From the Known to the Unknown

APRIL, 1928

BY ROBERT KEABLE

‘THOSE who demand new forms of belief most noisily are, as far as I can judge, intrinsically a-religious. When they have become more mature, even they will recognize that they are not concerned for a new faith, but for a new formation of being; that such a struggle does not necessarily mean religious strife, and that they will find themselves much more rapidly if they make up their minds to try to express their being in the world of appearance without any side-glances upon God.’

— COUNT KEYSERLING, The Travel Diary of a Philosopher

I

IT is almost impossible to avoid making of this story a personal narrative, and indeed, seeing that it is peculiarly personal, it is perhaps best to be as honest as possible, even though it is a process from which one shrinks. I might tell the whole thing in the third person, or even write it up as something that happened to some friend of mine, but that would smack of unreality, at least to me — and if to me, why, then, probably also to my readers. Besides, if the thing is worth telling at all, it is valuable only as a personal reminiscence.

It happened to me in November, a year ago, in England, when I one day received an invitation from the secretary of a well-known Scottish literary society to give a lecture in the biggest town in Scotland upon any subject that I liked. The invitation pleased me, not only because there was a sufficiently big honorarium attached, but chiefly because the secretary was a clergyman and the literary society was closely linked with the Church. Now it was indicated that a lecture was wanted upon some subject connected with my work, and I confess that I have found recently that the subjects discussed in my novels do not usually recommend themselves to the orthodox. So I replied to the secretary that I should be glad to come, that there were a large number of subjects upon which I should like to speak, but that I did venture to wonder if he himself had read my books, and if I should be as acceptable to the society as he expected. Once before, I had been asked to contribute to a London quarterly, and, in making much the same reply, had been politely told that there had been a mistake.

My Scottish clergyman, however, was of different metal. He wrote back at once that there had been no mistake whatever, that not only did he repeat the invitation, but that he and his society desired that I should speak whatever was in my mind without fear or favor. He said that they had especially asked me because they imagined that I should not give a purely literary address. And then he added what was to me a most moving paragraph. He said, with an unmistakable kindness and brotherliness, that he knew I had been a clergyman and had left the Church, and that if I could see my way to arrive on Saturday instead of the Monday of the lecture, and preach on Sunday evening in his church, he would be delighted. It chanced that it was the commemoration of Armistice Day, when the Roll of Honor would be read out and the church packed. He believed that I should have ‘a message’ for them. Would I come?

Now it is not easy to say how moved I was by that request. It was seven years since I had voluntarily left the Church, not because I was discontented with the life of a minister, and not because I hoped to make more money as a novelist, but merely because, in my state of mind, I did not think it was honest to stay. I had increasingly found that my old colleagues and friends did not, apparently, think that it had been loyal to go. I had increasingly found the gulf between us widening, and I had increasingly regretted it because, while we differed in so many things, I could not help thinking that our ideals remained the same, though we saw the approach to them through such different spectacles. At any rate, the loneliness of my position, and possibly the sadness of being misunderstood by new friends and foes, had become very hard to bear. And now unexpectedly, out of the blue, an ordained clergyman of a well-known, influential church had offered me his pulpit. I immediately accepted.

The first five minutes of that Sunday evening service was one of the most affecting five minutes of my life. The church was large, beautifully furnished, and packed to the doors. There were nearer two than one thousand people present. The beautiful altar, an outstanding artistic work given by the members of the congregation as a war memorial, had been decorated entirely with scarlet Flanders poppies rising from a field of corn. One of the finest organs in the North was pealing a pæan of victory as a voluntary, and there was about the whole place and audience an air of expectancy which was most moving. It was an unorthodox church and congregation, independent in a real sense; but it was a distinguished congregation, and its very independence made possible a richness of simple ceremonial, and a service in which could be incorporated the best of music and literature of a kind not often heard in a Christian church. Opposite me my friend, the minister, stood, one whom my old profession of faith had taught me to regard as outside the apostolic succession, and there stood I, in lay dress and merely academic robes, who last had ministered in priestly vestments. There was a feeling that I had come back home after seven years, but the realization that the home had changed. There was a knowledge that many before me either regarded me triumphantly as a convert, or thought of me as a renegade, or had come out of mere curiosity. And there was a growing wonder in my own mind as to whether I really had anything to say worth saying.

It was after a service of marked restraint that I entered the pulpit. The roll of some score of church members who had fallen in the war had been called by the minister, and, while they had been commemorated with honor, they had not been extolled without discrimination as saints; still less had they been looked upon as dead; still less as men who had given their earthly lives in a cause for which there was nothing to be said for the other side. Yet it had been a most moving service. The remembrance of those years of war, of suspense and loss and deprivation, was markedly in all our minds. That great congregation had sat down introspective, awed, and not a little sad. In the silence they waited for me to speak.

I said that I had no text to give them and that it was from a somewhat peculiar point of view that I wished to speak. They had commemorated a score of at least nominal church members who had fallen in the war, but we had to remember that at least seventy-five per cent of the million British dead had not been church members at all. I, who had been through it, knew only too well that the majority of the boys who had gone over the top had not gone inspired by any heroic dream of being Christ’s soldiers fighting in a crusade of right against wrong, but they had gone either because they had to, or because the war was a desirable adventure compared with their previous humdrum existence, or because they had been swept away in a wave of unreasoning national enthusiasm. They had died, not with a prayer, but with a curse on their lips. Religion had meant nothing to them in their agony and their trial; some such thing as a sweetheart’s letter, if it had not been the surgeon’s merciful drug, had helped them across the River of Death. Many names of men hung on rolls of honor, even in the stateliest churches of England, who had thought no more of the church in life than that it was a conventional place to be married in, and, in the end, to be buried from. That was the fact which the Church really ought to face on any Armistice Day.

Moreover, while it was a magnificent sight to see so many people assembled in a religious spirit to commemorate the fallen, we had to remember that that congregation was not, probably, twenty-five per cent of the population of the district. Seventy-five per cent of it would commemorate Armistice Day over a glass of beer or around the gramophone. In a word, seventy-five per cent of the living, as the seventyfive per cent of the fallen, were deliberately outside the boundary of orthodox religion of any sort. If any cared to investigate, they would find that I had probably put the percentage too low.

And, still again, the preacher who preached to them that night was one who had deliberately gone outside the Church to join the army of the seventyfive per cent. It did not interest him in the least to speak of the men who had died with a prayer on their lips; he would rather stand as representative of those who had died with a curse. He was not there as one of the orthodox to instruct the orthodox in their faith and duties; he was there as one of the unorthodox to speak for the unorthodox and to tell the true believers why he thought it was that he and they were outside the Church.

It would, of course, be tedious and uninteresting if I were to attempt to reproduce my sermon in these pages. I remember that I was enormously moved, myself. Constantly in my mind and before my eyes was a war-time picture which, for some reason or other, of the many I had seen, I had never been able to forget. Imagine an enormous French barn, retaining a roof by a kind of miracle, and lit fitfully by half a dozen lanterns. It was shaken every few minutes by the sound of exploding shells. It was crammed to its limits by I do not know how many men, lying on straw and even on the bare earth, groaning in every degree of pain, if not mercifully unconscious. Stretcher bearers poured continually in, to the increasing despair of the doctor-officer in charge. And there stood I in the midst of them, the only padre, who should have been a consolation and a strength to those men in their hour of need, and who was not idle only because I was useful now and again for jobs which had nothing whatever to do with my profession. I could shift a bundle of straw or light a ‘fag.’ If I had been a trained nurse I should have been more useful. I think in all that night of horror I was only once asked by any one of the wounded to supply the consolations of religion, and that was by a black Catholic soldier from Senegambia.

I think I told that congregation that it was because they and others like them had dimmed the image of the Christ that he was not known or wanted by that barnful of wounded men. When Garibaldi went to the conquest of Italy, he spoke to his soldiers in these words: ‘Men, I have much to offer you. I can offer you disease, starvation, nakedness, and death. If you are taken alive, you will be shot as traitors; if you fall on the field, I have practically no medical corps to attend you. I can offer you neither uniforms nor modern arms nor adequate ammunition, but I call you to the conquest of Italy.’ His audience rose as one man and shouted themselves hoarse for Garibaldi; the majority fell, and counted themselves well consoled if, in dying, the beloved general stood for a moment beside their bed; and the small remainder achieved a victory that the world will never forget. Christ was meant to be a Garibaldi, but the churches had made of him a name for blasphemy, or a sentimental kind of Mother-Jesus, hymns to whom, of the rudest composition, might bring tears, especially if they were sung in a sentimental and slightly drunken mood. That was why I thought seventy-five per cent of the men who died in the war, and seventyfive per cent of the population of the Kingdom, had no need for Christ’s religion. I did not myself believe that there was anything lacking in the Christ.

II

when we got into the vestry the senior deacon came forward with his hand out, to ask me to remain and take the ministry of the church for a year. To say that I was overwhelmed was to put it mildly; I remember the only adequate answer I had to make was that I wanted to go back to Tahiti. Then we got into the waiting automobile and returned to the manse.

After supper, in the minister’s comfortable study, as we sat in a couple of chairs round the fire with our pipes lit and human drinks handy, my new friend returned more seriously to the charge. He said: ‘Look here, you’ve just got to stop and help me with this church for at least six months. We will divide the salary, you can share this house, you will have adequate time to write, and you can give your message. Think it over. ’

Said I: ‘My dear fellow, you don’t know what you ask. There was never a more monstrous absurdity than that a man like me should take up again the ministry of the Church. You don’t realize what you would let yourself in for. The whole place would become a boiling pot of righteous indignation. The majority of respectable people would see me advertised to preach, would go home and read one of my novels, and would he absolutely scandalized.’

He said something to the effect that it would be good for the sale of my novels, and, since that was probably true, we left it at that. I went on: ‘ But honestly, I just could n’t do it. I am not what these people would even call a Christian. Frankly, I don’t even believe, orthodoxly, in God. My views on Christian morality they would call the most desperate immorality. I don’t know what your church organization is, but your bishop, or whatever corresponds to that dignitary, would not stand for it for a moment. You would probably lose your job as well as I.’

‘We have no bishop,’ he said, ‘and the only possible thing that could happen would be that the congregation would not pay their church dues and in consequence there would be no salary to divide. I am willing to take my chance on that, for I don’t think it’s the least likely.’

I moved restlessly in my armchair. In the vestry, the thing had seemed too monstrous for contemplation; in this brave man’s study it was not so easy to escape it. I fell back on my much more serious second defense. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I quite honestly have no message to give. I have what amounts to a set of negative beliefs, but actually no positive ones. When I told you that I did not believe in God, I really meant it. I do not see in existence any evidence whatever for a Being who is fatherly, almighty, the creator of heaven and earth, without whom not one sparrow falls unheeded to the ground. I do not believe that there is any really historical evidence that Christ was the incarnate Son of that God, or even that one tenth of what is said about him in the Gospels is actually true. I cannot imagine how I could conceivably marry people when I think of the orthodox teaching on marriage as monstrous, or baptize their children when I do not believe in the Church, or bury their dead when I doubt the existence of either heaven or hell. How, conceivably, could I preach, when I think that the majority of what you call sin is not sin at all, and the majority of what passes for virtue is not virtue at all? You’ve read my books; if I stayed here I should be preaching those things of which I have written; and, while I think that they are chockfull of ideas, I do not even pretend to have any practical programme. Perhaps I may have one day, but I have n’t it yet.’

He got up and paced the room. Then he stopped and faced me. ‘You have far more of a message than you know,’ he said. ‘ I am willing to set on one side all your negations. Preach us for six months the kind of sermon that you have preached to-night; that’s all I ask. And I think you have no right to refuse.’

So then, as I sat in the chair, there came over me a remembrance of Tahiti. I thought, first, of obvious things: of the long, quiet, peaceful days there; of the noise and bustle of a modern city here; of the books that I could not read for the number of newspapers that I should have to scan, whether I liked it or not; of the few old friends there that I should have to give up for a host of acquaintances here; of my own personal life which would be shattered. I dare say it seems foolish, but I thought of my own soul. I thought of the temptations that beset a popular preacher — or even an unpopular one if he is sufficiently unpopular, for the matter of that. I knew that I was not strong enough to bear them, and not even approximately clever enough to play a part in the social and municipal politics which would inevitably follow. I think I thought it through honestly, and if I could have felt that my friend spoke with the voice of the Lord God to a new kind of shivering Jonah, I think I should have assented. But I did not really feel that. I could only say, frankly, ‘I must go back to Tahiti.’

We argued it out till long past midnight, and at least in that hour I found a friend and a brother. In the end we compromised, and it is because of that compromise that this article comes to be written. Short as the time was, for my return passage was already fixed, I agreed to return for two Sundays, preaching morning and evening on each, and along the lines that my friend suggested. The sermons were to be perfectly frank and without any prejudice whatever. He had striven for years to make his pulpit a place for the expression of ideas, with the one proviso that they should be honest. Roughly speaking, the first Sunday should be devoted to saying what was difficult and impossible to the modern mind in the old Christianity, and the second Sunday devoted to the expression of what I, personally, thought the modern mind might find to help it in some development of the Christianity of Christ. The first Sunday would be easy enough, I thought; it was the second from which I shrank. It was only what was, to me, my friend’s wonderful conviction and faith that I was not, fundamentally, without religion, that I did not despair of humanity, and that I could not have preached as I had preached that night unless I had had a greater hope than I knew, that braced me to undertake it. And he was right: the mere fact of having to think through one’s convictions brought them home to me. The sermons were advertised under the conventional title of‘Christianity and the Modern Mind,’ and the best part of it was the couplet printed beneath that title: —

III

The simplest Christian creed of the most simple Christian congregation commences with ’I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.’ The first words of the first book in that Bible which is the Holy Book of every Christian denomination are these: ‘ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ To this latter statement the modern mind inevitably and quite rightly rejoins: ‘Who wrote these words? We do not know, nor when, nor where, nor how. But we do know, at least, that whoever wrote them knew less about the earth than the average modern schoolboy, that he believed a farrago of nonsense about the heavens, that he had entirely antiquated views on the subject of time and space, and that he was merely guessing about God. He said that God created the heaven and the earth because, knowing nothing about it, he made what seemed to him the only reasonable guess.’ The Christian creed is based upon that guess, and, despite the passing centuries and the unending controversy, it remains a guess. It may be rather a good guess; it may be a right guess; it may be the only reasonable guess of which we are capable; but it remains a guess. Increasingly, it appears a dubious guess. While the question of how the heaven and the earth came into existence is still unanswered, we are increasingly feeling that, until we know something satisfactory about the nature of the heaven and the earth, it is absurd to guess about their origin. We are increasingly feeling that, the more we do know of the nature of heaven and earth, the less likely it appears that they either originated with or are controlled by anyone to whom we can give the attributes of personal being in any sense at all. Some people still feel that the invention of God in this regard is the only probable answer, but an increasing number of people are coming to feel that it remains an improbable solution.

In any case, a religion based on a guess is inadequate. Vital religion has to cope with real conditions; it is wanted by a man at the most vital moments of his life, and it is precisely because it is in those moments that a mere guess is inadequate that the old religion is breaking down. So, in the days of the Apostles, the Creed was not a theological document which required laborious argument to sustain it. It was nothing more or less than a triumphant war cry, an irresistible slogan, the inspiration of even boys and girls to heroic living and not less heroic dying. It commenced with what seemed to them a certain statement, and it flowed majestically and irresistibly on through all its statements to a glorious hope. It was rightly the backbone of the Christian Church.

The whole process, in our day, has been reversed, a reversion of which the Christian churches have become yearly more conscious. They have tossed like a ship in a storm under this realization. The older ones have gradually given up or reduced in importance the creedal forms; thus the Athanasian Creed is printed as a supplementary document, and that in a revised form, in the new Prayer Book of the Church of England, which still, however, clings to the Nicene and the Apostles’. The newer Protestant churches have long ago relegated the Nicene Creed to the top shelves of libraries. It is now even fashionable for a church to say that it rejects creedal standards and that it asks of its members that they should be men of good will, believing what they please.

All this is a tendency which destroys the vital background of religion. It is almost better to stick to an increasingly dubious creed than to have none at all. In moments of trial and in the hour of death, a man must feel that his religion is a rock beneath his feet or it will be of no use to him at all. Thus the success of the Roman Catholic Church is not really questionable. While intelligent men are finding that it is difficult to believe in the dogmas of that Church, it still holds its place in the world, and even gains influence, because the mere fact that it professes to be based on great and eternal truths is attractive not only to the simple but even to others. In the Great War, the almost unanimous chorus of unprejudiced consent would admit that the Roman Catholic padre was wanted as the others were not. He was wanted to administer religion, not merely as a Y.M.C.A. worker.

If the Christian religion is to become a power in the world in any real sense, it must begin with a certainty and not with a guess. It must begin with something which seems as obviously true to people as the old assertion of the creation of the universe by God Almighty seemed true to the early Christians. From some such irresistible and glorious truth it can sweep on to some enabling hope. Men who have lived on a certainty will die happy on a possible guess. Men who have lived on a guess will not die with any ease on what they realize is but another.

Still less generally accepted, but for all that increasingly making its way, is the conviction that the historical story of Jesus Christ is likewise a guess. There amounts to what would be a conspiracy, if it were not honest and unorganized, to keep the historical truth about Jesus Christ withheld from men. The facts are that we do not know with any measure of historical accuracy where he was born, or when, or how. The documents which profess to attest the story are of increasingly dubious merit, and anyway, at least, not what they were to the founders of Protestantism. The Christians of the sixteenth century believed that the historical facts of the life of Jesus Christ were attested to by four independent witnesses who knew him or at least knew his friends, and were as much a matter of history as, let us say, the life and death of Julius Cæsar. The delusion has been maintained by the publication of innumerable Lives of Christ which set forth the main incidents as if there were no question of any of them and no doubt of, or disagreement in, the original Gospels. The very cinema has even been called into the battle. The average man is taught in his childhood a simple, unconflicting, straight forward Life of Christ as if there were no doubt in the world about it. Much worse, the average minister is approached by his theological professors in this way: ‘There are a number of irreligious and willful men in the world who dare to suggest that such and such a passage is doubtful. We shall now devote the morning to showing how willful and how malicious they are.’

This, too, is penetrating the consciousness of intelligent men. They hardly like to say so, but it does not seem to them adequate authority for a divorce law that such and such chapter and verse of Matthew should contain such and such a statement by Christ. They know enough to ask: ‘Are you sure he said it? If he did say it, are you sure he had any authority for saying it? Is there any reason to believe that the Being whom you have guessed into the position of Almighty God really instructed him to say it?’

Just as it is of no use for the Christian Church to found its creed upon a guess, so it is of no use for the Christian Church to go on upbuilding the Christ of a myth. It would, of course, be an enormous loss if research into the origins of the Gospel and the historicity of Jesus were to come to an end. It is possible, even if not probable, that new writings may be discovered or new discoveries made which may, for example, render it as historically sure that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead as that Napoleon was imprisoned at St. Helena. Should that take place a hundred years hence, it would do us no harm; meanwhile there is a glorious and inimitable Christ whom the Christian churches are neglecting.

Like a magnet the name of Christ has drawn to it during two thousand years all the most beautiful and all the best in European thought. By an almost inscrutable process there has been erected a majestic figure in the world whom we call Christ. So overshadowing is he to-day that every noble movement automatically shelters behind him. The emancipation of slaves was carried forward in the name of Christ, although the traditional record of him does not contain the vestige of an attack on slavery. When humanity tried to alleviate the horrors of war, it was his symbol that was inevitably taken for its badge, though the historical Christ, in face of the horrors of Roman war, had not a word to say upon such subjects as those which we think of under the symbol of the Red Cross. Heathen men in India and China and Japan offer him the tribute of their praise to such an extent that an intelligent man in those countries would hardly dare say that he was not at least among the first three or four noblest of men.

As for the stories in the Gospels themselves, it is indeed an almost miraculous thing that they ever came to be written. There is nothing in legend or poetry to excel them. From that distant misty age have come down to us these incomparable gifts of beauty. Whether or not it ever happened, the picture of Mary and Jesus and Joseph in the Stable at Bethlehem is the greatest the world has ever painted. The story of the Wise Men following the star and offering the most precious of their gifts to that baby is poetry of the most exalted order. Were we robbed of that legacy, we should be robbed of our best, and we are being robbed of that legacy because the churches will insist that it is all historically true. What in the world does it matter whether or not it is historically true? It is in fact a gem of beauty, and the souls of men need the purifying and strengthening power of beauty and imagination, when they will only shrivel and die on the bare facts of history.

Now the Christian Church has at its disposal an irresistible battle cry of a creed. It is just enough in doubt, popularly, to make it worth while crying. It has behind it, in its naked simplicity, the increasing consent of every science that we know. It has in it an irresistible appeal to the spirits of men and makes them ripe to follow. The wonderful leader, also, the Christian Church has it peculiarly in its power to proclaim. It would take a long argument, much longer than is possible in this article, to commend either, adequately, to serious readers who are inclined, naturally, to be a little skeptical and contemptuous. But the slogan battle cry which can sweep the world, I believe, is this: ‘I believe in Life Everlasting.’ And the popular leader who can lead the masses is no other than Christ himself, if the Christian Church would only ask men to say: ‘I give my allegiance to the beauty and honesty and simplicity of that figure who is symbolized among us as Jesus Christ, Son of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, who rose again the third day from the dead.’ Maybe then, in the extreme end of life, wearied by much thinking, but buoyed up by the creed and stimulated by the beauty of that almost mythical figure, men might be found who would breathe with perhaps their last whisper, ‘I believe in God.’

IV

If there is any living man who can say, in the face of the living world around him, that he does not believe in the irresistible, enabling, marvelous certainty of Life, he can be left to his own devices. It does not in the least matter that Life is inexplicable and incomprehensible. The fact is that, the more a man is alive, the more he knows that he’s alive. The more he thinks and reads, the more he is struck by the achievements of Life on the earth. The higher he lifts his head and the clearer he looks out on things as they arc, the more he is conscious of the miraculous powers within him. The baby in the cradle has always seemed to those standing by to be in the possession of wonderful possibilities — possibly an Alexander the Great or a Julius Cæsar. But what of the baby in the cradle to-day? It is actually possible that he may, ultimately, be conversing with intelligences in the stars, or passing through the door that Einstein has pushed ajar. If to believe in Life is not a creed, I do not know what is; and, curiously enough, it is the one indisputable thing that the modern world is tending to despise. It is actually an age which is delighted when its sons are ‘devoted to machinery,’ which thinks it has achieved something when a factory of a thousand men has become a factory of a thousand machines. The incredible inefficiency of a perfect machine! It cannot hate; it cannot love; it cannot dream; it cannot think.

Life everlasting seems more difficult, but the adjective is one upon which science, however reluctantly, is being more and more desperately driven. How other can you describe radioactivity? What other word is good enough for the motion of an electron in an atom? There are those who are even beginning to wonder if matter itself must not be without beginning and without end. We have long known that it is indestructible, and it would take a deal of argument to prove that the one and only thing in all this universe which can be annihilated is Life.

Christ himself was not annihilated, whatever happened on the third day after the crucifixion. His life has not merely been continuous — it has been ever-increasing. His thoughts, his message, his spirit, are enormously more alive to-day than ever they were when he lived on earth. When he died, a few thousands only had ever even heard of him; to-day as many millions think of him as a living personality. That he is a living personality I do not doubt. One need not be a spiritualist for that. It is literally true that that insignificant change which we call death has had no dominion over him. It will have no dominion over any of us, and less still has it had dominion over the finest of the sons of men.

If once, of course, we are led astray into any definition of Life and any attempt to explain its continuation after death, we are out of our depth. Whether personality survives death it might be possible to know could we, with any satisfactoriness, define personality at all, say whether there is any such thing as a single personality, or be absolutely sure that we are not multiple personalities with their beginnings lost to sight in the past. The act of faith, if such there be, is fairly easy now when we know that spacetime is merely a condition of this odd existence of ours. As for harps and crowns of glory, as for emerald thrones and glassy seas, as for endless anthems and never-changing days, all these are of the stuff of a fairy story — that it would be a thousand pities if we lost.

Such is the known. And the unknown? It is wonderful how the perfect simplicity and matchless rhythm of the old words chime in one’s head. Despite the temptation to paraphrase them just that little which would make them more intelligible to modern minds, I shall not do so. ‘Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.’

What if Life is God?