The New Priests

The Speaker, August 17, 1901

Among the various conflicting versions of the South African war, versions which in their divergence will probably be taken by historians as descriptions of several different historical events, there is one version of the facts upon which, simple as it is, it does not appear that anyone has lighted. It is surely a new and yet quite reasonable and arguable theory that there is no South African war going on at all. It may after all be one immense legend contrived by a unanimous conspiracy of journalists. Lord Kitchener may actually be lurking about London disguised with a pair of false whiskers. It may be that it is not the Boers who are at St. Helena but the British, removed from sight until the period of a normal war of conquest shall have been achieved. The few generals who are in the secret may have been convinced by the Government that it is necessary to plan some great events in order to inspire the various branches of the Empire with a sense of its unity. If we admit (what is indeed a large assumption) that there is any continent called Africa or any people called Boers, is it not tenable that these irreconcilable burghers may be nothing but a set of gentlemanly young Tory M.P.'s who have sacrificed some months of their leisure to a great patriotic necessity and a taste for sport? General De Wet may perhaps after all turn out to be Lord Hugh Cecil living a double life of singular rapidity between the veldt and the House of Commons. In any case, it is not very difficult to conceive that the whole drama which we devour night and day may be a tremendous myth of the journalists. When they go to the length of inventing whole battles (as they did recently) it is not so very difficult to believe that they might invent whole wars. Very few of us, I believe and hope, would accept the view above suggested as in the least probable,

but when we come to ask ourselves logically why it should not be true, upon what ground rests our conviction of the existence of a war, we shall scarcely find that we have after all any very unimpeachable grounds for it. The journalists, so far as can be seen, hold everything in their hands. If they chose to announce that France had just become a despotism under the benign autocracy of Mr. Stead, that Canon MacColl had been converted to Confucianism and become a Boxer, that the Czar of Russia had abdicated because he was an Anarchist, or that the island of Sicily had sunk suddenly into the sea, I cannot see, if all journalists were unanimous, that we could do anything but believe them. Consequently it is at least an entertaining thought that all the great events that we have seen convulsing Europe of late years may be incidents of this imaginative character; that the Peace Congress may have been a meeting that was supposed to have existed between various nations that are supposed to exist; or that King Humbert of Italy is still alive and cheerful, in so far as cheerfulness is consistent with a certain amount of doubt about one's actual presence upon this earth.

In this manner we reach a conclusion which is in itself somewhat remarkable. The journalists would appear to be in an almost literal sense the priests of the modern world. They may not rise precisely to the tremendous responsibility which was laid upon Peter, but at least it can be said that whatever they bind on earth is bound on earth, and whatever they loose on earth is loosed on earth. They have essentially and absolutely the same functions that were employed by the old priests, but their power for deceit is even greater and their responsibility to the world even less. A comparison between the priests and the journalists would be striking in many points. The man who entered into religion in the old days changed his name in order to obliterate all traces of his worldly personality. The journalist either adopts a pseudonym or remains literally anonymous in a similar manner because he has joined the brotherhood of a great institution which claims its right to absorb all that he can do. The priest's influence and power consisted almost entirely in the fact that he was the only man who brought news. He alone had the keys of the house of knowledge, and his decadence consisted, as in the case of the Pharisees whom Christ denounced, in that he would not enter in himself nor suffer those that were entering to go in. In other words, the corruption of the priesthood occurred at the precise moment in which it changed from a minority organised to impart knowledge into a minority organised to withhold it. The great danger of decadence in journalism is almost exactly the same. Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed mankind. This horrible transformation will occur at the exact instant at which journalists realise that they can become an aristocracy. In theory they are the popular voices, the very quintessence, as it were, of the common point of view. But do not let us forget that this was in an even greater degree true of the priests. The pontiffs, who set their feet upon the necks of kings, were in theory the types of a terrible humility, humbler than that of the meanest beggar. Their exceptional character consisted, according to the theory, in their being exceptionally at one with the poor, exceptionally indifferent to externals, exceptionally human, exceptionally humdrum. Yet they realised at last that they were an aristocracy, and they deceived and browbeat men for many centuries. The terrible danger for journalists is that they may discover the intoxicating fact that they are a minority, for a minority can always be an aristocracy.

A minority, however, they must remain, and we all depend finally upon minorities, upon the minority who are called dentists, or the minority that are called shoemakers. Of all the phrases which modern rationalism has made current, the most entirely ridiculous is the phrase that represents us as testing all things by experience. If we went merely by direct experience we should not believe in the continent of America or the other side of the moon. Our belief in the existence of America depends finally and absolutely upon one thing, our confidence in human nature; that is to say, it rests exactly upon the same ground as the belief which many men in many ages have given to stories of flying horses and of men raised from the dead. Once assume that all men are really cynical, that any tale supported by any testimony is as likely to be a dodge as a piece of evidence, and the whole Western Continent vanishes like a cloud along with Atlantis and Asgard. If men are really cynical, America may be only an American fake.

The conclusion, to my mind, is very simple, but very severe and urgent. To these new priests must be brought home some sense of the appalling responsibility which they hold. They must be given lessons in a certain priestly vanity- they must be discouraged from that facile humility which is a dangerous form of cynicism. They must realise that they above all men have a sacred profession, that humanity is everlastingly trying them, that they with all kings and priests and rulers are eternally in the dock. If they fail us, if they give unmistakable signs of scepticism and a belief in the victory of words and moments, if they ever decisively refuse to be a priesthood and a great priesthood, there will be only two courses left open to any sane man, either to disbelieve everything and everybody or to set sail immediately to discover whether there is such a place as Pekin.