Part 2 (1/2)
Of Bergson he said to me, ”I hope he is still thinking,” and when I questioned him he replied that Bergson's teaching up to this moment ”suggests that anything may happen.”
Here you may see one of the main movements of our day which call, in the Dean's judgment for unpleasantness--the unpleasantness of telling people not to make fools of themselves. Humanity must not go over in a body to Mr. Micawber.
Anything may happen? No! We are not characters in a fairy tale, but men of reason, inhabiting a world which reveals to us at every point of our investigation one certain and unalterable fact--an unbroken uniformity of natural law. We must not dream; we must act, and, before we act, we must think. Human nature does not change very greatly. Bergson is apt to encourage easy optimism, to leave the door open for credulity, superst.i.tion, idle expectation; and he is disposed to set instinct above reason, ”a very dangerous doctrine, at any rate for _this_ generation.”
What is wrong with this generation? It is a generation that refuses to accept the rule and discipline of reason, which thinks it can reach millennium by a short cut, or jump to the moon in an excess of emotional fervour. It is a generation which becomes a crowd, and ”individuals are occasionally guided by reason, crowds never.” It is a generation which lives by catchwords, which plays tricks, which attempts to cut knots, which counts heads.
What is wrong with this generation? Public opinion is ”a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man.” Democracy means ”a victory of sentiment over reason”; it is the triumph of the unfit, the ascendancy of the second-rate, the conquest of quality by quant.i.ty, the smothering of the hard and true under the feather-bed of the soft and the false.
Some may prefer the softer type of character, and may hope that it will make civilisation more humane and compa.s.sionate... .
Unfortunately, experience shows that none is so cruel as the disillusioned sentimentalist. He thinks that he can break or ignore nature's laws with impunity; and then, when he finds that nature has no sentiment, he rages like a mad dog and combines with his theoretical objection to capital punishment a l.u.s.t to murder all who disagree with him.
Beware of sentiment! Beware of it in politics, beware of it in religion.
See things as they are. Accept human nature for what it is. Consult history. Judge by reason and experience. Act with courage.
As he faces politics, so he faces religion.
He desires to rescue Christianity from all the sentimental vulgarities which have disfigured it in recent years--alike from the aesthetic extravagances of the ritualist and the organising fussiness of the evangelical; to rescue it from these obscuring unessentials, and to set it clearly before the eyes of mankind in the pure region of thought--a divine philosophy which teaches the only true science of life, a discipline which fits the Soul for its journey, ”by an inner ascent,” to the presence of G.o.d. Mysticism, he says, is the pursuit of ultimate, objective truth, or it is nothing.
Christianity demands the closest attention of the mind. It cannot be seen at a glance, understood in a moment, adopted by a gesture. It is a deep and profound philosophy of life. It proposes a transvaluation of values. It insists that the spiritual life is the only true life. It sets the invisible above the visible, and the eternal above the temporal. It tears up by the roots the l.u.s.t of acc.u.mulation. It brings man face to face with a choice that is his destiny. He must think, he must decide. He cannot serve both G.o.d and Mammon. Either his life must be given for the imperishable values of spiritual existence or for the meats that perish and the flesh that will see corruption. Let a man choose. Christianity contradicts all his natural ideas; but let him think, let him listen to the voice of G.o.d, and let him decide as a rational being. Let him not presume to set up his trivial notions, or to think that he can silence Truth by bawling falsehood at the top of his voice. Let him be humble. Let him listen to the teacher. Let him give all his attention to this great matter, for it concerns his soul.
Here again is the aristocratic principle. The average man, until he has disciplined his reason to understand this great matter, must hold his peace; certainly he must not presume to lay down the law.
When we exclaim against this doctrine, and speak with enthusiasm of the virtues of the poor, Dr. Inge asks us to examine those virtues and to judge of their worth. Among the poor, he quotes, ”generosity ranks far before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chast.i.ty, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one. In brief, the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue, the higher it stands in popular estimation.”
But we are to love G.o.d with all our _mind_, as well as with all our heart.
Does he, then, shut out the humble and the poor from the Kingdom of G.o.d?
Not for a moment. ”Ultimately, we are what we love and care for, and no limit has been set to what we may become without ceasing to be ourselves.” The door of love stands open, and through that doorway the poor and the ignorant may pa.s.s to find the satisfaction of the saint.
But they must be careful to love the right things--to love truth, goodness, and beauty. They must not be encouraged to sentimentalise; they must be bidden to decide. The poor can be debauched as easily as the rich. Many are called, but few chosen.
His main protest is against _the rule_ of the ignorant, the democratic principle applied to the _amor intellectualis Dei_. Rich and poor, learned and ignorant, all must accept, with humility, the teaching of the Master. Plotinus, he points out, was the schoolmaster who brought Augustine to Christ. The greatest of us has to learn. He who would teach should be a learner all his life.
In everything he says and writes I find this desire to exalt Truth above the fervours of emotionalism and the dangerous drill of the formalist.
Always he is calling upon men to drop their prejudices and catchwords, to forsake their conceits and sentiments, to face Truth with a quiet pulse and eyes clear of all pa.s.sion. Christianity is a tremendous thing; let no man, believer or unbeliever, attempt to make light of it.
It is not compa.s.sion for the intellectual difficulties of the average man which has made Dr. Inge a conservative modernist, if so I may call him. Sentiment of no kind whatever has entered into the matter. He is a conservative modernist because his reason has convinced him of the truth of reasonable modernism, because he has ”that intellectual honesty which dreads what Plato calls 'the lie in the soul' even more than the lie on the lips.” He is a modernist because he is an intellectual ascetic.
When we compare his position with that of Dr. Gore we see at once the width of the gulf which separates the traditionalist from the philosopher. To Dr. Gore the creeds and the miracles are essential to Christianity. No Virgin Birth, no Sermon on the Mount! No Resurrection of the Body, no Parable of the Prodigal Son! No Descent into h.e.l.l, no revelation that the Kingdom of Heaven is within! Need we wonder that Dr.
Gore cries out despairingly for more discipline? He summons reason, it is true, but to defend and explain creeds without which there is no Christianity.
To Dr. Inge, on the other hand, it is what Christ said that matters, what He taught that demands our obedience, what He revealed that commands our love. Christianity for him is not a series of extraordinary acts, but a voice from heaven. It is not the Christ of tradition before whom he bows his knee, but the Christ of history, the Christ of faith, the Christ of experience--the living and therefore the evolving Christ.
And for him, as for the great majority of searching men, the more the mists of pious _aberglaube_ lift, the more real, the more fair, and the more divine becomes the Face of that living Christ, the more close the sense of His companions.h.i.+p.
A friend of mine once asked him, ”Are you a Christian or a Neoplatonist?” He smiled. ”It would be difficult to say,” he replied.
He was thinking, I am sure, of Troeltsch's significant prophecy, and warning, that _the Future of Christian philosophy depends on the renewal of its alliance with Neoplatonism_.