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have not prevented them in practice from conducting themselves in the same manner as Germany. Only they are not willing to avow the facts. They are either like the English, who possess the happy psychological knack of honestly confounding and reconciling morality with business, humanity with the exploitation of other nations, and virtue with utility; or else they are like the French, who have succeeded in persuading themselves naïvely that they are entirely innocent. But when sounded to the bottom this way of seeing things is but a lie. The democratic habit of mouthing mere words, like "Truth,' 'Justice,' 'Liberty,' of dragging these highest conceptions of the human soul in the gutter of politics, excites only honest repugnance in the German mind. The self-complacent virtue of the western democrats, their pretensions to be the only moral beings, seem to Germans a 'great fake' and 'an impudent farce.' It is striking to see how utterly Mann misconceives the habits of thought and feeling of alien nations. He so fails to comprehend them that he does not believe them sincere. And by a strange optical illusion, honesty to him is the sole possession of the Germans.

The real source of his error is that he does not discover that other nations lack the faculty peculiar to the German brain, of building thought-tight bulkheads between certain sections of its mind. Realist and anti-idealist though he may be, the German explains and extenuates his deeds after the event by purely mystical notions, which he calls 'war,' 'catastrophe,' 'necessity,' 'the metaphysical people.' These notions, he asserts, are too profound to be analyzed, and in their obscure recesses his country's thinkers unconsciously delude themselves with their own imaginings.

Such a method of reasoning would be impossible for the French mind, with its

unsparing logic, its pitiless dissection of all its concepts. Social rather than mystical, the Gallic intellect makes principles the guide of social conduct. Its lucid vision perceives that justice, truth, loyalty to one's given word, are the indispensable bases of all relations between man and man, and between government and government. That explains the indignation of the French people at such a crime as the violation of Belgium's neutrality, an indignation far less artificial, and far more sincere and spontaneous and profound than Mann can ever conceive. Although the conduct of France and of its representatives is not always above attack, the nation as a whole neither desires nor believes possible aught else than cleanness and honesty as the basis of public life.

Mann exclaims: "The presumption with which the Celto-Roman and the Anglo-Saxon democracy passed judgment upon Germany, and pretended to prescribe treatment for its betterment is puerile, grotesquely stupid'; and he makes bitter sport of the charges of barbarism brought against his country. What would you have? Progress, modernism, youth, genius, up-to-dateness? Were they not all on Germany's side in 1914? Was not Germany the bestgoverned country? Did it not enjoy more real liberty than the French Republic, for instance, where corruption, scandal, favoritism, anarchy, and all the abuses of democracy were rampant? Was not Germany's intellectual conservatism at heart more revolutionary than the conservatism of 'immortal principles' which its enemies professed?

No, the moral level of Germany was not inferior to that of the Entente nations in 1914. This is unquestionable. If it dishonored itself morally by the war, is this due chiefly to its having built up an impervious barrier between its spiritual life and its political life, and to its having abdicated its authority

over its own government? How can any one be blind to the danger which any nation incurs when it ceases to interest itself in its public affairs, and entirely turns over the care of its interests and its foreign relations to a few individuals? The only safeguard against such a tragic error is democracy, no matter how many drawbacks democracy may have. Mann is unwilling to admit that Germany had 'masters.' He asserts that the country's rulers led it in the course which the people willed. Grant this, and you are forced to assume that the German people as a whole have fallen victims to materialism, to that negation of public morals of which we reap the fearful fruits to-day.

A critic wrote some years ago, in referring to Thomas Mann: 'German culture is based on sentiment and the emotions; French culture is based on judgment and discernment.' This appropriately characterizes the quality of Mann's book. Undoubtedly it is desirable in the interest of the richness and variety of European life, that the German should continue true to his native type; but it is still more desirable, for the peace of the world, without which life will henceforth become impossible, that the Germans should learn to exercise their judgment and discernment with more effect; above all, in the sphere where it is indispensable - the sphere of public life.

THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF H. G. WELLS. I

BY A. E. BAKER

From The Church Quarterly Review, April
(LONDON THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL)

MR. WELLS tells us that he was brought up in the atmosphere of Evangelical Christianity, and it is clear that the main religious influence of his childhood was Nonconformist rather than Anglican. Nobody who had not himself suffered it would ever hate and despise the crude theology, the illiterate preaching, the vulgar, unimaginative worship, of the more impossible type of little chapel, with quite such cold determination as Mr. Wells shows. Two things stand out clearly in his memories of Evangelicalism: the emphasis on Eternal Punishment, and the emotion with which the blood-symbolism of the doctrine of the Atonement is surrounded. What he calls 'the idiom of barbaric sacrifices, of slaughtered

lambs, and fountains of precious blood (an idiom which he thinks may have been borrowed from Mithraism) is, he tells us, most repulsive to him. But during the last few years his newly quickened sense of the reality of religious experience and the fundamental importance of conversion have led him to understand that behind the vivid symbolic language of the Salvation Army, and similar sects, is a religious experience which sometimes works real changes in the will and life of the believer.

In the doctrine of hell, as it was taught by the Evangelicalism of his childhood, he has never discovered any meaning or value. He speaks of it as 'God's mockery of his own creation,' a

'cosmic jest,' the 'coming "Yah, clever," when the lucky, the bold and the cheerful' will be 'served out' and 'shown up.' And Mr. Wells, having first of all taken all these things quite seriously, presently with an equal seriousness flung them out of his mind.

When I was still only a child of thirteen [he writes] by the grace of the true God within me, I flung this Lie out of my mind; and for many years, until I came to see that God himself had done this thing for me, the name of God meant nothing to me but the hideous scar in my heart where a fearful demon had been.

Mr. Wells nowhere speaks of Anglicanism with the 'bitter condemnation' that he pours upon the chapels. But neither in his youth nor at any later time did the Church of England win the allegiance of his intellect. His attitude toward it has always been cold and critical, when he is not merely amused. He sees it as a characteristic product of the compromising side of the Reformation; not of what he calls 'the Reformation according to the common man,' the revolt of the people against the church's weaknesses and irreligion, but of 'the Reformation according to the Princes,' who objected to the Church's power, and wanted to put the authority of the prince in the place of that of the Pope.

The Church of England 'is still sacramental and sacerdotal; but its organization centres in the Court and the Lord Chancellor, and though subversive views may and do break out in the lower and less prosperous ranks of its priesthood, it is impossible for them to struggle up to any position of influence and authority.' It seems extraordinary to him that anyone can believe that the Anglican compromise is the final truth of religion. And the brilliant portrait of what one must admit to have been a characteristic product of the Establishment, the 'County Anglican'

lady, proud, rude, ignorant, and dogmatic, is true enough to make some of us smile on the wrong side of our mouths.

Mr. Wells sees the fine old buildings of the Church standing like shells, like empty skulls from which the life has fled, the soul of our race in exile from the home and place our fathers built for it. The clergy he describes as 'narrow-witted parsons besieged by narrow-souled dissenters,' ready enough to offer their services, to say their large flat amiabilities over people, but too honest to force their poor platitudes where they are not sure they will be acceptable (if only they had the certain balm, he says, how gladly would they give it!). But they conduct public worship in unfamiliar garments, and their vestments, their altars, and their pulpits stand between the people and the idea of God; the service is singing and bowing and hearing sonorous prayers and joining in sonorous responses. The total effect of it all is to make God unfamiliar, unreal, divorced from common life. . .

And yet, when full allowance has been made for the faults and shortcomings of the ancient Church of England, it must be insisted that Mr. Wells's description of it is a short-sighted and external one, is, indeed, little better than a caricature. During the last hundred years the revival of the Church's life has been startling in its thoroughness; to-day its leaders are aware of the obligations laid on the Church by God, and are anxious to understand and satisfy the need of the times.

The times we live in are fast discountenancing Mr. Wells's criticism of the clergy. As a body they are diligent and sincere, not by any means the most narrow-minded class in the community, and less self-seeking than they are commonly credited with being. The weaknesses of the Church of Eng

land are the weaknesses of the English character. But it is not fair to judge it by its weaknesses. It is still a school for saints, it is catholic in ideal and intention, eager to serve the people, thinking more of its duties than of its rights, striving to use the treasury of its great tradition to serve the great needs and the great ideals of the new world that is being born.

Mr. Wells is very civil to the Quakers. 'Quakerism in its beginnings,' he says, quite truly, 'was a very fine and wonderful religion indeed, a real research for the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.' But he has less patience with Catholicism. Judged by that hope of the unity of mankind which is, to him, the Pole Star of true religion, Catholicism seems to come short. It is possible, indeed, to quote

'I am the Vine and ye are the Branches,' but look at the Church itself. Don't look at the formula but at the practice and the daily teaching. Is it truly a growing Vine? The reality of Catholicism . . . [is] a traditional, sacramental religion, a fetish religion with a specialized priest; the mass is its central mystery, it is concerned primarily with another world, it sets its face against any conception of a scheme of progress in this. All good Catholics sneer at progress. Take Belloc and Chesterton, for example; they hate the idea of men working steadily for any great scheme of effort here. They hold by stagnant standards, planted deep in the mud of life. It's a different species of mind from ours; it has its head and its feet turned backward. What is the good of expecting the Pope, for instance, and his Church to help us in creating a League of Nations! His aim would be a world-agreement to stop progress. . . . He wants peace in order to achieve nothing. . . A Catholic League of Nations would be a conspiracy of stagnation, another Holy Alliance.

In some circles this will sound very plausible. It is not certain, unfortunately, that the Papal claim to temporal power and infallibility, and the trust to

a 'closed revelation' will not make the Roman Church a bulwark of reaction. But now that Mr. Wells has really faced the story of what Catholicism has achieved in Europe, he would probably not write so confidently in condemnation of it. By his own testimony, at the heart of the Catholic system, stained as the latter has been with violence and folly, intrigue and crime, there has lived on the spirit of Jesus, inspiring countless men and women to unselfish and devoted lives, and making a better world possible.

The criticism of Catholicism in Joan and Peter is too external, and too sweeping, to bear examination. It reveals a Mr. Wells who is not always willing to credit those who differ from him with the intellectual honesty, the spiritual sincerity, and the genuine search after religion which he knows he possesses himself. The charges of bigotry and formalism which Catholic and Protestant hurl at each other (and there is a good deal of the old Protestant left in Mr. Wells) only mean that each side must learn to put the most spiritual, rational, and human meaning on the institutions and prayers of the other.

Catholicism is too universal, its boundaries are not sufficiently defined, for any such slap-dash characterization to be even approximately just. It is impossible to damn a civilization with an epigram. In spite of its inconsistencies, of the varied spiritual and intellectual levels which are its glory and divinity, though from outside they appear its weakness, there is in Catholicism a real sense of the authority of the corporate conscience, a memory and a hope of Christendom as a unity. The reality of 'sacramental religion' is the material world redeemed to express a religion of love; the 'other world,' fully known only in and through a concrete, particular, immediate experience of the present; a fellowship offering itself

in union with his self-offering who gave Himself to win unity of man with man through the unity of God and man. Newman, Gladstone, Manning, Charles Gore, Dolling, and Robert Cecil are as good Catholic names as Belloc and Chesterton. They stand for a direction and spirit in human life which make Mr. Wells's talk of reaction and stagnation look like Twelfth-of-July propaganda. Unless he can find some central place in his ideal, and in his work for it, for the best there is in Catholicism, he is postponing the World Republic to the Greek Kalends.

The next notable influence on the

mind of Mr. Wells has been Natural Science. He studied biology under Huxley, who is almost the only Victorian of whom he always speaks with respect; and took the B.Sc. degree with first-class honors. Then, after various experiences as a teacher, he took to journalism, and became a friend of Grant Allen and Edward Clodd. This sound scientific learning, and the influence of such scientific men, is at the root of his impatience with muddled thinking and slipshod, rule-of-thumb work, whether in politics, or education, or life. It reveals itself in his religion as an instinctive, unflinching acceptance of the divinity of Law. To-day, when God has revealed Himself to him, he will hold no parley with the idea that any setting-aside of natural law, any miracle in that sense of the word, is either possible or desirable. There are still people who think that God will interfere with the ordinary course of nature in order to favor those who pray to Him, or live as He wishes them to, or to punish those who are ungodly, or who neglect their religious duty. Mr. Wells seems nearer to the teaching of our Lord, that God sends his rain on the just and the unjust, and causes his sun to shine on the evil and on the

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It is an idle dream. But God will be with you nevertheless. In the reeling aeroplane or the dark ice-cave, God will be your courage. Though you suffer or are killed, it is not an end. He will be with you as you face death; he will die with you as he has died already countless millions of brave deaths. He will come so close to you that at the last you will not know whether it is you or he who dies, and the present death will be swallowed up in victory.

Mr. Wells's denial of the Christian doctrine of immortality is the result of biological ideas, and deductions from them. At first sight it may seem meaningless to say, if I am not immortal,

that God will come so close to me that the present death will be swallowed up in victory. But Mr. Wells believes that God lives in and through the life of the race, and that, compared with that racial life, the individual has no more permanence than has a single cell in the human body compared with the life of that body. We are only incidents in the life of the race, experiments in its growing knowledge and consciousness. His study of biology has taught him the reality of the species; it has a life, growth, adventures of its own. Nature seems so careful of the type, and so careless of the individual life; and, unlike Tennyson, Mr. Wells is quite content that it should be so:

My idea of the unknown scheme [he says] is of something so deep and wide that I cannot conceive it encumbered by my egotism perpetually. I shall serve my purpose, and pass under the wheel, and end. That distresses me not at all. Immortality would distress and perplex me.

Just because the best things any mortal has are those which every mortal shares, the only things which can have the quality of immortality - the eter nal, absolute things nal, absolute things must be general,

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