RELIGION AND POLITICS

FROM A SPEECH AT THE LANGHAM HOTEL

11th February, 1926

Many people, I fear, to-day fail to realise the very critical character of the period through which the world is passing. There is nothing the country needs so much as another Wesley or Whitefield. Those spiritual movements, such as occurred in the eighteenth century, led largely by Wesley, have come up from time to time in the history of the human race. Their spirit is always the same, though the form is different. Had Wesley been born four centuries earlier, he would have been Wesley just the same, but he would have worn a rough robe girded with a cord and have founded a great body of preaching friars. I confess I am not sure, if a Wesley or a St. Francis arose to-day, that to found a body of preaching friars would not be the best thing they could do for the world. To-day the world seems more irreligious than it has ever been in the Christian era. Irresponsible pleasure-seeking and prodigal luxury abound; church-going has lost the hold it had in our childhood; and candidates for the Ministry are less in number than in years past. But I believe this condition of affairs will pass. The side of Christianity which takes into view all kinds of activities for the social betterment of the people is the side which most appeals to the present generation. Undoubtedly there is as much philanthropic and altruistic work done by all kinds of people as has ever been done.

I find the study of the various types in the House of Commons a very interesting occupation. I find there, especially among the Labour Party, many men who fifty years ago would inevitably have gone into the Christian Ministry. They have been drawn into political life from a deep desire to help the people. Such men are common in all parties to-day. These are facts which relieve the darkness of the outlook. Things will change again. We must not let ourselves imagine, amidst the changes of the day, though the very foundations are cracking, that the things we hold most precious are going to pass away. I certainly agree with many observers that since the war the manifest forces of Satan have been more conspicuously at large. But the very manifestation of these forces is calling other forces into the field.

On this account I feel it to be so important that a Church like yours should send its quota of young men into politics to-day. Political work is of enormous importance at this time. We do not all realise in what a changed world we are living. Superficially it is a frivolous world, full of "jazzing" and pre-occupation with pleasure, but under the surface it is intensely serious. I believe the electorate is intensely anxious to listen to men who have sincerely at heart the uplifting of the nation.

Many of those who seem to be running most wild in their political views are men who have been led astray by insufficient education or experience, but are truly desirous of bettering their country. Therefore, I believe that men who will sincerely and honestly embrace political life with the idea of helping the community (no matter to what party they belong), are wanted in these days. This, coupled with the desire of service, will defeat the menacing forces which threaten us. If, in consequence of words spoken this night, some of the young men connected with the Wesleyan Methodist Church feel the call to political work, it will be of great advantage to the Commonwealth, for the political career properly viewed is really a kind of Ministry.

THE CHURCH ARMY

AT A MEETING OF THE CHURCH ARMY IN QUEEN'S HALL

7th May, 1925

I am afraid I have been talking too much during the last few days. On Tuesday I was talking to newspaper men about truth; on Wednesday I was talking to artists about beauty; and now I am at this great meeting, the note of which and the key to which are goodness, truth and beauty, which surely make a perfect trinity, since no man can be leading the ideal life unless he has these things combined in unity in himself.

I think that perhaps we are awakening more and more to the deeper spiritual impulses and to their importance in the life of the country. When we read (or used to read) history, we find a great deal one hundred and two hundred years ago about politics, kings and battles, but very little about a man called John Wesley. Yet, as the years go by, historians have begun to say that it was the lives of men like Wesley and Whitefield, and what they taught the people of this country, that really were the significant factors in moulding the character of the people and of the leaders of the people, and that it is largely owing to the spirit which they, and men like them, breathed throughout England, that the immense impetus was given to the reforms—social and religious—which took place in the country during the last century, and which helped, in spite of a thousand difficulties and evil things on the other side, to make the rough path smoother and to kindle afresh the Divine spark in the hearts of men.

So, when the history of the nineteenth century comes to be written, I believe there will stand out the names of two men, William Booth and Wilson Carlile, who represent the spiritual revolt voiced before them by Ruskin and many another against the ugliness of life, and its sin and its blind devotion to nothing but material progress. I have always thought that if Mr. Carlile had lived many centuries ago, instead of to-day, he would have been one of the first of the Franciscans. He has shown the country what the Church of England can do, and there has been no risk for him of sharing the fate that fell to John Wesley, and of another schism being unnecessarily caused among the people of God in this land.

The record of the Church Army is a modern chapter in the Acts of the Apostles, and its work is as inspired as anything of which we read in the sacred Scriptures. The Church Army is a living testimony of what a life of Divine love can mean in the hearts of ordinary men and women. Whatever controversies rage—doctrinal, theological—among men who profess religion, they go on their way and combine to give a glorious demonstration of personal devotion in the service of men.

The activities of the Church Army are innumerable—in emigration, recreation and good, honest mirth, preaching—but, above all, coming to the rescue of fallen humanity. When I think of this I cannot help feeling, as I look around this room, that there can be no life on this earth in which men may be more sure to find real happiness than in this life of perpetual self-sacrifice. We may look in vain in the faces of those whose life is one constant search for illusive pleasures to see the radiant expressions which I have noticed in all parts of this great audience.

The work of many of you is not only among the poor and unfortunate, but among men and women who are the broken results of life in this age—men and women who, in many cases, have lost not only work and health, but what is far more difficult to make good, their spirit, temper, morale, courage and faith. Yet the Church Army goes out to its work preserving that spirit of health and happiness which is its motto. It shows that the more men will give their lives to service and the more impossible the tasks they try to achieve, the more is the grace given them in that fight, the brighter their faith burns, and the more they are able to radiate among those with whom they work that spirit of confidence, hope and happiness which the world needs and desires so much. I have watched your work with the deepest and most heartfelt sympathy and admiration, and I only wish that I personally was competent to do it. You look in the most unlikely places for that spark of the Divine which exists in every human soul. You search until you find it, and then you blow on it with the spirit of love till you have blown it into a flame, however feeble; and so you have one more to testify to the eternal truth that love alone in this world is the conqueror, and that by love alone can the nations be brought into the paths of peace, and that to pursue and attain love is the one thing needful.

CHRISTIAN IDEALS

AT THE NATIONAL FREE CHURCH CONFERENCE

12th March, 1925

You have taken the opportunity to waylay and entrap a singularly busy man on his way to make an ordinary political speech, and you have brought him to speak to you this afternoon for a few moments before an assembly distinctly representative of a great deal of the religious movement and religious thought of the country. Curiously enough, this is the first occasion, I think, on which I have ever addressed a body directly concerned with any of the churches. I have in the past always been reluctant to speak at those gatherings, possibly from the Englishman's fear of saying in the excitement of a public audience more than he really felt or really believed, knowing as a public man the temptation of winning easy applause by saying comfortable things, by saying things that perhaps are an exaggeration of what one really feels oneself, with the inevitable result, so often seen, that the more popular one becomes as a speaker the greater is the tendency to spiritual atrophy in the individual.

Now, the first thought that naturally occurs to me at an assembly of this kind is the difference between the work that lies before the politician and the work that lies before the Christian minister. I represent here and in this visit the State; you represent the Church. You are the Guelphs and I am the Ghibellines, and there are some marked points of difference that it may help us to dwell upon for a few moments. But, tempting as the theme would be, I have neither the time to-day nor even the inclination to dwell on the struggles, the secular struggles, that have taken place between Church and State, and the great part played in these struggles and the development of life in our country by the Free Churches of England.

In many ways, in that struggle, I think we may say that we have often been in religious life far in advance, as we ought to be, of political life. For, while it is true that in distant ages long past representatives of Christianity tried to drive mankind into their fold by stern measures, by execution and by fire, we have left those things far behind us, and it has remained in the last century for wild and extreme men in some parts of the world to apply, in trying to make mankind believe their political doctrines, weapons which have been given up by the Christian for more centuries than I like to think of.

I, in my capacity as a politician, have to deal with mankind in the mass. You, in the life of your churches, have to deal with the individual; and the difference lies in this, that the problems of life come to us wholesale, as it were. We have columns of figures before us of unemployment, for instance. You don't trouble about columns of figures, but you all, in your lives and in your ministry, when you think of unemployment, think of the man and the woman and the child; and while we are devising methods of helping, so far as we can, you have vividly before you the daily increase in the hopelessness, the daily increase in the lack of skill, the daily increase in the lack of morale. It may well be that you feel, as you must at times, impatient with those, to whatever party they may belong, who are attempting to govern this great country, for their inability at once to find something that will alleviate the troubles from which our people suffer to-day.

There is another aspect of this. Parliament represents all the citizens in a way that religious bodies cannot. Your membership is voluntary. We are all born members of the State, and you have an excluding discipline which we in politics have not. You can supply selective tests both to your members and to your ministers—tests of character, tests of knowledge, tests of belief—and you can make them obedient to a rule of life. I can do none of these things and, indeed, I have only to try to do the best I can with the tools I have, which means to work the existing institutions of the country so far as I conceive it to the best advantage of the multitudinous interests of her citizens. Then again, while you have, and all churches have, their rule of life, you cannot say that there is any definite code laid down for all political parties. My party have no political bible. Possibly you might find our ideals best expressed in one of Disraeli's novels, but I have no power to make people read them, and I have no power to compel them to belief.

It would ill become me to say what may be the bible, if there be such a book, of the Liberal Party. The party that can claim more than any of the others to have a religious code to-day is the Labour Party, because they still have the Marxian Capital, but, as a matter of fact, that book has been subject, as other books, to the higher criticism for some years past, and what will happen when the results of higher criticism percolate to the lower intelligence I have little idea.

There is yet a third difference: we of the State do possess—to a certain extent—the power of compulsion. We can enforce the law, and we can enforce it upon the unwilling. But the sense of the State in the minds and hearts of most men is still feeble and undeveloped. The State wears an extravagant guise to them, and they are apt to serve it with a grudging assent. In a supreme crisis men will lay down their lives for it, but they don't lay down their lives conscientiously so much for what we call the State as for the country behind it. We in politics—let me say politicians—even at the moment of the greatest popularity cannot, and perhaps ought not to, command the love and enthusiasm that the Church, if it is to be the instrument it might be, can command, and ought to command, from her sons and daughters.

But after looking for a few minutes at the obvious differences, one comes to the more congenial topic of how we are able to help one another.

What can the Christian Church do for the State? Now, here again we have many voices speaking to us to-day, and, while it would ill become me to say anything on any difference of opinion that may exist among you, I think I may take two typical voices in the Church of England which do express to-day two different lines of thought, and which yet seem to me to converge if you only go down underneath the surface. The Bishop of Durham and the Bishop of Manchester represent two very different schools of political thought. The Bishop of Durham stresses the individual appeal of the Gospel, and the Bishop of Manchester the social application of the Christian message. Those are two sides of the same thing, and I think we ought to look at both sides at once.

To my mind, the distinctive Christian motive is the individual transformation of character. The making of that character reacts on the national life, and I think the Bishop of Durham quite truly pointed out that, so little effect, looking at it historically, has the quality of the social order had on individual morality with all varieties of social organisation, that sometimes even the worst periods of history have been found compatible with and to co-exist with the very finest development of the Christian character. And I venture to agree with him when he stressed what I spoke of in my first sentence, the danger of people thinking they can satisfy their consciences by talking at large on sacred subjects and on general amelioration, and amelioration to be brought about by social improvements, unless at the same time they never lose sight of the fact that you must come back ultimately and all the time to the individual; and that you must not let the joy of beautiful visions or discussions on dogma or any other things make you forget that it is the ethic, it is the life, it is the transformation of life, that is the thing which really matters. Work up from that to the other, and don't try to work down from the other to that.

He also reminds us of what I think many need to be reminded, that this world is a much harder place to live in and do your duty in than we sometimes care to remember. It is so much more comfortable to make easy speeches. Browning has said, "How very hard it is to be a Christian," and he never said anything more true. But, of course, this does not express the whole truth. It is quite true that you cannot identify Our Lord with any academic theory or school, Tory, Manchester or Marxian, and when we try to do that I think we make a profound error; yet, living in this world, the bodies of Christian people, united by a common ideal, have to act not only as individuals but as corporate bodies and communities, and it is when they come to act in that way that their real difficulties, it seems to me, begin.

This is a point which the Bishop of Manchester stresses, and, if I may say so with respect, quite rightly. His desire is to see the Christian Churches really influencing public life in this country, not taking sides, but raising the standard of the country's ideals, criticising, judging, with Christian charity where possible, but criticising and judging, that we may be told where we fall short of the highest ideals in trying to apply political and social remedies in this country.

It is quite right to tell us, and to tell us emphatically, that the Christian Churches should give themselves to helping in the elevation of the social condition of the country, and not be satisfied with things as they are. You have the double message, and I am sure you have it in all your Churches through your different teachers and different types—the cultivation of the spiritual life of the individual, the regeneration of the mass through the individual, and the reaction of the regenerated mass on the country at large.

That should be the process, and I think that in these days we all of us want, perhaps more than anything, and more than at any time, to be bound lightly and loosely to the luxuries and the good things of this world. We cannot all of us embrace poverty as St. Francis did, but we all know the difference between the man who cherishes the treasures of this world and the man who sits lightly to them, and it is only by sitting lightly to them that you have the right to say much that wants saying in these days; for it is only in that way that you can hope to influence those amongst whom you work, rich and poor alike. It is a spirit essential to-day in the present conditions of our country, and I believe and recognise with joy that it is more common to-day amongst those who are directly relieved from poverty than it was in the years before the War.

People often say that this is a materialistic age. There is much truth in that, but I do feel, too, that there has never been an age in which there are more people struggling, some with more success and some with less, to live to the highest ideals that are in them, and doing something to help to better the moral and the physical conditions of the people among whom they live. And it is only natural, in a time when you have active and strong the spirit of things that make for good, that you have co-existent with it the spirit that makes for evil no less active and strong. I think that that is possibly one of the reasons why you see the great contrast that you do see to-day, and that while it is true that there is throughout Europe a great deal of gross and crass materialism, you have at the same time all over Europe eager souls who are struggling to impress themselves on their day, to improve themselves and to improve the world.

Now, in that struggle we all have to take our part. That struggle exists everywhere, and is round us every day, and in that struggle what help to the country can the churches of England give? They stand reminders day by day of that truth in which they have been born—to teach us to shun the luxury that divides us so much from one another, to spread the education that ought to unite us, to supply us with an inspiration to sustain us. In ways such as this the churches of England can hold up the right arms of the politicians of England and join in the common work of making the crooked paths a little straighter and the rough places a little smoother for our own people.

I think it is well in an assembly like this to remember one other thing. Some people talk as though Christianity had done its work in the world—a singular lack of imagination in that remark, seeing that the work has hardly yet been begun. There is not one of you in an assembly like this who has not known at one time of your life a character which can only have been formed on the model of Our Lord and Master—some man, some woman, it may have been someone among the highly educated and fortunate in the world, it may have been a working person. But we have all known, at one time or another, such a one, and it has been a great help to us in our pilgrimage through life to look to that example and to walk to some extent in the light that they cast on their path as they passed along. Now churches may rise and churches may fall, but the influence of lives like that will go on for ever, and it is through the light of such lives that the redemption of this world will ultimately come; for they will survive persecution, and derision, and coldness, and apathy. We shall never see those times, nor our children, nor our children's children; but it will be by the succession of such lives as I have endeavoured to depict that some day the Kingdom of Heaven will come on earth. If we cannot hold fast in the most difficult times to an ideal of that kind, we shall find that we shall be suffocated in the daily toil which most of us have to undergo, and as a people we shall go down and perish for lack of vision.