, we shall give a brief sketch first of intellectual Liberalism, often called Rationalism or Naturalism, which forms the philosophic ground-work of the movement; secondly, of political Liberalism or Secularism upon whose principles the constitutions of most modern states are largely modelled, and finally of economic Liberalism. which reached its apogee in the 19th century, and is closely allied with modern capitalism. 

REPUDIATION OF REVELATION.

 The spirit and tendency of the un-Christian Humanism of the 15th century, and still more the principle put forward by the 16th century Reformers that every individual has the right of interpreting divine revelation according to his own judgment without the aid of a teaching Church, opened the way, first to a repudiation of all supernatural revelation, and then to Atheism and Materialism. During the second half of the 17th century there arose in England a school of Freethinkers and Deists whose teachings without spreading, for the time being, to any great extent in England itself, exerted much influence in France and the Continental countries. A few of these Deists remained nominally Christian, but most rejected completely all supernatural religion; and some threw doubt even on the existence of God. Among the best known were John Locke, author of the "Essay on the Human Understanding." (d. 1704). John Hobbes, author of the "Leviathan"; Collins, Roland, Tyndal, Charles Blount, Lord Bolingbroke, etc., and later on, Hume and Berkeley. Protestant Germany gave birth to a similar Rationalistic school, founded on the teachings of Leibnitz, Wolf and others, whose names were afterwards overshadowed by that of Emmanuel Kant, the greatest of German Rationalistic philosophers, and the real founder of the modern German Rationalistic School.

 FRANCE CENTRE OF MOVEMENT.

 France, however, was, or soon became, the real centre of the Naturalist movement. The ground had been prepared there by the Gallican and Jansenistic propaganda of the preceding generation and by the strong Rationalistic tendencies of Descartes' philosophy. But the principal cause of the rapid spread of the movement was the moral corruption which had eaten, like a canker, into the wealthy classes, the aristocracy, and even the clergy. Voltaire brought from England the doctrines of the English Freethinkers and Deists, and with Jean Jacques Rousseau, became the most powerful apostle of the new ideas. Soon a whole galaxy of brilliant writers appeared, filled with the spirit of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and Voltaire. Ecclesiastical authority, religion, revelation all the cherished ideals and principles of Christianity, were now persistently held up to ridicule in poetry, romance, drama, letters, historical and philosophical treatises, written mostly in a brilliant and very attractive style. The extreme Rationalistic doctrine, which denies the existence of God, and the immortality of the human soul, rejects the moral law, and proclaims war against all authority, was summarised in the celebrated "Encyclopedie." This monumental work, the first of its kind, appeared about the middle of the 18th century, under the editorship of Diderot and d'Alembert, and immediately secured unprecedented popularity. In the "Encyclopedie" all kinds of subjects were treated and discussed, sometimes with a superficial veneer of fairness and impartiality, but always with the underlying purpose of discrediting Christianity. Diderot, in whose mind the virtue of chastity is only the result of ignorant prejudice, sketched an ideal society whose perfection lies in the complete gratification of the sexual passions, while the professed ambition of Naigeon, one of the Diderot's disciples, was to "strangle the last of the priests with the entrails of the last of the kings." This anti-religious campaign in France, resulting in the excesses and religious persecution associated with the French Revolution, was the first great effort of the Liberal anti-Christian revolt, which has continued to spread and gain strength down to our own day. 

EXTREME AND SELFISH INDIVIDUALISM.

 During the 19th century the Rationalistic movement manifested itself in the pseudo-philosophic theories of Pantheism, Materialism and Positivism, culminating in the Modernism, Neo-Gnosticism, Theosophism, Christian Scientism, etc., of the present day. The movement has gathered into its wake most of the perverted intellectual forces of Europe outside the Catholic Church. It has spread more or less into every country, but has taken deepest hold in France, Britain, the Protestant portions of Germany, the United States of North America, and the British Dominions. The Pantheistic philosophy of Kant and Hegel in Germany, tending to make each individual a kind of God unto himself, and setting up actual fact, the "fait accompli," as the sole criterion of what is reasonable and right, leads, when applied to social life, to a glorification of brute force, and contains besides a philosophic ground-work for the most extreme and selfish individualism. The whole philosophy of Materialism, as propounded by Haeckel, Huxley, Spencer and others, and especially the theories of the Evolutionists, including those of "struggle for life" and "the survival of the fittest," as well as Nietzche's theory of the "superman," for whose sake other men are born to toil, have similar practical applications.

 POSITIVISM.

 Positivism, which was first put forward by Auguste Comte (d. 1857), was widely adopted by French and English Rationalists, such as J. S. Mill, during the second half of the century. In this system a new deity is set up for men to worship and serve. That deity is none other than Humanity. Positivism, while encouraging a vague and ineffective philanthropy or humanitarianism, has a predominant tendency, like all forms of Rationalism, to an extreme and unnatural individualism. For a Positivist of the average type of character tends to regard himself as representing Humanity, and consequently to consider himself, and not God, as the summit and centre of the Universe, towards whose glorification all his interests and efforts most converge. Modernism, Neo-Gnosticism, Kabbalism, Theosophism, Spiritism, etc., are at present the most dangerous and insidious form of Rationalism and Naturalism. The Modernists, who aimed at remaining within the Church's fold while working to undermine her teaching, were condemned by Pius X. in 1903. They deny or strive to whittle down and explain away by specious reasoning everything supernatural, including miracles, divine revelation, supernatural grace, etc. Neo-Gnosticism essays to get rid of a deity distinct from man and to whom man is responsible. Hence they deny the dogma of creation. All things, according to their philosophy, are in some way or other emanations of the divine essence: hence man himself is practically identified with the deity, so that whatever he thinks or does must be right and good.

 DIRECT INFLUENCE OF THE DEVIL.

 Neo-Gnostic philosophy is practically the same as that of the ancient Gnostics so often referred to in the New Testament and the writings of the early Fathers of the Church. This philosophy has reappeared at different times in the history of the Church assuming various shapes, but remaining always substantially the same, and invariably tending to supply an apparent justification for the unrestrained gratification of man's worst passions. It was under varying forms the underlying philosophy of the Manichaeans of the 5th century, of the Albigenses of the 12th century, of the Waldenses, etc., of later times. It was the heresy, too, of which the Templars of the 15th century were rightly or wrongly accused. Gnosticism and Neo-Gnosticism are closely associated with the occult practices and beliefs of certain pre-Christian secretaries of the East which have always attracted a certain type of depraved minds, and seem to show strong indications of the direct influence of the evil one. Gnosticism and its different manifestations are not improbably the heresy or philosophy to which St. Paul is said to refer in his First Epistle to Timothy: "In the last times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error and doctrines of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy and having the conscience seared."*

The Kabbalists and Theosophists are closely associated with the Neo-Gnostics, and their theories are only different manifestations of the same desire to free man from all supernatural law, and even from the rule and authority of God. Kabbalism, which betrays the Jewish influence in the modern Naturalistic movement, would found its Rationalistic doctrines on ancient Jewish tradition. Theosophy relies for all knowledge, and especially for knowledge of the deity, upon some kind of interior revelation of illumination, the result of the study and contemplation of secret rites and symbols. It is closely allied to Brahminism and Buddhism, and tends to teach some kind of universal faith which would be as it were, a common denominator in which all religions and creeds would agree. For according to the Theosophists, all religions of all times, including Christianity, are but different manifestations of the one true religion, which the Divine Wisdom reveals under varying forms suited to different times, places, and persons.

 TENDENCY TOWARDS DESTRUCTION.

 All these phases of Naturalism are closely associated with the present day Judaeo-Masonic movement, whose aim and object is the destruction of Christianity. The propagation of the Neo-Gnostic pseudo-philosophy, as well as that of the Kabbalists, the Illuminists, the Theosophists, the Spiritists, etc., is in fact the most dangerous phase of the war now waged throughout the world against the Church by the Masonic and Jewish sectaries. Their philosophy cuts deeper into Christian life and affects more fatally the Christian organism of society than their purely political and governmental activities, as it tends to destroy the very foundations of all Christian morality and belief.

* I. Tim. I.V., 1-2.

Catholic Advocate (Brisbane, Qld. 1927,)http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article258727750

ETHICS AND MORALS IN PRESENT-DAY AMERICA

 By S. Parkes Cadman, D.D. of New York

THE responsibility for the widespread ethical disturbance in the United States rests primarily upon the older generation. If youth, as some educators assert, is in open rebellion against conventional standards of conduct, the revolt is due in large measure to the adult mental activities of the past forty years. The two chief sanctions of ethics religion and public opinion, exercised a muted and undisputed control until 1880. An unquestioned acceptance of the Bible as the literally inspired Word, and of its teachings as final for matters of faith and conduct was then universal. The social code of a feudal rather than an industrial age obtained; woman's place in Church and State had been stationary for a prolonged period. Since that era of innocence the ideals and codes regulating personal and social behaviour have been subjected to severe criticism.

The Churches are chiefly called upon to account for the social disintegration and to work out a readjustment between those codes and ideals and the twentieth century environment. Naturally the older groups resent these changes and deny their implications. But the younger groups demand them, and stress the need of a revaluation of moral standards. They have received academic training in enormously increased numbers, not all of which is in sympathy with the ruling ideas of their elders. Protestantism's insistence upon individual interpretation of Holy Scripture and freedom of thought concerning its teachings, hastened the decline of its rigid authority in morals.

The approach to religion through historic critical, and psychological methods, and the attention given to non-Christian faiths also impaired the Biblical sanction of Ethics.

EXPERIMENTING YOUTH

Anthropology has contributed to this impairment. High School and College students note the marked variations of ethical codes, and that these have been moulded by social and economic environments. The net result of numerous contributory causes is that a quotation from Holy Scripture, especially from the Old Testament, is no longer necessarily confirmatory of conduct for the youth of America. Sex relations, the family, parental governance, and kindred issues are affected by these changes. Philosophies which stress the lack of eternal ideas, and the constant flux of being, bring the lasting validity of any code within the zone of attack. Pragmatism is well to the fore in some applications its authors scarcely anticipated. The proposition that if a course of life works it is permissible is easily transmuted into the propriety of getting what seems desirable, if getting it is possible.

In any case, experimentalism is the favourite creed of youth. It is practised and catered for to a degree which would have been inconceivable a generation ago. Its chief exponent is Professor John Dewey of Columbia University, New York City, the first American thinker who clearly saw the bearing of the theory of evolution on morals, and has taken it with utter seriousness. His ethics are mundane. Their material is obtained from education, social, philosophy, and physchology. Thinking with Dr. Dewey is purely instrumental, and logic subordinate to ethics, as he understands them. He defines truth as that which we can achieve, and any process of thought as true only because it functions truly in obtaining what it sets out to obtain. Reason with him is a subsidiary gesture, since man in spite of all illusion of wounded desire, is only an animal; yet one capable of continuous development, and therefore, equally incapable of attaining a fixed ethic. Hence any law which prescribes duty or oughtness for life is false, because there is no such reality.

Transcendental ethics fall under this exclusion, and those who advocate them betray ignorance of things as they are. In brief, superior and changeless laws imposing indefeasible obligations upon humanity simply do not exist. Dr. Dewey admits that the generally accepted moral code may be valid in a particular instance. But he contends that it cannot apply in other instances. For him every moral situation is unique. It follows that all rival philosophies, the ruling concept of which is one great end for life and conduct, are founded on a fallacy.

REIGN OF SCIENCE

Plainly in this teaching science is the only technique for attaining good life, and its morals consist in using the means at our disposal for the satisfaction of its demands. The chief possible benefit for humanity is its expression of all its capacities in a world to he taken as it is found, and without setting up a final goal. Freedom, therefore, is the ability to do what one wants to do, and this ability must be developed by one's knowledge of the laws of nature and of the dispositions of one's fellow men. Two requirements only are needed in order to be a moral person: (1) Intelligence, by which is meant the power to forecast the results of scientific laws; (2) Sympathy to perceive ahead the effect of one's conduct on others. Dr. Dewey's philosophical and scientific ideas have been popularised by the remarkable sale of books such as Durant's Story of Philosophy and Dorsey's Why We Behave Like Human Beings, the majority of which are written from naturalistic level. They dwell upon the fluidity of life, and argue that by changing environment we can change human nature.

The influence of relativity is felt in their pet idea that group opinion makes morality. What we deem the eternal verities of right and wrong are thus pronounced vulnerable. The younger generation has a religion, but it is nebulous. It issues no specific commands covering conduct. Right apparently depends on conditions, and not on eternal law. When the older generation forbids a thing as wrong, youth is apt to ask why it is wrong. The first sufficient answer is to convince the questioner that certain lines of conduct are, or are not, conductive to individual or social good.

We are here confronted by a condition and not a theory. Christian men and women are asking why this decay of belief in Biblical teaching, this loss of religion sanction for ethics, this popularity of Freudian sex psychology? They complain that the new knowledge has shaken traditional family morality. The economic independence of women, their dress and demeanour, the free use of the motor car, the passing of the chaperone and the practice of contraception would seem to need salutary superintendence. Youth also reads our past in the light of the World War, and accuses us of not being true to our loftiest professions. Its attitude is one of doubt and disillusionment.

Its peril is that too many young people are the victims of a confusion of values for which their predecessors are in part responsible. American parents have been too deeply engaged in money-making and social pleasure to administer domestic discipline in wisdom. What is called education frequently omits the hard and the high. It is selfishly flabby, a poor substitute for the extensive breakdown of home training. Indeed, the background of the American home patterned on the English and Dutch model has been heavily obscured in recent years, especially in cities flushed with temporal pursuits and profits.

The authors I have named are not of equal merit. Some are no more than echoes of one or two prevailing voices. But all assumes a self-regulated concrete universe for which secularism is the living air. The spiritual element in morals is either denied or passed over as an insoluble enigma. Prevalent ethical formulas are traced to primitive thinking in which romanticism predominates. We are warned that the time is near when individuals who have to make decisions about conduct will desert priests, parsons, and melodramatic revivalists for scientific experts whose directions are based upon ascertained facts and not imaginary concepts and whose trinity of ethics is centred in Freedom, Responsibility, and Knowledge.

GERM PLASM AND THE ETERNAL

True, we are consoled by the reminder that theological dogmas may reduce the strife between the flesh and spirit for the moment, and so render first aid to a bedevilled world. But the censure at once follows that they are ultimately productive of childish experiments which benumb brain and conscience. A second category of opinions resorts to chemical affinity for the solution of the problem, and regards the human mind as nothing more than an agent in the biological adjustments which that affinity affects. The powers of eager upward living, it is said, are not due to Deity, but to the germ plasm. The further release and use of atomic energy is at least co-ordinate in rank with conventional ethical and religious beliefs.

These assumptions are rejected by other scientific thinkers as altogether unwarranted. Their onslaughts upon normal morality have not touched the heart of the nation, which is still sufficiently Puritan to enact Prohibition, and put an actress in an indecent play in jail. They will what they call the actual but too often achieve the fantastic, or the unclean. Some of these leaders of the forces of anti-Christian morality are the prisoners of their own culture, and cannot conceive of any other. They freeze the enthusiasm of the youth which heeds them, and make it cynical rather than candid. The ironic complacency with which they condemn the Church and the Gospel as injurious to morals is ludicrous in view of the fact that however indifferent the masses may be to Biblical religion, they are practically unanimous in their support of its historic standards of conduct.

Fortunately, the American people have a lively sense of humour. Their laughter frequently unifies society better than the scholar's logic or the politician's plans. They still steadfastly believe that faith in an eternal and an objective morality is the solely sufficient barrier against sex anarchy and its destruction. The germ plasm has its mission, so has the evolutionary theory, and much else that goes with them. But my fellow citizens cannot be convinced that these things transfer man from the perishable to the imperishable, or account for his higher self and wisest preferences.

Nevertheless, the homelife of the nation has to be reconsidered and protected. Within its unit, as Aristotle said, social order, affection, and obedience were first generated. To it we look with an intensity born of recent experience for the social integrity and conservation underlying the general welfare. For these reasons the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America has appointed a large and representative Committee to investigate the entire question of marriage and divorce.

Their review will include everything obtainable which is relative to the problem. Its bearing upon the child life is to be emphasied. As perhaps you know, the United States has an unenviable notoriety in this matter, and now leads the world in the number of needless divorces. A uniform marriage law is probably the outstanding statutory reform needed by the nation; nor can it, in my judgment, be much longer postponed without grave risk to the national morality.

BEAUTY AND MORALITY

It has been suggested that a positive programme for the strengthening of moral standards will ally them with beauty. The dullness, drabness, and aesthetic stupidity, too often associated with the "safe" ways of living has made them flat and insipid to millions of young people. It is proposed to substitute what is lovely, courteous, and attractive for what is ugly, rude and repellent in the old right-and-wrong division. The hedonism which simply hardens with years into prudence, we are told, is unendurably boring. Since our age is analogous to the Greek period in its love of physical development, of physical frankness, and its freedom from sentimentalism, it seems reasonable to some that the love of beauty which animated the Greeks might do much for us.

Small beginnings are being made in this direction. There are gratifying improvements in art, architecture, interior decoration, and a keen relish for spiritual adventure in matters of taste and form.  Better still, the city slum, the cogwheel in the machinery of immorality, is on the decline. Beauty in conduct is suggested by hatred of cheapness and love of good, sportsmanship. Theft, covetousness, and wanton violations of another's personality are ugly things which do not belong to the grace and charms by which life must be shaped.

Certainly the Puritanism of the future will not stress ugliness as an accompaniment of holiness, nor be content with the doctrinal correctness of mundane minds whose moral squalor defiles life. Acts which are appropriate, appreciations which are magnanimous, pleasures which are free from the grossness must be made the norm.

While custom may not be the essence of morality, or the opinion of the group the sole criterion of right and wrong, they are powerful factors for determining in what directions to what ends, by what rules of behaviour and standards of judgment the individual's native impulses shall be shaped. Gregarious suggestiveness and imitativeness must be examined afresh by Christian teachers who would enforce the New Testament ethic. The advantages and disadvantages of custom in relation to that ethic are likewise important. For custom not only conserves co-operation and past social experience; it stimulates individual loyalty through the group conscience. Doubtless many customs are foolish, or harmful, or alien to progress. They do not provide for the solution of new moral problems, nor are they a sufficient stag against the uprush of strong passions. But they are to be used for the furtherance of those principles which experience demonstrates are indispensable to moral welfare.

Four great forces will have to be studied in our reorganisation of ethical teaching under the authority of the New Testament. (1) Scientific Rationalism, which reflects the claim of any institution to circumscribe the limits within which human mind may operate. We are bound to show that Christianity's supernatural system of ethics is not only religion but reason, and the highest reason, transcending man's capacity for the good, and his strength to attain it apart from the virtue which is in Christ. (2) The New Humanism, which inculcates the idea that a good life consists in the development, and enjoyment of human powers in the material world, and in perfecting of man's capacities here on earth through intellectual culture. (3) The distinction between secular and sacred occupations, which was broken when the Protestant Reformation substituted the democratic community for the hierarchy, and industrialism was introduced as a service rendered to God and man. (4) The relation of industrialism to plutocratic feudalism, and the resultant organisations of labour. These movements carry with them grave moral dangers, some loss of the sense of personal responsibility and initiative, and the increasing despotism of class feeling and mass prejudice.

BASES OF AMERICAN MORALITY

I venture the affirmation that despite the antagonisms I have mentioned, the prevailing estimate of morality by educated Americans is found in the prophets of Israel and the teachings of our Lord. The test of goodness for them is in the true self-realisation which contributes to the larger and enduring life of the individual and of society. In other words, they follow consciously or unconsciously the doctrine of idealists like Thomas Hill Green, Profesor Bradley, Seth, Sorley, and other thinkers. Professor Royce's excellent volume on Loyalty expresses the basic sentiments of the nation as a commonwealth of moral persons in which every member co-operates to realise the true ideal of humanity. This is not attainable; when severed from the spiritual realities which are the vital sources of moral action.

These realities involve the service of all human institutions and human culture as means for the fuller fruition of spiritual life in human beings present and to come. It is well for us to know that the social heritage in regard to conduct cannot be trifled with, and that social control will not only continue but increase as society grows more complex. It is also well for us to know that organised supervision of ethical standards is destined to remain, and that it is utterly futile for each individual to attempt to work out his own sex life and general behaviour through mere sense data supplied, by his limited experience.

But in the long last, the satiate condition and weariness which transgressions of moral law engender, and the spiritual hunger of human beings for a Higher Power which can subdue the baser to the nobler self, will drive men and women to the God of all righteousness revealed in Jesus Christ.

Observer (Adelaide,  1930,)  http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article164810169