Epilogue to The Return of Christendom

Epilogue to The Return of Christendom (1922)



Last night, as the grey twilight deepened into darkness, a weird and telepathic conviction came to me that somebody was somewhere at that moment writing down these words: "The modern world is no longer in the swaddling-bands of the creeds; it has come to years of discretion and claims a full responsibility for its own thoughts and actions"; or words to that effect. This conviction was not wholly due to a cold and creeping shudder that came across me; such as that which is said to warn a man that someone steps across his grave. It was indirectly connected with a conviction closer to experience; the knowledge that somebody does write that sentence every night in order, that it may appear every morning in all those newspapers which pride themselves on giving us what is new. But there is something much more extraordinary about that sentence than the suggestion that it is new; and that is the belated realization that came to me that, after all, it is true. I had read it some nine hundred and ninety times before it even occurred to me that this could be the case; but when I read it the nine hundred and ninety-first time I realized suddenly that, even in a world of so much seeming waste, even these words had not been written in vain. The phrase is much more true than the writers are aware; it is true in a sense that they would not at all approve; and if they knew how true it was, they probably would not write it. I confess that there falls on me a sort of hush of awe, and almost of terror, to think of all those thousands of journalists simultaneously writing down something that is perfectly true, even without knowing it.

In a simple and almost sinister sense the modern world really has come of age. That modern spirit that had birth in the Renaissance, its boyhood in the Protestant and commercial centuries, and its first manhood amid the machinery of the industrial revolution, really has been going long enough by this time to be judged on its own merits. It really is old enough to take the responsibility for its own actions. It really is old enough to answer for itself. But the fact may perhaps appear less boisterously exhilarant when we consider what it has to answer for, and what its actions have been.

In any case, however, the distinction is of some importance; because those who make this suggestion generally also make suggestions flatly inconsistent with it. While insisting that the modern man can do anything he likes, because it happens to be something they like, they commonly take refuge in a contrary suggestion when it happens to be something they do not like. Anything which is wrong with the world is attributed to the stringency of those dogmatic bonds that have been burst asunder, or the vitality of those superstitions that have been finally slain. Now it is obvious that these philosophers cannot have it both ways. If it be true that emancipated man has made a new and wonderful world in his own image, he cannot possibly excuse the ugliness of the image he has made, as due to his devotion to the idols he has deserted. In short, if he is responsible for his actions, he is responsible for his bad actions; and cannot put the blame on the religion from which he broke away in order to act at all. This is obvious even in abstract logic, and much more vividly obvious when we come to concrete facts. We may like or dislike modern machinery; but we cannot say it is a historical fact that a modern machine was modelled on a torture-engine of the Spanish Inquisition. We may like or dislike a hive of workers "living in" under capitalist conditions; but we cannot say it is a historical fact that those who arranged it modelled it, with devout ardour, on a mediaeval monastery. We may like or dislike a modern colonial war; but we cannot assert that it was imposed on us by the Pope like a Crusade; we may like or dislike the Yellow Press, but we cannot pretend that it is one of the false colours flown by the Scarlet Woman. Modern man is, as his admirers say, by this time a sufficiently ancient man to have done a good many things on his own account, without the slightest consultation with his mediaeval grandmother. There is hardly a link left of the chains that bound him to the pre-reformation prison. He has come out of prison long ago. The only question is what has come out of prison; and whether some perverse persons have not been tempted to prefer the prison to the prisoner.

In trying to judge this fairly, it may be well to begin even with the simplest and most self-evident proviso; that this normal question concerns the mass of mankind. It would be as absurd to talk as if all mediaeval men were as wise and happy as the saints, as it would be to talk as if all the modern men were as stupid and squalid as the millionaires. Even to the chance examples already chosen the application of this popular test holds good. If we were simply comparing the machinery of the Industrial Revolution with the machinery of the Inquisition, most of us would prefer even a threshing-machine to a thumb-screw. But most men, even in the last and worst days of the Inquisition, went to their graves without knowing any more about the thumb-screw than most American citizens know about the Third Degree, and much less than they know about the ceremonial of burning negroes alive. On the other hand, no man can go to his grave, or go to his shop or his office, without knowing all about the good or evil of modern machinery. We can therefore, truly ask what the modern machinery has done with the mass of men; we might almost put it in the form of asking how it has manufactured the mass of men. And that comparison, though full of complexities like all historical things, is capable of a certain large simplification. The modern change found the mass of men living on the land, and it turned them out on to the road. It is quite true that they were originally called slaves on the land and were later called free men on the road; and we will give all due importance to such names. The road may be a symbol of liberty and the furrow of slavery; but the object here is to sum up the realities that were so symbolized. The point is that the modern spirit, as such, certainly did not tend to make the serf in the field the master of the field; but only to make him the master of the feet with which he walked in his freedom along the king's highway. He could only take his chance of selling his labour to this man or that; and I do not undervalue the fact that it was in form a free contract, even when it was in fact a leonine contract. But it certainly is the fact that his economic position as a modern wage-earner is less secure even than his position when he was a feudal serf, and far less dignified than when he had the luck to be a free guildsman. If I say that there is at least a doubt, touching the mass of men, whether their lot has been improved at all by the vast rational revolution of the last four hundred years, I am deliberately adopting a tone of restraint and even of understatement. For I wish to emphasize the fact that all people who think, and not merely our own school of thinkers, have by this time reached that degree of doubt. Nobody is certain that Capitalism has been a success; nobody is certain that Industrialism can solve its own problems; nobody is certain that these problems were not solved better in the ages of faith. The revolution has revolved; the wheel has come full circle; the world has run its own course. And the world itself is doubtful of its goal. The world itself has lost its way. There is in it a doubt far deeper than what is commonly called religious doubt. It might be called irreligious doubt; or a doubt about the ideal wisdom even or irreligion. The Church, being an object of faith, is in some sense naturally an object of doubt. But modern men are not merely in doubt about what they believe, but about what they know. They are not merely questioning what they are told to do; they are questioning what they have done. What they have done is to destroy charity for the sake of competition, and then to turn their own competition into monopoly. What they have done is to turn both peasants and guildsmen into the employed, and then turn these into the unemployed. They trampled on a hundred humanities of piety and pity in order to rush after Free Trade; and their Free Trade has been so free that it has brought them within a stride of the Servile State. They gave up their shrines and their sacred hostels to the pleasure of an aristocracy, only to find that their aristocracy no longer consisted of aristocrats, or even of gentlemen. They have laid the world waste with the dreariest and most abject atheism, only to find that their very atheism has cleared a space for the return of the most fantastic superstitions of crystals and mascots. They have built a city of houses only notable for the size of the groundrent and the smallness of the ground-plan; a city of whose wealth and poverty they are alike ashamed; a city from which they themselves flee into the country, and which they themselves cannot prevent from crawling outwards into the country to pursue them. But upon all these things the modern man looks doubtfully and with a double mind; for they are the fulfilments of his own doctrines of science and free thought; and it would be strange if some broken and half-forgotten sentence did not sometimes begin to form itself in his mind. "Unless the Lord built. . . ."

To the modern man who has reached this degree of real doubt, truer and more terrible than the cheap riddles of the Bible-smasher, the essays of this book are addressed. It would be, indeed, unwise to end it in a tone which denies that his doubt is a real doubt; that is, a doubt that cuts both ways. He may justly claim much that is valuable in the modern world; nor need he fear, as I think he sometimes does, that its critics propose merely an artificial and antiquarian reconstruction of the mediaeval world. For, indeed, those who understand the Catholic tradition of Christianity are not offering a Church which is exclusively at issue with modern things, or even one that was exclusively expressed in mediaeval things. The point is not so much that that age was relatively right while this age is relatively wrong; it is rather that the Church was relatively right when all ages were relatively wrong. Even if the modern man's doubt goes no farther than balancing sweating against serfdom, or swindling financiers against robber barons, it will imply the need of some third thing, some authority above the ages, to hold the balance. History has produced only one thing that can even claim to hold it.

When the Christian apostle declared that he died daily, he told all the truth there was in what was told us, in our youth, to the effect that the Church was dying. If the saint had died every day, the Church has died in every century. Many said the Church was dying when Julian proclaimed from the Imperial throne the worship of Apollo. Many would have said again, after the first triumphs of many oriental heresies, that the Church was dying; and in this sense they would have been right. The Church was dying; but the worship of Apollo was dead. Many would have said it when Calvinism was overshadowing province after province, and rightly; the Church was dying, but the oriental heresies were dead. When the French Revolution had made a new heaven and a new earth, it was quite obvious to every clearsighted person that Christianity had come to an end. The Church was certainly dying; but Calvinism was dead. The Christian religion has died daily; its enemies have only died. And what we see before us to-day is not a mere fashion of the praise of one century over another; but at most a rather unique illustration of the fact that the world fares worse without that religion than with it. The Church is dying as usual; but the modern world is dead; and cannot be raised save in the fashion of Lazarus.