The Nadir of Nothingness

I

IT will be my modest endeavor to establish herein these somewhat provocative but rather interesting propositions: —

1. That there are only two schools of Christian thought in the Western World.

2. That, if it is true that religion is the root of conduct, one or the other of these two schools must be largely responsible for world conditions to-day.

3. That all Christian creeds, cults, sects, and churches outside of Roman Catholicism have a common origin and a common responsibility.

4. That they all have their source in the principle of private judgment, and that this principle automatically tends toward more and more complete creedlessness and churchlessness.

5. That this process has a profound and deleterious effect upon citizenship by way of its effect upon social institutions, social customs and conventions, and the attitude of the individual toward his private and public obligations.

Since a sincere survey of American citizenship, as affected by religious affiliations, seems to be very much in order in this particularly significant political year, it may be profitable and interesting to introduce into the picture types which have not yet been considered — types which happen to constitute nearly four fifths of our own population.

If the minority religion seems to reveal, upon close examination, signs and stigmata which give rise to genuine and honest concern, it may be a healthy and a wholesome thing to scrutinize also the religious tendencies and tenets of the majority, and to study their possible patriotic repercussion.

In order to accomplish this titanic task, we must at the very outset determine desperately to be good-natured — to emulate, if we can, the best British controversial manner (with an Oxfordian accent) when the best British manner descants upon the faults and foibles of its American cousin. Let us jointly resolve to be indefectibly and invincibly amiable, and determine not to be tripped or trapped into a display of ill-temper — to lighten what might otherwise be an unlovely situation by an indomitable cheerfulness. If the civic sins and omissions of the majority require to be chastised, let the chastisement be manfully administered, but in such wise that no one shall say, in the sore and aching aftermath, that we lapsed from a bland and beautiful amiability.

In addition to registering this high resolve, we must also agree to hold in abeyance certain popular preconceptions and prejudices which are so common and so well-nigh universal that they may certainly be called a national conviction. Thus, there is a popular fallacy that you cannot reason with a man in regard to his religion; and this fallacy has a fellow which says that you must not — that it is uncharitable and almost indecent to do so.

The assumption in the first instance is presumably that religion is an unreasonable thing per se, or that the man is an unreasonable being in his religion. The implication in the second case, it is to be assumed, is that the man’s religious unreasonableness invests him with a tremendous dignity which must not be impinged upon or impugned.

To these two topsy-turvy contentions is added a third monstrous assumption, which maintains that it makes very little difference what a man believes, anyway. If we are to progress at all, we must agree temporarily to abate this attitude — otherwise we shall not be able to enter upon an examination of the sectarian majority citizenship at all.

It is obvious that we cannot agree to permit a man to be as irrational and idiotic as he chooses in regard to the next world if he will only conduct himself lucidly in this, for the very excellent reason that he is not at all apt to conduct himself lucidly in this life if he is insane about the next.

As far as we can determine, for instance, the followers of King Ben — of unhappy memory — were most excellent business men, bankers, lawyers, farmers, housewives, and what not, but the citizenship which evolved from their quaint religious aberrations compelled the intervention of the State and the application of the long, strong arm of criminal law. Similar recollections come to us of the early days of that thriftiest of all sects, the Mormon Church, whose members certainly could not have been criticized even at their worst for a lack of earthly acumen, but were assailed for certain eccentricities of conduct which did not seem to be in consonance with the highest type of American citizenship.

To go back to the very beginning of modern things religious, the origin of at least one of the great modern and now most respectable religious bodies rested in a reverend person who was a prototype of King Ben and Brigham Young, imbued with another quaint conception of religion which impelled him to lead his religious hosts through the streets of a German city bereft of the habiliments of the day and, like his first parents in the Garden of Eden, quite simply and beautifully unadorned.

So, if we are to survey the citizenship of the sectarian majority, we must for the moment smother our sensibilities and endeavor to determine whether or not that citizenship is influenced by this sectarianism.

And we must part with another cherished illusion which cannot be dissolved without inflicting momentary pain — the illusion that there is no common kinship between the aberrations of Protestantism and its nobler and more beautiful manifestations. Alas! There is such a kinship, and that kinship springs from a common origin, and carries a common responsibility — one which cannot be avoided any more than the Catholic Church can avoid the responsibility for all that inheres in Catholicism through the opposite principle.

The Catholic principle is, of course, the principle (in the interests of peace and amity let us call it, in this case, the presumption rather than the principle) of truth conveyed by Christ through His Church; the Protestant theory, the theory of truth conveyed to the individual by interior illumination, of whose authority he and he alone shall be the judge.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the Catholic theory imprints itself upon the character, conduct, and citizenship of its adherents. There is also no doubt whatever that the principle of Protestantism — which, of course, is a negative and not a positive principle — likewise imprints itself upon its adherents.

What is this Protestant principle, common alike to all its churches and animating alike all its cultural agencies, inspiring its poetry, literature, art, and scholarship, and even predetermining its scientific conclusions when they encroach upon the domain of man’s creative origin and supernatural end?

The principle, of course, of private judgment — the principle common to them all, in spite of the seeming checks placed upon it by occasional attempts to enforce the rules and regulations of a particular sect — the principle which brought them all into being and therefore without which their existence would not be possible to-day.

And what is this principle of private judgment?

It is whatsoever you shall choose to call it. It is interior illumination. It is the spirit of the phrase already referred to and so frequently uttered by so many million lips: ’It makes no difference what a man believes.’ In its least lovely but most common acceptance, it is literally the colloquialism: ‘One man’s guess is as good as another’s.’

II

Now, at long last, we are face to face with the two great religious forces operating in the world, and we propose to study the second, in particular, for the first time, perhaps, in several hundred years — considering it especially with relation to American citizenship to-day.

It is well to remind ourselves at this juncture that there are only two systems of religious thought in the Western world to-day. There are not a thousand, as it might seem, but just two — the authoritarian or Catholic, and the sectarian, which is Protestant.

This in spite of the numerous isms and ologies which have proceeded out of the latter and which are, in their separate capacity, of no significance, since all owe their existence to the common principle of private judgment and are dependent upon that principle for the expression of the peculiar body of thought, practice, and doctrine which each one of them expounds.

That principle is compulsory in its action and results. It compels division because all men cannot agree when all men are told that each of them can decide as he believes about creation, birth, death, Heaven, religion, and Hell. It is a dissolvent and a separative principle — automatically and irresistibly and invincibly so — and it resists and will continue to resist all efforts at coalescence and consolidation.

It is therefore important to remember that there are only two Christian schools of thought, and that out of one or the other of them must issue the salvation of society. On one or the other every man must base his philosophy of life. Why? Because life yields back to men in the aggregate the shape, the color, the shadow, or the substance of their thoughts about it.

Man is under a compulsion, from which there is no escape, to take cognizance in some manner or other, in religious or irreligious terms, of himself, of his destiny, and of his God. Should he adopt the childish subterfuge of seeking refuge in nullity or nihilism, nullity and nihilism will be rendered back to him and to the society in which he lives. He must take cognizance, either by assent or denial or agnosticism, of the riddle of life, and according as he shall decide, so in due time shall that decision be translated into the civic and social structure which he erects.

Let this point be stressed; first, lest it be forgotten, and also in contradiction to that other loose and jovial assumption that it makes no difference what a man believes. Man, in the mass, cannot with impunity hold any conviction whatsoever concerning the origin and destiny of man.

No man can be an honest and practising Catholic without consequence to his citizenship, and no man can be an honest, practising Protestant without consequence to his citizenship. No man can subscribe to the eccentricities of an unbalanced sect and apply and practise its tenets without himself becoming unbalanced and warping his earth life, even though we are willing to leave all consideration of his after life to the love and mercy of his Maker. All man’s lesser convictions will in turn be colored or controlled by these deepest of all convictions.

To repeat — whether the representatives of the various sects recognize the fact or not, they are all blood brothers in the original point of departure from the only other existing Christian philosophy. Howsoever or how much the Fundamentalists may assail the Modernists, or vice versa, they are only exponents of momentarily divergent interpretations of a common subject, which come to the same thing in the end. In exactly the same way the polite and polished Episcopalian is a blood brother to the lantern-jawed Tennessee mountaineer mouthing against the horrors of evolution. They are all united in the initial dissent. The sects are merely clothes bedecking the old original skeleton — ranging all the way from the white bed sheet of immersion to the gayly starched surplice of the High-Church Anglican.

Protestantism tends inevitably to break out and break off, because the root principle compels it to break out and break off and push on. It is a continuous process of throwing overboard — and the point of the process is that it is compulsory and that Protestantism cannot help itself. According to the degree of intelligence and examination and consistency in the adherents of the individual sect is the degree of escape from convulsive and epileptic outbreak.

Sectarianism, by everlastingly emphasizing the doctrine of religious self-determination, steadily drives the individual back upon himself. It never tires of assuring him of his own self-sufficiency in solving the eternal riddle. It ceaselessly dingdongs into his ears the comforting assurance that he needs no intermediary between himself and his God. All that he has to do is to tumble all of the doctrinal and dogmatic lumber out of his cerebral attic and he is ‘all set,’ here and hereafter. It pronounces him gloriously free, and, with the same affectionate gesture, endeavors to hold him fast to some silly little sectarian programme which it has already pronounced superfluous.

Man, with all of his faults, is a rational creature. He can sometimes detect a contradiction and an inconsistency when it apparently touches his well-being here and may even affect his comfort in a dubious hereafter. When the sects anathematize all authority and say ‘ full steam ahead’ to his intellect, the average man takes them at their word. When, immediately afterward, they contradict themselves and ask him to subscribe to a little cult made up of free souls like himself, who are to hold their freedom in abeyance in order that the cult may flourish, he frequently balks and withdraws.

Or, if he consents to wear the sectarian phylacteries, he begins to squirm uneasily and ask what it is all about. He has been told that the free intellect is the only road to salvation. He has been assured, in effect, that he is his own judge, jury, pope, and God. He has been told that definiteness — which is another word for doctrines and dogmas — is not merely unnecessary, but an actual hindrance to the development of the spirit. He has been told that there is no authority higher than the authority of his own intellect.

And straightway the little sect which has given him this glorious assurance begins to exercise over him a pale, apologetic shadow of authority. Straightway it begins to reinstate doctrines and dogmas, mumbling apologetically that these are not really doctrines and dogmas at all. Straightway it begins to beguile him with soppy songs and soppy sermons and soft lights and stained glass and revolving crosses — and running through them all is a note of authority and command for which he can find no slightest trace of validity or justification.

Naturally, being a rational creature, — even according to the most lugubrious of modern scientists, — he rebels. As the saying is, he ‘walks out on the show.’ He walks out in such numbers that he constitutes to-day more than one half the entire population of the United States.

Now, what are these fifty or sixty or seventy million Americans? Fifty or sixty or seventy million morons? Or fifty or sixty or seventy million straight-thinking, more or less logicalminded, consistent human beings?

They have pushed the process of unloading the fast-disappearing supply of Protestant dogmatic lumber to the point of cutting churchgoing out of their category of conduct altogether. Certainly none among their brethren can consistently complain of this. They were given a word, and they accepted a word. They were told they were free, and they exercised their freedom. They were told that dogmas were almost damnable, and then an attempt was made to hold them with dogmas.

In deserting the sects, they are logically pursuing the Protestant premise — the glorious principle of private judgment. The fifty or sixty or seventy million Americans who have rejected the churches are merely exercising that privilege in their own way, as the Mormon exercises it in his, or the High-Church Anglican in his.

It is not at all necessary to conduct periodical, solemn surveys to determine why the sectarian churches have been emptied of their congregations. The congregations have left because there was nothing left to hold them. The sectarian churches are empty because the sectarian creeds are empty

— and they emptied themselves with loud curses on everything dogmatic, with hosannas to God and vociferous pæans to the freedom of the human intellect.

The irresistible and unescapable necessity in Protestantism is a continuous sloughing-off of church and a further and further falling-back on the individual. This is the very essence and genius of Protestantism.

If Protestantism is true to the philosophy of private judgment, Protestant congregations both in the city and in the country must dwindle

— and they have dwindled and they will continue so to do, no matter how many and how often saline solutions are applied. Indeed, if the entire body of adherents were severely consistent, there would be no Protestant churches at all.

If ever there was ritual without reason, or mummery without meaning, it is the varied and various forms of brick, mortar, and millinery in which private judgment has decked itself out since its first clamorous appearance several centuries ago.

III

The critics of Protestantism are practically all within the ranks of Protestantism, but they are to alt appearances sublimely unconscious that in belaboring each other they are only belaboring themselves. Thus, it is popular nowadays to excoriate the Evangelicals; but what have the critics of the Methodist, the Baptist, and other evangelical churches by way of a philosophy of life which these churches do not also possess?

At the most, when Protestants criticize Protestants, they can only complain of theological manners. Dean Inge may be a tremendously superior person in point of education, living, and good breeding, but he has not one whit more of definiteness or certitude than the grimiest Holy Roller who ever ‘threw a fit’ in religious ecstasy. Dean Inge has opinions; Clarence Darrow has opinions; Bishop Brown has opinions; William Jennings Bryan had opinions; and that is all.

When Dean Inge dresses up his opinions in stained glass, deep organ diapasons, and scholarly discourses, he has neither added to nor subtracted from their original significance and validity. When Clarence Darrow mouths agnosticisms and when Bishop Brown espouses infidelity, they are merely exercising the Protestant privilege of believing what they please in forms of unbelief. When William Jennings Bryan erected around his opinions a scaffolding called Presbyterianism, he was merely exercising, under the same Protestant privilege, the right of wearing a label called ‘Presbyterian’ which any Presbyterian has the right to discard whenever he wishes to be consistent and fully apply the principle of private judgment.

Neither Dean Inge nor Clarence Darrow nor the shade of William Jennings Bryan nor Bishop Brown nor Harry Emerson Fosdick nor Dr. Frank Crane nor Bishop Manning has anything whatsoever of justification or authority which is not the product of his own mortal mind.

This is point No. 1.

Point No. 2 is approached with diffidence. It does not affect alone the motley mob. It affects the elect. It is apt to cause disquietude and discomfort in high places. It is calculated to take some of the starch out of the self-satisfied, so-called intelligentsia. It has to do with sacrosanct Harvard and pious Princeton quite as much as with some Ku Klux university or with Baptist Albion.

It revolves around this singular and disturbing fact, which is repeated for emphasis: that, whether he breaks out in a sect or rejects all sects, every nonadherent of Rome, unless he is an Oriental, a Jew, or an atheist, is still a Protestant.

Sloughing off the sect does not help him a particle in trying to escape the philosophical first principle upon which he erects all of his conclusions. Having registered the great act in which he rejects all religious authority, save that of interior illumination, his thought of himself is that he is forever-after free.

The ludicrous fact is that he has locked himself up in his own brain cells. His intellect has not been freed, but incarcerated. Its processes have been inhibited; and those processes, if he is consistent, can be predicted with positiveness. If he is logical, he has become an automatic thinker, whose aberrations can be anticipated with accuracy, as an alienist charts the symptomology of a defective.

Thus, if he pursues his premises undeviatingly to their ultimate conclusion, we can say with certainty that he will become a philosophical, if not a physical, anarchist. Before he has attained that beatitude, the iron limitations of his intellectual strait-jacket will induce other convulsive gestures — some strange and cynical, some beautiful and benevolent. But always he will be cramped and constrained by his premises.

He can approach no problem without prejudice. That prejudice is, of course, that all authority other than the individual intellect is impossible. Armed with this bias, he approaches the supernatural verities, and at his touch they melt into grotesqueries of their original format.

The theory is that interior illumination is what the inept but poetic phrase implies — a light that infallibly finds the truth. The fact is that it is a corrosive which has changed the shape, substance, and spirit of every law laid down in the Christian dispensation.

Changes as momentous as these mean not merely changing habits and motives and changing conduct, but a revolution and a disintegration of the society in which they operate. The laws of life may not be aborted without disaster to the body politic. They have been aborted, and the catastrophe is upon us.

It seems a simple thing for a man to say that he will think as he pleases about himself. But it is not a simple thing. In its results, it is a tangled and a terrible and a tragic thing. It may well be that the awfulest moment in all history was the precise moment when man elected to make his own God according to his own image and likeness. In that moment he did indeed rid himself of an ancient compulsion, but he exchanged it for another far more terrible. Thenceforth he could hold no conviction save those convictions remaining to the man who reserves to himself the right to fashion his own God. By that simple and seemingly salutary assertion of opinionative independence, he lost forever his freedom of opinion.

There is more than mere consanguinity of ideas in the fact that the so-called free intellect is always a concomitant of free love. It is not by chance that the destructive red radical is always a religious individualist. A rigid and determinative rule is at work here, the directness and deadliness of which are not even dreamed by the modern world. Not merely the marriage law, but all the ancient and sacred amenities of life and death become fluid at the dissolving touch of religious individualism.

In the light of the World War, the hideous tragedy of the thing advertises itself as violently as the gibbet on Golgotha. But it is invincibly invisible to the religious individualist himself — an innocent myopia in which there would be humor of a cynical and sardonic sort if it were not freighted with a fatal aftermath.

IV

For more than a century parson and professor have been repeating, parrotlike, the same superlatively stupid formula: ‘Free the intellect of man and the millennium will be at hand.’

The emancipating process has proceeded apace. In religion it has released millions altogether from the disagreeable duty of going to church. It has stripped bare the churches themselves, until nothing of slightest consequence remains but the Sunday sermon and the organ recital. The sermon has descended to the nadir of vulgarity and the very depths of latitudinarianism. All the ancient handmaidens of religion were banished for a long period in the grim determination to be literal. The cross was ousted first, and then everything else of beauty and sweet significance. Sacred art and sacred architecture, reverent ritual, lovely liturgy, all hallowed and rendered authentic and authoritative by the holiest tradition, were consigned to the dust heap — to come creeping back in a faint masquerade of their pristine significance as the sects found themselves bankrupt of human appeal.

But, worst of all, the Word itself was wounded, dismembered, distorted, and crucified under the remorseless, destructive process of individual interpretation. Gross misconceptions multiplied, clerical scholarship sank lower and lower, the very word ‘heresy’ became a byword and mockery, so fast and so complex was the structure of contradiction and violent inconsistency reared in the name of the Scriptures and of Christ. Here the overemphasis was on faith, there faith was reviled; here hope was anathematized, and there made the keystone of the arch; here love was degraded into mawkish sentimentalism, there garbed in the robes of harsh and relentless justice.

Conduct and the human character changed with these violently changing malinterpretations of God’s word. Queer sectarian types multiplied and still multiply — queer, unlovely lives sprouted the world over and left their imprint on the backwoods, the little town, the city, the state, the nation, and the world. There is no need to enumerate them — from the bloodletting Covenanter, the cruel and heartless Calvinist, the pious, persecuting Puritan, the frenzied and epileptic fanatic of a score of nearly insane sects, down to the illiterate and feud-fighting mountaineer, and, very apex of the process of sectarian sterilization, the cold, respectable, successful, loveless, and unloving infidel of the moment — they are recognizable wherever we look or read or listen or turn to-day. And still the raucous parrot shriek for freedom of the intellect goes on.

It echoes throughout the sectarian and so-called nonsectarian halls of learning the world over. In the name of the ‘glorious’ principle of academic freedom, — they are all dubbed glorious, these mock escapes from an imaginary and mythical thralldom, — it has barred nothing and admitted everything to the inquiring mind of the student. It has sent him out into the world blinking and bewildered, cynical and disillusioned, doubtful and more than doubtful of God, patronizing and inquiring of Christ, lordly and superior of the ‘superstitions’ surrounding the Christian theory — stripped of all his defenses and then desperately endeavoring, without spiritual strength or spiritual weapon save his own poor self, to fight the heroic fight a man must fight before he can attain the knighthood of being a good son, a good husband, a good father, a good citizen, and a good man.

The churches are free, and stripped bare to the bone; the pulpits are stark free, and utter any banality that occurs to them; the universities are free, and complain bitterly of the barrenness of their human output; the professors are free, and fly instinctively to the defense of any phase and form of infidelity; the laboratories are free, and manufacturing travesties of man made in the image of His Maker — and still the plaintive, cowardly cry ascends to heaven: ‘Just a little more freedom and the millennium will be at hand.’

This is merely a rapid-fire sketch, but not a highly colored one. The pursuit of the subject leads into a thousand blind alleys and byways, and always it encounters hosts and hosts of humanity warped and spoiled by wrong thinking — running the gamut of human relations, from the multifarious functions of the home to the devious and sometimes devilish machinations of statecraft, following always the same dreadful deification of the human with the same dire and dreadful result.

Never was the process consummated in a more easily recognizable type than the hideous exhibit of warped humanity which directed the Prussian and militaristic ideals of Germany in the World War — and yet it went unrecognized for what it was. There is no thought here of impugning the German people, or indeed of endeavoring to measure the blood guilt of Germany; but the ruling caste, the predominant type, the directing philosophy issuing out of sedate and stern universities and ultimating in a conception of superman and of supermilitarism, was so clearly and so plainly philosophic in its origin, so plainly the fruits of Prussian classroom and laboratory, so plainly the fruit and culmination of three hundred years of German sectarianism, that it would seem that it must have been written on the skies for all the world to see.

But the world did not see it and will deny it with curses to-day, because the same sort of education has its echo in other superior lands which boast of their Christianity. These lands, too, have their Nietzsches and their Haeckels and would, if they possessed the courage of their convictions, drive these convictions to deductions just as deadly to humanity and just as destructive to the rights of man as the philosophy of the infidel savant and the blind, brutal, military overlord.

An echo of the same philosophy — a first faint, far-off trending toward the same brutal ideal — is with us in America to-day in the misguided clamor for centralized, bureaucratic control of education, with its inevitable still further elimination of the slightest trace of religious influence. It is clearer still in the dictum of a university president who declares that the student of the future must be carefully selected from a preferred class — the remainder to be declared unfit for entrance and barred from the sacred halls of learning. The product of the colleges and universities has fallen below par, so an artificial standard must be established and a system of selection and rejection put into operation in this land of freedom and democracy.

This same college president is the very fruit, flower, and culmination of the sectarian system. He is by way of being an advocate of birth control for the same reason that he is an advocate of student selection. The human product is exhibiting unfortunate animalistic tendencies — not as a result of sectarianism, of course, but because the individual intellect is still ‘restrained and hampered.’ The average must be lifted, and he proposes to lift it, not by inculcating virtue in the individual, but by applying the hydraulic pressure of birth control and student selection and lifting the entire mass. He tells us, moreover, that the youth of the nation is in revolt — somebody or something is always rebelling and revolting under the sectarian system — and for the ten-thousandth time utters the old platitudinous parrot cry in telling why they are in revolt !

They are hampered by fundamentalism — which blindfolds the eyes, and shackles the mind, and restrains individual action. And so with one sublime gesture he would confer on them still fuller academic and selective freedom, and, for fear that will not suffice, sift and sort them out and raise the standard of quality by eugenics and a caste system of student selection.

This is the sort of sublime idiocy issuing out of the most eminent mouths and minds impregnated with the individualistic theory of life and society — filling the front pages of the newspapers and, under gentler and more cultured guise, monopolizing the pages of our so-called highbrow magazines. The test of it all is so simple and so easy that it is ludicrous. Pick up any book or any magazine containing the reflections of a college professor, preacher, or scientist and try, if you can, to discover one who writes to a definite conclusion — who offers a clear-cut solution, or who is not befuddled, hopeless, pessimistic, antichristian, and still singing the old everlasting song of freedom, more freedom, and still more freedom.

V

Unless a man orders and operates his life according to sanctions outside and above and beyond himself, his spirit sinks like a stone into the dull, ignoble daily routine of earthly existence. He cannot so order his life by merely eliciting from his inner self acts whose only validation is a personal opinion. No matter how ardent and earnest may be his idealism, these acts will not bear the test, in the mass of men, of personal, practical, everyday application.

It is precisely in these dull, daily duties that men fail. A purely human code of ethics is like an inflated gas bag which buoys a man up for brief and thrilling emotional flights. It is quickly punctured when it comes into sharp and piercing contact with the rough and unromantic requirements of social, domestic, business, and spiritual life.

Spiritual growth and development require of a man that he do the things which he does not want to do. It is beyond his own unaided powers to put this principle into practice. Relying solely upon his own interpretations and his own strength, it is inevitable that he shall construct a code which accommodates itself to his weaknesses.

There is no need of debating this question academically. The pragmatic test provides the proof. This is what will happen when the individual pursues the principle of self-determination, because it is precisely what does happen — not necessarily in the last living individual, but in the vast and overwhelming majority of individuals, to-day, yesterday, to-morrow, in all lands, at all times, in all climes,and under all circumstances.

The sectarian mass is not governed by its ethical or idealistic upsoarings, but by the call of convention and convenience, which is the call of the flesh.

The spirit of individual decision is quite obviously a spirit of revolt. It is quite obviously a spirit which makes a virtue out of necessity; and the necessity in this case is personal convenience and indulgence. If it becomes inconvenient to practise a virtue, the virtue is legislated out of existence and a substitute virtue takes its place which permits the personal indulgence and renders it sinless and respectable.

In other words, the spirit of individual decision is nothing more or less than the spirit of the world, and the spirit of the world is more powerful than the edicts of kings and emperors and parliaments, because it is built upon that horrible and almost indestructible strength which is the desire and weakness of the human spirit and of human flesh. There is nothing stronger in the world than the human will, and when that will wills to err and justify the error, it is as powerful as Hell and only less powerful than Heaven.

Applying again the simile of volatility, the spirit of religious individualism — which is private judgment, which is pride of intellect, which is the spirit of the world — is as impalpable as poison gas and infinitely more penetrating and deadly. Poison gas kills the body—the invisible gas of intellectual pride sears and destroys the soul. It overturns standards of virtue and induces the individual intellect to accept vicious substitutes with complaisance. It penetrates every nook, corner, and cranny of the social structure and poisons human conduct in all of the relations. It invariably invades the home first and establishes the rule of the flesh between man and wife. It creeps into the secrecy and the sacredness of the nuptial chamber and perverts the primal relation. It enters into the very womb of woman. It defeats the very law of creation. It imposes its own regimen upon the child, rendering it certain that both the human and the spiritual experience of the offspring will be as wretched as that of its parentage.

Again it is not necessary to prove these assertions. They are proven. Society to-day is a network of surrenders, so far as the ancient Christian standards of conduct are concerned. The conveniences substituted by modern life scarcely produce a qualm of doubt and uncertainty. Their most enthusiastic exponents are the fortunate and the presumably intellectual.

The pulpits touch them gingerly. The university professor applauds them openly. Private judgment is in the saddle in both cases. Frequently the pulpiteer and the professor join hands in public. Much more often they agree in private. The mass is tainted, too. But the taint was handed down from above. Everybody who is anybody is liberal now. The hand that holds the surgeon’s scalpel does not hesitate to exercise the laws of lordship over life and death. It does not scruple to enter the domain of morals and render a decision under the new code of social convenience and economic necessity. The medical profession in the mass does not believe in the soul, therefore does not hesitate to tamper with what used to be called the soul. The surgeons and the physicians are chiefly of the soulless sectarian school, which means pure pagan, which means that the laws of social convenience and necessity actually do prevail. Contraception, eugenics, euthanasia — who is so old-fashioned as to dispute them now, or who, on sectarian grounds, could possibly justify such a dispute?

VI

There is probably no slightest hint of suspicion in the mind of any sectarian scholar laboring to-day in laboratory, library, or school, that he is not an absolutely free agent, whose findings are untainted by any ulterior or distracting element. Religion with him is usually so remote from the subject of his research, so thin and attenuated a thread in the warp and woof of his thought, that he would be apt to reject with indignation the suggestion that it might color or control his scholarship.

And yet it is as plain a fact on the face of society as is the nose on his distinguished countenance that the entire body of sectarian scholarship to-day bears the unmistakable stamp of its origin, both in content and in conclusions. As long as it deals merely with objective things — with the physical sciences, in particular — modern research is filled with as fine and fiery a zeal for accuracy as the world of study has ever known. It is not necessary to catalogue its triumphs, because all men know them, and in these instances the fatal taint of sectarianism leaves the intellectual product unmarred.

But the moment the investigator enters upon the domain of man, the inscrutable, the process of inhibition begins to manifest itself. The long and honorable roster of savants whose names have graced the sciences and the arts for the past several centuries comprehends a list of distinguished men whose output is just as unmistakable in its Protestantism or infidelity as they accuse the alternative school of being mediæval, scholastic, and reactionary. The scholastic, the sectarian feels, is cabined, cribbed, and confined by his superstitions. He, the agnostic, has no superstitions. Therefore his scholarship is free to scour the sciences for truth.

This is the innocent myopia of which we have spoken, which befogs the world to-day. If there be superstition or prior commitment to a conception in the one case, there is a superstition infinitely more coarse and brutal, and a prior commitment infinitely more warping, in the other. The one is at least couched in terms of nobility and beauty and bears no results which are not also noble and beautiful. The other inevitably degrades and brutalizes the image of man. It inevitably divides its members and destroys its votaries and its victims — the unschooled and unlettered mass. Its output is not merely of a standardized sameness in all the arts and all the sciences, but it is of a standardized monotony in the type of thinking which it produces. The rotarian intellect is not rotarian primarily because it is a middle-class mind of restricted observation and experience. The rotarian is a rotarian because he is the heir and product of several centuries of strictly sectarian, mediocre thinking.

The fiery Southerner who has recourse to lynchings and burnings is not nearly so much acting upon the impulses of a fiery Southerner as he is a sectarian following the behests of a misdirected individualism which bids him take the law into his own hands and out of the hands of the courts, when a seeming exigency requires it.

It is well-nigh incredible that the general mind can have escaped a realization of the universal ugliness which has issued out of religious individualism. Every single social aberration, insanity, or inanity which has manifested itself in several hundred years has borne the birthmark of irrational sectarian thinking. Almost invariably those follies and tragedies have been proudly proclaimed as great progressive movements. Individual sectarian action is frequently simple, sane, and sweet. Mass action is nearly always banal, grotesque, and unlovely. It has produced millions of lopsided mentalities, whose social experiments have almost invariably gone awry, because they have laid too much or too little emphasis on this, that, or the other tendency in human nature, or this, that, or the other Scriptural interpretation.

From Darwin to Volstead, religious individualism has continuously been engaged in discovering something about man — something which invariably turned out to be untrue, and which warped and wrecked countless lives before it was discredited and discarded. Darwin was one of the elect who felt himself so freed from the old onus of responsibility to the supernatural that the output of his intellect was certain to be pure science and therefore pure objective truth. Ernst Haeckel was another who was filled with scorn for the scholastics. Coming down to most modern times, Henry Fairfield Osborn was another, and Lothrop Stoddard still another. And they all bore and bear the earmarks of their cultural handicap and intellectual inhibitions so clearly that nothing but the strabismus of sectarianism could possibly fail to discern it. The control and dominance of the inhibition, instead of lessening, grows more pronounced as the years pass and Protestantism becomes, as it believes, more liberal and generous.

Thus, the patron saints of the new learning at the present moment in interpreting man’s mind are men of the type of Wells and Van Loon. And yet every page or chapter they write of the history or constitution of men and of nations is so obviously biased that none but the closed minds of sectarianism could possibly give it attic room.

That is perhaps one of the most destructive phases of the sectarian outlook — that it chloroforms the sensibilities, destroys the sense of values, blunts the perceptions, and lowers the standards, not merely of the mass, but of those who in other respects might be called cultured.

Religious individualism has all of the fickleness and contrariety of the mob spirit. It even has its little spells of sane thinking — quickly followed by the pursuit of passion.

In one breath it clamors for the separation of Church and State; in the next it deifies the State by erecting the principle of the divine right of kings or the divine right of the people. It is so ignorant of its own operations that, in spite of most recent history in England and Germany, it interprets the divine right of kings as a mediæval philosophy. Failing — as it always fails — to lift the morals of the mass, it invariably turns to the State for aid, and endeavors to enforce virtue by legislation, as in the attempts to prohibit liquor, and the more recent attempt to prohibit learning.

This manifestation, of course, is not an espousal of the divine right of kings, but of the divine right of man, as first proclaimed by Rousseau, and reasserted from Protestant pulpits in ten thousand varied and varying forms ever since. In criminology the relegation of the moral responsibility to group or individual interpretation logically ultimates in lynch law. In the administration of law the sectarian professes a pious belief that his courts are sanctioned from on high. Actually, he tends more and more toward a contempt of courts and the origin of their power, and may yet refer all of their decisions to a referendum.

Instinctively, naturally, and necessarily, he is ‘against’ authority, whether it be in the courts, in his executives, in his home, or in himself.

In matters of sex, the sectarian spirit has induced the almost universal adoption or condonance of contraception. Marriage it has, of course, stripped of everything savoring of the supernatural and the sacramental — reducing it, as it is rapidly reducing every other human relation, to the mood and the whim of the individual.

In literature — having no solution for the riddle of life — it concerns itself with phases and aspects, and the relations of individuals, rarely with life itself, and the conclusions of life. In poetry it gravitates between the sweetly sentimental and the abstruse and incoherent.

Like sectarian religion, sectarian literature is in deadly fear of conclusions. It can tell what happened to a group by reason of social conditions, but it cannot tell what created the conditions, or how they are to be cured. Only the occasional master, like Conrad, has running through all of his works the ominous note of a common doom of humanity when wedded to the earth.

In art the most recent and triumphant expression is a complete contempt of form and a descent into chaos, which leaves the onlooker bewildered and hopeless of interpretation.

It is not necessary to go beyond the mad incoherence of free verse, the incoherence of the modern novel, the incoherence of modern art, and the incoherence of modern religious thought, to realize that, so far as the soul of man is concerned, modern society is quite completely and hopelessly mad.

If sectarianism ever has the courage to confront itself with its own colossal and tragic failures and admit that they involve the annihilation of existing civilization, only two courses are open. It must either maintain the sufficiency of churchlessness and creedlessness when properly administered for the salvation of society, or go over to Rome, en masse. It will never do the latter, and so, humanly speaking, there is no solution. If society is dependent for its salvation upon the Christian dispensation, and if the sectarian idea is to dominate and be carried to its last anarchic conclusion, then society is indubitably doomed.

VII

This thesis may well conclude by reverting to the lighter tone with which it opened and considering for a moment one of the amusing dispositions which nearly always asserts itself in the discussion of American citizenship as affected by religious affiliation. The assumption underlying nearly every challenge to the Americanism of Roman Catholics is that the same suspicion cannot possibly attach to those who do not adhere to Catholicism. By some strange species of divine right, all sectarians are born nationalists of purest ray serene. Their position is not only unassailable — it is the definition and the test of patriotism.

Precisely the same bland assumption of proprietary right has, at one time or another, been advanced in every one of the so-called Christian Western nations and even in some nations of the East.

Those who disagree with the Catholic Church are self-constituted custodians of true nationalism and true patriotism, from whom nothing antinational can possibly proceed. It is a sweetly simple and soothing conception, but unhappily it carries in its train some other elements or consequences not quite so comforting or pretty.

The principle which constitutes the sectarian the patriot par excellence is the principle of allegiance only to himself, so frequently cited in these pages. He is not disturbed or distracted by any obligation, spiritual or otherwise, outside of himself, and can presumably dedicate himself without let, hindrance, or qualification to the nation which sires and the government which rules him.

Unhappily this beautiful picture begins to blur the more closely it is examined. Precisely the same principle which permits the individual to define his spiritual, moral, and patriotic duties for himself leads him, as we have tried to illustrate, into other licenses and declarations which, upon not infrequent occasions, become distinctly antinational.

One of them, frequently carrying calamitous consequences, is the socalled divine right of insurrection, a purely Protestant invention. Another is the divine right of kings, also of Protestant origin and practice. Another is the so-called divine right of the individual, which probably had its birth in the irreligious philosophies of the French Revolution. There are numerous other pseudo-divine rights, almost always accompanied in their expression by rebellion, bloodshed, and rapine.

All these threats to pure citizenship are not merely possible only to sectarianism — they are among its proudest prerogatives, ofttimes celebrated in flamboyant song and story. The benighted Catholic may not share in their bloody glory. He, luckless wight, is restrained by something outside of and above himself — an articulate and definitive and even a doctrinal and dogmatic God who restrains him from cutting off the heads of kings, shooting down the populace, overturning the State, sacking, slaughtering, and building barricades at the dubious summons of a highly debatable battle cry of freedom.

The Catholic may rise and do battle only with divine sanction — only when obeying the obligation laid upon him by the divine dictum of rendering unto God the things which are God’s and unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s. He has no divine right of rebellion based on purely human tenets. Only when his God is affronted and his conscience assailed may he rebel against the State — and even then he is compelled to patience even unto persecution, proscription, violence, and death.

The sectarian’s decisions are not referable to any alien spiritual superior, therefore those decisions are presumably always in consonance with the purest patriotism. But, if his decisions are not referable to a higher spiritual authority, to whom or to what are they referable? To the opinion of the individual patriot, of course. But opinion, even when grandiosely described as conscience, wears many guises when it operates in the sphere of civics or citizenship or partisanship or nationalism. Sometimes it seems to function as sheer selfishness. Sometimes it is an ambition for power spuriously operating as patriotism. Sometimes it is sheer demagogy.

Chameleon-like, the individual patriot conscience can and does accommodate itself to all of these colorings. But it frequently ceases to be conscience when so functioning. It bears strange and sometimes deadly fruits; as, for instance, when it hangs and burns under the urge of lynch law, or cuts and kills and slaughters as a supposedly beneficent communism, or robs and expropriates as socialism, or assassinates as radicalism.

Sectarianism, or the regulation of civic allegiance by way of the individual opinion or conscience, undoubtedly has done and continues to do all these things. And yet it is to be considered immune from questioning as to the purity of its motives and its acts. Only the Catholic is to be suspect in his patriotism. Is there not a slight hint of Pharisee-ism here which will bear further examination both from the standpoint of history and from that of philosophical speculation?

Which of the two types has been most distinctly and savagely antinational throughout the centuries?