Compton Mackenzie

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end of chapter four chapter v e phillips it is a curious feature of our social and conversational life that the one subject which is of supreme and vital importance to every human being is the least often discussed our thoughts and feelings concerning the hereafter and the shaping of our lives in accordance with our theories or convictions it seems indeed as though the whole world of men as well as women were afflicted with a curious shyness when the subject of religion is even indirectly alluded to in these days of bridge and mahjong universal dancing and freer intercourse between the sexes the habitude of conversation between men at their clubs and other meeting-places has naturally enough declined yet there are always friendships and with friendship an exchange of views upon all the vital matters of life these continue to some extent yet it is a curious fact that if the conversation between any little company of intellectuals should wander from sport or literature or art to the graver question of a possible hereafter even the most brilliant talkers become tongue-tied there are self-conscious gaps in the flow of speech and there is an universal air of relief when as usually happens before long the subject is changed youth is sometimes bolder and deliberately seeks elucidation of the one ageless impenetrable mystery yet among the middle-aged and elderly there exists almost a cult of silence concerning those problems which science has failed us and which faith in the mystic teachings of the spiritual leaders of the world can alone solve from the earliest dawn of intelligence we walk through life whether our own way lies through the pleasure gardens or across the rugged places along the edge of a mysterious and yawning abyss into whose unfathomable depths we know that some day or other we must commit ourselves there are times times as a rule of solitary thought during which we strain our eyes looking downwards but for the most part we accept our destiny with a curious mixture of fatalism and an ostrich-like capacity for burying our heads in the affairs of the world until the last moment without any hope or fear of the hereafter we should logically become a world of lunatics yet all those forms of faith and belief which from the earliest days of history have produced a countless procession of saints and heroes have grown fainter throughout the generations until to-day it really seems as though in future ages not far removed from our own all established forms of worship will die of sheer inanition it is the penalty which we are paying for a larger measure of intellectual comprehension for greater inroads into the mysterious world of science that with all such developments the primitive faith of men in god grows fainter and fainter centuries ago religion was an easy thing man believed what he felt and what he was taught nowadays when the utilitarianism of a more mechanical world has destroyed to a large extent the earlier and the sweeter forms of apprehension born of faith and sentiment religion as expressed by any definite formulae is sinking fast into the background of our lives taking its place among the dead beautiful things whose inspiration is past the mythology of greece the pictured worship of the egyptians it is scarcely our fault it is a matter often when one contemplates the simple joyous lives of past generations for deep and bitter regret that the whole-hearted unquestioning faith with which they accepted the priest expounded explanations of the problems of the universe has in a large measure become impossible to the dwellers in this bustling world of ours impossible whatever effort of will or brain we devote towards its renaissance with it has passed without the shadow of a doubt much of the spirituality of our lives our art has become distorted and uninspired and even our national existence has felt the need of that flame of idealism which gave it color and force the materialist to-day has come into his own yet the greatest skeptic has to admit that there is implanted in us from some unknown source together with our other inherent proclivities certain aspirations towards a world morality the cultivation of which brings us a measure of content and happiness which we can gain by no other means my religion is the religion of the man in the street an attitude of i hope reverent ignorance as regards the great unsolved problems of life and death but a desire as one looks upward in vain to pass through one's day-by-day life believing that in one's own fellow-creatures there must be a spark of that divinity which elsewhere eludes us an inclination always to accept the most charitable view of a fellow creature's misdoings to believe the best of every one with whom one is brought into contact and to help so far as one can those who are confronted with graver problems of life than we ourselves are called upon to meet there seems to be no other religion left to-day for the thinking man but to worship the unknown god through his fellows fulfilling thereby a primitive and inherent instinct we are few of us heroes we all have our weaknesses but it is always possible in yielding to them to sacrifice as little as may be the happiness of others the struggle to keep our place in life is forced upon us but we may fight for our own hand and still retain a measure of consideration for those whose interests clash with our own we are fundamentally selfish by the logic of necessity forced into an attitude of self-preservation by the laws of life still at the cost of a little thought we can carry on the fight without undue hurt to others with some blending indeed of altruistic effort if the shadows of the great abyss reveal to us nothing of what may lie beneath their terrifying embrace the best preparation for the inevitable end in the absence of that rare gift of absolute faith would seem to be the conviction earned by continual effort that the happiness of one's fellow-creatures had been rather added to than marred by one's passage through life chapter v chapter six of my religion by various authors chapter six compton mackenzie it would have been a much easier task for me to write about my religion if i could have invented a religion of my own to expound but i am a catholic and a man might as well try to circumnavigate the globe in a paper boat as hope to circumscribe the catholic faith within a thousand words fortunately however the catholic church is not at the mercy of an individual apologist her dogmas rest upon something firmer than the shifting sands of scientific theories in no galilean cave will any enthusiastic young palaeontologist find the skull of jesus christ and therefore make it advisable for theologians to change the date of the incarnation by a trifle of twenty thousand years let me hasten to add that i am not presuming to sneer at science an obscurantist attitude to science is as repulsive as a smoking lamp the more i devote my reason to the study of nature and the less i surrender my emotion to the contemplation of art the more firmly do i believe in what the curiously feeble terminology of metaphysics calls the absolute and the more clearly do i perceive that only within the catholic church can i hope dimly to apprehend that absolute it is encouraging for instance to read in dr jean's lecture to the royal society on february fifteenth nineteen twenty four that our sun is situated fairly near the centre of the fifteen hundred million stars that make up the known universe after the scorn that has been expended on the folly of medieval man in supposing that he was the centre of the universe and that his earth was something quite definitely extraordinary the tidal theory of cosmogony advanced by dr jeans restores some of my anthropocentric complacency for the moment that theory seems unassailable yet belief in it paradoxically requires an effort of faith in the improbable even more severe than the effort demanded for the improbable fact of the incarnation i am not trying to lighten the ship by flinging the cargo overboard after the fashion of modernists or broad churchmen or whatever they choose to call themselves when the theories of science appear positively to conflict with the teachings of the church i prefer to wait until the church decides before i commit myself to accepting any theory be it never so attractive dear wise ray lancaster communion with whose profound knowledge and beautiful common sense is one of the pleasures of contemporary existence once told me that he could not understand how i had managed so completely to surrender my individual judgment as to profess catholicism it would be insincere to pretend that i cannot imagine a conflict between my reason and the authority of the church that may develop at any moment all i can affirm now is that my reason has not yet been called upon to struggle with my faith after all the church allows the individual mind a much greater liberty of speculation than is generally supposed what she does not allow is any attempt by the individual to speculate for others the classic instance of apparent fallibility is the condemnation of the copernican system but it must be remembered that it was really the astronomers of the time who were so urgent and unanimous in their defence of the ptolemaic system a parallel case at the present day would be to ask the church to decide at once whether or not dr jean's tidal cosmogony has superseded the celestial mechanics of laplace the strength of the chain is its weakest link and the conservatism of the church is continually being justified will any man of common sense who has studied the fragmentary history of mankind blame the caution of the church in always being more ready to condemn than to approve let it be remembered that she has been equally slow to approve the novelties of the theological speculation the theory of the immaculate conception took over eight hundred years to become a dogma and though the assumption of the blessed virgin mary is celebrated as one of the major feasts belief in it as an historical fact is still no more than a pious opinion to touch for a moment on the political aspect of catholicism we hear a great deal about the wickedness of the church in the past and our flesh is invited to creep at the thought of priestcraft well a decent anti-clericalism is not unbecoming to a catholic and few of us are prepared to claim too much for the priesthood which it may be remarked is only a small part of the church no doubt in the middle ages the tyranny of the priests was dangerous and unpleasant yet i venture to think that the tyranny of lawyers by which it was replaced was equally dangerous and unpleasant and i am not sure but that the tyranny of doctors with which we are now threatened will be the most dangerous and unpleasant of all i am certainly prepared to maintain that the abuses of psychoanalysis already exceed by far the sum total of the abuses of the confessional for which it is an inadequate and pretentious substitute i see no hope for the future of western civilization unless it return to the political ideals of the middle ages if i had not been a papist before the war i should have been driven into becoming one by the war alone the church preserved her integrity during that mundane epilepsy to my eyes which many people might consider as ineffective as stained-glass windows for clarity of vision the formation of the league of nations is no better than a half-hearted compromise with the ideals of catholicism a typist dream of the holy roman empire for politicians a new hypocrisy for diplomats a sitting of addled eggs had i the strength of mind to divorce myself entirely from the present i might find my salvation in the study of mathematics my worship in listening to the music of bach and my pleasure in reading the poetry of lucretius as it is incapable of such a starry remoteness i find in the catholic faith that common humanity which fortifies me against the horrors of a twentieth century existence did i possess the requisite credulity i might seek consolation and assurance in spiritualism but my reason revolts less from a belief in the resurrection of the body than from a belief in ectoplasm and if i had to fancy a postman's eternity for myself after death an endless rat-tatting on easily manipulated tables i would prefer to be granted a certain faith in my ultimate obliteration all that humanity can believe all that humanity can hope all that humanity can love i find in catholicism our minds have been so lately stunned by the noise of war that we do not yet apprehend what a much more tremendous spiritual contest is preparing it may be that the historian of a thousand years hence will consider the creation of the irish free state a more important date than august nineteen fourteen because ireland may ultimately prove to be the first political expression of the finer civilization that by the mercy of god shall emerge from that immense struggle already looming it will be observed that hitherto i have not used the word christianity in this article that is because i believe that within a comparatively short time catholicism and christianity will once more mean the same thing in that great spiritual struggle even an ulsterman may have to beat his drum in honor of the pope if he wants to drive antichrist out of ulster putting on one side those intimations of divinity that no man should be expected to proclaim thus casually as it were i am a christian because without christianity i should be so much perplexed by the riddle of life that i could not wait another moment to solve it i am a catholic because only in catholicism does my skeptical mind perceive a rational exegesis and a practical synthesis of christianity if i have appeared bigoted and contentious my bigotry and contentiousness must be forgiven because anybody who believes ardently is bound to disbelieve with equal ardour and if i did not believe and disbelieve with a deep conviction that i was believing what was true and disbelieving what was false i should never have allowed my voice to be heard at this symposium of testimony chapter six chapter seven of my religion by various authors this librivox recording is in the public domain chapter seven j d the changes in my own attitude to religion followed generally and in a condensed form the broader movements of thought during the past century i was brought up in a country rectory and my father was a low churchman of the old school in those years i believed in hell as firmly as i believed in god or the wisdom of my own parents i was in short a fair representative of the average church-goer of the early and mid-victorian period the first breath of doubt crossed my mind when i was just twenty-one and so strong a breath was it that in a single evening i came over as it were into the scepticism of the later part of the nineteenth century begotten by the works of darwin huxley and tyndall i reached too the same climax of absolute materialism and then like so many others entered on another phase of reaction as a result of reading haeckel's riddle of the universe in which matter was so triumphantly proved to possess all the potentialities hitherto attributed to god that it really made little difference whether one believed in the god of matter or a material god the further stages that mark the subtler movements of thought cannot be followed in an article of this length they include the examination and rejection of the phenomena of spiritualism so far as the evidence for actual messages from the dead is concerned the opposition to modern occultist thought is that it omits an essential to development by too great a concentration on the self and last a tendency to find in recent science strong support for the purely mystical attitude inasmuch as the further our researches are pressed into the constitution of matter the more we find it becoming resolved into an aspect of force which is merely a name for anything you please but though we may enlarge our conception of god to any extent forsaking that early notion of him as a kind of jealous patriarch and judge extraordinarily quick-tempered where his own rules are concerned and assuming him as the essential spirit of the whole universe we the inhabitants of this one small planet are compelled by the accident of our present condition to consider religion from the point of view of its influence on our day-to-day existence now whatever may be our conception of life after death whether indeed we believe in it or not the whole experience of mankind seems to show that the true practice of religion enforces before all else an element of self-denial in all forms of the christian religion this element is found in avoiding the temptation of what has been clearly defined for us as sin in hindu buddhism and occultism generally the necessity for self-denial as a means to self-development is pushed to an extreme asceticism but even in the most primitive of savage cults we find this root principle of denying ourselves something that we desire this then is what i have come to believe in as the meaning of religion as such the element of faith as a means to the practice of self-restraint since this is the common factor of all creeds from this it will be inferred that i do not disapprove the principles of christianity nor do i i regard the ethics of christ as being beyond all comparison the most admirable rule of life ever given to the world but i have never seen that ethic practised by the members of any christian community with which i have been associated moreover the dogmas of the churches appear to me to be utterly at variance with the spirit of christ to take the most obvious of many examples i can find no warrant in christ's teaching for the doctrine that a man shall find salvation only by following the particular articles of belief adopted by one particular sect or division of the christian church the clearest statement that christ made in this connection was he that believeth on me shall not perish and i choose to accept that at once in its simplest and widest significance not as implying he that believes in an endless rigmarole of senseless ordinances and ritual originally imposed by priests for their own purposes but as he that believes in the divine principle in himself and all mankind if we could indeed accept that single faith as the basis of a great world religion all our controversies would be blown away and the whole life of man would have to be reorganized no matter in what creed i was educated if i believe in this divine principle in myself and act always as if i so believe i should be compelled to lead a religious life to do anything less would be to deny my faith and relinquish the hope of eternal life but at the present stage of our evolution this one simple creed with the enormous responsibilities and need for self-discipline that it necessitates is a world too hard for the average man and woman if we could truly believe in god not as a distant superhuman judge whom we must presently confront but as inhabiting instantly and forever our own mind we should be incapable of acting unworthily every mean selfish cruel cowardly intolerant act would then be a denial of our great faith and would indeed recrucify that spirit of christ which is still seeking to incarnate itself in all humanity this then in conclusion is what religion means to me the belief that god seeks to express himself in us not by a slavish adherence to some trifling form of worship but by the practice of a principle which was incorporated by christ in the words thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself but who as yet is capable of obeying that tremendous commandment the essence of all true religious practice chapter seven chapter eight of my religion by various authors chapter eight israel it is sunday morning in the temple my laundress who hath sacrificed to me her one morning of rest with a maternal devotion that recalls the constant service of the ancient world and proves that despite bolshevist organs kind hearts may still beat beneath cheap blouses has returned to the remote bosom of her family after a feverish week of wrestling with theatrical folk and business men i am alone the church bells are ringing and though i was born a jew and know that the original templars on the day they captured jerusalem and the tomb of christ in one of their crusades slew every jew man woman and child i would willingly quit the work of writing this to sit in the temple church but even as it is the glorious music soars up to my tree shadowed study and i rejoice that although the crowd will be standing to-night in long patient queues outside the film palaces of the strand noble buildings still exist wherein an ever dwindling minority can hear the inspired words of the ancient jews in the almost equally inspired jacobean english and although i myself can rest no day at all these weeks i am glad that this day of repose should have been given to the toiling masses through the medium of the mosaic code and while i would cut them off from no open-air recreation i think that they no less than their so-called betters stand to lose by the abandonment of all ritual save that of the dance-hall and the night club i can forgive wells much when i recall that in his history of the world he has done something if far from everything to put isaiah and amos in their places as the greatest factors in civilization it is true bossuet had long ago made all history turn round the jewish but that was superstition whereas wells's view is provable we moderns must be open says the villain or as his already belated disciples would style him the hero of my latest play but on religion who to-day is open only those whose minds are closed be they ultra pietists or atheists both forms of extremists are brainless but the immemorial instinct of mankind would justify the former rather than the latter though democracy has proved itself as despicable as aristocracy there is still safety in numbers and tradition orthodoxy makes also for happiness and with all my larger opportunities and means my life has probably been less enviable than that of my penurious father who in his old age left his home and family to die in jerusalem it is unfortunate nevertheless that the orthodox bear out the only truth that oscar wilde has contributed to thought to wit that each man kills the thing he loves i remember in my school days a boy pouncing on a contradiction in the bible and at once disbelieving in the whole book but of course the bible is not a book because it is all bound together a literature covering seven or eight centuries is mistaken for a single volume this is christianity's fault the only book the bible resembles is an anthology for this mixture of magnificence and myth was culled from the literature of israel by an editorial board the old testament is a chosen book more certainly than the jews are a chosen people there was no need for my friend sir james fraser to point out the savage elements of this book they leap to the eye the real need is to point out that despite the later appendix called the new testament these savage elements still exist in christendom and never more brazenly than since the war to end war ended the peace of mankind it is now the common duty of all civilized men of every creed to find the next religion to quote the title of my still prohibited play of nineteen twelve there is very little real difference among the higher creeds of today even between such apparent opposites as roman catholicism and judaism what keeps them apart is largely the economic factor jesus in that punning mood to which he like the other ancient hebrew prophets of whom he was the latest and greatest example was prone told peter he was founding his church on a rock the rock his church is really founded on as i remark in my italian fantasies is a gold reef desalarize the creeds and you will soon unify them but of course money though it petrifies religion is not its real source and though it perpetuates the differences between religions these differences are not insignificant but in practice they are reduced or even eliminated by the common nature of every man everywhere the founders of religion are supermen and as a character in one of my novel's remarks it is only by being misunderstood that a great man can influence his kind we see this in the sudden acceptance of bernard shaw by the church-going classes because of his st joan and despite his unflinchingly analytical preface to the text to me he seemed from the first a sort of comic christ even before i had the privilege of his friendship i could see the love and pity behind the wilfully brazen but if he does not die in the odour of sibyl thorndyke's sanctity it will be because he subsequently read that little masterpiece o'flaherty v c on the wireless i myself though that alone is no proof of greatness have been equally misunderstood it takes two you see to make a truth and though by marrying out of the fold i tried to make it clear that to me judaism was not racial i failed to get the idea over jewry thought i had made a mixed marriage a form of union i utterly disapprove of the fact being that the englishwoman who honoured me by becoming my wife was essentially at one with me but as pascal says the heart has reasons of which the head is ignorant and by some inarticulate instinct the jewish masses the world over still believed in me as a racial jew and followed me as they still insist on following me i cannot complain since jehovah himself was pictured by the pious as clad in praying shawl and phylacteries and the same fate has overtaken dr herzl the founder of modern zionism who often brought me his problems to this very room two decades before lord rothschild sir herbert samuel or alfred mond who in those days might have been so useful had discovered their passion for palestine so little racial am i that i have not made my eldest born a son of the covenant i cannot with my vision and knowledge of history carry on the nineteenth century old tradition of trying to sit between two stools before the war i might avail jew offered to send a five-pound note to any charity i pleased if i will tell him if my son was circumcised i was sorry to rob a charity but i left the inquisitive letter unanswered if the writer is still alive as i hope he can send the fiver to the jewish refugees stranded by pitiless america's immigration policy i will add and he may perhaps rise to a tenor at the glad news that my younger son is circumcised but that was only because the doctor advised it circumcision has in fact become so popular a prophylactic that it can no longer connote the covenanted isolation of the jew were jewry in earnest in fulfilling its vaunted mission it would rejoice at this removal of the greatest stumbling-block to the spread of its religion i cannot too much admire those masses of romans who in the times of tacitus and juvenal were not deterred from judaism even by a surgical operation in the pre chloroform period but in our day if judaism is ever to create the world of its millennial dream it must perform a surgical operation on itself and cut away all that clogs and hinders its vitalizing activity it must recognize that brianism like poor brian himself is dead and that the old testament is as far from finality as the new which judaism should now add to it what the next religion should be exactly i have tried to answer in the spirit of renan who in a preface to one of his plays urged that only drama giving through its personages even opposite answers can give the full reply to any real human question simplicity in statement is possible only to journalists and politicians themselves cunningly complex thus doubly the theatre may claim to replace the dying church i have been compelled to refer to my own books because alone among the contributors to this series unless dear old conan doyle's fantasies are to be reckoned a contribution to the subject i seem not to have waited for editorial prompting to bear my heart on religion apart from my play with that great word in its very title i have dealt with the subject in my book of verse blind children and especially in my bulky book the voice of jerusalem my very first sonnet published when i was sixteen in an organ called society now extinct like most of the papers i have been connected with began the glamour of deceit is over all we prize in the stars that seem with love to glow are huge black worlds the inward god gleam dies and hearts shut up as flowers when sunlight flies and not many years later i published in another extinct organ called progress a poem that still seems to me to sum up all that shaw and wells have said and which had already been anticipated by john stuart mill as to god's lack of omnipotence since then i at least have become less omniscient a line in my murdered tragedy the war god have you experience then in making whirls seems worth pondering at the end of my dreamers of the ghetto you may find a poem called jehovah which still represents my views as well as a passionate outburst which must have anticipated pragmatism in a vast american anthology called the world's great religious poetry the bulk of which appears to have been written recently in america i am represented by three pieces but the tiny quatrain in my blind children still seems to me to express a final truth who armed us with righteous meeting-rod by which our trust in heavenly love grows dim the fact that you and i despair of god is common ground for hope and trust in him wells and shaw are modern manichaeans but possibly the last word remains with the bold utterance of isaiah i create good and i create evil i am the lord but even this view of religion cannot blind us to the fact that life remains a tragicomic mystery and that a god without a sense of humour as i was before dean ing in saying would be to that extent our inferior i agree with the hero of the next religion in his doctrine of one world at a time and in his view that if we fail to turn our planet into a paradise no power outside us will do it i do not share the megalomaniac view of my friends maeterlinck shaw or wells that we shall ever be able to steer our planet through space as for einstein's view of space true or not i regard it as relatively unimportant a future life is unthinkable but not therefore impossible and there are not a few people i should love to see again or to atone to though it seems pointless if they are transmogrified beyond recognition as for the idea of back to methuselah although human life is extending that can at best alter only the ratios at six hundred i feel i should have the same old foibles as i find in myself at sixty but if by science or otherwise we have the right to prolong life we have also the right to end it war cannot have a monopoly of the right to kill peace must also have its lethal rites under rigid safeguards of course but agonized incurables must be relieved of their agony in the famous conversation between george eliot and f w h myers who though the founder of the psychical society has failed deplorably to communicate with his followers that great but now somewhat obscured victorian authoress held forth duty as all-sufficient for the spiritual life i would rather phrase it that our guiding stars in the darkness of the infinite spaces should be not only duty but loving-kindness pity and courage i have always regretted that arnold bennett annexed the title the great adventure to an insignificant play because that is the only phrase for the life of the universe and our own chapter chapter nine of my religion by various authors chapter nine h de vere stackpool one morning a great many years ago the congregation of the mariners church which is in kingston ireland had settled into their pews for the sermon it was before i was born but i can see them in imagination these irish protestant victorians the light streaming upon them through the tall narrow windows the silence broken by an occasional cough or the snap of a vinaigrette the parson above them proceeding with his discourse the children nudged to make them behave suddenly a whisper ran through the church passing from pew to pew heads turned a man stood up and the congregation rising stampeded leaving the parson and his discourse literally in the air news had come that the queen's yacht was in sight it was queen victoria's second visit to ireland and these good people did not i am sure cast religion to the winds in their eagerness to satisfy a consuming curiosity but just convention the same convention that took me as an unwilling child through the sundays of many a long year to the same church to sit bored through many a long sermon unable to cut it short because no queen's yacht was in sight convention i imagine takes a good many people to church but of this i am sure that it takes all or nearly all children for i cannot imagine a normal child washing itself and dressing itself in its best and proceeding of its own free will to sit for an hour and a half in a stiff pew listening to a service it can only partly understand a service that enjoins it among other things to pray that it may be saved from the sin of coveting its neighbour's wife of murder and of adultery i am just talking out of my own experience as a child the words god religion church sunday clergyman all became related and each expressive of something i did not care for something to do with form and stiff collars something i could not understand something mirthless limb stiffening and at times terrifying as when they sang that frightful hymn which includes the lines oh what eternal horrors hang around that second death i am not arguing against church-going for adults i am only saying in the course of these remarks and saying with conviction that the english church service is not adapted for children and that the taking of a child to church as a matter of convention sunday after sunday is not the surest way to induce in its mind the love of god but perhaps the surest way to induce the fear of him as a wretched disciplinarian a person before whom it is wicked to shuffle one's feet or smile and who may treat one not at all in a fatherly fashion the terrible threat of hell would have haunted my childhood only for the fact that i did not consider it fully i had other things to consider including lessons in marbles and mackerel fishing in dublin bay also i had the feeling that the threat of eternal punishment for finite sins was a bogey put up to frighten me not by god but by my elders and betters in the course of many years i have not altered this opinion substituting for elders and betters the heads of the churches of the past for in the course of these years i have seen the church make a half turn from the position it adopted towards the sinner when i was a child hell is not preached to-day as it was in those days and in consequence perhaps the church of convention has partly lost its hold upon the public while at the same time the religion of fear has departed for many of us and given place to a new religion which teaches us that though a god surely exists we can by no means visualize him it is the attempt to depict god as a person a superior sort of clergyman with the attribute of a magistrate and a schoolmaster a hanging judge and a loving father that i am sure has been accountable for a great deal of the growth of disbelief and the birth of the age of reason among ordinary men disbelief in the conventional creed of our forefathers belief on lines more rational and understandable belief in good and evil belief that in clinging to good as far as in us lies is the best form of worship of the spirit of good and in avoiding evil as far as in us lies the best means of fighting the spirit of evil i think very likely we who hold this simple faith are limited even purblind but there are men so much above us that they have the power to come into closer touch with the great spirit i just speak for myself and i am sure many like me and when i call it a simple faith i do not mean that it is easy of observance for it implies in its recognition of good not only good in its personal application but in its application to others the recognition in fact of the rights of man this teaching is in the bible but in some extraordinary way it was never set free from the churches and conventicles till recent years and then it was released i suspect not by the parsons but the congregations redeemed by education from the deadening clutch of formalism and creed the result has been almost unthinkable on march seventh eighteen eighteen at the lincolnshire lent assizes his majesty's judges and their sheriff all pillars of the church and state murdered in cold blood by hanging twelve unfortunate men guilty of thefts or small offences scarce worthy of a ten-shilling fine or a month's imprisonment in october eighteen thirty in bedford jail was murdered by hanging a boy almost a child for the act of putting a light to a hayrick two of a million facts that point to a recent past so terrible that contrasted with the present the mind is led to say surely christ has come to the world again perhaps he has i do not know but of this i am assured that the world of england to-day despite its supposed irreligion and the emptying of our churches is now more permeated than ever it has been by the spirit of clemency and justice by the hatred of cruelty and oppression and the determination at all events among the masses that there shall be equal rights for all men but we have still a long way to go chapter ten henry arthur jones i was brought up in the rigorous creed of english puritanism i am grateful for it as i believe that puritanism offers a firm basis for building up strong solid and sincere character i was forced to read and study the bible constantly and on this count also i acknowledge an immense debt to puritanism those strange and beautiful and deeply human books have been my classics but i am equally grateful that i was able to make an early escape from puritanism till i was twenty i accepted almost without question the creed that i had been taught i had never been what my co-religionists called converted for there is no need in my nature for crude and luscious spiritual experience i kept a hard belief in the cast-iron dogmas that had been hammered into my head all through my childhood the business i was engaged in allowed me long stretches of leisure and i was a wide and diligent reader science and poetry i loved most but i read a good deal of fiction no thoughtful man in those years could avoid being drawn into the currents of controversy between the new affirmations of science and the old affirmations of orthodox christianity i eagerly examined the arguments on both sides and was swayed towards darwin huxley mill i carefully studied herbert spencer's synthetic philosophy it has largely influenced my after thinking though philosophic thought has passed aside from herbert spencer he remains a clear solid thinker and a sure corrective to the wild loose fallacies of socialism i read the leading apologists of that day with a strong reaction of dissent newman i received gladly with sensitive delight in the moulds of his language with great admiration for his dialectic with wonder to see this lofty subtle intellect entangling itself in nave incredulities and with not a particle of agreement in his main positive conclusions but he who chiefly propped my mind and steered my course in those days was matthew arnold i may gratefully dwell upon the memory of my close friend the rev t w chinyall the unitarian minister at exeter a cousin of mark rutherford although he had thrown away all dogma his was one of the most religious minds that i have held in communion together we found great religious support in matthew arnold if to-day i were asked for the clearest expression of my religious belief so far as i have a belief that can be formulated i should find it in that long courageous song of empedocles with its final note i say fear not life still leaves human effort scope but since life seems with ill nurse no extravagant hope because thou must not dream thou needst not then despair arnold constantly sends out the loftiest and most invigorating religious strains and impulses those who are doubting and baffled may go to him for help he will not offer them a hard definite creed but he will spiritually fortify them he is not for those who seek an anodyne but for those who need a tonic to brace them to endurance arnold is the surest and strongest and most fearless religious teacher of our time we can lean upon him and face the darkness with him tennyson and browning never went through the darkness they saw the deep black cave that opened before mankind when orthodox christianity shook and cracked under the assaults of science they entered the cave of doubt made extensive excursions in it and came back reporting that on the whole it was better to abide safely on this side in the comfort of cheerful and spacious generalities matthew arnold did go fearlessly right through the darkness and came out on the other side strengthened and assured since those years in the seventies when to the best of my power i diligently searched into the truth of these things i have never been able to accept the dogmas of orthodox christianity not even to save my soul will i teach my tongue to say over forms of words that have no meaning to me my mind offers a swift instinctive repugnance to all statements of fact that i cannot analyze and understand neither in religion nor in politics nor in art will i bewilder and deceive myself by repeating formulas that i cannot break up into their constituent parts so that i may reassemble them in an intelligible unity of thought before admitting them to a permanent place in the furniture of my mind it will be argued that the cardinal dogmas of christianity are matters of faith but they are issued to me as definite statements of fact and as such they are imposed upon believers what moral impulse and quickening what spiritual illumination and ardour what assurance and consolation in this dim world can i obtain by repeating statements of fact which merely baffle and puzzle me and which i must not question but must receive as matters of faith from my early manhood until a few years ago i called myself an agnostic i was never wholly sucked into the invading tide of materialistic thought that followed the publication of the origin of species if in my struggle to gain firm land i swallowed much of its wash i always manage to keep my eyes above its mountainous waves our civilization to-day nourishes a large and increasing amount of hideous coarse materialism but there is i think a sensible decline in materialistic philosophy and affirmation some fine and high-tuned souls have found a resting place in spiritualism they have amassed an overwhelming amount of evidence that manifestations of a power beyond our seeing do actually take place much of this evidence is questionable some of it is incredible but much of it has great weight is difficult to discredit and impossible to disprove i am more curious about the scientific aspects of spiritualism than about its religious aspects as a religion it does not satisfy my needs i cannot develop a true religious feeling towards it the future existence that it promises has no allurement to me without denying it or ridiculing it i cannot find suitable accommodation for it in my scheme of things i cannot make it fit into the macrocosm quite contentedly i can absent myself from its extremely tenuous felicity and linger here to commune with my earthly companions and enjoy with them the light of the sun while i have many absorbing tasks of present concern to fill my days i push aside the business of investigating spiritualism i am far less concerned about what is going to happen to me in eternity than about what is going to happen to this country in the next ten or twenty years if the new heaven of spiritualism is veritable scientific topography i look back with affectionate memories to the vanished new jerusalem of my childhood with its spotless white raiment and angels waving wings and harps of gold we don't get such fine weather as we used to get in the days of charles the second addison's old squire complained to his crony i echo that we don't get such fine solid mansions in the skies socialist and spiritualist as we used to get in the days of good queen victoria my dear friend arthur conan doyle to whose earnestness and truth-seeking crystal sincerity i pay the warmest tribute will forgive me if i lag out of his company immersed as i am in the affairs of this world that give me little respite to lay up for myself treasures in heaven whatever call to wander in strangely haunted spheres of ether or fields of asphodel in new modes of being amid new duties and new pleasures whatever call to prolong and fulfil its existence my spirit may obey when it has earned its release from the flesh it is to this earth that it turns and returns and passionately clings today this earth that is the mother of all that i know and feel this earth where i have lived and sinned and suffered and loved and fought and stumbled and triumphed and despaired and laughed and wept and eaten my fill and drunk deep draughts of pleasure and success and bitter cups of misery and defeat and shame this earth whose dawns and sunsets and variegated pageantries are nicely suited to my eyes and her harmonies and discords exactly tuned to my ears this earth whose biting winds and angry hailstorms have buffeted me but whose sunny skies and blue halcyon days have restored me this very earth the only place where my foot finds firm standing and where my spirit feels itself at home only in the degree that any promised or imagined paradise offers to renew the conditions and experiences and activities of this present mortal life and to restore its associations does it win me to desire its hospitality and then only as a last resort a refuge from dissolution a chilly exchange from this pleasing anxious being this palpable breathing world where beating hearts make music to beating hearts and where love and friendship clasp no shadows but warm human flesh and blood still i will snatch as much as i can from annihilation and i shall find no paradise intolerable if arthur conan doyle is there on its threshold to welcome me meantime i have had no slightest personal revelation of anything outside the everyday course of events nor am i inquisitive to communicate with loved ones who have gone from me i am disinclined to invoke agencies that claim a power to bridge the gulf that separates me from the dead i would rather imagine them to be at rest and not vexed about the happenings of this world it would give me no happiness to know that i was certain to receive a spirit communication to-night rather i should feel uneasiness and discomfort i am content to hold communion in my own soul with their memories who have been my dearest earthly companions but i will accept all authentic evidence of their continued existence that is offered directly to my own senses and that i can subject to proof i will not go out of my way to seek it what then is my religion to-day what positive definite creed have i wherewith to fortify and cheer myself and light my feet in my few remaining years as i go down to the nobility of death descending to the shadows have i any encouraging words to call back to them who are following me down that same beaten path it is only in late years that we have learned from science that each of us lives not as we supposed in a tenement of clay but in a tenement of electrons matter has been resolved into force but this force is everywhere intelligent foreseeing orderly directory purposeful in its manifestations whether it majestically swings our earth round the sun in a mathematically calculated orbit whether it supervises the fall of a sparrow or whether with the same unerring precision it commands the infinitesimal rings of movement in every atom.

but is this force not blind and malignant when it hurts or punishes or destroys me no i must not ascribe to it my purposes and my preferences whether the tiny phagocyte expels the poison from my blood and saves me or whether the deadly microbe instills the poison and kills me there is alike purpose and intelligence directing their microscopic activities how can i call that design which shapes and animates the clumsy work of man and not call that design which shapes and animates the infinitely perfect forms and movements in every cranny of this universe how can i call that spirit which inhabits my flesh and directs my movements and not call that spirit which inhabits this universal frame of things and directs its movements however we may name this pervading force however we may imagine or apprehend it we cannot without abolishing our conceptions of design and intelligence nay without abolishing the very words themselves deny that design and intelligence are the creators the sustainers and the sovereign dictators of this universe it is impossible to acknowledge that there is design in any part or section of this universe in any work of man or of nature and then to rail off that section as an oasis and a preserve from chaos if design and intelligence operate anywhere and in anything then they must necessarily operate everywhere and in all things from the march of the stars to the finest rhythm of the smallest atom is that determinism in defiance of it i instinctively assert my free will because i am conscious of exercising my free will i cannot dare not abdicate my responsibility if i try to escape from it conscience and remorse stand ready to arrest me whence come these compunctious visitings as lady macbeth calls them if not from the power beyond our seeing that with design and intelligence compels the universe is there a paradox here there is a dilemma how can i escape from it i will perform an act of faith because i have no alternative i will trust this power that is beyond my comprehending unless i perform this act of faith i cannot steadfastly and courageously continue my earthly pilgrimage i am justified because i am thereby helped and strengthened and made equal with my fate this act of faith is wholly different from the mechanical repetition of a form of words which i cannot understand which it is sought to impose upon me as an act of faith and which is indeed nothing more than an emission of sounds from the tongue a placebo like the comforting pronouncement of the blessed word mesopotamia we cannot comprehend this intangible power it is not stuff that our senses can handle and dissect i do not understand what is meant by a personal god the phrase brings me up against a blank wall so far as i can understand what is meant by it it seems to me a contradiction in terms when it is used i recall the psalmist's rebuke thou thoughtest that i was altogether such an one as thyself but i will reprove thee we cannot comprehend that power but it insists that we shall apprehend it matter has been resolved into force and every manifestation of that force shows arrangement design intelligence force power spirit we are using large indefinite synonyms are they not all the same the only reality the ultimate reality out of which all things are spun our own bodies as well as every other compound of electrons i believe that all this vast universe is living intelligent spirit in its every tiniest atom i believe that we can rest in its faithfulness and punctuality it is not a lying spirit it is a truthful and honest spirit facing and accepting all the angriest convulsions and hurricanes of that universal spirit facing and accepting all the woes and disasters and diseases and brutalities and blinding sorrows that it visits upon us facing and accepting all the torments of the flesh and agonies of the mind that man endures i believe there is yet a great balance of sentient happiness and joy and beauty and interpenetrating the cosmos to its utmost limit i discern an infrangible law compelling all its atoms in one long march of unity and order of purpose to secure that balance of happiness and joy and beauty when wordsworth declared that every flower enjoyed the air it breathed he was not using a poet's license but stating a scientific fact may we not divine intrinsic spirit in those dust grains of the clods of the field which seeds of wheat shall intelligently clasp and shall endow with vegetable life and that having been garnered and become foodstuff shall then be intelligently drawn into my blood and thence shall be intelligently appointed to the chief office in my brain there to burn with love and adoration is there spirit in me and not in that grain of dust which is qualifying itself to become the noblest part of me in what obscurest nook or recess of matter in what rock or plant or animal or man shall we search and shall not find there the home of the living spirit that men call god thou hast beset me behind and before whither shall i go from thy spirit or whither shall i free from thy presence if i ascend up into heaven thou art there if i make my bed in hell behold thou art there if i take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea even there thy hand shall lead me and thy right hand shall guide me how the old words fit our mouths and lift our hearts to-day if we do not basely put them to literal use if we do not harden them into dead benumbing incredible statements of fact it is the fate of all creeds ultimately to petrify religion the letter strangles the spirit let us not submit ourselves to the despotism of dead forms of words equally having thrown off the fetters of dogma let us not ignobly seek refuge in amiable generalities and vasty vagueness and that balmy optimism which is equally meaningless with the dogmas that we have rejected thus i am led in the company of many of the deepest and devoutest minds of all times to pantheism to that large simple faith which finds poetic expression in paul's words to the athenians he giveth to all life and breath and all things that they should seek the lord if haply they might feel after him and find him though he be not far from any one of us for in him we live and move and have our being my creed is not a full rich seductive creed like roman catholicism embroidered with golden legends and spangled and painted with gorgeous imageries it is a narrow plank but i find it sure under my feet i tread onwards with no misgiving i pray to that living universal spirit not expecting it to work miracles for me not to command scarcely to beseech but that i may be drawn into aspiring communion with that power whose abundant life gave me life and gives me more life whose inexhaustible strength gives me new strength that i may keep perfect step and tune with its laws and that i may thereby gain increased faith courage patience hope and self-control my prayers do not fall into the void for i rise refreshed invigorated and assured i am not distressed about immortality i cannot clearly enough picture to myself any future state of being that will be so different from this present state that i feel obliged to make special preparation and do extra packing for it my ordinary everyday spiritual luggage will suffice me to carry me through the journey however long it may be i am not building upon immortality but i will joyfully receive it if it is conferred upon me such is my religion is it meagre is it chilly is it pagan is it a religion at all it is true for me it is enough for me i can live by it at seventy-four i can face death without a fear i do indeed shrink from a wearisome dying the drawn-out pain the trouble and inconvenience to myself and to those that wait to see me pass but of death itself i have not the least dread let me not say a word in rebuke to them whose habit or nature demands a vast architectural scheme of dogma and incomprehensibility the operative part of any man's religion is that which he weaves for himself out of his own spiritual experience the unseen power whose eyes for ever doth accompany mankind hath looked on no religion scornfully which man did ever find which hath not taught weak wills how much they can which hath not fallen on the heart like rain which hath not said to sunk self-weary man thou must be born again we cannot rest in a materialistic interpretation of the universe the last creed that i can accept is that which affirms the spirit of man to be a transitory emanation from dead matter and resolving it back into dead matter accuses the universe of being a huge trick organized by futility and nothingness to delude and defeat mankind we refuse to deify futility and nothingness the spirit of man will always throw up to heaven its triumphant affirmation though he slay me yet will i trust in him chapter ten chapter eleven of my religion by various authors the unknown man it has been a real inspiration and joy to read the articles by well-known writers on their religious beliefs which are included in my religion i think mr walpole is correct when he says if you were to question nine out of ten grown men and women of to-day as to their religious experience they would describe to you an evolution through three stages of discovery first the child's acceptance of the dogmas handed over to it by its elders second the adolescent's reaction against that acceptance and third the evolution of some positive personal opinion born of personal experience i have quoted these words of mr walpole because they do exactly sum up my own experience an experience which has brought me back to the christ and to through a period of bewildering doubt and agnosticism what mr arnold bennett does not seem to realize is that many of us have gambled the whole of our lives on the side of religion with no more of an intellectual certainty than he exhibits that is to say on the balance of probability to accept belief in a mind behind the universe which is working out a purpose for good in and through that universe on the same balance of probability to accept the theory of a future life and the likelihood that our conduct in this life will materially affect the nature of it to see in the christ one whose moral standard is the highest mankind has ever reached and one who understood better than anyone else the secret of happiness from my earliest thinking days of doubt and agnosticism i was convinced of this one thing that if there is a god at work in the universe whose purpose is good and if man can come into communion with him and consciously co-operate with him then our life here in this queer and often sad world is indeed infinitely worth while i soon found as mr arnold bennett truly says that my brain was utterly unequal to the sublime problem but i also found that i had a power of spiritual insight latent within me which seemed to be super rational above and beyond reason while recognizing that our religion must be reasonable and not an insult to our intelligence i at the same time discovered within me a spiritual insight a second life as mr walpole calls it reaching out beyond the gropings of my little brain and giving me a sense of awe and a desire to worship him with whom i felt myself to be in contact the gambling instinct so often perverted and used for unworthy ends is one of the most valuable instincts possessed by man and nowhere does it find a truer or more complete outlet and fulfilment than in religion as donald hanke once said to us writing from the trenches in france religion is betting your life there is a god i decided to bet my life that there is a god and more and more as the years go by i find that in so far as i yield up my will to god and open my heart to his indwelling in so far as i try to live out my everyday life in the christ spirit the experiment works peace and serenity come to the soul and harmony and balance to conflicting instincts it seems to me that by one road or another we are all coming back to the christ not so much the christ of dogma and ritual but to a layman's christ the christ of galilee and gethsemane what does he stand for to us lay folk who try to follow him not only in his relationship with other people but also in his relationship with the all-father to me the christ stands for the mystery of god and man the divine spark and humanity perfectly shown forth in him but possessed in some measure by all mankind he stands for the fact that all life is sacramental the spirit showing itself in and through the material he stands for our fundamental need of communion with the father of quiet spaces in our lives when our spiritual consciousness can grow and develop the still small voice is so often drowned in all the vulgar noise and bustle of our modern hurrying life jesus went apart on to the hilltops to pray he withdrew himself for periods of quiet communion with the father and each one of us can prove for ourselves how life can be transformed and enriched beyond all description if only we will do the same above all however it is the christ who makes it possible for us to face the hard and apparently cruel places in life without despair and hopelessness behind all the crude and terrible theories of the atonement which still haunt us in many well-known hymns i believe there is eternal truth the truth that life comes through death through sacrifice and self-giving the truth of christ's eternal paradox he who would save his life shall lose it and he who would lose his life for my sake and the gospel's the same shall save it that is to say whoever lives for himself alone never really lives at all while he who gives his life away for others discovers the secret of true living through the perfect atonement of god and man in the christ all humanity is lifted nearer to the divine and freed from its bondage to the material if all this is true then the god of nature is not so different after all from the god revealed to us by christ in nature we see all life feeding upon other life all creatures giving their lives that others may live in nature this is involuntary but man has been given the awful responsibility of being free to choose in some measure whether his life shall be lived for the sake of his own little self or for the sake of god and his fellow men god saw no other way for free-willed human beings to find and fulfil themselves than the way of hardship struggle and difficulty the saints have told us over and over again that the two most paralysing failings of our human nature are sloth and pride if we are honest with ourselves we all know that as soon as things become easy and soft for us or as soon as we become successful and popular we deteriorate but because god is love he could not stand aside and look on at this struggling and striving of humanity so full of suffering bewilderment and apparent defeat and so he came and still comes to share the fight and the suffering with us the workman laboring day by day in the carpenter's shop at nazareth is the eternal symbol of god in us the figure hanging dying on the tree with arms outstretched to all the world is the eternal symbol of the wondrous fact that there is a cross in the heart of god and that the way of the cross is the way of life because it is the way of love chapter eleven chapter twelve of my religion by sir arthur conan doyle mr arnold bennett's chapter which begins this book defined his position in a number of negatives he does not believe in any actual dogma of the churches and he includes immortality of the soul in his disbelief one cannot but admire the unflinching mental honesty of his declaration and also the absence of any bitterness towards those whose views may differ from his own but he is all negative and i would put it to him that man cannot live on negatives alone he must have some positive guidance and assurance if he is to have a tranquil heart in the presence of those mists which drape him in and that worldly extinction which is the only absolutely certain thing in his future a man may run for a time possibly for a lifetime upon that which he has learned when young as a motor may run onwards when the engine has been shut off but some motive power somewhere is needed if he is not to relapse into the animal i have a great sympathy with bennett's position it was my own until i learned that agnosticism is not a terminus but only a junction where you change on to another line leaving your packet of faith behind but picking up a packet of fact in exchange the same evolution may well occur to the quick brain and inquiring mind of arnold bennett he says after giving his views further than this i do not go cannot go and do not wish to go i cannot take those last words seriously if those of us who have gone further have found peace and happiness in doing so surely he would not deliberately refuse such comfort i trust the day may come when he will look into these psychic matters not superficially but with that thoroughness which they deserve and need then a strong new prophet may arise in israel mr hugh walpole followed mr arnold bennett his chapter was also distinguished for an earnest broad-mindedness but he was not so positive in his negatives as mr arnold bennett he was unorthodox but in gentler and vaguer fashion one general remark he made which was true and worth preserving he said that most of us went through three clear stages of religious thought that of the religion of childhood that of the reaction which brings disillusion and negation and finally that of the philosophy which we find for ourselves that was a helpful generalization and indeed its working is apparent in the case of each of these writers with the exception of the roman catholic personally i do not think that it would be true of a spiritualist because a belief which is reasoned from fact cannot be radically altered my own children have of course been brought up as spiritualists and i would be very surprised to learn that they have ever to traverse those deserts of doubt which their father trod before them beyond the impression of a kindly philosophic mind i do not see that mr walpole is in a position to bring help to any one else the same may be said of miss rebecca west her mind is broad and tolerant she admires the cold virtue of the puritan and she admires the sensuous but beautiful ritual of the catholic she has sympathy for all which is right and beautiful but when a traveller seeks a path and the whole horizon is indicated it does not help him forward upon his journey if the whole horizon is beautiful that may please the spectator but we are travellers not spectators And we want some sure guidance among the tangle of paths which lead in many directions and one or other of which we must take therefore i find miss west's admirable charity to be useless as a guide to the race i happen to know however that miss west has brushed however slightly the edge of positive psychic experiment and when she has gone further down this path she may find that which will concentrate and clarify her views mr oppenheim is kind and vague so also is mr de vere stackpool but there is nothing positive nothing that one can get a grip of in the views of either of them they are both gentlemen of the world who have seen much of life who have recognized that everywhere in humanity one finds nobility as well as baseness and that all creeds have their sinners as well as their saints both shrink as nearly every one of the writers does from the dogmatism of the churches one helpful remark is made by stackpool that as the rigidity of the churches has declined and as their power has waned mankind has perceptibly improved and that the criminal law of eighteen twenty five would shock the conscience of nineteen twenty five this is a demonstrable truth and it would seem to prove that from one cause or another the individual has developed in his moral sense on the other hand when one reflects that never has materialism been so rife never has there been such a disaster as the great war and never has there been such utter chaos in the morality of a nation as is now evident in russia one cannot claim that the whole world shares the advance after all the criminal laws of england were peculiar to england and were the most barbarous in europe just as the present divorce laws of england are the least enlightened of any civilized nation in the year twenty twenty five people will point to their reform as a proof of the progress which that century has effected mr compton mckenzie declares himself an orthodox catholic who has remained firm in the religion of his childhood Well, it must have saved him many mental struggles and many hours of sadness, but whether it has aided that spiritual development which is the true object of life, only his future experience can show.

If he has felt no overpowering impulse to change, then it is clear that he could do no other than to stand fast where he is and enjoy those consolations, true or false, which his church undoubtedly does give.

i would remind him however that he is not yet out of the wood even in this world father tyrrel clung fast to the church but he used his own judgment and excommunication awaited him in the end sir george meervat also alone among scientific men clung long to the church but the hour of parting came still if it makes him happy and is for his spiritual good i hope mr mckenzie will long remain in those peaceful waters and reconcile his reason to doctrines which have repelled so many earnest minds but there are points in his argument which show a strange want of proportion he talks of the tyranny of the mediaeval church being as no more dangerous or unpleasant than the subsequent tyranny of lawyers and finally of doctors what sort of talk is this it was the mediaeval church which instituted the inquisition not as a secret thing but as a recognized official branch with the patronage of popes and all high dignitaries this holy office as it was blasphemously called lasted for centuries and during that time it murdered in very cold blood by torture and by fire many tens of thousands of people whose only crime was that they were earnest in religious matters and aspired to other and as they thought higher teaching than the church gave them how could so horrible an institution the details of which cannot be read without disgust compare with any hold which modern lawyers or doctors have had upon the earth perhaps he may say that this was an old story it is not such an old story it was napoleon i who released many of these victims and it carried over in south america up to our own day but the church's own axiom is that before a sin is forgiven we must have confession and contrition i have never heard of confession or contrition of the church as regards the inquisition then again compton mackenzie says my reason revolts less from a belief in the resurrection of the body than from a belief in ectoplasm and if i had to fancy a postman's eternity for myself after death an endless rat-tat on easily manipulated tables i should prefer a certain faith in my ultimate obliteration mr mckenzie does not seem to realize that what he may prefer or what he may not prefer has really no bearing upon the matter the great laws of nature and their evidence as recorded by careful observers take no heed of individual preferences if his church will allow him to read psychic books and i understand that psychic research is not yet interdicted he will find in crawford richet schwenck nutzing and others ample evidence as to the existence of ectoplasm and he will understand that raps are a very small portion of our psychic experience if he can muster an equal amount of evidence for the resurrection of the physical body of course we are all agreed as to the spiritual one then he should let the world know those facts upon which he founds his faith these sneers at spiritualism are simply the measure of his own ignorance equally ignorant is my friend mr zangwill a big-brained and big-hearted man whose real philanthropic work is often covered by a needless cloak of levity he is an earnest man and he cries as so many cry it is now the common duty of all civilized men of every creed to find the next religion the idea that we the ridiculed spiritualists may have found it has never entered his head he refers to my fantasies and i suppose he attaches my name to them because i happen to be the one spiritualist among his own private acquaintances if he considers this philosophy to be some personal fad of my own he would be right to attach limited importance to it.

But when he knows, as he should know, that so many of the greatest brains of the world, scientific men of the first repute, eminent statesmen, men whose opinion must have weight within the audience, have examined this matter carefully, and have finally declared that the evidence is overpowering, then it is surely an example of that unhappy levity of which I have spoken." that he who has not made the most elementary examination should declare the subject to be a fantasy it is a particularly unhappy word to choose for the only system of religious thought which is based not on faith or imagination but on experiment and on fact there remains the kindly pantheistic article of mr henry arthur jones i have angled for mr jones i have dropped tempting pamphlets before his nose but he has not touched my bait and yet his kindly references to our subject show that my work has not been lost the reason why i have tried to help him and succeeded perhaps in worrying him is that i have an affection for him and that i can conceive of no greater gift from one man to another than that which i wish to bestow upon him he says in a most generous passage that he will find no paradise intolerable if i am on its threshold to welcome him i told him in my answering letter that i could not presume that i should be at the rendezvous but that i had no doubts at all about him i have long looked upon henry arthur jones as one of the very first if not the very first prose writers that we possess he has that rare gift of rhythm which marks the great artist for this alone his article would be memorable take such a passage as this whatever call to wander in strangely haunted spheres of ether or fields of asphodel in new modes of being amid new duties and new pleasures whatever call to prolong and fulfil its existence my spirit may obey when it has earned its release from the flesh it is to this earth that it turns and returns and passionately clings to-day this earth that is the mother of all that i know and feel this earth where i have lived and sinned and suffered and loved and fought and stumbled and triumphed and despaired and laughed and wept and eaten my fill and drunk deep draughts of pleasure and success and bitter cups of misery and defeat and shame this earth whose dawns and sunsets and variegated pageantries are nicely suited to my eyes and her harmonies and discords exactly tuned to my ears this earth whose biting winds and angry hailstorms have buffeted me but whose sunny skies and blue halcyon days have restored me this very earth the only place where my foot finds firm standing and where my spirit feels itself at home there are few living men who can write such prose as that now in summing up these chapters i shall deal with my own one presently what is the prevailing characteristic it is a curious one it is that they are quite divorced from christian dogma and yet that they are all in close sympathy with the christian spirit it might also be expressed by the aphorism the less dogma the more christ that is the clear line of thought which has suggested itself to nearly every one of these writers and it represents i think and hope the general trend of the world it is full of hope for us for we cannot write our noble and epoch-making message upon a slate which is already covered with ancient and discredited inscriptions there are to my mind just two things needed for the religion for the future the christ spirit and direct spirit communion the latter will give us that ever-widening knowledge which will meet and satisfy the ever-growing demand of the evolving human brain and now i turn to my own modest contribution i wish the task had been placed in more capable hands i do assure you that i never go forth to meet such things but if they come to me they take the form of a challenge and i cannot pass them by i was asked to testify and i have done so to the best of my ability i have traced here my own foundation in catholicism i have shown what it was which loosened my roots in that ancient soil and how naturally the arnold bennett negative position came to me then came a long course of psychic study and experiment until i was placed in the position that i should have been an intellectual and a moral coward if i did not accept conclusions which were so plain in my chapter i describe my own upbringing in the roman catholic church my revolt against doctrines and dogmas which are common to all christianity but which seem to me to be unreasonable untrue and in some ways pernicious there followed my complete severance from christianity but never from deism which is a gospel written across the whole heaven and earth carrying conviction to any brain which can appreciate the order and wonder of the universe i was never so bemused as to accept the haeckel doctrine that laws were responsible for this since laws require a wise maker just as much as the more material things do then i described how gradually i became interested in psychic reading and experiment and how for many years i explored that line of thought until in the war time foolproof and conviction came upon me together with an overpowering sense of the vital importance of this knowledge to mankind in their present stage of materialism and honest bewilderment i saw that the weathercock of fate could be dispensed with and the fixed signpost of fact placed in its stead i perceived how trivial the phenomena were and what tremendous issues lay behind them the tapping of an immense hidden reservoir of knowledge the only source from which a fresh and sure inspiration could be obtained i summed our gains up as follows it is not merely the reunion with our lost ones which has been effected something much higher has been obtained we have got into contact with virtuous souls long passed over who now correspond to what were called angels from them we get direct religious teaching founded upon actual experience it is in many ways a new conception and yet it has come through to us in many lands and through many instruments It is simple.

It is reasonable.

Many a tender intrigue has been woven around its dark yew alleys.

Mr. Compton Mackenzie, for example, introduces it most effectively as a lover's rendezvous in The Passionate Elopement, and no doubt the readers of romantic literature will recall other instances of a like nature.

The story of fair Rosamond's Bower is one which will leap to mind in this connection.

This type of maze alone is worth more than a passing thought, but it is far from being the only, or even the most interesting, development of the labyrinth idea.

Many a tender intrigue has been woven around its dark yew alleys.

Mr. Compton Mackenzie, for example, introduces it most effectively as a lover's rendezvous in The Passionate Elopement, and no doubt the readers of romantic literature will recall other instances of a like nature.

The story of fair Rosamond's Bower is one which will leap to mind in this connection.

This type of maze alone is worth more than a passing thought, but it is far from being the only, or even the most interesting, development of the labyrinth idea.

Many a tender intrigue has been woven around its dark yew alleys.

Mr. Compton Mackenzie, for example, introduces it most effectively as a lover's rendezvous in The Passionate Elopement.

And no doubt the readers of romantic literature will recall other instances of a like nature.

The story of fair Rosamond's Bower is one which will leap to mind in this connection.

Then comes Mr. Arnold Bennett.

Then Mr. Compton Mackenzie.

Mr. McKenna and Mr. Walpole may be bracketed together.

She sat down.

Anyway, customs officers arrived and there was a bit of a standoff between the locals and the officers of the law.

And this episode actually inspired Compton Mackenzie's book Whisky Galore.

And of course, there was the famous 1949 film, which was remade in 2016.

Eriscus Pub, the AM politician, opened in 1988 and was named in honour of the ship.