Christianity and History

0

Ulerbert

Qutlerfield HRISTIANIT D

IIISTOR " m u s l be regarded u i the most oulsicmdinq pronouncement on the meaning of

history

made by a professional historian in England since A c t o n ' t I n a u g u r a l . " T h * L*n j * n

UiAMlES st.Klli\t.R'S SQAS

Tim*!

CHRISTIANITY A N D

HISTORY

BY

THE

SAME

AUTHOR

The Historical Novel The Peace-tactics of Napoleon, 1806-08 The Whig Interpretation of History Editor Select Documents of European History, Vol. Ill, 1715-1920 Napoleon [Great Lives Series) The Statecraft of Machiavelli The Englishman and his History George I I I , Lord North and the People, 1779-80 The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800

CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY BY

H. BUTTERFIELD,

M.A.

Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge

NEW

YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S 1 9 5 0

SONS

COPYRIGHT, 1949, 1950, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS P r i n t e d i n the U n i t e d States of A m e r i c a

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . T h e G o d o f History, i — C h r i s t i a n i t y as an Historical Religion, 3—History and the Present D a y , 4—Nature, History and M a n , 5. I.

HISTORICAL T O LIFE

SCHOLARSHIP

AND

ITS

RELATION

Religion and Scholarship, 9 — O u r Relations w i t h the Past, 1 1 — T h e Scientific Historian, 1 2 — T h e R o l e o f Sympathetic Imagination, 1 7 — T h e Case against Academic History, 1 9 — T h e Interpretation o f the H u m a n D r a m a , 22—History and Prophecy, 24. n.

HUMAN N A T U R E IN HISTORY History and Personality, 2 6 — H u m a n Nature in Society, 2 9 — T h e Problem o f Modern Barbarism, 3 1 — T h e Relations between Force and an Ethical Order, 3 2 — T h e Universal Element o f Cupidity, 3 5 — T h e Gravitational Pull in History, 38 —Doctrines concerning Man, 3 9 — W a s Napoleon better than Hitler?, 44—History uncovers Man's Universal Sin, 45.

III.

JUDGMENT IN HISTORY T h e Judgment on German Militarism, 4 8 — E u r o p e under Judgment, 51—Judgment upon Great H u m a n Systems, 54 — T h e Hebrew Prophets, 57—Paradoxes o f History, 5 9 — T h e Relations between Progress and Judgment, 6 4 — T h e G o a l o f H u m a n History, 65.

IV.

CATACLYSM TORY

AND

TRAGIC

CONFLICT

IN

HIS-

History and Morality, 66—This R i s k y Universe, 6 9 — Cataclysmic History, 7 0 — T h e Importance o f Ancient History, 7 1 — T h e O l d Testament and History, 72— Redeeming Catastrophe, 7 5 — T h e Development o f Hebrew Religion, 76—Messianism, 78—Patterns in History, 8 1 — T h e Suffering Servant, 83—Vicarious Suffering, 84— Reconciliation with Life and Destiny, 8 7 — T h e Tragic E l e ment in H u m a n Conflict, 8 8 — T h e Predicament o f Hobbesian Fear, 8 9 — R i g h t versus W r o n g i n History, 9 1 — T h e Historian and H u m a n Conflicts, 92.

CONTENTS V.

PROVIDENCE AND THE HISTORICAL PROCESS

.

93

Providence in the Historical Process, 93—Progress and the Providential Order, 96—Bringing G o o d out o f E v i l , 9 8 — Co-operation w i t h Providence, 9 9 — H u m a n Presumption and the Providential Order, 101—The W r o n g K i n d o f F a r sightedness, 1 0 4 — T h e Fall o f M a n , 105—Over-Anxiety i n Politics, 1 0 6 — G o d i n History, 1 0 7 — T h e Delicate Texture o f History, 109—History under Providence, 111. VI.

C H R I S T I A N I T Y AS A N H I S T O R I C A L R E L I G I O N

.

113

Belief i n G o d , 1 1 3 — T h e Vision given to the Humble, 115— T h e Screen between M a n and G o d , 117—Conceptions o f G o d , 1 1 8 — T h e Implications o f an Historical Religion, 1 2 0 — T h e Problem o f H u m a n Sin, 122—Foolishness to the Greeks, 1 2 3 — T h e Gospels, 124—Ultimate Interpretations, 1 2 5 — T h e Historical Jesus, 128. VII.

HISTORY, RELIGION AND THE PRESENT DAY

.

A Christianity that is Ancient, 1 3 0 — T h e Ecclesiastical Interpretation o f History, 1 3 2 — T h e C h u r c h i n History, 134—Wars for Righteousness, 1 3 7 — T h e Framework o f our C o n temporary History, 140—Christianity and C o m m u n i s m , 142.

vi

130

NOTE T h e Introduction and the seven chapters o f this book are an amplified version o f the six broadcast lectures delivered between A p r i l 2nd and M a y 7th, 1949, Listener.

o

n

t n e

T h i r d Programme, and subsequently printed i n the

These were based in turn upon a series o f seven lectures originally

delivered at the request o f the Divinity Faculty at the University o f Cambridge i n Michaelmas T e r m , 1948. H. B.

Blank Page

INTRODUCTION T H E God w h o brought his people out o f the land o f Egypt, out o f the house o f bondage, was to be celebrated i n the O l d Testament pre-eminently as the God o f History. I t seems to have been when the Children o f Israel lapsed into i d o l a t r y — gave themselves over to the worship o f Baal, for example— that they turned rather to the God o f Nature, glorifying the forces o f the physical universe and the fertility o f the earth. N o t h i n g could have served better to enhance the preoccupation w i t h history than the fact that Jehovah was bound to His people by a promise, while they themselves were admitted to be under special obligations by the terms o f the Covenant that He had made w i t h them. It was necessary to justify Jehovah and vindicate His fidelity when appearances were against H i m — o r alternatively i t was necessary to show where Israel had broken the Covenant—and this helped to give to the religion itself and to the discussion o f historical events that ethical bias which was so strong a feature o f the O l d Testament narrative. The lapses into nature-worship on the other hand, far f r o m promoting any advance i n ethical standards, appear to have been accompanied by licentiousness and immorality. From a remarkably early date, therefore, there is significance i n the peculiarly intimate connection that existed between religion and history amongst the people o f the Bible; and perhaps i t was because He was so v i v i d l y realised as the God o f History that Jehovah came to be apprehended as a God so ethical i n His requirements and so remarkably personal. Even when he was only the God o f Israel—only the God o f History for those w h o called themselves His Chosen People—His very jealousy was conducive to something like a monotheistic system w i t h i n the limits o f the single nation. The deification o f the multifarious powers and potentialities o f nature, on the other

2

INTRODUCTION

hand, seems to have been calculated to encourage the uglier forms o f polytheism. The significance o f the connection between religion and history became momentous i n the days when the ancient Hebrews, though so small a people, found themselves between the competing empires o f Egypt and Assyria or Babylon, so that they became actors, and i n a particularly tragic sense proved to be victims, i n the kind o f history-making that involves colossal struggles for power. I t cannot have been an accident that such events should have coincided w i t h the age o f the great prophets, whose religious thought developed i n a direct way out o f these historic experiences and so often took the f o r m o f historical interpretation itself; while many o f the great Psalms and the book o f Job bear the marks o f subsequent historical vicissitudes, and represent similar attempts to grapple w i t h human destiny—especially w i t h the moral paradoxes w i t h w h i c h men are faced when history is catastrophic. So far as I can see, the apocalyptic thought that emerged before the opening o f the Christian era, and the turn to the kind o f speculation which we call eschatological, are i n a certain sense a continuation o f the same story—a further phase o f the search for an interpretation o f history which w o u l d embrace catastrophe itself and transcend the immediate spectacle o f tragedy. Altogether we have here the greatest and most deliberate attempts ever made to wrestle w i t h destiny and interpret history and discover meaning i n the human drama; above all, to grapple w i t h the moral difficulties that history presents to the religious mind. The revelation appears not always to have been granted to the ancient Hebrews until there had been a great struggle to achieve the truth. History must be a matter o f considerable concern to Christians i n so far as religion i n this way represents the attempt to engage oneself w i t h the whole problem o f human destiny. Its importance is enlarged i f now, as i n O l d Testament times, i t is true that the real significances and values are not to be found by focusing our attention upon man i n nature, but are to be

CHRISTIANITY

AS A N H I S T O R I C A L

RELIGION

3

sought rather by the contemplation o f man—and the ways o f God w i t h m a n — i n history. O u r interest is more intimately engaged i n that the Bible itself, both i n the O l d Testament and i n the N e w , unfolds the religion to such a considerable degree by telling its history, and conveys a message to men by the narration and exposition o f historical events i n general. A n d our concern must be still more intense if, after a long period o f comparative security and general progress, we i n this part o f the w o r l d find ourselves—as I think we d o — i n the midst o f that very kind o f catastrophic history which confronted the Hebrew prophets at one period, and which the great St. Augustine, for example, had to face at another period. I n a sense much more striking still, however, the Christian must find that religious thought is inextricably involved i n historical thought. The historical Jesus on the one hand brings to a climax the k i n d o f developments which I have mentioned, gathering up the whole story and fulfilling the things to which the O l d Testament had so often pointed. In this respect, His life, His teaching and His personality are the subject o f an historical narrative which knits itself into the story o f the R o m a n Empire. Over and above all this, however, Christianity is an historical religion i n a particularly technical sense that the term possesses—it presents us w i t h religious doctrines which are at the same time historical events or historical interpretations. I n particular i t confronts us w i t h the questions o f the Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, questions which may transcend all the apparatus o f the scientific historian— as indeed many other things d o — b u t which i m p l y that Christianity i n any o f its traditional and recognisable forms has rooted its most characteristic and daring assertions i n that ordinary realm o f history w i t h which the technical student is concerned. The fact that Christianity comes down to us as an historical religion i n this sense—though people may r u n to opposite extremes i n the construction they place upon i t — i s bound to provide certain bearings for the interpretation o f the whole drama o f human life on this earth, bound to affect for

4

INTRODUCTION

example any views or d i m feelings that we may have concerni n g the scheme o f things i n time. Such an historical religion must affect the manner i n which men apprehend historical events or meet historical vicissitudes whether i n their o w n actual lives or when they are reading about the past. I f for all these reasons the larger aspects o f human history have their bearings upon man's religious outlook i n any generation, the whole question is likely to touch us particularly closely at a moment like the present. This is not only because we find ourselves confronted w i t h events and situations so catastrophic i n character that many people are filled w i t h dismay. The truth is that, o w i n g to a defect i n the transmission o f human experience i n comparatively recent times, many people, as they face the developments that are taking place i n the w o r l d , feel that their expectations have been cheated—feel that the future is not what they thought they had a right to hope for. Apart f r o m this, certain characteristic notions have become prevalent concerning the past, certain views about the process o f things i n time, and certain impressions o f what I m i g h t call the panorama o f the centuries, all o f which I can only account for on the hypothesis that they spring f r o m the peculiar texture o f historical abridgements, f r o m the curious foreshortenings that occur i n text-books, and f r o m the way we abstract particular kinds o f things out o f the past for teaching purposes because o f their convenience as examining-material. I gather that I am not the only person w h o thinks that at the present-day such history—by which I mean current assumptions concerning the whole course o f human life i n time—is i n reality a more serious obstruction to Christianity than the natural sciences. I n any case the principal challenge and the most formidable threat to Christianity to-day, namely the Marxian creed, is wisely based upon an interpretation o f history—one o f a type which is calculated to produce a shaping o f the whole mind. I personally am disposed to treat that challenge as both a dangerous and a respectable one, not to be dismissed as

HISTORY

AND THE PRESENT

DAY

5

though i t were the mere plaything o f a gang o f crooks, even i f — l i k e Christian history itself on occasion—it is liable to fall into the hands o f unscrupulous men. I t w o u l d be absurd for any person to say that a knowledge o f technical history is either essential to the good life or an indispensable part o f wisdom or a necessary condition for the soul's salvation. B u t i f certain stages o f half-knowledge and certain kinds o f half-baked history have created difficulty i n the w o r l d , we might see whether the historian cannot be used to remove some o f the obstructions for which he himself was responsible i n the first place. A n d those w h o have been carried to high and rarefied realms by p h i l osophers and theologians may even find a coarse kind o f utility i n the process o f being brought d o w n for a moment to the hard earth. One o f the really disillusioning moments i n recent years was the time when, immediately after the announcement o f the atomic bomb, so many scientists—even apparently most distinguished ones—talked too much i n their exultant m o o d and gave themselves away, daring even to i n f o r m us o f the place which this invention was destined to have i n the whole march o f ages. Their original enthusiasm has since shown signs o f becoming more sober, and some o f them have even r u n to hysteria i n an opposite direction altogether; but they have illustrated the poverty o f an age w h i c h directs all its ingenuity on things till i t regards human beings as mere things, and has lost the gift o f reflecting on the story o f man through the centuries. If, finally, i n spite o f the progress o f science, we i n the West have so largely allowed ourselves to stand i n the position o f M e t t e r n i c h —frightened defenders o f the status quo, upholding the values o f an ancient civilisation against the encroachments o f something new—this may be a further reason w h y i t may be useful for us to examine the whole question o f our attitude to the process o f things i n time. W e have seen h o w those w h o once reflected upon God i n history were wiser than those w h o worshipped the gods i n

6

INTRODUCTION

nature. I t is equally true that w i t h regard to the study o f man himself there may be misunderstandings or mistaken emphases which could lead to cruelties, idolatries and human sacrifices. Hitler i n Mein Kampf pointed out that nature is ruthless since she is prodigal w i t h individual lives and considerate only for the development o f the species; and because he had taken nature as his pattern or first principle, because he envisaged primarily man-in-nature (and then transferred his conclusions or his inferences to man-in-history), he regarded this inhuman p r i n ciple as one which was applicable to the human race itself. That attitude is more understandable, more dangerous, and more likely to recur than many people realise; for i t is liable to be the facile heresy o f the self-educated i n a scientific age. Too easily we may think o f man as merely the last o f the animals and i n this way arrive at verdicts which we are tempted to transpose into the w o r l d o f human relations. A n d some people are so accustomed to thinking o f great collectivities and handling them i n a mathematical manner, that the whole human story is to them only an additional chapter i n the great book o f biology. O n such systems as these the individual matters little—he is the foam on the wave—and the only thing to consider is the development o f the species as a whole. U p o n our willingness to engage ourselves rather w i t h man-in-history depends the valuation that we place upon personality, or personalities, as such. It has been said that i f a lamb should die i n May, before i t had reproduced itself, or contributed to the development o f the species, or provided a fleece for the market, still the fact that i t frisked and frolicked i n the spring was i n one sense an end i n itself, and i n another sense a thing that tended to the glory o f God. This view may serve to typify the attitude o f the historian, as distinct f r o m that o f the biologist, only interested i n such history as relates to the development o f the species as a whole. The historian does not treat man as the student o f biology seems to do—does not regard h i m as essentially a part o f nature or consider h i m primarily i n this aspect. He picks

NATURE,

HISTORY

AND

MAN

7

up the other end o f the stick and envisages a w o r l d o f human relations standing, so to speak, over against nature—he studies that new kind o f life which man has superimposed on the jungle, the forest and the waste. Since this w o r l d o f human relations is the historian's universe, we may say that history is a human drama, a drama o f personalities, taking place as i t were, on the stage o f nature, and amid its imposing scenery. A n d i f we take our bearings f r o m this as we make our judgments on life—setting off personalities against all the rest o f creation, and seeing a w o r l d o f human relations superimposed on nature— the result w i l l have the effect o f transforming any impression that we may finally acquire concerning the nature o f the u n i verse as a whole; i t w i l l carry us far f r o m the stark, bleak nature-fallacies o f a Hitler. I t may be true that nature and history are not separable i n the last resort, but at the level at which we do most o f our ordinary thinking i t is important to separate them, important not to synthesise them too easily and too soon, important above all not thoughtlessly to assume that nature, instead o f being the substructure, is the whole' edifice or the crown. The thing which we have come to regard as history w o u l d disappear i f students o f the past ceased to regard the w o r l d o f men as a thing apart—ceased to envisage a w o r l d o f human relations set up against nature and the animal kingdom. I n such circumstances the high valuation that has long been set upon human personality w o u l d speedily decline. Those w h o look for God only i n nature, or judge the u n i verse f r o m what they see i n the jungle, are liable to debase even religion, as we have already noted, and are themselves i n danger o f coming to grievous harm. Those w h o envisage only man-in-nature are calculated to degrade human history into a wilderness o f atrocity and crime. The God o f history certainly turns out to be the God o f nature too; and once we have laid hold o f the conception o f man-in-history we can then safely go forward to discover h o w deeply man himself is rooted i n earthiness. B u t at some time or other life on this earth

8

INTRODUCTION

moved to that subtle and elaborate f o r m o f organisation w h i c h involves great differentiation i n human personalities, and by virtue o f this constitutes the realm o f human history. Some are i n danger o f going back on this w i t h o u t k n o w i n g i t when they t r y to pre-figure future developments and picture too rigid a continuation o f the former ground-plan o f evolution, or imagine that some super-person ('society' or the 'state') is due to be brought not to a subtler but to a stronger degree o f organisation. Worshipping organisation i n too hard and primitive a sense they threaten to transform the human w o r l d into something more like a w o r l d o f ants. I n many respects, therefore, i t is dangerous to by-pass history, or imagine that the natural sciences—as though reigning over all—can safely be left to determine our views on human destiny.

CHAPTER ONE

H I S T O R I C A L SCHOLARSHIP

AND

ITS

R E L A T I O N T O LIFE I t was often noted i n the earlier decades o f the present century h o w greatly it had become the habit o f Protestants to hold some German scholar up their sleeves—a different one every few years but always preferably the latest one—and at appropriate moments strike the unwary Philistine on the head w i t h this secret weapon, the German scholar having decided i n a final manner whatever point might have been at issue i n a controversy. From all o f which the charge arose that for the Protestants the unanswerable pope was always some professor — a system more inconvenient than that o f Rome, partly because the seat o f authority m i g h t change over-night and be transferred to a new teacher w h o had never been heard o f before, and partly because i f one has to have a pope i t is at least better that he should be subject to certain rules and traditions, and appointed by a properly constituted authority. The tendency was not confined to Protestants, however, for almost a century ago the young Acton was warned not to play this game o f waving German professors at his fellow Catholics; though he not only failed to take the advice, but added the weight o f his influence to a tendency that was making historical scholarship perhaps over-arrogant and certainly too pontifical. W h e n , therefore, the other week I happened to hear t w o theologians congratulating one another that the very advanced German professors w h o had been t h r o w n at our heads i n the days o f m y youth had long been exploded, I had the feeling that we w h o study the past must be all alike; the new school o f thought i n the i94o's is evidently as sure o f itself as the old one o f the 1920's used to be. 9

io

HISTORICAL

SCHOLARSHIP

AND

LIFE

The perfect parable for those w h o are interested i n the relations between religion and any f o r m o f science is provided b y the conflict between Galileo and the Church on the subject o f the rotation o f the earth. O n the one hand Galileo's conduct i n the particular circumstances o f the case required—if he was to be justified—that he should make good his claim that he had actually demonstrated the earth's motion; but, as he imagined that the action o f the tides was the clinching argument which proved his thesis, he was w r o n g at a critical p o i n t — m i s taken i n his science and premature i n his dogmatism. O n the other hand i t is clear f r o m Galileo's case as well as many others, that much unnecessary anguish has been produced for Christians throughout the ages because the Church has so often imagined the gospel to be tied t o the science o f a particular epoch (Aristotelian physics, and Ptolemaic astronomy for example), w i t h the result that men have felt that the one must stand or fall w i t h the other. O n both sides o f the Galileo controversy, therefore, we see the effect o f the mind's presumpt i o n — w e see a little o f that intellectual arrogance, or mental rigidity, or stiff-necked self-assurance which manages to interpolate itself into all forms o f scholarship and science. I f anybody were to doubt the existence o f this, i t is always sufficiently evident when we turn back to examine the dogmatisms o f scholarship i n any generation previous to our o w n . I n the case o f history, for reasons that are understandable, such presumption insinuates itself into the study more regularly, more powerfully and w i t h more dangerous guile than i n all other forms o f scholarship and science put together. A n d i f it infiltrates into the upper regions o f the study i t comes w i t h much mightier force into all popularisations o f knowledge, all forms o f sub-scholarship. As regards historical learning we may begin by noting, therefore, that when attached to other things—when geared into some specific outlook on life for example—it results i n a product colossal i n its comprehensiveness and almost frightening i n the power that i t has over men. W h e n i t is envisaged i n itself, however, its scientific

OUR

RELATIONS

WITH

T H E PAST

n

authority is limited by the character o f its apparatus and the nature o f the evidence which i t can employ. Taken by itself historical scholarship as such must be regarded as fulfilling a more limited and humble role than many people take for granted. W e can do many things w i t h the past apart f r o m scientifically studying i t — w e can sing songs about i t , like B r o w n i n g i n his Cavalier Songs, or we can let our fancy play around the R o m a n wall, as Kipling did, and simply use the past as a thing to tell tales about. T h i n k i n g vaguely about the founders o f our ancient colleges we may be moved almost by a sense o f piety towards them; and i t is clear that some men have found a part o f themselves reaching strangely out to the past as they have gazed for a moment on the ruins o f Rome. Sometimes there has existed a nostalgia for the past that is almost a f o r m o f disease, as i n the case o f that romanticising which i n the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many European nations began to do over their primitive history—their fairy-tales and folk-lore and heroic poetry—a phenomenon which helped to bring about the evils o f romantic nationalism. B u t a different set o f factors is involved i f we note the peculiar interest— beyond that o f the academic historian—which the twentiethcentury Protestant must have i n the Reformation; while the claim has been made that every man must have an attitude to the French Revolution—must make a decision about i t somehow—as part o f the stand that he generally takes i n life. Another aspect o f our relations w i t h our predecessors is illustrated i n the whole question o f the power o f tradition which, whether by its unconscious operation or as a result o f certain doctrines and institutions, may go so far as to i m p l y an exaggerated subservience to the past. I t is even true that the recovery o f the past has never been solely or even principally the w o r k o f what we usually call the historian—as can be seen in classical education, Biblical scholarship, and much o f our study o f architecture, painting and literature. The Renaissance had the design o f salvaging and actually reinstating the

12

HISTORICAL

SCHOLARSHIP

AND

LIFE

arts and sciences, the wisdom and the learning, and indeed the whole civilisation o f antiquity—a plan o f resurrection much more radical and far-fetched than anything which the mere historian pretends to undertake. The past i n fact must never be regarded as a fossil or as having existed merely to be the object o f the historian's scientific curiosity. B u t however much I may have loved m y grandfather I may be convinced that he was always mistaken, or always tried to cheat me, about his age; and, w i t h o u t diminishing m y affection for h i m , but holding i t i n suspense so to speak, and freezing out any wishful thinking, I may set myself to discover by a scientific procedure the precise date o f his birth. I n the nineteenth century such a critical attitude to historical data—such an enquiry for those facts which could be established i n a watertight manner—received its great development and recognition, though the fundamental features o f the method had been practised on and off, or applied i n certain fields, for many centuries. The nineteenth century, on the one hand, illustrated the truth that o w i n g to the laxity o f the human m i n d and our tendency to float at ease on what we too readily regard as established facts, there are certain lessons o f critical awareness that easily drop out o f our traditions and have to be discovered over again i n successive generations. The same century, on the other hand, vastly intensified the technical discipline and extended its application, carrying the sceptical or critical attitude into further realms o f what had hitherto been too easily accepted as established facts. For students o f modern history i t was an important moment when the young German historian Ranke, looking at the age o f the Renaissance, took various authors o f that period, w h o had written the chronicles o f their o w n times, and by various forms o f detective-work undermined their credibility. The novelty o f his technique was perhaps exaggerated i n the nineteenth century, but i t established the fact that y o u were foolish to depend on the contemporary chroniclers and narrativewriters o f the sixteenth century i f y o u wished to k n o w what

THE

SCIENTIHC

HISTORIAN

13

really happened i n that period—you must go to official documents. For some time Ranke himself as an historian made great use o f the despatches sent by Venetian ambassadors resident i n foreign countries to their government at home; but there was a period when he laid himself open to the charge that he w h o had torn the contemporary chroniclers to pieces w i t h his criticism did not think to exercise a parallel criticism upon the despatches o f Venetian ambassadors i n turn. He relied on their descriptions for many kinds o f information, whereas we to-day w o u l d feel dissatisfied i f for a knowledge o f the sixteenth-century economic life o f England we had to depend upon the reports o f a foreign ambassador resident i n London. Ranke himself was to learn later that a considerable degree o f human frailty is liable to insert itself into any species o f mere reporting that is done by a man i n circumstances i n which there is likely to be no immediate check on h i m . I n the nineteenth century, then, and even i n the w o r k o f Ranke himself, the scientific method went on developing. The intensity o f criticism, and the awareness o f the possible pitfalls, increased i n a remarkable manner as time went on. Y o u were i n a position to learn a great deal more than before about the diplomacy o f Europe when the archives o f die British Foreign Office became available to scholars for a particular period; but i t soon transpired that i f y o u worked up the story f r o m that body o f documents alone you were simply locking yourself up i n the British Foreign Office view o f what was happening i n that period; and this needed to be squared w i t h evidence coming f r o m other quarters. The total result was that the labours o f the historian were multiplied a hundredfold. A Napoleonic battle reconstructed from the vast collection o f orders issued during its course, and supplemented by the constant flow o f reports f r o m officers to their superiors while the action was developing, is a colossal piece o f labour for the student, but i t stands i n a different class f r o m an account o f a batde compiled merely f r o m eye-witnesses' reports, or the later recollection o f participants, both o f which

14

HISTORICAL

SCHOLARSHIP

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are forms o f evidence gravely discredited i f we look at the history o f historical science as a whole. Once we pass beyond the establishment o f what I have called specific facts, however, and particularly when we come to the reconstruction o f a complicated episode or the attempt t o put a whole story together i n its proper bearings, then a certain feature o f historical science makes its appearance w h i c h i t is important above all other things that people should realise, and which is more generally overlooked than anything else. The only appropriate analogy to the authentic w o r k o f historical reconstruction is the case o f the detective w o r k i n g out the solution o f a crime-problem i n a conventional w o r k o f fiction. A t the first stage y o u have the stupid inspector f r o m Scotland Yard w h o sees all the obvious clues, falls into all the traps, makes all the common-sense inferences, and lo ! the criminal is self-evident. The whole story o f the crime i n fact is immediately made clear to us; there is a plausible rôle i n that story for each o f the characters concerned; the solution satisfies the m i n d , or at any rate the m i n d at a given level; and indeed for this poor Scodand Yard inspector one w o u l d say that the study o f history ought to be the easiest occupation i n the w o r l d . Detective stories may not i n other ways be true to life, but i t is the case i n human affairs that the same set o f clues, envisaged at a higher level o f thought, w i t h or w i t h o u t additional evidence—the same set o f clues reshaped into a new synthesis by a Sherlock Holmes—may produce a new map o f the whole affair, an utterly unexpected story to narrate, and possibly even a criminal where i n the first place we had never thought to look for one. A n d the same thing is liable to happen when an historical episode is reconsidered and reconstructed after, say, a century o f learned controversy. I n other words, the development o f the scientific method i n nineteenth-century historiography did not merely mean that this or that fact could be corrected, or the story told i n greater detail, or the narrative amended at marginal points. I t meant that total reconstructions proved to be necessary, as i n the

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detective stories, where a single new fact might turn out to be a pivotal one; and what had been thought to be an accident might transform itself into an entirely different story o f murder. I n these circumstances, evidence which had seemed to mean one thing might prove to be capable o f an entirely different construction. I n the British Documents on the Origins of the War the crucial volume for July, 1914, contains some interesting scraps o f documents—only a few lines o f them i n particularly small print —belonging to a class o f evidence which the editors had some difficulty i n getting published, and which w i l l not be published i n the parallel series o f documents n o w appearing for the Second W o r l d W a r . A person who looks hard at those half a dozen lines, and broods over them till their implications simply stare h i m i n the face, w i l l find them so important that he must go back to the beginning again—he must re-read hundreds o f pages o f documents before and after the critical point, to find what they n o w mean i n the light o f those few significant sentences. Here, as on so many occasions, i t is something small which proves to be a clue or turns out to serve as a hinge—a few sentences that w o u l d not have been missed i f (as so nearly happened) they had not been printed w i t h the rest o f the collection at all. There exists i n most historical w r i t i n g , therefore, an appearance o f definitiveness and finality which is an optical illusion — a n d this is particularly the case as the period under study becomes more recent, and the history becomes more nearly contemporary. I f historical education gets into the hands o f heavy pedagogues, w h o teach a hard story i n a rigid framework and expect i t to be memorised, then new depths o f unimaginativeness w i l l have been reached, not possible o f attainment without an education i n history. I f men at twenty learn to see the events o f history i n a certain framework, and learn that framework so thoroughly that i t remains on their minds i n after-years—if they learn i t without acquiring imagination and elasticity o f mind—then we can say (and the words let fall by

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some o f our leaders and by the framers o f public opinion w o u l d tempt one to say i t already), that by the study o f history a merely probable national disaster can be converted into a one hundred per cent, certainty. N o w i f history is a science o f this peculiar structure there are certain comments to be made on this whole f o r m o f scholarship w h i c h may be relevant to a study o f the relations between Christianity and History. First o f all i t transpired i n the nineteenth century that the critical method, as applied i n this field, could be pursued w i t h a scepticism that overstepped the bounds o f common sense. Over a century ago this possible extravagance had become the subject o f satire i n a w o r k entided Historic Doubts concerning Napoleon, where, by rejecting things alleged to be too improbable for belief, the author purported to demonstrate that the great Napoleon h i m self must have been a mythical personage. O f course i f Ranke showed the untrustworthiness o f old narrators, when compared w i t h official documents, his destructive criticism has a striking application to the narrative i n the Bible and to ancient history generally. Indeed Ranke only transferred to modern history a critical method which had already been applied long before i n the various fields o f ancient history. I must confess that, as a modern historian, when I consider the terrible effects o f criticism even on the most respectable o f contemporary memoirs—those o f Sir Edward Grey, for example—or remember the suppressions o f which both good Protestants and good Catholics have been so often guilty, w i t h the most pious o f intentions, i n their w r i t i n g o f history; when I think that the future student o f the 1930^ and the I940*s is going to have t o pick his way even amongst faked diaries and narratives o f pretended eye-witnesses; and when I recall h o w much more easy i t is for a camel to go through the eye o f a needle than for the most excellent trained historian to repeat a piece o f gossip or an anecdote at the dinner-table w i t h o u t adding a little varnish— putting all these things together I have wondered sometimes h o w such a thing as ancient history, whether secular or sacred,

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could be taken seriously at all. I t was not surprising that sooner or later somebody should raise the question whether Jesus Christ Himself were not perhaps a m y t h , possibly even a syndicate. I have an impression, however, that the purely sceptical method almost gave us the measure o f itself i n the nineteenth century; for i t produced some prime specimens o f ludicrousness i n the way o f conjectural interpretation, and the centre o f gravity i n these ancient studies seems to me to have shifted i n the other direction. A remarkable factor affecting both classical and Biblical history has been the archaeological discoveries which confirmed the literary documents sometimes i n unexpected points o f detail. The general fact emerges that i n a great deal o f historical w o r k mere scepticism carries one nowhere and everything depends i n the last resort on the very delicate balancing o f the m i n d as i t makes what we call an 'act o f judgment'. F r o m what has been already noted concerning the nature o f history i t w i l l be apparent that i n reality there are reasons w h y we ought to have a great respect for ancient studies. The weight o f scholarship is imposing in realms where year i n and year out, for generation after generation, century after century, minds have been traversing and re-traversing the same field, one hypothesis after another being put forward and tested, every permutation and combination tried, a tremendous amount o f detective w o r k carried out over every square inch o f the area, all the jealousies and rivalries o f scholars adding to the intensity o f the debates. It always seems to me that such long centuries o f study result i n history o f an entirely different order—not to be compared w i t h those hurried superficial compilations o f recent happenings which have their currency w i t h us to-day for a moment because they happen to be the first i n the field. Secondly, history is a peculiar science i n that i t depends so much on things which can only be discovered and verified by insight, sympathy and imagination. The historian does not have direct access to the insides o f the people he deals w i t h ; he

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imagines that they must have profundities o f m i n d and motive, tremendous corridors and recesses w i t h i n , just as he has himself; but he has to piece these out from scraps o f external evidence and he must use his imaginative sympathy, must give something o f himself, to the reconstruction o f an historical character. Thomas Carlyle is supposed to have provided the w o r l d w i t h the clue i t had long been needing for the production o f anything like a plausible personality for Oliver Cromwell; and i t is held that he achieved his effect by the process o f reading something o f himself into that historical character. That method may give easy results when the historian is dealing w i t h a temperament that has some special degree o f affinity w i t h his o w n ; but the resources o f history are bound to be very limited i f a given historian can only achieve understanding i n the case o f men w h o are somewhat likeminded w i t h himself. Carlyle showed his weaknesses when he began to read too much o f his o w n personality into other historical characters for w h o m the procedure was bound to be less happy than i t had been i n the case o f Oliver Cromwell. Because i t is so difficult to attain an internal knowledge o f historical personages i t is extremely hazardous for the historian to venture on certain interesting questions—for example to pretend that he can show that one generation was really more happy than another. Because the historian cannot reach the seat o f the personality i t is not he who, when confronted by a pleasing character on the one hand and an unpleasant character on the other hand, can decide quite what was due to merit i n the one case and what to misfortune i n the other. I f I claimed to be the reincarnation o f Beethoven, any man w o u l d have as much right as any other to put me d o w n as a lunatic, but i t is not by the apparatus o f the historian that I could be proved to be actually w r o n g . I f any man were to say that history had scientifically established or scientifically disproved the D i v i n i t y o f Christ, he w o u l d for the same reason be guilty o f that intellectual arrogance which works i n all the sciences as each o f

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them transgresses its bounds i n order to gain an usurped authority. Thirdly, i f I demonstrate that m y grandfather was born, shall we say, on January ist, 1850, then that thesis must be equally valid whether I present i t to Christian or atheist, w h i g or tory, Swede or Dane. I n respect o f points which are established by the evidence, or accepted by the judgment o f common sense, history has a certain validity o f its o w n , a certain m i n i m u m significance that is independent o f p h i l osophy, race or creed. I t is recorded somewhere that the group o f men w h o founded the Royal Society i n seventeenthcentury England resented the waste o f time that was liable to occur i n their discussions when—as i n the case o f some societies i n our present-day universities—every topic w o u l d be carried back to the region o f first principles and fundamental beliefs, so that the debate was for ever returning to the same issues and they could not discuss the ordinary operations o f nature w i t h o u t perpetually coming back to their basic theological or philosophical differences. O n l y when these men learned to keep their conversation fixed on the mere mechanical operations o f nature—the observable effects o f heat on a certain substance for example (where what was true for one was true for all o f them)—could they short-circuit that tantalisingly unprogressive f o r m o f general debate. I n historical science, and particularly i n the upper regions o f the study, a similar policy o f abstraction has become customary. Historians, limited by the kind o f apparatus they use and the concrete evidence on which they must rely, restrict their realm to what we might almost call the mechanism o f historical p r o cesses: the tangible factors involved i n an episode, the displacements produced i n human affairs by an observed event or a specific influence, even the kind o f movements that can be recorded i n statistics. A l l this tends to give historical narrative and historical scholarship a mundane and matter-of-fact appearance. I must confess that i f i n the ordinary course o f teaching I were to ask for what I should carefully call the

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'historical explanation' o f the victory o f Christianity i n the ancient R o m a n Empire, I should assume that there could be no doubt concerning the realm i n which the problem was to be considered, no doubt that I had i n m i n d the question ' h o w ' Christianity succeeded and not the more fundamental question 'why.' As a technical historian, that is to say, I should not be satisfied w i t h the answer that Christianity triumphed merely because i t was true and right, or merely because God decreed its victory. I remember taking part i n a viva voce examination i n O x f o r d over ten years ago when we were left completely and permanendy baffled by a candidate w h o ascribed everything to the direct interposition o f the A l m i g h t y and therefore felt h i m self excused f r o m the discussion o f any intermediate agencies. Yet i t seems true to say that nothing i n the w o r k o f the technical historian causes so much dissatisfaction at the present time as this matter-of-fact policy—this way o f setting out the concrete story, the observed phenomena, and leaving i t for people o f all beliefs to make their varied commentaries. A n d so i t is that the liberal and the Jesuit, the Marxist and the Fascist, the Protestant and the Catholic, the rebel and the p a t r i o t — all cry out against our modern forms o f exposition, saying what a bloodless pedestrian thing academic history is. Above all, the young student w h o does not k n o w where he stands amongst all these partisans but goes round w i t h a hungry look seeking for something like an interpretation o f l i f e - e v e n the student w h o comes to history itself for his education, on the assumption that life w i l l somehow explain itself i f y o u study a greater length o f i t — h e tells us that whereas he asked for bread, he is i n reality only being given a stone. M o r e serious still, i t happens that the historian has to t r y to see Christian and Mohammedan, black man and white man, conservative and socialist all somewhat from their o w n point o f view—he must include all men and parties i n a comprehensive effort o f understanding. A n d some people have complained that by such a policy they have found themselves doomed to a perpetual relativism, as though between Christianity and Islam i t

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were a matter o f indifference—they have been trapped into a habit o f m i n d w h i c h sees no values as absolute i n t h e m selves. This last point is particularly important and i t equally affects the students o f the natural sciences; because i t is true that we fall into certain habits o f m i n d and easily become the slaves o f them, when i n reality we only adopted them for the purpose o f a particular technique. It is as though people could be so long occupied i n tearing flowers to pieces and studying their mechanism that they forget ever to stand back again and see the buttercup whole. I t is possible that i n the transition to the modern oudook the w o r l d was guided much less by any deliberated philosophy than is often assumed, and I think that few people could be said to have come to that modern outlook by an authentic process o f thinking things out. M e n are often the semi-conscious victims o f habits o f m i n d and processes o f abstraction like those involved i n technical historical study or i n physical science. They decide that for purposes o f analysis they w i l l only take notice o f things that can be weighed and measured, and then they forget the number they first started f r o m and come to think that these are the only things that exist. I f men have found no philosophy or religion i n their actual experience o f life, i t can hardly be claimed that the academic study o f history—the mere concrete study o f the workings o f events—will itself provide the remedy, or that die attempt to learn more scientifically when things happened or h o w they happened can solve the whole problem o f human destiny or achieve anything more than a better statement, a better laying-out, o f the essential riddle. Certainly academic history is not meant for all people and is often a somewhat technical affair; and those are gravely w r o n g w h o regard i t as the queen o f the sciences, or think o f i t as a substitute for religion, a complete education i n itself. Those w h o p r o moted its study i n former times seemed to value i t rather as an additional equipment for people w h o were presumed to have had their real education elsewhere, their real training i n values

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(and i n the meaning o f life) i n other fields. Those w h o c o m plain that technical history does not provide people w i t h the meaning o f life are asking f r o m an academic science more than i t can give and are tempting the academic historian himself to a dangerous f o r m o f self-aggrandisement. They have caught heresy f r o m the secular liberals w h o , having deposed religion, set up scholarship i n its place and unduly exalted i t , assuming that the academic historian was fitted above all others to p r o vide out o f his technique an interpretation o f life on the earth. Academic history w o u l d be subject to fewer attacks i f our educational system as a whole had not gone adrift, and we had not allowed the administrative m i n d to t h r o w overboard the very things which (precisely because they had elements o f the imponderable) provided a training i n values. I f i t is the assured Christian w h o is reading academic history these problems—these objections to a technical f o r m o f s t u d y can hardly be said to exist; for, having i n his religion the key to his conception o f the whole human drama, he can safely embark on a detailed study o f mundane events, i f only to learn through their inter-connections the ways o f Providence. W h e n we have reconstructed the whole o f mundane history i t does not f o r m a self-explanatory system, and our attitude to i t , our whole relationship to the human drama, is a larger affair altogether—it is a matter not o f scholarship but o f religion. I t depends on the way i n w h i c h we decide to set our personalities for the purpose o f meeting the whole stream o f events—depends ultimately on our attitude to life as we actually live i t . I f academic history cannot provide a man w i t h the ultimate valuations and interpretations o f life under the sun, neither is i t generally competent to take them away f r o m the person w h o actually possesses them; and i f there is internal friction and tension when the religious man puts on the technical historian's thinking-cap, the strain is just as constant between religion and one's actual experience i n the w o r l d — i n both cases we might say that, for the Christian, the friction which is produced is o f a generative kind.

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I t is true that technical history and historical research only comprise a specialised part o f our attitude to the past, and their realm is restricted by the character o f the apparatus which they use and the kind o f evidence which is available. They provide us w i t h a reasonable assurance that certain things did happen, that they happened i n a certain order, and that certain connections exist between them, independent o f any philosophy or creed o f ours. B u t for the fulness o f our commentary on the drama o f human life i n time, we have to break through this technique—have to stand back and see the landscape as a whole—and for the sum o f our ideas and beliefs about the march o f ages we need the poet and the prophet, the philosopher and the theologian. Indeed we decide our total attitude to the whole o f human history when we make our decision about our religion — a n d i t is the combination o f the history w i t h a religion, or w i t h something equivalent to a religion, which generates power and fills the story w i t h significances. W e may find this i n a Christian interpretation o f history, or i n the Marxian system or even perhaps i n H . G. Wells's History of the World. N o t h i n g can exceed the feeling o f satisfaction that many people have when they meet some such system which helps them through the jungle o f historical happenings and gives them an interpretation o f the story seen as a whole. I n such cases our interpretation is a thing which we bring to our history and superimpose upon i t , however. W e cannot say that we obtained i t as technical historians by inescapable inferences f r o m the purely historical evidence. Therefore, the liberal, the Jesuit, the Fascist, the Communist, and all the rest may sail away w i t h their militant versions o f history, h o w l i n g at one another across the interstellar spaces, all claiming that theirs is the absolute version, and admitting no place even for an academic history that shall be a bridge between them. I n a cut-throat conflict between these and other systems for the control o f schools and universities (in other words for predominance i n society) i t is not clear that a

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specifically Christian or Biblical interpretation w o u l d i n fact prevail at the present day, or w o u l d be acceptable to the w o r l d at large, unless i t were seriously corrupted. B u t while w e have Marxists and Wellsians, Protestants and Catholics w i t h their mutually exclusive systems (historical assertion confronted by counter-assertion), many people, confounded b y the contradictions, w i l l r u n thankfully i n the last resort to the humbler academic historian—to the man w h o w i l l just t r y to show what can be established by the concrete external evidence, and w i l l respect the intricacy and the complexity o f events, bringing out the things w h i c h must be valid whether one is a Jesuit or a Marxist. Technical historical study has its place, therefore, and we shall find further reasons later w h y perhaps the Christian should be the last person i n the w o r l d to object to historical reflection, even i f i t only serves to deepen our understanding o f human relations, and to provide a limited knowledge o f the demonstrable connections between events. The cry for an interpretation o f the human drama is a cry not for technical history but for something more like 'prophecy'. Those Christians w h o wish to have their history rich i n values, j u d g ments and affirmations about life, can find the clue and the pattern to its interpretation very easily; for they, o f all people, ought to be the most inveterate readers and students o f the Bible. Those w h o complain o f the aridity o f technical history w h i c h strands itself i n petty discussions about the date o f a despatch or the mechanical operation o f a constitutional device, while evading the majestic issues that relate to man's larger destiny, are crying out for precisely the thing w h i c h the Biblical writers were doing w i t h the human drama, and to the dignity o f which the academic historian could not pretend t o reach. Even w i t h i n the range o f what I might call mundane comment on human affairs and on the moral problems involved—even i n the things that w o u l d still be valid i f there were not a w o r d o f truth i n superna tural religion itself—there is a profundity o f long-term historical comment i n some o f those

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ancient writers which i t is surprising that our civilisation should have allowed itself so tragically to forget. O n the decisive question o f the posture one should adopt towards life or the interpretation one w o u l d give to the whole human story, i t w o u l d be unwise to surrender one's judgment to a scholar, any more than one w o u l d expect a scholar by reason o f his technical accomplishments to be more skilled than other people i n making love or choosing a wife. Neither should one be guided i n the great decision by the spirit o f an age—for, concerning the spirit o f any age, even technical history can find many disillusioning things to say. O u r final interpretation o f history is the most sovereign decision we can take, and i t is clear that every one o f us, as standing alone i n the universe, has to take i t for himself. I t is our decision about religion, about our total attitude to things, and about the way we w i l l appropriate life. A n d i t is inseparable f r o m our decision about the role we are going to play ourselves i n that very drama o f history.

CHAPTER T W O

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IF there is any region i n w h i c h the bright empire o f the theologians and the more m u r k y territory o f the historians happen to meet and overlap, w e shall be likely to find i t at those places where both types o f thinker have to deal w i t h human nature. The t w o do not coincide over a great area, however, for the theologian probes more deeply into the 'self, and explores the darker recesses o f m i n d and motive; while the historian ranges over a wider w o r l d o f people, but is generally called to a halt i n his attempt to reach the innermost recesses o f them. I t has e ven been established i n the course o f time that i f the historian could paint every man as white as a Henty hero and every w o m a n as innocuous as Sir Walter Scott's idea o f a heroine, the result w o u l d give no embarrassment to the kind o f theologian w h o maintained even the total depravity o f all this — w h o insisted upon the utter corruption o f human nature when judged at a profounder level o f analysis. History deals w i t h the drama o f human life as the affair o f individual personalities, possessing self-consciousness, intellect and freedom. Imagine human beings w i t h o u t these three things and y o u w i l l find i t difficult to write historical narrative at a l l — y o u w i l l find yourself inserting them i n spite o f your original presuppositions—just as the Marxist, whatever theories he may have about morality, w i l l apply to some men (and not to others) all the language that we reserve for the wicked. A n d the historian deals w i t h historical events not as though they were things which could be mechanically and externally explained but as they come out o f personalities and run into personalities; so that the insides o f human beings have to be brought into the discussion—mind and motive, hope and fear, passion and faith have to come into the question 26

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—before we can begin to connect one fact w i t h another and understand anything at all. I n keeping w i t h all this the historian is concerned also w i t h the thoughts o f the human m i n d and the achievements o f the human spirit, so that the w o r k o f Dante, the genius o f Beethoven, the documented spiritual experiences o f the saints, belong to his w o r l d , though he cannot say that his apparatus and science qualify h i m to p r o nounce as an historian the absolute judgment o f value upon them—he cannot pretend to declare against the musicians that Beethoven, as a composer, was lacking i n quality. W i t h pre-history i n a particular sense o f the w o r d much o f this is liable to be less true and we may be puzzled to meet very often a somewhat different attitude. Here the unit that we start f r o m and hold i n our minds is rather the society—a thing which we may study i n its internal interactions or its external relations—our interest tending to concentrate on its aspect as a collective body involved i n a system o f necessity. Some people think that history, as i t follows pre-history, ought to keep the continuity and aspire to the same structure, studying society as an organism or a mechanism, w i t h its actions and reactions. The result w o u l d be a schematised, de-personalised map o f the course o f social development; and the truth is the reverse, for i t is 'pre-history' that w o u l d always move to become more like 'history' but for the absence o f the required evidence and information. Stalin wisely recalled Marxian history f r o m the laboratories o f the sociologists and the economists, demanding a return to the k i n d o f history which is a narrative about people—even about national heroes—and i n structing the press to declaim against the older k i n d o f Marxist history, which is n o w regularly criticised i n Russia for its over-schematisation. A n d i n this Stalin has acted i n conform i t y w i t h the most profound and most high-brow versions o f Marxist historical theory i n the last fifty years; while his policy illustrates the broad truth that all the partial systématisations o f the past—all those histories w h i c h are bleak diagrams o f developing structures, or mechanical expositions o f social

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change—need to be perpetually referred back to the unbroken web o f ordinary human history, the full w i l d , prodigal, c o m plicated story o f the actions o f innumerable people. I t seems particularly true o f those w h o never entered into the fulness o f the Graeco-Roman traditions or o f Christian culture that they can contemplate human life i n time—they can actually envisage the course o f history—without our customary sense o f the all-importance o f personality. W e have already noted what this may lead to, as i n the case o f Hitler, w i l l i n g , like nature herself, to be prodigal w i t h the individual lives o f real men, because only the fate o f the species mattered, only the collective noun had reality for h i m . I am not sure that there exists a firm barrier against this k i n d o f error save for those w h o hold the Christian view that each individual soul is o f eternal moment and has a value incommensurate w i t h the value o f anything else i n the created universe. Human souls are i n this view the purpose and end o f the whole story, so far as the w o r l d is concerned—not merely the servants o f the species and not ever mere means to some other mundane end. History, as we have seen, envisages a w o r l d o f human relations standing over against nature, and this means that i t puts the story i n a different universe—a universe i n w h i c h every human being is a separate well o f life, a separate source o f action, and every human being, so far as mundane things are concerned, has his aspect as an end i n himself. I f human beings are sufficiendy royal to possess m i n d s — i f men can get on t o their hind legs and have views about the universe—dien there is a new order super-imposed on nature, and personalities are the crowning blossom o f creation, though vast masses o f blind matter may have had to r o l l round for immeasurable astronomical eras to make this possible. I t is sometimes assumed by propagandists that this view o f the w o r l d as a field for the play o f personalities, this high value set on human beings, is a peculiar product o f Greek culture and the Christian tradition; but though Our European conceptions do seem to have been cast i n these particular moulds I should wonder

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whether a parallel result could not occur whenever the advancing condition o f a civilisation brought about great differentiation between personalities. I n some o f the aspects o f i t which the w o r l d most prizes to-day, our respect for personality has g r o w n w i t h the g r o w t h o f civilisation, even while the power o f religion i n society seems to be declining; though i t is possible that the development o f a more thorough-going paganism may turn all the tendencies o f the twentieth century i n the opposite direction. A l l the same, when people have said that a totalitarian victory i n war w o u l d end all hope for the human race and destroy for ever this fine flower o f personality, they seem to me to have shown a grave distrust both o f Providence and o f the human intellect, as well as a misunderstanding o f the nature o f history. A n d they have forgotten what dark things the human race managed to emerge from i n the earlier stages o f its story. The historian begins, then, w i t h a higher estimate o f the status o f personality than thinkers i n some other fields, just as Christianity itself does when i t sees each individual as a creature o f eternal moment. Having made this splendid start, however, the historian proceeds—like the tradition o f Christian theology itself—to a lower view o f human nature than the one commonly current i n the twentieth century. So clearly is this the case that I have heard i t said that historians tend to cynicism; and indeed there exist types or specimens o f historical interpretation which seem to reduce everything to a play o f vested interests, diversified on occasion perhaps by the odd antics o f a few dreamers and escapists. L o r d Acton said that practically all great men were bad men and that hardly any public reputation survived the exposure o f private archives. I think he w o u l d have been kinder i f he had made the whole w o r l d k i n , and w o u l d have been less unbalanced himself i f he had started simply on the footing that all men are sinners. O n the other hand he made what I should regard as a profound statement about history, when—as his verdict on the whole sum o f i t — h e put the point that much o f the evil i n the

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w o r l d which historians allow to pass as the result o f mistakes was i n his opinion rather due to sin. O n the whole I think i t is true that as a reader o f history, he was deeply shocked at die spectacle o f man's unrighteousness. I t may prevent a misunderstanding i f I say that even after all possible allowances have been made, I accept Acton's thesis i n regard to the generality o f human wickedness, w i t h all the implications that i t appears to have had for him—accept i t indeed a little more emphatically than he himself did i n that I do not believe i n the authenticity o f certain cases which he apparently took to be exceptions. M o r e often than people generally recognise i t is true that a moral element—pride or wilfulness or a tendency to wishful thinking, for example—enters into the constitution o f even our intellectual mistakes. I t seems to me, however, that, i n regard to the relations between human nature and the external conditions o f the w o r l d , the study o f history does open one's eyes to a significant fact, a fact which indeed has long been recognised, so to speak, by one half o f our minds. The plain truth is that i f you were to remove certain subtle safeguards i n society many men w h o had been respectable all their lives w o u l d be transformed by the discovery o f the things which i t was n o w possible to do w i t h impunity; weak men w o u l d apparently take to crime w h o had previously been kept on the rails by a certain balance existing i n society; and y o u can produce a certain condition o f affairs i n which people go plundering and stealing though hitherto throughout their lives i t had never occurred to them even to want to steal. A great and prolonged police-strike, the existence o f a revolutionary situation i n a capital city, and the exhilaration o f conquest i n an enemy country are likely to show up a seamy side o f human nature amongst people w h o , cushioned and guided by the influences o f normal social life, have hitherto presented a respectable figure to the w o r l d . W e are thinking o f the problem i n something like the same terms when we consider as we often do, the relation o f wartime

THE

PROBLEM

OF MODERN

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31

conditions to a possible increase o f crime and immorality. The case w o u l d be entirely different no doubt, i f there were no flaws i n human nature i n the first place; and I suppose that one inference f r o m these facts w o u l d have to be that even when society presents a tidy appearance to the historian or the observer its human constituents must make a pathetic show before a God who searches the secrets o f the heart. B u t granted the flaws i n human nature, then the orderings and arrangements o f a healthy society seem to help out man's imperfections, conspiring w i t h quiet inducements and concealed checks to keep the surface o f life comparatively respectable; though d o w n below there slumbers all the time the volcano that lies i n human nature, and an unexpected cataclysm may bring i t into activity. O n the operation o f certain safeguards which i n normal times w o r k so quietly that the superficial observer may miss them altogether depends all the difference between civilisation and barbarism. I n this connection we may say indeed that the difference between civilisation and barbarism is a revelation o f what is essentially the same human nature when i t works under different conditions; and this means that wherever we meet w i t h the problem o f modern barbarism we can never hope to deal w i t h i t i f we handle i t merely as a case o f crime or as a moral question—it is a problem arising out o f conditions. W e meet i t on a large scale because the ordinary stuff o f human nature has been placed under certain influences or finds itself i n certain predicaments. Some o f us have become so accustomed to a humane f o r m o f society, which cushions the conflicts between men and m i t i gates the self-aggression, that we imagine its virtues to spring straight out o f nature w i t h no more cultivation than the w i l d flowers on the bank o f a stream. W e almost come to think o f human beings as creatures naturally civilised, so that when we are confronted w i t h the spectacle o f barbarous conduct on a wide scale we are content to stop at the first stage o f the argument and say that here are millions o f men stupendously wicked, worse than human nature itself. W e do not go far

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enough i n considering what is implied i n such a general lapse into barbarism, or reflect h o w precarious our civilised systems w i l l always be, if, almost i n absence o f m i n d , we allow certain o f the guards to be taken off. The virtues o f western society i n modern times were i n reality the product o f much education, tradition and discipline; they needed centuries o f patient cultivation. Even w i t h o u t great criminality i n anybody—merely by forgetting certain safeguards—we could lose the tolerance and urbanities, the respect for human life and human personality, which are i n reality the late blossoms o f a highly developed civilisation. I f modern war has contributed to a decline o f civilisation i n certain regions, i t is a betrayal o f the intellect merely to come out i n moral indignation against those w h o are i n reality the victims o f this decline. I n the eighteenth century there was elaborated a scientific theory o f diplomacy on the basis o f anthropological doctrines such as this—doctrines clearly facing the issues raised by this more seamy under-side o f human nature. I t is interesting to note that, though the writers o f theoretical books i n that period m i g h t talk o f human perfectibility, the statesmen were much too wary to gamble on such illusions when the issue was a matter o f life and death. I t was clearly understood i n those days, for example, that i f y o u placed a great power i n a position to act w i t h impunity over a considerable part o f Europe, then though i t had been righteous hitherto—kept o n the rails by the general balance o f the w o r l d and by its calculation o f what was prudent—it w o u l d n o w become an unrighteous power. Either i t w o u l d be dazzled by new vistas o f temptation or i t w o u l d be desperately nervous to find itself the object o f general suspicion. Granted an approximately reasonable disposition o f forces on the map, they argued, and then—to something like that same degree—not only w o u l d wrong-doers be checked but i n fact they w o u l d be less likely to emerge, and the statesmen concerned w o u l d actually be well-intentioned, and w o u l d get into the habit o f being so. I n other words, what is i n f i r m i n human nature may be helped out

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AND ETHICAL O R D E R

33

or concealed by the actual play o f forces i n an international order. O n the footing o f such ideas i t was possible i n times past for men to have what our o w n age has so tragically lacked —namely something like a considered view o f the relations between force and the existence o f an ethical order; because what is important i n this respect is not the strength actually necessary to put d o w n crime, for example—not the weight o f the policeman's truncheon—but that subtle disposition o f latent force which exists i n a healthy society, where the police are said to be doing their w o r k properly because they have ehminated the conditions i n which crime flourishes—they most justify their existence when they are able to stand at street-corners doing nothing at all. From all this the fact emerges that, both w i t h i n a nation and i n the larger realm o f a whole international order, a healthy disposition o f forces can be attained for long periods which, so to speak, makes human nature better than i t really is, so that w i t h good fortune and i n quiet times certain aspects o f i t w i l l hardly even be put to the test. I n quiet times indeed people even come to be locked i n illusions on this question, and to imagine that certain things cannot happen nowadays or cannot happen here—as though a superficial observer were to say, 'There is little crime. See the police have nothing to do. W h y should we not cut d o w n such a redundant service?' The infirmities o f human nature are always w i t h us and the twentieth century can hardly complain to high heaven that the basic human material w i t h which the w o r l d is endowed is any worse nowadays than i t was i n other periods. The trouble is that the w o r l d has lost so many o f the safeguards, and i f there is an aspect o f the modern tragedy which is to be regretted, because i t might conceivably have been avoided, i t is that the last generation suffered so much f r o m the superficiality o f its idealists and the spiritual impoverishment o f its self-styled prophets. I t seems to me that some o f the most inveterate talkers during m y lifetime have been the victims o f precisely that optical illusion on the subject o f human nature which I have described; and we

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have gambled very highly on what was an over-optimistic view o f the character o f man. I t is not social institutions that make men worse than they might have been, as people used to say—social institutions however bad, are better than nothing and have the effect o f making men appear a little more virtuous than they really are. I f we had no rule o f the road a nasty side o f human nature w o u l d make its appearance amongst motorists more often than i t does at the moment. B y having a rule o f the road we reduce the manifestation o f human wilfulness, not that men inherendy have any less o f i t i n their composition, but we reduce the number o f the occasions that bring i t out. There has come d o w n i n the Christian tradition a profound but paradoxical system o f teaching on the subject o f the origin o f government. O n the one hand government is regarded as being due to the Fall o f M a n , a consequence o f human sin, while at the same time i t is looked upon as being o f Divine institution, the creation o f Providence. O n this view, property, and even slavery at one time, and any f o r m o f subordination o f man to man were on the one hand necessary evils i n the given circumstances—things which w o u l d never have been conceivable, and never needed, so long as the human race remained i n the Garden o f Eden. But at the same time they were regarded as, so to speak, a second-best gift from God, since they implied a certain structure and ordering o f society— they were better at least than the sheer ungovernable anarchy which resulted when human cupidity was left totally unrecognised and uncontrolled. Though government does not cure men o f sinfulness any more than the institution o f the idea o f property eliminates human selfishness, the evil is mitigated by institutions that are the gift o f God, and i t is brought under regulation by the orderings o f society. A n d so Providence produces a w o r l d i n which men can live and gradually improve their external conditions, i n spite o f sin—in other words i t does the best that human beings have left possible for i t at any time. The industrial revolution and the rise o f the capitalistic system

THE

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CUPIDITY

are the best that Providence can do w i t h human cupidity at certain stages o f the story. In regard to one important aspect o f this whole question I believe that students o f history have been less prone to illusion than many o f the people who have pretended to be experts i n the contemporary w o r l d ; though i t is probably true to say that even i n this respect the England o f 1949 is beginning to have a clearer vision o f the true condition o f things. I f i t was ever doubted by the doctrinaire i t is surely plain to everybody n o w that certain forms o f inducement are necessary—even forms o f compulsion have to be resorted to i n certain fields—to secure the w o r k i n g and the maintenance o f society itself; and I think i t could not be pretended that even Soviet Russia has shown itself the v i c t i m o f any hallucinations on that point. W e may hear whispers o f cases i n which an increase i n the wages o f industry ceases to act as an inducement, and may actually have the effect o f curtailing the number o f hours that a man is w i l l i n g to w o r k . This beautiful paradox, however, only serves to prove more clearly that society must provide the kind o f inducement that operates effectively. Society caters for human cupidity i n all o f us and secures its ends by making a skilful use o f this side o f human nature; so that when all things are nicely balanced men may be doing their duty w i t h o u t realising that their self-interest has come into the matter at i l l — t h e y may hardly be conscious o f the neat dove-tailing o f public service and private interests. B y organising our cupidities society tames them, exacts its toll from them, curbs them and even conceals a considerable part o f their operation; though i t is always possible to desire better adjustments i n the social system, so that the checks on self-aggrandisement may be tightened i n one way or another. One point is fundamental, however. N o b o d y may pretend that there has been an elimination o f the selfishness i n human nature, and the self-centredness o f man. A n d nobody may pretend that egotism is a thing which belongs, for example, to social classes as such rather than to human beings. I f we

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eliminated the conflict between horizontal layers i n society— i f we got r i d o f that 'class-conflict' which has certainly been a great feature o f human history—there w o u l d still be r o o m for vertical conflicts, cut-throat battles between coal-miners, railwaymen and teachers, each thinking that they have a right to a higher share i n the total sum o f benefits which are open for distribution i n a given society. I t is impossible to get our view o f diplomacy square unless we face the fact that the British Foreign Office exists i n a p r i mary and fundamental sense to protect our interests; and even a sense o f humour ought to prevent our imagining that we are so righteous as not to have any o f these. I n a similar way i t gready assists us i n the w o r k o f getting our history into focus i f at the first stage o f the argument at least, when we take our initial bearings, we regard the element o f cupidity, whatever place i t holds i n the make-up o f a man, as being universal i n the sense that all are touched w i t h i t . W e may begin by saying that only some men—only a few very bad people—are egotistical. I n the case o f the industrial revolution for example we may begin by arguing that i t was the selfishness o f the capitalists which was to blame, as i t operated on the innocent passivity o f the victims, the w o r k i n g classes. Soon, however, we meet the paradox that the capitalist, when he makes his appearance, w o u l d be received as a benefactor, and we find that the erection o f a factory w o u l d be taken i n a given neighbourhood as a local boon, workers rushing to find employment because apparendy here was at least something better than any alternative that was immediately available. Then we note h o w the friends o f the workers become alive to the fact that the capitalists were taking advantage o f the competitive spirit, the rival cupidities amongst the wage-earners themselves. Finally we see the industrial revolution as a general process i n society, the result o f no man's plan, but rather the total effect o f all men's cupidity, all men playing their little parts as they t r y to better themselves or to escape the difficulties created by their competitors—all engaged i n the competition though some w i n

THE

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ELEMENT

OF

CUPIDITY

prizes and some lose. Similarly Thomas Carlyle, asking w h o was responsible for the horrors o f the French R e v o l ution, said every man i n France—every man was to be blamed w h o i n one way or another had come short o f his public duty. M u c h o f the aggressiveness o f states comes f r o m the pulls and pressures exerted i n society itself by the interests o f all the individuals and groups that compose it—as when French public opinion i n the nineteenth century induced Napoleon I I I to make repeated bids for Rhineland territory even when his personal desires and his o w n judgment were against the policy. M u l t i p l y i n g itself i n millions amongst the race o f men, this cupidity is at least effective enough to organise itself into those various kinds o f pressure-groups w h i c h are always direcdy influencing governments. I f it were nothing more than so to speak a little grain o f sand i n an otherwise perfect watch, i t w o u l d be sufficient to derange the smooth mechanism o f that orderly progress i n which some people have put their faith. W e may say i t sets every compass slightly w r o n g ; i t puts the bend into our wishful thinking; and i t gives a bias to our very righteousnesses. A civilisation may be wrecked w i t h o u t any spectacular crimes or criminals but by constant petty breaches o f faith and minor complicities on the part o f men generally considered very nice people. I f we were to imagine a great war taking place, say, i n i960, we w h o too often measure guilt by its consequences m i g h t w e l l be w r o n g i n imagining that a tragedy so stupendous could only be the w o r k o f some special monster o f wickedness. I f all men had only what we consider a reasonable degree o f cupidity, politics w o u l d still be driven into dialectical jams—into predicaments and dilemmas w h i c h the intellect has never mastered. I f there were no more wilfulness throughout the whole o f human nature than exists i n this r o o m at the present moment, i t w o u l d be sufficient to tie events into knots and to produce those deadlocks which all o f us k n o w i n our little world* while on the

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scale o f the nation-state i t w o u l d be enough, w i t h its c o m plexities, ramifications and congealings, to bring about the greatest war i n history. A n d i n modern society everything is so entangled w i t h everything else that disaster could come f r o m man's selfishness and i t might yet be impossible to pin the blame on anybody i n particular. As a total result o f all this there is a gravitational pull i n history itself which tends to bring d o w n man's loftiest dreams, so that over a considerable span o f time a long-term purpose generally manages to m i x itself into a lot o f earth. M a r t i n Luther did not intend that the Reformation should l o o m so large i n history books as a stage i n the rise o f the secular state or as the occasion for vast redistributions o f property. The men o f 1789 did not dream that the ideals o f the French R e v o l u tion w o u l d come to be taken over by rulers because they strengthened the arm o f government, or that states which had suffered military catastrophe w o u l d adopt revolutionary p r i n ciples because they had proved to be an effective means to a military revival. The eighteenth-century democrats w o u l d not have guessed that a Bismarck, struggling w i t h a middleclass liberal opposition i n Prussia, w o u l d threaten i t w i t h u n i versal suffrage, because he knew that the lower classes, i f they had the vote, w o u l d take his side. W e might almost say that the ideals o f the French Revolution were realised over a long period i n the nineteenth century i n so far as they served the cause o f power. The liberals used to think that for centuries they had been getting their way i n Europe, bringing governments and societies into conformity w i t h their more generous ideals. B u t , whatever truth there might be i n this at a certain level o f analysis, I am personally much more impressed by the tremendous part which war has played i n the last five hundred years i n conditioning the character and deciding the whole development o f the modern state. Even the French R e v o l u tion paved the way f o r the modern wars o f peoples, and even liberalism stands i n history as a principal link i n the chain which leads to the modern high-powered state. The Christian

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39

Church itself, regarded as a visible and terrestrial institution, has not been exempt f r o m that bias, that curious twist i n events, that gravitational pull i n human nature, which draws the highest things downwards, mixes them w i t h earth, and taints them w i t h human cupidity. A n d i f the modern intellect finds its greatest pride i n its scientific achievements there is some significance i n the fact that i t should issue i n the atomic bomb, the sort o f thing that the pessimists about human nature always predicted. Even when we are formulating the ideals and schemes that we all w o r k for i n life, we have to ask ourselves h o w these w o u l d operate when t h r o w n into the tricky waters o f a w o r l d like this; and i f we dream that i t w o u l d be nice for the state to decree higher wages for married men w i t h children, we might have to wonder whether, considering the ways o f this w o r l d , i t w o u l d not have the effect o f securing that i n really hard times the bachelor w o u l d be more likely to acquire the available posts, because he w o u l d cost his employer less. One o f the reasons w h y i t is so difficult to secure Utopia i n our time, or even anything very satisfactory i n the way o f a League o f Nations, is the fact that no man has yet invented a f o r m o f political machinery which the ingenuity o f the devil w o u l d not find a way o f exploiting for evil ends. Against this curious toughness which seems to exist i n the very texture o f historical events, and against this admixture o f earthiness which subjects the whole story to that serious gravitational pull, the more superficial kinds o f idealism beat themselves into foam, and hang i n the air as a sort o f alien froth. I t is easy to make plans o f quasi-political salvation for the w o r l d i f we can have human nature as we want i t to be, and presume on a general change o f heart i n our fellow men. A n d when such plans go w r o n g , i t is easy to find a culprit—easy for the idealist to bring f r o m under his sleeve that doctrine o f human sinfulness which i t w o u l d have been so much better for h i m to have faced fairly and squarely i n the first instance. A t a later stage i n the argument the disillusioned idealist trounces the people w h o thwarted h i m , and brings human wickedness

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into the question, as a deus ex tnachina, when i t ought to have entered more profoundly into the initial stages o f the problem. A n d n o w he discovers wickedness w i t h a vengeance—for on this system the sinners are fewer i n number but they are diabolically wicked i n order to make up for it. N o t h i n g more completely locks the human race i n some o f its bewildering dilemmas and predicaments than to range history into a fight o f white men, pure and righteous, against the diabolically wicked, instead o f seeing initially that human nature—includi n g oneself—is imperfect generally. I n reality events tie themselves into knots because o f the general cupidity; situations becoming more frantic and deadlocks more hopeless because o f man's universal presumption and self-righteousness; and some men may even be goaded to greater wickedness by the exasperating conduct o f the stiffnecked. Therefore, though history does not carry these questions to the searching depths at w h i c h the theologian may make his judgments and expose the fallacy o f our pretended righteousnesses, i t seems to me that even at his o w n level, even i n the realm o f observable historical happenings, the historian must j o i n hands w i t h the theologian; and the truth o f the fact becomes patent when conflicts are bitter and times are desperate. I n the kind o f w o r l d that I see i n history there is one sin that locks people up i n all their other sins, and fastens men and nations more tighdy than ever i n their predicaments— and that is the one which is not allowed by the terms o f the situation which I have defined, namely the sin o f self-righteousness. I cannot say that i n history statesmanship works under entirely different laws i f a politician happens to be a Christian or even a clergyman—if politics are influenced, say, by a Wolsey or a Laud. I cannot say, looking over the centuries, that the clergy seem to me to have been always right against the laity, at any rate i n the conflicts that pertain to m u n dane affairs. I think that i n modern centuries the unbeliever has sometimes even fought the churchman for what we to-day w o u l d regard as the higher ethical end, the one w h i c h

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most corresponds w i t h the deeper influences o f Christianity. I n one fundamental sense, however, i t seems to me that Christianity alone attacks the seat o f evil i n the k i n d o f w o r l d we have been considering, and has a solvent for the intellectual predicaments w h i c h arise i n such a w o r l d . I t addresses itself precisely to that crust o f self-righteousness which, by the nature o f its teaching, i t has to dissolve before i t can do anything else w i t h a man. The more human beings are lacking i n imagination, the more incapable men are o f any profound kind o f self-analysis, the more we shall find that their self-righteousness hardens, so that i t is just the thick-skinned w h o are more sure o f being right than anybody else. A n d though conflict might still be inevitable i n history even i f this particular evil did not exist, there can be no doubt that its presence multiplies the deadlocks and gravely deepens all the tragedies o f all the centuries. A t its worst i t brings us to that mythical messianism—that messianic h o a x — o f the twentieth century which comes perilously near to the thesis: 'Just one litde war more against the last remaining enemies o f righteousness, and then the w o r l d w i l l be cleansed, and we can start building Paradise/ I t w i l l readily be objected—and i t is certainly true—that the picture which I have given does not comprise everything i n human nature, and I have many things to say later concerning the heights that can be reached on the spiritual side. I must add at the moment, however, that the greatest spiritual heights achieved by human beings must be regarded as rising f r o m the basis I have described—even they are to be interpreted w i t h reference to that initial substratum, that initial human material. I n any case I have described i t as what seems to me a k i n d o f bias or a gravitational pull i n history; and I wonder whether to the theologian and the philosopher i t w o u l d seem like a mere grain o f sand spoiling the mechanism o f an otherwise beautiful watch, or a taint that has the effect o f corrupting the whole personality. I t matters which end o f the stick y o u pick up first when y o u are dealing w i t h human nature, whether i n

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statesmanship or i n your reflection on l i f e — i t is a very serious distortion o f the picture i f your programmes and philosophies begin by assuming a w o r l d o f normally wise and righteous men. W h a t I have described i n history is very different. I t amounts to an historical equivalent—I think i t is a valid equivalent— to the usual theological assertion that all men are sinners, and I am saying that this is the end o f the stick that we must pick up when we are dealing w i t h this question. I t means that certain characteristics o f human nature which m i g h t not be defects amongst animals i n a jungle are not only detrimental even to an ordinary w o r l d o f human relations but threaten almost to be fatal to such a w o r l d as we can see at the present day. For moral reasons human beings are incapable o f permanently establishing a system o f human relations on this earth such as can go on indefinitely w i t h o u t resort to violence i n one f o r m or another. I t is always a paradox to me that, considering what Christians have been preaching week i n and week out for so many centuries on the imperfections o f human nature, they should have allowed the Marxists to steal a lead on them i n incorporating this fact into the very structure o f their history, so that a whole significant aspect o f the truth fell into the custody o f men w h o had every motive to misuse i t i n their historical w r i t i n g . For the Marxists, i n spite o f so much that offends, and i n spite o f those uncouthnesses w h i c h are always a stumbling-block to tidy academic minds, have contributed more to the historical scholarship o f all o f us than the non^-Marxists like to confess, partly because, by tearing the mask f r o m human nature they have found some clues to the understanding o f the processes o f history, w i t h the result that they have appropriated truths which are dangerous i n the hands o f anybody except a Christian. T w o things strike me very forcibly i n sixteenthcentury Europe, and one o f them is the tremendous faith and devotion o f which there is such unmistakable evidence i n the correspondence and papers o f both Catholics and Protestants. I t is a valid complaint against the Marxist that he seems to have

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no eyes for the things which bring human history and achievement to their peak—he has the k i n d o f materialism which dismisses the piety o f the saint or the genius o f Shakespeare as mere frills to the story. But the second thing which always somewhat dazes me when I think o f the history o f the sixteenth century is not only the magnitude o f the vested interests involved i n what are called the wars o f religion, but that fact that i n one country after another—Germany, France, the L o w Countries, the Scandinavian lands, Poland, etc.—it seems to me impossible that anybody should begin to understand the wars o f religion w i t h o u t studying the classstructure o f the region concerned, and the tensions or conflicts between classes. O n this whole question there are t w o further things which I have i t on m y m i n d to say, though perhaps I have no right to say them; and i f they are displeasing at any rate I dó not pretend to put them forward as more than a personal feeling, so that you may regard them as hurdles which I have failed to get over, or as the unfortunate effects o f the habit o f historical study. Once we have noted that human nature limps inadequately i n the w o r l d , after the manner that I have described, then I am not sure that on this question the historian can justifiably go any further. There is one impression which grows upon me i n reading history, i n spite o f theories which I once held to the contrary. Although I am clear that both i n life and i n historical study I have met people w h o soared so high that their virtue seems to me to be superior to conditioning circumstances; although I think that i n Christianity we find a demonstrable historical case o f conditions under which men may choose to put themselves and which have the effect o f raising their personalities superior to other conditions; although I believe that no man is ever excused for allowing himself to be at the mercy o f conditions and circumstances—still i n general I think that not only we but the secularist thinkers o f our time do i n practice ascribe too litde rather than too much to conditioning circumstances i n our estimates o f human beings.

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HISTORY

Some may have risen b y great internal resources, or by spiritual strength, to a certain superiority over mundane circumstances; but the great differences w h i c h we see between men are due more than we often remember to the fact that some are fortunate i n their birth, their physical structure, their education, their environment—fortunate i n all the operation o f accompanying circumstances. I n some cases human nature looks better than i n others because i t can go through life w i t h o u t being subjected to the same test. W h e n people begin to say: 'Was Napoleon better than Hitler?' the thought comes to me sometimes that Napoleon admitted h o w little he cared about France and confessed his whole object to be a purely personal domination over men; while I have a feeling that H i t l e r — t h o u g h he was not a w h i t less dangerous for that fact—was a fanatic i n his devotion to Germany. W h e n I ask myself w h y I dislike Napoleon so much less than Hider, I find myself feeling that i n the one case die redeeming features were due to an urbane and aristocratic education, while i n the other case there is an uncouthness and barbarity o f ideas which I have discovered on other occasions to be associated w i t h the self-educated, especially self-educated rebels. I f y o u t r y to compare Napoleon w i t h Charles James Fox or L o r d Casdereagh for the purpose o f anything more than what I should call an aesthetic verdict, then even here you had better leave i t t i l l the Judgment Day, for i t is past man's unravelling. That same human nature w h i c h i n happy conditions is frail, seems to me to be i n other conditions capable o f becoming hideous, unless i t has found a way o f putting itself above the effects o f w i n d and weather. I have seen litde people so w i l f u l i n their litde kingdoms that i t seems to me merely their good fortune that they were not crowned heads or prime ministers, w i t h peace and war depending on their coolness o f m i n d . A n d though i t may be a fatal confession for me to make I must confess that, while being afraid even o f a spider, still, i n that w o r l d o f half-truths and half-hypocrisies which we call politics, I can imagine myself a Stalin feeling that

HISTORY

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MAN'S UNIVERSAL

SIN

45

the other party, or that the whole predicament, has goaded me into blockading Berlin. I can imagine myself a member o f the Stern gang, secure i n the conviction that m y angers were based on righteous indignation. The historian— especially as he shares the defects o f human nature himself and speaks out o f the arena—cannot say whether Napoleon or Hider made the most o f the opportunities heaven gave to each o f them. He cannot decide which o f these men is better or worse i n the eyes o f eternity. W h a t history does is rather to uncover man's universal sin. The other thing that I have to say is correlative w i t h all this. It happens to be a fact that I can recognise responsibility or freedom i n myself—I can feel more internally sure about the fact that i t was possible for me to have helped doing this or that than I can about the matters that belong to external scholarship. B u t I cannot recognise or measure the same thing i n other people, for the simple reason that I cannot see their insides. I can condemn myself after self-examination, but i n the case o f others I can never k n o w what allowance has to be made for conditions—I can only assume that they are not entirely unlike myself. T o me, therefore, i t seems that nothing could be more exact perhaps for any man than the statement that 'all men are sinners and I the chief o f them'; or die thesis, 'There but for the grace o f God go I ' ; and I do not k n o w w h y we ourselves should not be able to pray sometimes: 'Father, forgive them for they k n o w not what they do.' A l l this seems to be the final effect o f the reading o f history upon me. A n d i f anybody answers me that o f course there must have been great saints w h o m I am slandering i n all m y descriptions o f human nature, I accept the correction, but still note the fact that these always seem to me to be the people w h o are most emphatically i n agreement w i t h me on the point that I am making. The historian cannot give a judgment on particular human beings that can be admitted as a final moral judgment on their personalities, save i n the sense that he can say: ' A l l men are sinners.' I t is necessary for me to emphasise the fact that what I have

46

HUMAN

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been outlining i n this lecture is not merely a Christian idea—it is not dependent on the truth o f any super-natural religion. W e are concerned for the moment not w i t h theology but rather w i t h anthropology, w i t h our ordinary doctrine concerning man; and the view that is here presented is supported by non-religious as well as by religious thought. It means that we ought to consider very carefully our doctrine on the subject o f human beings as such i n the first place; and i t is a mistake for writers o f history and other teachers to imagine that i f they are not Christian they are refraining f r o m committing themselves, or w o r k i n g without any doctrine at all, discussing history w i t h out any presuppositions. Amongst historians, as i n other fields, the blindest o f all the blind are those w h o are unable to examine their o w n presuppositions, and blithely imagine therefore that they do not possess any. I t must be emphasised that we create tragedy after tragedy for ourselves by a lazy unexamined doctrine o f man which is current amongst us and which the study o f history does not support. A n d now, as i n O l d Testament days, there are false prophets w h o flourish by flattering and bribing human nature, telling i t to be comfortable about itself i n general, and playing up to its self-righteousness i n times o f crisis. W h e n i t suits us we may set out to advertise the sins o f one nation or another, but we bring i n the moral issue here and there as i t serves our purposes. W h i l e we are crying out against the crimes o f an enemy we may be putting the soft pedal on the similar terrible large-scale atrocities that are being committed by an ally. O u r o w n doctrine o f human nature leads us into inconsistencies. D u r i n g the war i t was put to a British ambassador that after the destruction o f Germany Russia w o u l d become a similar menace to Europe i f she found herself in a position to behave over a large area w i t h impunity. The answer given on behalf o f this country was that such apprehensions were unjustified, Russia w o u l d not disappoint us, for we believed that her intentions were friendly and good. Such an attitude to m o r a l i t y such a neglect o f a whole tradition o f maxims i n regard to this

HISTORY

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UNIVERSAL

SIN

question—was not Christian i n any sense o f the w o r d but belongs to a heresy black as the old Manichaean heresy. I t is like the Bishop who said that i f we totally disarmed he had too high an opinion o f human nature to think that anybody w o u l d attack us. There might be great virtue i n disarming and consenting to be made martyrs for the sake o f the good cause; but to promise that we should not have to endure martyrdom i n that situation, or to rely on such a supposition, is against both theology and history. I t is essential not to have faith i n human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a very disastrous one.

CHAPTER

THREE

JUDGMENT I N

HISTORY

A T the very time when modern historiography was finding its feet, i n the latter half o f the nineteenth century, i t happened that an important chapter o f European history had been opened, and had begun to alter the shape o f the w o r l d ; though i t had not yet by any means worked itself out or given a hint o f the dénouement which i t had i n preparation. The contemporary historians o f that day, therefore, were only observing i t while i t was still i n mid-career, though they failed to realise the fact—failed to see that here was a piece o f story which still had a significant part o f its course to run. They imagined that they could rule o f f the whole episode and draw their conclusions f r o m it, awarding the prizes and pointing the moral i n the way historians like to do. Since their assessment was premature we shall not be surprised to learn that the results at which they arrived were such as to give them serious misgivings on occasion. Indeed diey were the type o f result that has a disconcerting effect on one's whole conception o f the nature o f history. I f one could have taken stock o f things i n 1815 and left the question there the particular matter at issue w o u l d have presented a straightforward appearance and answered to ordinary expectations. The story o f Napoleon had provided the w o r l d w i t h a clear example o f the way i n which inordinate pride and ungovernable power are brought i n the course o f time to their appointed doom. The career o f Frederick the Great, put together w i t h the trend o f nineteenth-century Prussian history, however, showed that an excessively military state could flourish i n spite o f some unscrupulousness; and there was some difficulty i n avoiding the conclusion that history was an accomplice i n this, as though Providence itself worked on the side o f cunning and power. The spectacular 48

THE JUDGMENT

ON GERMAN

MILITARISM

49

successes o f Bismarck underlined that conclusion and clinched the argument, and it seemed that the whole machinery o f time worked blindly on, i n disregard o f the humble and p o o r — blindly on, in accordance w i t h the rules o f real-politik. The most central movement taking place i n the whole history o f Europe i n that period confronted one w i t h the spectacle o f the steam-roller advance o f organised force, which i n its relentless progress seemed to be blest w i d i the final favour o f heaven. I n those circumstances i t was not easy for the casual observer to see that morality itself was part o f the structure o f history, a thing as real and as drastic i n its operation as the material strength o f principalities and powers. O f course we to-day are i n a position to see that any assessment taken during the nineteenth century was premature, and that the question o f the militarism o f Prussia was not by any means ready to be ruled off by the historians as yet. The moral judgments that lie i n the very nature o f history are often long-term affairs, so that one gets the impression that the sins o f the fathers are visited on the children to the third and fourth generation; though on further analysis we may have to recognise that the later generations suffered rather for allowing the sins to go on uncorrected. I n the case o f Prussia the time-period was undoubtedly extended as a result o f the p r u dence or the virtue o f Frederick the Great and Bismarck themselves; for instead o f becoming Napoleons they provided perhaps the t w o most remarkable examples i n modern history o f men w h o called a halt to a career o f conquest, precisely because they had a curious awareness o f the importance o f the moral element i n history. They so realised the danger o f nemesis that for long decades i n the latter part o f their lives they stood out as conservative statesmen, not only pacific themselves but anxious to see that nobody else i n Europe should disturb the peace. I do not think that we are interpolating anything fanciful into the structure o f history, however, i f we say that, whether i n 1918 or i n 1933 or i n 1945, or i n all these together, a j u d g -

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ment has been passed on the militarism o f Prussia—a judgment which we have no reason to believe that she w o u l d have had to suffer i f she had avoided an actual excess. A n d i t was a j u d g ment both on the Hohenzollerns as a dynasty and on the Germans as a people—it was not a judgment that fell on Frederick the Great and Bismarck personally, for these men were permitted more than the ordinarily-expected span o f power; and when Bismarck retired i n 1890 nobody could have said that Germany was then so to speak under sentence, nobody could have said that Germany was doomed whatever Bismarck's successors i n the government m i g h t t r y to do. The achievements o f ancient R o m e and the N o r m a n Conquest o f England make i t clear that the course o f history does not carry w i t h i n itself an inevitable judgment upon all conquerors —they show that heaven often gives men a chance to redeem the effects even o f their o w n violence and to turn the evil they have done into later good. Germany's desire to appear formidable, her very attempt to appear even more formidable than she really felt herself to be, had the paradoxical result o f helping to turn the scale against her as early as the First W o r l d W a r . A n d h o w happy might Germany not have been to-day — h o w many errors m i g h t she not have saved herself—if even i n 1918 she could at least have taken the verdict as the judgment o f God and set out to discover what i t was that she had done to offend heaven. Here, neady packed and parcelled, is a specimen case o f the operation o f the moral factor i n history, w i t h the whole system o f things recoiling i n the approved fashion upon those w h o have affronted i t . A n d here we can see how, though some offences may pass at first w i t h o u t a reckoning, yet i f men presume on such immunity, those old debts may accumulate at compound interest and may still have to be met when the moment comes for the final settlement o f the account. U n t i l I am convinced that m y idea o f this chapter o f history needs revision I must personally hold that here is a valid example o f moral judgment w i t h i n the terms o f history

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51

itself; and i f this is true i t is a more significant comment on the drama o f human life i n time than the more mechanical things which the technical historian discovers by virtue o f his apparatus and his evidence. I t is only the first simple stage i n the formulation o f the truth i n regard to this important issue, however—only the introduction to the study o f the moral element i n the structure o f history. A n d lest I should have said anything that might encourage us i n self-righteousness I p r o pose to look a little further at this case, and to attempt a deeper analysis o f that moral retribution which seems to be worked out i n the very processes o f time, that nemesis which makes itself apparent w i t h i n the course o f history itself. I have carefully abstained f r o m any suggestion that Germany either wanted or was responsible for that resort to war which i n 1914 put an end to one o f the most brilliant periods o f material and intellectual progress i n human history. I have followed Professor Temperley, w h o was so great an authority on this subject, i n the view that our criticism o f Germany must be directed rather against her general posture i n the previous decade, a posture undoubtedly affected by her militaristic tradition. B u t even w i t h this larger aspect o f the question i n m i n d Professor Temperley wrote: 1 fail to see any respect i n which Russia was better than Germany—and i n some respects she was worse. France I think always opposed limitation o f armaments and egged on Russian designs.' Since I personally accept this view, which seems to me to have been held by the most imposing people w h o have written on this subject, I am inclined to say that the f o r m o f interpretation which I have used i n respect o f Germany must be capable o f being projected on to a larger canvas. A n d I must n o t e — what I imagine nobody can really deny—that the old Russia o f Tsarist days, though i t might have been due for some sort o f revolution i n any case, suffered the last extremes o f overt h r o w , suffered the total annihilation o f its existing structure at the hands o f the Bolsheviks, precisely because the country was at war i n 1917. 4

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I f Germany came under judgment, then the ancient Russia did the same, meeting a d o o m more terrible, more swift, more assuredly permanent than that o f Germany herself. A n d ever since that time we have looked apprehensively to France to learn whether upon her there has not come a judgment equally lasting by virtue o f the very efforts that have been made to improve her position. I n other words, i t is a dangerous illusion to imagine that i f Germany can be proved to have sinned those w h o were fighting against her may be assumed to have been righteous. W e are hoaxing ourselves i f we think that because judgment came upon Germany through the victory o f our arms, we—being the instruments o f God i n this matter—may count ourselves as having qualified for virtue; or as having even found special favour i n His sight. I f such an argument were valid God must have a great and unusual favour for C o m munism, which, besides being the chief beneficiary i n t w o w o r l d wars, could outbid us i n the claim to have been the most terrible instrument o f Divine judgment i n our generation. B u t the truth is that a God w h o could use even the Philistines i n order to chastise His chosen people may similarly use us for the purpose o f chastening Germany, while still reserving for us a terrible judgment later. Indeed y o u cannot introduce the idea o f judgment into history without quickly meeting w i t h situations o f a paradoxical kind. Widening our survey still further, and looking at the spectacle which the w o r l d n o w presents to us, I think i t n o t too much to say that i f Germany is under judgment so are all o f us—the whole o f our existing order and the very fabric o f our civilisation. I f once we admit that the moral factor operates i n this way i n history at all, then we to-day must feel ourselves to be living i n one o f those remarkable periods when judgment stalks generally through the w o r l d , and i t becomes a question whether the orders and systems to which we have been long attached can survive the day o f reckoning. I t is when the issue comes to be brought home to us i n this way, however, and when we see that something more is i n question

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UNDER

JUDGMENT

53

than a judgment o f God upon the Germans for their militarism — i t is when we are confronted w i t h the fact that we ourselves may be under sentence—that we begin to wonder whether perhaps i t was not a mistake to bring the idea o f judgment into the matter at all. W e might pick up the opposite end o f the stick and say that morality does not come into the question. W e might feel that i f we have to suffer hard things we are merely the undeserving victims o f a relendess machine. W e might do what I remember the Germans doing so much both i n their conversation and their books after 1918—whine that the course o f history has been particularly hard on us, when we had done nothing to deserve so miserable a fate. I t seems true that i n certain particular types o f cases some advantage is achieved i f men can be persuaded at least to think o f their disasters as a judgment o f God and make them the occasion for a deeper k i n d o f self-questioning. I n such instances—when for example i t is a case o f an old order crumbling and collapsing, or i t is a case o f the mighty w h o are brought l o w — I think we can go further than this, however; we can hardly avoid the conclusion that moral defects have something to do w i t h the catastrophes that take place. The processes o f time have a curious way o f bringing out the faultiness that is concealed i n a system w h i c h at first view seems to be satisfactory; and even concerning our pleasures i t has often been noted that, however exquisite they may be i n their beginnings, they often terminate i n disillusionment i f pursued for long periods as ends i n themselves. Even i n regard to our higher purposes i t is equally clear that the passage o f time produces a relentless sifting and testing o f anything we achieve. I t appears that the w i n d and. the weather soon bring out the blemishes or show the seamy side o f causes which are relatively good. For example, i f we were to establish an ideal state o f unconditioned freedom i n society, we all k n o w that w i t h i n a shorter or longer period the result w o u l d be an alarming scene o f license. A n d some men w h o have been only too self-sacrificing i n their fanaticism for their

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country or their devotion to family or their attachment to a revolutionary cause, so self-sacrificing that they only seemed to miss virtue by an inch, have f r o m that bright beginning been drawn to wreak such havoc i n the w o r l d that they appear on the pages o f history as terrible criminals. Since the passage o f time puts both our pleasures and our purposes to such a withering test i t is no wonder that the course o f centuries tries out our institutions and our orderings o f society. Whether we think o f the Greek city-state or the R o m a n Empire or the medieval idea o f the Church's relation to society; whether we have i n m i n d the cultural system o f the modern humanist, or the ideals o f secular liberalism or the principle o f the nation-state—all these have a way o f turning sour w i t h the lapse o f time, and when they come to an end i t is not a case that they are merely unfortunate. I n the realm o f the relatively good we may admit that all o f these things were good i n their beginning and that for a period they had a valid claim upon human loyalty. The Greek city-state may still appeal to some o f us as perhaps the most beautiful f o r m o f organisation ever achieved for the political .life" o f man. For Christians long ago the R o m a n Empire, even i n its pagan condition, appeared to represent the culmination o f the w o r k o f Providence i n so far as concerned the establishment o f a mundane order. Again, many people still believe that nothing could be higher than a society and a civilisation presided over by the Church, as was the case i n medieval times. As to the national principle we ourselves i n t w o w o r l d wars have made i t our programme to defend the system o f nation-states and the political independence o f small peoples. A n d though there are eighteen hundred years o f Christian history against them, some o f our contemporaries apparently believe that the Christian religion is only reconcilable w i t h a society based on the liberal-democratic principles o f the nineteenth century. The men w h o have lived under one or other o f these various systems have even come to regard their o w n order as the best that could be imagined, and have

J U D G M E N T U P O N G R E A T H U M A N SYSTEMS

55

felt—just as people i n England do to-day—that, i f that particular organisation o f the w o r l d collapsed, there w o u l d be nothing left to make life w o r t h living either i n their o w n day or i n all the future. Yet the river o f time is littered w i t h the ruins o f these various systems, and we can hardly understand w h y those w h o lived under them should have even wished them to go on for ever or valued them so much. Judgment comes upon these orders and systems; and what is judged, o f course, is not this man or that but the system as a whole. O r rather we may say that, though i t is the system that perishes, i t is not quite the system as such which has come under condemnation—for all the ones which I have mentioned are virtuous enough i n themselves, virtuous enough i f we only consider them i n the abstract. A t bottom i t is an inadequacy i n human nature itself which comes under judgment; for i n the course o f time i t is human nature which finds out the holes i n the structure, and turns the good thing into an abuse. A particularly rapid example o f this process is afforded by the French Revolution, where, w i t h i n three or four years a liberal movement had turned itself into a totalitarian autocracy; while only ten years after the outbreak i n 1789, the establishment o f democracy led to a new corruption—the modern type o f dictatorship based on a popular plebiscite. I f the Greek city-states were ruined by their exclusiveness and their mutual hatreds i t may be true that the smallness o f the political unit brought about too great an intensity o f parochial feeling. B u t whether we look i n that or any other direction for our explanation, i t still remains the case that any criticism o f the city-state as a political unit is neither more nor less than a comment on human nature as i t operates under those conditions. A n d i t is not a comment on human nature as i t merely existed i n the Greeks; we cannot say that the Greeks as Greeks were worse than the rest o f human nature i n this respect, for the city-states proved equally untenable i n Renaissance Italy for similar reasons; so that what we

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are always faced w i t h is the defect o f human nature i n general. I f we need to be convinced surely nothing more is necessary than a glance at the system o f nation-states as i t n o w exists i n the w o r l d . W e may have once imagined that the trouble was due merely to a single government which by its special wickedness had spoiled the w o r k i n g o f the system; but we k n o w n o w that there is an inadequacy i n human nature which makes the reality so different f r o m the ideal—time has brought out new patterns o f human wilfulness not anticipated by the political dreamers o f a century ago, w h o imagined that the establishment o f the national principle was all that was needed to bring paradise to Europe. The same is true o f capitalism; when the Marxist promises us the downfall o f capitalism he builds his prediction for what i t is w o r t h on certain complicated calculations that he has made concerning the effects o f a selfishness and self-centredness presumed to exist throughout human nature. A n d we should be unwise to overlook the fact that the democratic system itself is not i m m u n e — i t , too, w i l l come under judgment i f human nature fails to show the quality which the system requires. The truth is that i f men were good enough neither the ancient city-state, nor the medieval order o f things nor modern nationalism w o u l d collapse. Neither humanism, nor liberalism nor democracy w o u l d be faced w i t h intellectual bankruptcy. Indeed all these systems could exist concurrently, so that the virtues o f them might be combined i n a way o f which Dante had perhaps a sort o f pre-vision. A n d even the fate o f the old League o f Nations was a commentary and a judgment on human nature at large. W h e n these great human systems crumble or when the mighty are fallen, i t is useless to say that a cleverer politician might have saved them, for his statesmanship is still only the art o f dealing w i t h the problems human cupidity has raised or o f coping w i t h the wilfulness o f human beings. A n d i f the clever politician carries the w o r l d around one corner, i t has always happened i n the past that the cupidities have caught up w i t h h i m or his successors sooner or later.

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PROPHETS

57

That this f o r m o f judgment exists i n history is a thing which I believe can hardly be denied, though it is important to note that its verdicts are an interim affair and not a final judgment on anything. W h a t many would deny o f course is the view that this f o r m o f judgment is a judgment o f God. It is embedded i n the very constitution o f the universe, but those who do not believe i n Christianity w i l l hardly admit that i t is there by any providential and purposeful ordination. The notion that there is a judgment o f God involved i n the very processes o f history is older than Christianity, and still leaves us dealing w i t h the dark places i n the story o f mankind, the seamy under-side o f the tapestry. I t is only a preHminary to the Christian gospel and needs to be complemented w i t h other truths—needs an outlook that transcends i t — f o r i t is very far f r o m providing a total Christian interpretation o f history, and i t leaves the critical problems o f life still untouched. I think that one o f the most significant and revealing chapters in the history o f human thought is provided by the ancient Hebrew prophets, however, i n their insistence upon this judgment o f God, and their vindication o f the moral element i n history during an age o f cataclysm so much like our o w n . A n d before the cataclysms occurred i t was a remarkable moment, i f I have understood it correctly, when the prophet Amos warned the Jews that 'the day o f the L o r d ' , which they so eagerly awaited, was to be not a time o f triumph and exultation, as they expected, but a dark, terrible day o f reckoning; for the modern w o r l d has been i n a similar position, imagining itself on the very threshold o f Utopia, and then suddenly awaking to the fact that i t was really on the edge o f an abyss. I t is not difficult to see the parallels, furthermore, when the ancient writers cried out against the blind leaders o f public opinion i n their day—the false prophets who told the people that all was well and that they would have peace, who called evil good and good evil, and who flourished by giving men the comfortable doctrines they like to hear. I f judgment comes on twentieth-century democracy, that w i l l be partly because i t encouraged—and i n

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fact erected into a system—that whole policy o f flattering human nature; so that politicians could only achieve office in this way, and writers only acquire a hearing by these means, while even ecclesiastical pronouncements have felt i t so necessary to avoid offence that amid their diplomacies i t is difficult sometimes to k n o w what their authors intended to say. Where the greater prophets o f the O l d Testament extend their survey beyond their o w n country and pronounce a doom upon many nations for rearing themselves up like gods, the analogies w i t h the modern deification o f the state seem to me to be very remarkable indeed. The shadow o f mighty empires came nearer, and brought the sense o f approaching disaster. The great prophets saw God Himself coming w i t h judgment, and began to ask, ' W h a t are die sins o f Israel?' They did not—as the twentieth century w o u l d have done—merely cry out i n self-righteousness against the sins and aggressions o f Assyria. Sometimes they seemed to regard the judgment as implicit i n events, or embedded i n the very constitution o f things. Jeremiah says, 'Thine o w n wickedness shall correct thee'; 'Your sins have withholden good things f r o m y o u ' ; 'Behold, I w i l l bring evil upon this people, even the fruit o f their thoughts'; and ' D o they provoke me to anger? saith the L o r d : do they not provoke themselves to the confusion o f their o w n faces?' Later, i n the W i s d o m o f Solomon, we read : 'For the creation, ministering to thee its maker, straineth its force against the unrighteous for punishment/ Sometimes God has only to withhold His p r o tection and let events take their course—'I w i l l hide m y face from them, I w i l l see what their end shall be'—and the penalty comes from His formidable non-intervention. There were times when i t was an additional sin o f the Jews to resist events that seemed an ordinance o f God—to fight against Providence —as when under die shadow o f the terrible empires o f Assyria and Babylon Isaiah had to protest against any resort to an alliance w i t h Egypt, and Jeremiah preached, not resistance, but 'collaboration', to the horror o f the jingoists.

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I n such cases the refusal to listen to the w o r d o f God through the mouth o f the prophets brought its o w n automatic retribution. It must be difficult for the religious mind not to feel that the set-backs, the adversities and die sufferings o f life are (according to circumstances perhaps) either a judgment on one's sins or a discipline for the soul, or a testing o f character, or any combination o f these. A n d i f God works upon our lives i n detail or touches men i n the things which are most intimate, then He is affecting history i n any case—we can hardly avoid projecting the idea o f judgment on to a broader canvas and saying that there is a judgment embedded in the fabric o f history. Historians have often recognised the fact and easily read the fate o f Hitler as a penalty for sins and excesses; and even when they seem to speak a different language we ought to be careful not to be deceived by what i n reality is almost a technical f o r m o f phraseology that they use—a phraseology which is appropriated to the particular purposes o f technical historical study. W e have already seen that the historian, though he may say that the capitalist system is imperfect and that i t is responsible for some o f the distresses o f our age, really means that the human cupidity, which he takes for granted (and which on this argument is not sufficiently curbed under the so-called capitalistic system), has been over-reaching itself. I f we say that absolute monarchy is an evil we are really asserting that human beings are not sufficiently virtuous to make i t a practical policy to allow them unlimited power. O n the other hand, speaking as a reader o f history, I must say that i f one examines the course o f the centuries i n the light o f this idea o f judgment, one meets w i t h some curious facts that might produce displacements i n some o f our ideas at the next stage the o f argument. One o f the paradoxes involved i n such judgment as takes place i n history itself is its curious incidence — t h e fact that i t does not always strike exacdy where people might expect or where the conventional morality o f the w o r l d w o u l d have regarded as likely. Indeed sometimes we might

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be tempted to think that what to us are little sins have disproportionate punishment, and sometimes a thing that might have been a very great good needs what we might feel to be only a minute mixture o f evil to be turned into colossal tragedy. From a survey o f the past we must be tempted to feel sometimes that none ever do what we might regard as unmixed good, except those who undertake works o f charity or seek to deepen human understanding or t r y to w i n men f r o m unbelief. There seems to be one fundamental law o f a very solemn kind which touches this question o f judgment; and when I turn to the ancient prophets and recall the limited area o f history they had at their disposal for making their inductions, I am always surprised at the curious aptness w i t h which they seem to have found the formula i n this connection—a formula which they put i n a special position o f priority. Judgment in history falls heaviest on those w h o come to think themselves gods, w h o fly i n the face o f Providence and history, w h o put their trust i n man-made systems and worship the w o r k o f their o w n hands, and w h o say that the strength o f their o w n right arm gave them the victory. W e are speaking o f an interim j u d g ment taking place w i t h i n the historical sphere and I am not saying that i t is a final assessment; but supposing there is a man like Hitler and we even concede diat he may be utterly unselfish i n his passion for his country, still, i f there is a moral judgment i n history i t tells us repeatedly that such a man by aping providence blasphemes God, and brings more rapid tragedy on the w o r l d and on himself, than the people w h o give half their lives to wine, women and song. A n d similarly i f men put their faith i n science and make i t the be-all and end-all o f life, as though i t were not to be subdued to any higher ethical end, there is something i n the very composition o f the universe that w i l l make i t execute judgment on itself, i f only i n the shape o f the atomic bomb. I t is one o f the curious facts o f history that a civilisation or a people or a series o f generations may concentrate upon some particular aspect o f human experience or human activity

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— i n one age the technological perhaps, or i n another age art for art's sake; or perhaps amongst some people the military men prevail and the educational system becomes one-sided; or alternatively, as i n the Middle Ages, the priests are predominant and you seem to run the whole gamut o f that experience. I n such circumstances things become over-balanced sooner or later, and the one-sided development sometimes ties itself into knots, or events close in on men and the w o r l d finds itself driven into dialectical jams and unmanageable predicaments; just as we ourselves might say to-day: ' W e all k n o w that science has outrun man's moral education, but by n o w we are locked i n the system and what are we to do about it?' Sometimes, therefore, i t is only by a cataclysm that man can make his escape from the net which he has taken so much trouble to weave around himself; and that is w h y the j u d g ments o f God so often appear to be remedial to the future historian—we can even hope to see German historians o f the future who w i l l be glad to record that their country was rescued f r o m militarism. Historians do not seem to me to spend their time weeping over the downfall o f the Roman Empire, even though in its last consequences it brought about an eclipse o f culture and a return to primitive forms o f society. Even that catastrophe broke d o w n prison walls and disengaged new forces in the w o r l d , releasing Europe for a new phase o f human experience, and a wider future o f unpredictable achievement. It must never be forgotten, however, that even amongst the ancient Hebrews this doctrine o f judgment, far from solving all problems, merely provided an initial substratum for an ethical view o f history. I n fact i t confronted men w i t h new paradoxes to resolve. W h a t happened in the case o f Germany after 1870 happened also i n those ancient days, and men w o u l d be left for long periods to wonder and complain, as they asked themselves: ' W h y does God allow the wicked to prosper?' They w o u l d say like Job: 'The earth is given over into the hands o f the wicked: i f God is not the one responsible then w h o is it?' N o w we find Jonah reproaching God for

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having decided not to destroy Nineveh as he had threatened to do, and i t is God w h o says: ' W h y should I destroy Nineveh, which has six-score thousand people w h o — p o o r things—do not k n o w their right hand f r o m their left?' A t the opposite pole we have the expostulations o f Ezekiel w h o asks God i f He intends not to stop until He has destroyed everything. This whole idea o f judgment seems generally to be adapted to peoples regarded in their corporate capacity, and i t marks that f o r m o f O l d Testament teaching which envisaged, not i n d i viduals so much, but rather the solidarity o f a whole nation, while at the same time the condemnation is addressed not to this man or that party but to the sins o f the nation as a body, the people as a whole. Such an idea might help to explain w h y great human systems collapsed and w h y great powers have sometimes been brought to their doom when nothing i n the w o r l d had seemed capable o f resisting them; but, far f r o m explaining, i t only brings out into greater relief the crucial ethical problem that provoked some o f the principal thought o f the O l d Testament, namely the case o f a weak people submerged by cataclysm—the helpless prey o f a cruel aggressor. W e can never pretend to say that those w h o have suffered the most pitiful catastrophes i n history must be regarded as ipso facto more wicked than anybody else. I n any case the judgment which lies i n the structure o f history gives none o f us the right to act as judges over others, or to gloat over the misfortunes o f the foreigner, or to scorn our neighbours as people under punishment. There is a sense i n which all that we may say on this subject and all the moral verdicts that we may pass on human history are only valid i n their application as self-judgments—only useful i n so far as we bring them home to ourselves. W h e n we are relating our personalities to the whole drama o f human destiny, when we are learning to gain the right feeling for the intimate structure o f history, we always come to regions where the most important truths only have an inner reference and an inner ratification—• as in the case o f falling i n love, when only we ourselves k n o w

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our ultimate feelings, and these are hardly matter for common discourse even i f they are capable o f communication at all. I n the privacy o f this r o o m I may say that Germany has come under judgment for what people call her Prussianism or for her adherence to a militaristic tradition. I know, however, that I have no right to say any such thing, and I very much doubt whether i t w o u l d be w i t h i n the competence o f the technical historian to assert i t . Here is the kind o f truth which is only effective provided i t is adopted and taken to heart by the nation concerned, as a matter between itself and G o d — we as outsiders, or third parties, are not entitled to presume upon it. Y o u may make i t a law to yourself to turn the other cheek when I strike you, and I may take the corresponding attitude i n the event o f anybody striking me. W h a t w o u l d be the last w o r d i n effrontery w o u l d be for me to tell y o u that i t was your duty to turn the other cheek when I am the aggressor. I n this sense some o f the most important truths about the human drama, precisely because o f their intimacy, are not always two-way affairs. Indeed, we may see judgment i n history—see a nation broken because o f actual sins that even the outsider may put his finger o n — b u t we are not permitted to use the occasion i n order to feed our self-righteousness. Such a nation only suffers, i n reality, for its part i n man's universal sin. I f one studies the way the thing which we call Prussianism (and which we ought to call Hohenzollernism) was imposed on unwilling provinces i n the latter half o f the seventeenth century, and was imposed to meet problems o f anarchy, disunity and external danger which otherwise seemed insoluble; or i f one studies another thing that has long been buried i n this country by a kind o f historical w r i t i n g which I must regard as war-propaganda—if one studies the resistance that had to be overcome before the modern Prussian A r m y and the Kaiser's B i g Navy were established—at every further degree o f analysis one learns a thousand tilings to explain the phenomenon o f modern Germany i n understandable human terms, namely

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as the result o f that kind o f human nature which exists everywhere. I t is all like the case o f our use o f the atomic bomb i n Japan. Some people, looking at i t one way, may say, 'This is unforgivable'; others who look at i t in a different way may show that i t is humanly explicable all the same. Though the judgment is always upon us—upon man's universal sin—the sentence falls on great human systems, on nations, civilisations, institutions; indeed on all the schematised patterns into which human life ranges itself in various periods. The systems break, the organisations crumble, though man himself goes on; and for this amongst other reasons we must never regard these systems and organisations as being the actual end o f life, the ultimate purpose o f history. The very things which provide the neat developing patterns in our history books—provide the supra-personal edifices like state, culture, capitalism, liberalism—and which are associated w i t h the idea o f progress, are the things which are shattered when the j u d g ment falls on men. W e can take the present opportunity, therefore, to make an important assertion concerning the whole meaning o f the human drama. Some people may say: ' W e l l , the city-state went under, but i t gave way to the nation-state; the nation-state is superseded by empires; empires are being surpassed by w o r l d powers. Here is the meaning and the purpose o f history , sheer organisation being carried to a higher power, the larger unit swallowing up the smaller.' This, however, is a shaky structure on which to erect a system o f values; for all that history knows so far is the case o f organisations that grow until they reach a breaking-point, events becoming inextricably entangled, the story piling up into dialectical jams and hopeless dilemmas, and most men feeling so utterly helpless that they become merely fatalistic as their system falls. For one thing, as organisation becomes more high and intense a totally new range o f baffling problems confronts the intellect, which can hardly adjust itself quickly enough, so that one gets the feeling that statesmanship itself is baffled—the men

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are not clever enough to manage the machine. I n any case, i f either science or organisation outrun the moral education o f human beings, i t is difficult to see w h o could deny that judgment here comes i n history as remorsely as the operation o f any forces i n real-politik. Even i f all this were not the case, we could not say that the ultimate meaning o f history lies in the progress and development o f these great systems which form, so to speak, merely the framework for human activity. Such progress as exists i n human history is not o f the kind upon which a final evaluation o f human history can be based. A n d the same must be said o f such analogies to evolutionary development as are sometimes alleged to be found i n the history o f human organisation. A t this place i n the argument i t is possible that something i n the point o f view o f a technical historian may be o f assistance to those w h o wish to take their bearings i n the drama o f human history. The curious fact is that the historian has to learn— and he has had to learn i t consciously b y discovering that the alternative method produces unsatisfactory results—that the generations o f the past are not to be dismissed as subordinate to the later ones, mere stepping-stones to the present day, mere preparations or trial shots for an authentic achievement that was still to come. N o r are we to regard the lives o f our forefathers as mere means to an end that lies above personalities, that is to say, as subordinate to the history o f any developing system or organisation. I t lies i n the very constitution o f historical science that when we first look at our ancestors w i t h o u t this lesson i n our minds—as we are prone to d o — w e arrive at inconsistencies and distortions, and we have to tell ourselves to shift our focus, and stop regarding the Anglo-Saxons as mere links i n a chain leading to us, mere precursors, significant only because o f what they contributed to the modern w o r l d . The technique o f historical study itself demands that we shall look upon each generation as, so to speak, an end i n itself, a w o r l d o f people existing i n their o w n right. A l l o f which led the great German historian Ranke a hundred

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years ago to the important thesis that every generation is equidistant f r o m eternity. So the purpose o f life is not i n the far future, nor, as we so often imagine, around the next corner, but the whole o f it is here and now, as fully as ever i t w i l l be on this planet. It is always a ' N o w ' that is i n direct relation to eternity—not a far future; always immediate experience o f hfe that matters i n the last resort—not historical constructions based on abridged text-books or imagined visions o f some posterity that is going to be the heir o f all the ages. A n d neither do I k n o w o f any mundane fulness o f Hfe which we could pretend to possess and which was not open to people i n the age o f Isaiah or Plato, Dante or Shakespeare. I f atomic research should by some accident splinter and destroy this whole globe to-morrow, as we are told that some o f the scientists have apprehended, I imagine that i t w i l l hurt us no more than that 'death on the road* under the menace o f which we pass every day o f our lives. I t w i l l only put an end to a globe which we always knew was doomed to a bad end i n any case. I am not sure that i t w o u l d not be typical o f human history if—assuming that the w o r l d was bound some day to cease to be a possible habitation for living creatures—men should by their o w n contrivance hasten that end and anticipate the operation o f nature or o f time—because i t is so much i n the character o f Divine j u d g ment i n history that men are made to execute i t upon themselves. B u t supposing all this were to happen i t w o u l d be an optical illusion to imagine that God's purposes i n creation w o u l d thereby be cut off unfulfilled and the meaning o f hfe uprooted as though the year A.D. 2,000 or 40,000 had a closer relation to eternity than 1949. Supposing the time is to come—as I always understood that i t w o u l d — w h e n the w o r l d i n any case w i l l be no more than a w h i f f o f smoke drifting i n desolate skies, then those w h o rest their ultimate beliefs i n progress are climbing a ladder which may be as vertical as they claim i t to be, but which i n reality is resting on nothing at all. I f there is a

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meaning i n history, therefore, i t lies not i n the systems and organisations that are built over long periods, but in something more essentially human, something in each personality considered for mundane purposes as an end i n himself. T o survey history requires great elasticity o f m i n d because the processes involved are infinitely more supple and flexible than people imagine w h o make pictorial diagrams borrowed f r o m biology or other sciences, or are deceived by some pattern i n text-book abridgments, so that they look for something to which human personalities are only the means. History is not like a train, the sole purpose o f which is to get to its destination; nor like the conception diat m y youngest son has o f i t when he counts 360 days to his next birthday and reckons them all a wearisome and meaningless interim, only to be suffered for the sake o f what they are leading up to. I f we want an analogy w i t h history we must think o f something like a Beethoven symphony—the point o f it is not saved up until the end, the whole o f i t is not a mere preparation for a beauty that is only to be achieved i n the last bar. A n d though i n a sense the end may lie i n the architecture o f the whole, still in another sense each moment o f it is its o w n self-justification, each note i n its particular context as valuable as any other note, each stage o f the development having its immediate significance, apart f r o m the mere fact o f any development that does take place. I t may be the case that the people w h o once imagined that the w o r l d was soon to come to an end were i n a position to discover some fundamental aspects o f i t , and see them i n better proportion, than the nineteenth century, w i t h its picture o f indefinite progress and rising good fortune. W e envisage our history i n the proper light, therefore, i f we say that each generation—indeed each individual—exists for the glory o f God; but one o f the most dangerous tilings i n life is to subordinate human personality to production, to the state, even to civilisation itself, to anything but the glory o f God,

CHAPTER

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T H E ancient Hebrews are remarkable for the way i n which they carried to its logical conclusion the belief that there is morality i n the processes and the course o f history. They recognised that i f morality existed at all i t was there all the time and was the most important element i n human conduct; also that life, experience and history were to be interpreted i n terms o f i t . B y i t God Himself had to be explained and justified on those occasions when i t was tempting to make the charge against H i m that He was deserting His people. Indeed the religious difficulties i n those days w o u l d appear to have been largely moral ones, just as i n the modern w o r l d (by virtue o f a different phase o f human experience) we have tended to assume that the real difficulties are scientific. I n the w o r l d o f the O l d Testament i t was a moral factor which complicated men's relations w i t h God and caused their terrible wrestlings w i t h H i m , p r o voking even religious minds to protests and expostulations which sometimes quite take one's breath away. Everything that happened i n human history had to be capable o f being construed i n t o morality, i t w o u l d seem. A n d everything that happened was to be capable o f translation into terms o f moral benefit. A t the present time people seem to feel that i t is just this k i n d o f thing which was once nice and easy, but which n o w has become impossible. I t was all very well, they say, i n the neat logical days o f hope and progress, i n the snugness o f Victorian England, when everything fell into place i n an intellectual system which easily achieved the reconciliations required. They argue, however, that what is impossible i n the general chanciness and terrible cataclysms o f the twentieth century 68

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is just that attempt to connect the story w i t h morality. It i t impossible, they say, yet without i t men are t h r o w n back upon a feeling o f the total meaninglessness o f everything. A n d because so many people are worried by this inability to see any meaning in the story, the difficulties o f the present day are still moral-historical ones as i n O l d Testament times, though we are so defective i n our self-examination that we are often unaware o f the fact. Yet the power o f the O l d Testament teaching on history—perhaps the point at which the ancient Jews were most original, breaking away f r o m the religious thought o f the other peoples around them—lay precisely i n the region o f those truths which sprang f r o m a reflection on catastrophe and cataclysm, lay indeed i n their interpretation o f cataclysmic history at its worst. I t is almost impossible properly to appreciate the higher developments in the historical reflection o f the O l d Testament except i n another age which has experienced (or has found itself confronted w i t h ) colossal cataclysm, an age like the one i n which we live. Machiavelli held the view that no monarch could really k n o w anything o f statesmanship unless he was a usurper, alone against the universe and entirely dependent on his wits; for the ordinary legitimate hereditary ruler o f a State was supported by custom and the traditional affection o f his people, which enabled h i m to keep his throne w i t h o u t any special exercise o f skill. I n a similar way men may live to a great age i n days o f comparative quietness and peaceful progress, w i t h out ever having come to grips w i t h the universe, without ever vividly realising the problems and the paradoxes w i t h which human history so often confronts us. A n d we o f the twentieth century have been particularly spoiled; for the men o f the O l d Testament, the ancient Greeks and all our ancestors d o w n to the seventeenth century betray i n their philosophy and their outlook a terrible awareness o f the chanciness o f human life, and the precarious nature o f man's existence in this risky universe. These things—though they are part o f the fundamental experience o f mankind—have been

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greatly concealed from recent generations because modern science and organisation enabled us to build up so tremendous a barrier against fire, famine, plague and violence. The modern w o r l d created so vast a system o f insurance against the contingencies and accidents o f time, that we imagined all the risk eliminated—imagined that i t was normal to have a smooth going-on, and that the uncertainties o f life i n the past had been due to mere inefficiency. A l l the same, when men used to talk o f making the w o r l d safe for democracy, one suspected that one heard half an echo o f a satirical laugh a great distance away, somewhere amongst the inter-planetary spaces. After that, statesmen became still more presumptuous and promised that by a victory i n war they could secure for the w o r l d 'freedom f r o m fear'; but i t has not taken us long to realise—with what wealth o f dreadful meaning—that there are occasions when God mocks. I t once seemed likely that all our modern system o f insurance against danger only meant that perhaps we m i g h t have fewer wars i n future but they w o u l d be so much bigger when they came as to cancel out the profit—the bulge i n the india-rubber ball w o u l d simply come out i n another place. W e have n o w reason to ask ourselves whether even this was n o t i n all probability an illusion; for, besides being bigger than before, we might well wonder i f the wars are not also to be more frequent. I t is questionable whether even we can believe again that the next war w i l l end all war, instead o f rendering still a further one more urgendy necessary w i t h i n a shorter time than before. Whether we escape the deluge or not, therefore^ we are confronted by the threat o f i t on a scale out o f all c o m parison w i t h what was even feared i n 1914. A n d history has resumed its risky, cataclysmic character. W h e n we think o f some o f the catastrophic events o f history, like the fall o f the R o m a n Empire i n the West, or perhaps the N o r m a n Conquest o f England, we can find an easy reconciliation w i t h them—indeed historians seem to fall unconsciously into the habit o f w r i t i n g about them as though

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i t had turned out to be a good thing in the long run that they did take place. W e do not find people saying that life has no meaning because such things happened as the fall o f R o m e or the N o r m a n Conquest—men point rather to the new w o r l d that was able t o arise i n due course o f time on the ruins o f the old one. This is a view which seems to i m p l y an acquiescence i n some idea o f vicarious suffering, for nobody can doubt that such catastrophes were dreadful for great numbers o f men w h o had to live through them, and w h o had not even the comfort o f k n o w i n g that f r o m their sufferings there might issue a w o r l d more happy than before. There are other catastrophes, h o w ever, which do not admit o f so easy a reconciliation—for example those M o n g o l invasions which came like a smear over so many o f the lands between Europe and Asia, and which had so great a part i n permanently setting back the civilisation o f Russia, and i n destroying for ever the glory o f places like Baghdad. A n d such were the invasions o f the Ottoman Turks, who, when they were turned out o f the Balkans i n the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, left behind them a scene w h i c h gives the impression that the Balkan peninsula had just come out o f a dark tunnel lasting hundreds o f years. I t might be claimed that for all students w h o hope to understand either history or the problem o f its interpretation the importance o f ancient studies is greater than is usually recognised. I t w o u l d not be an exaggeration to say that those people w h o study merely nineteenth-century history, and see the nineteenth century running by apparently natural processes into the w o r l d o f the present day, are liable to fall into a routine kind o f thinking which actually incapacitates them for any appreciation o f the profounder characteristics o f our time. I n the ancient w o r l d , where a long series o f centuries allows us to see h o w historical episodes ultimately worked themselves out; i n more simple forms o f society where events are less entangled, so that causes may be seen more clearly leading to their effects; i n antique city-states, where we can more

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easily view the body politic as a whole and where developments are telescoped into a shorter compass, so that the p r o cesses are more easily traceable—in all such cases as these the student o f history may reach a profounder wisdom than can come f r o m any vision o f the nineteenth century through the eyes o f the twentieth. Even i f this were not true i t might be well i f all historical students were induced to occupy themselves w i t h an internal analysis o f a few m i g h t y episodes i n history—the fall o f the R o m a n Empire, for example, or the scientific revolution o f the seventeenth century—episodes which have represented the climax o f human vicissitude and endeavour, high peaks i n the experience o f humanity o n the earth. B y all these lines o f argument the events i n the centre o f which stands the famous Exile o f the ancient Jews ought to be an element i n the curriculum o f every serious student o f the past. They are more contemporary w i t h the moral predicament o f this part o f the w o r l d since 1939 or 1945 than anything i n the history o f the nineteenth century. A n d they enable us to see t o what an extent our religious thought itself has developed from wrestlings w i t h God and reflection on tragic history. I t is possible that the power o f much o f the O l d Testament teaching about history w o u l d be more v i v i d l y appreciated, and its relevance to the twentieth century more readily recognised, i f only we could rid ourselves o f an obsession and genuinely convince ourselves that the history o f the ancient Hebrews was fundamentally o f the same texture as our o w n . There is ample evidence that i n their o w n great days, i n the age o f the mighty prophets for example, they looked back upon their o w n distant past i n the way i n which we ourselves n o w look back to them; and i n manifold ways they express the thought w i t h which the twentieth century itself is so familiar—the longing o f Psalm 44: ' W e have heard w i t h our ears, O God, and our fathers have told us, what w o r k though didst i n their days, i n the times o f old.' It w o u l d appear to have been one o f the functions o f the great prophets to point out that God was

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still acting and intervening i n history as i n the time o f Moses— that history i n their more modern age and the history o f the days o f their forefathers must be regarded as running all i n a single piece. A n d there is ample evidence o f the repeated failure o f the prophets to achieve the task—ample evidence o f the desire that God should show Himself more plainly, as i n the ancient days, so that people should not be able to ignore His part i n history any more. W h a t was unique about the ancient Hebrews was their historiography rather than their history—the fact that their finer spirits saw the hand o f God i n events, ultimately realising that i f they were the Chosen People they were chosen for the purpose o f transmitting that discovery to all the other nations. Their historiography was unique also i n that i t ascribed the successes o f Israel not to virtue but to the favour o f God; and instead o f narrating the glories or demonstrating the righteousness o f the nation, like our modern patriotic histories, i t denounced the infidelity o f the people, denounced i t not as an occasional thing but as the constant feature o f the nation's conduct throughout the centuries; even proclaiming at times that the sins o f Israel were worse, and their hearts more hardened against the light, than those o f the other nations around them. The great religious thought which stands as the O l d Testament interpretation o f the whole human drama was clearly the w o r k o f a few select souls—of great prophets often standing w i t h their backs to the wall, for example—in a nation whose history otherwise ran under very much the same rules as the history o f other peoples. I t is even possibly true to say also that the makers o f the O l d Testament, while having an extraordinary feeling for the might and grandeur o f the human drama, were not historically-minded i n the sense that this term has come to have i n the twentieth century—not interested i n seeing that the past should be accurately recorded for its o w n sake, or that all the great episodes i n the history o f their country should be put into narrative for the sake o f posterity. I suppose that we all find i t difficult to remember h o w small

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a country the ancient Hebrews possessed—at largest only the size o f Wales, and sometimes only the size o f one or t w o o f our average counties—while i t is easy to forget for h o w short a period even before the Christian era they were ever able to exist as an independent monarchy. I t is remarkable that so small a nation should have come to occupy so great a place i n the history o f the w o r l d ; and George A d a m Smitli, i n his Historical Geography of the Holy Land, has given us cogent reasons for not accepting any mere geographical determinism as the explanation o f their peculiar historical destiny—cogent reasons for regarding the story as an example o f the triumph o f the human soul over physical conditions. I t was a stormy history that the country had, moreover, w i t h only a remarkably short period o f political independence, and i t has been questioned whether any area o f the earth felt the tramp o f troops more often than Palestine d i d i n the period d o w n to the opening o f the Christian era. The great original contributions o f the ancient Hebrews to both religious and historical thought are curiously connected w i t h the period when this stormy history came to its climax, and the country was engulfed i n the conflicts between the vast empires i n their neighbourhood. Once again i t is necessary to remember that their fate i n this respect was not unique—they experienced that cataclysmic history w h i c h we find constandy recurring as the centuries succeed one another i n this precarious universe. A t the critical moment i t was all as though they found themselves between a Nazi Germany and a Soviet Russia, and by the rules o f the game they too ought to have been smeared off the map—ought to be as dead as the Hittites and as d i m i n our memory as Tyre and Sidon. Some o f us used to wonder whether after the Second W o r l d W a r the Germans, in«the very bottom pit o f disaster, might not give twentieth-century history a surprising turn and gain a new kind o f leadership amongst us, perhaps by a religious revival, perhaps by the fact that sheer grimness o f suffering brings men sometimes into a profounder understanding o f human destiny. B u t i t appears that unless great spiritual resources are there

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already men tend rather to he prostrate—to droop as mere victims o f conditions and circumstances. Even without taking any religious point o f view at all, but adopting the purely mundane reckonings o f a secular historian, one may say that amid disasters and predicaments more permanently hopeless than those o f present-day Germany, and amid a catastrophic history compared w i t h which the story o f modern Belgium or Poland is one o f blessedness and peace, the ancient Hebrews, by virtue o f inner resources and unparalleled leadership, turned their tragedy, turned their very helplessness, into one o f the half-dozen creative moments i n w o r l d history. I n particular the period already mentioned, the period associated w i t h the Jewish Exile, provides us w i t h a remarkable example o f the way i n which the human spirit can ride disaster and w r i n g victory out o f the very extremity o f defeat. W e have had an opportunity i n recent years o f picturing to ourselves the chilling horrors associated w i t h the displacement o f populations, and some o f us may have made for ourselves a vision o f such a tribulation as almost a kind o f living death. Such tilings apparently took place amongst the g r i m empires o f the ancient w o r l d , to the cruelty o f which our o w n w o r l d has been fast reverting. Yet both under these conditions and through a long period o f other vicissitudes the O l d Testament people vindicated human freedom and the power o f personality. They showed that by resources inside themselves, they might turn their very catastrophe into a spring-board for human achievement, even when the catastrophe was o f that irresistible kind which breaks men's backs. There is something very moving at times i n Negro spirituals —something which makes one feel that human nature under pressure can reach a creative moment, and find a higher end o f life ( i f only i n the arts) than the mere continuance o f material comfort had seemed to offer them. I t is not O l d Testament doctrine, so far as I know, but i t w o u l d seem that one o f the clearest and most concrete o f the facts o f history is the fact that men o f spiritual resources may not only redeem catastrophe,

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but turn i t into a grand creative moment. I t is hard to r i d oneself o f the impression that i n generatthe highest vision and the rarest creative achievements o f the m i n d must come from great internal pressure, and are born o f a high degree o f distress. I n other words, the w o r l d is not merely to be enjoyed but is an arena for moral striving. I f the end o f history lies i n personalities, which represent the highest things we k n o w i n the m u n dane realm, then we must face the fact that the purpose o f history is not something that lies a thousand years ahead o f us—it is constandy here, always w i t h us, for ever achieving itself—the end o f human history is the manufacture and education o f human souls. History is the business o f making personalities, even so to speak by putting them through the m i l l ; and, though i t fails us i f we expect i t to hand us happiness on a spoon, its very vicissitudes bring personality itself to a finer texture. I t is necessary to take a long period into our survey all at once, and to be careful on that dangerous ground where the knowledge o f the specialist may affect the state o f the question. B u t i f we examine the things which the ancient Hebrews were thinking i n the times o f their great tribulation we shall find that they are matters o f very real interest to the general historian. For one thing, though they may have concerned themselves w i t h the matter before, this people seemed to be having to strain their minds to reach at the truth that the k i n d o f righteousness which God demanded o f them consisted not i n ritualistic observance and mere burned offerings, but i n doing good and showing mercy; and i t is interesting that we should possess documente i n which the change o f emphasis f r o m one k i n d o f righteousness to another—from the ritualistic to the ethical idea—was being carried out i n a maimer that was to affect the whole history o f mankind. Further than this, because Jerusalem, on which they had set their hearts, had been razed to the ground, and because their country, on which their religion had been too closely fixed, had fallen into the hands o f the enemy—they themselves having been carried away i n exile

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i n great numbers—they n o w raised their hopes to something less materialistic, and i t seems to me that you can actually see religion becoming a more spiritual thing. Then again, precisely because they had been broken and had ceased even to be an organic people i n the older political sense, those o f them w h o had been scattered and found themselves n o w strangers i n an alien land learned to picture their situation differendy. They came to see more vividly that God was not merely interested i n them as a nation i n a single piece, a corporate c o m munity, but was concerned w i t h them as individuals scattered i n an alien country, concerned moreover w i t h the other individuals around them, even though these belonged to different nations altogether. They gained a firmer apprehension o f H i m as the God o f all the peoples o f the earth, but not merely o f peoples—He was God for individuals as such. I n addition to all this i t seems to me that the ancient Hebrews, i n the period o f their tribulation, gave much o f their most anxious thought to the whole problem o f human destiny, and superimposed upon their former beliefs on the subject o f judgment in history certain peculiar but extremely interesting ideas. Even n o w their views come short o f anything like the Christian outlook on history, but i n the development o f our religion at each stage o f the story the old truth is not cancelled — i t stands as a sort o f substratum to the new, so that the things which the O l d Testament arrived at are ultimately gathered into the Christian synthesis, though often i n some sense transformed or transcended. I n any case one can hardly resist the feeling that i n the w o r k o f some o f the major prophets the tragedy o f human history has that sort o f might and grandeur which we often associate w i t h the name o f Beethoven. A n d they even lacked three o f the things which ease the path o f the modern Christian w h o has to deal w i t h this question: the doctrine o f original sin, which affects any notion o f history as judgment; the idea o f a future life, w i t h a redistribution o f fortunes in another w o r l d ; and the Christian scheme o f salvation. Unless we imagine people w h o were confronting the tragic

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spectacle o f their history i n an inescapable manner, and wrestling w i t h it, so to speak, as one might wrestle w i t h things when standing alone i n the face o f a universe somewhat terrifying —unless we realise that the problems were being faced when everything was at high pressure—even the loftiest achievements o f Hebrew prophecy w i l l leave us cold. I n situations that must have been beyond weeping some o f the thought about man i n history carries us to such rarefied realms that we can hardly conceive o f the exaltation o f m i n d i n which a Hebrew prophet could have produced i t . The awful nature and the v i v i d reality o f their catastrophe comes home to us when we meet that conception, so interesting to the historian, o f the Remnant o f Israel, which was to survive the cataclysm, as Noah and his family had survived the Flood, and which—whether they had remained faithful all the time, or because they had been brought to their senses by the thuds and thunders o f disaster — w o u l d still carry God's promises to fulfilment and inherit all the promises. Even i f the Remnant were only a handful i t w o u l d inherit the fulness o f the Promise, and all the hope that history ever offered to man. Jewish history had been based on the Promise, but the thunderous message o f judgment i n history' which the prophets came to announce seemed sometimes to denote a final judgment on the nation, i n other words an utter destruction. I t came to be realised, however, that the idea o f history as Judgment was superimposed on the idea o f history as Promise, but w i t h o u t superseding the earlier idea—without actually cancelling the Promise. I n the very depths o f disaster i t came to be realised that i f God had used the Assyrians to bring a punishment upon Israel, still i t was not Israel but the Assyrians whose name w o u l d be blotted out o f the land o f the living for the very presumption w h i c h they had shown i n their time o f victory. The judgments might be terrible, but, for the children o f God, the O l d Testament view o f history was always one o f hope. I t was perhaps i n keeping w i t h this that there emerged the messianic expectation, which issued on occasion i n such fine

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nostalgic poetry. I n so far as i t was a hankering for a mere political deliverer, w h o w o u l d bring victory i n battle and carry the nation to prosperity and power—which seems to have been its prevailing f o r m — w e may regard i t as a simple and facile kind o f wishful thinking, interesting to the historian precisely because i t further illustrates h o w the history o f the ancient Jews tends to resemble that o f other nations. Some writers have argued that this political messianism represented a significant moment i n human development, since i t taught men to look for a grand consummation w i t h i n the realm o f human history itself—it taught people that events were pointing to some end actually to be achieved and enjoyed on the stage o f human history. I t has even become fashionable to say that this Jewish hope—a hope fixed i n the realm o f temporal affairs, though possibly i n the far future—only required to be secularised i n order to become the modern idea o f progress, which also purports to give meaning to history by presenting i t w i t h a goal i n an ever-receding future, but always w i t h i n the realm o f temporal affairs. I t is not easy to accept this attempt to salvage Jewish political messianism, for i f i t produced the effects described i t is not clear that i t did not mislead the w o r l d , and we pay i t a doubtful compliment i f we make i t the parent o f the particular idea o f progress that is relevant to the case. This political messianism may have led the ancient Jews themselves to political mistakes and disasters at a later time; and i t does not make much difference to the political aspect o f the case i f people, i n periods o f religious fervour, thought that the political deliverer w o u l d be sent by God. Forms o f messianism are not rare i n history and the modern historian has seen traces o f i t i n sixteenth-century Europe, where, after the turmoils o f the previous age and the turbulence o f over-mighty subjects, the new messiah seemed to be the despotic king. W e have not only courted disillusionment i n the twentieth century by this f o r m o f day-dreaming, but i t might even be said, that like the ancient Jews, we have been

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deluded into a false messianism which has drawn us into w r o n g policies and brought the w o r l d to more than one disaster. A nation i n a desperate mood has more than once been ready to welcome the dictator as the saviour for w h o m i t had been yearning. O n the other hand, when i n the First W o r l d W a r Englishmen thought o f ' m a k i n g the w o r l d safe for democracy', or talked o f 'the war that w o u l d end all war'—alternatively when, i n the struggle against Hitler, they tried to be apocalyptic about the four freedoms and dreamed that the w o r l d was being cleansed for ever f r o m the evil thing—they were reverting to a primitive messianism not only over t w o thousand years old, but representing a somewhat inferior version o f the ideas o f that ancient period. O r rather—since wise and good men fall i n weak moments into this kind o f messianism—it is not too much to see i n the phenomenon something that is fundamental to the human mind, something that appears therefore as a recurring pattern i n history. I t was only at a further stage—at a stage which we might almost describe as ultra-messianic—that ancient Hebrew thought really came to grips w i t h the problem o f their catastrophic history. B u t this whole branch o f Jewish thought on the subject o f the human drama was to be wonderfully redeemed at a later date, and was to become wonderfully relevant, when i t became spiritualised and was brought to a different k i n d o f fulfilment i n die Christian revelation. I n the time o f catastrophe all w o u l d have been easy for prophets and teachers i f God's judgment had fallen only on the wicked, so that the righteous had been spared; but as thought came to focus itself on occasion upon individual people, rather than upon the nation as a whole, the critical problem for the ancient Hebrews was provided by the incidence o f suffering i n the w o r l d . Even the fate o f the nation as a whole could not be continuously interpreted as the effect o f a judgment and was bound sooner or later to present the problem o f undeserved catastrophe. There are signs that the Hebrew prophets dealt tentatively w i t h this problem at first, and put

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out experimental suggestions concerning the incidence o f catastrophe. Ezekiel, puzzled to see that some o f the unrighteous survived the disaster which God had brought upon the wicked, conjectured that they had been allowed to live i n order that their wickedness should provide a standing witness to the provocation that had been given to Heaven. 'Ye shall see their ways and their doings; and ye shall be comforted concerning the evil that I have brought upon Jerusalem . . . and ye shall k n o w that I have not done w i t h o u t cause all that I have done/ The converse case—the case where the doctrine o f judgment was palpably insufficient to account for the incidence o f suffering—represents the problem which seems to have exercised some o f the highest thought o f the O l d Testament. A t this point i n the argument a different shape was given to the f o r m u lation o f the whole human drama. The Hebrew prophets i n the periods o f successive disaster found what might almost be called new patterns i n history; but the w o r d pattern itself is too hard to be applied to anything so elastic as history, and I see no harm and possibly some good i f we call these things rather myths, using the w o r d m y t h not to represent something untrue or something which did not happen, but to typify an essential process i n history. Galileo's name is identified w i t h one o f these myths or patterns o f essential truth; for when he adopted something like the modern doctrine o f inertia (the view that a body once i n motion continues that m o t i o n to infinity unless something intervenes to stop or deflect i t ) , he was opening a gateway to modern science, but he was specifying something he could never have seen i n its actual purity, because things become so entangled, and i n the actual w o r l d there are always problems o f air-resistance, gravity, etc., affecting the issue. W h e n the Marxists say that history works on the principle o f thesis fighting its antithesis, the conflict resulting i n the discovery o f a new synthesis, then that view is extremely interesting to an historian, even though i t were to be shown that no such case ever existed i n a state o f absolute purity. It represents an aspect o f truth i n respect o f the workings

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o f history—a better m y t h or pattern to have by us than the generally accepted view o f a linear development, an ascending course o f progress i n history. Similarly when Professor Toynbee talks o f challenge and response i n history—calls our attention to the kind o f challenge which a given environment may give to certain people—he has found a m y t h or a pattern i n the sense which we are here giving to the words, something so wonderful i n its elasticity that i n a certain sense we can apply i t almost anywhere i n history, though a critic might pick holes i n any particular application o f the idea i n actual life, where all tilings are so inextricably entangled. Perhaps the most familiar o f the myths or patterns used to typify p r o cesses that take place i n history is the conception o f a Renaissance, which, according to one suggestion, is associated w i t h the idea o f the phoenix rising to new life out o f its o w n ashes. It happens that I personally w o u l d question the validity o f that particular formula or symbol, when used i n the way we do use i t to indicate the kind o f thing which happens i n history; but i t pleases technical historians immensely, and i t illustrates very aptly the kind o f point that I wish to make about the application o f diese symbols or images; for, having begun w i t h a single Renaissance, the Renaissance o f the fifteenth century, historians discovered that here was a pattern which could be kept i n regular stock and pulled out o f the drawer on a great number o f occasions. They discovered one Renaissance behind another and applied the concept i n many varied fields; and indeed there is no reason w h y , supposing the concept to be legitimate or useful i n the first instance, one should not find a Renaissance every time a new generation grows up, or a Renaissance somewhere or other every ten years. N o w the ancient Hebrews contributed a number o f these myths or essential patterns which were to be symbols o f historical processes or formulas for something fundamental and significant i n history; and one o f the best ever produced, for example, is the simile o f the leaven that leavens the whole lump, while the idea o f the Remnant o f Israel, which was to

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inherit all the promises, has its o w n applicability i n history, as we can see i f we consider the Catholic Church after the fall o f the R o m a n Empire, or possibly even the position o f the Church at the present day. B u t the most remarkable o f all such types or patterns was the famous picture o f the Suffering Servant, w h o was wounded for our transgressions and w h o is described w i t h such amazing vision i n the latter half o f the prophecy o f Isaiah, especially the fifty-third chapter, which has been called the greatest religious poem i n the w o r l d . I t does not matter for our particular purpose whether this Suffering Servant were intended to describe an individual w h o had actually lived, or the author's autobiographical experience, or the figure o f some future Messiah. N o r does i t matter i f the picture o f the Suffering Servant is meant to denote a collective body, like the people o f Israel themselves (or the people o f Israel idealised), or to mark out prophetically the ideal role o f the Church i n the w o r l d . I t does not even matter i f the picture owes something to a kind o f pagan ritual, or is coloured by the part ascribed to the K i n g i n a Babylonian cultus. The fact that these alternative theories have been held—sometimes a number o f them concurrently by the same scholars— increases the strength o f the argument that here at any rate is a pattern or representation o f something which is essential, something which lies at the roots o f history. The passages i n question deal undoubtedly w i t h the problem o f suffering, i n a period which at least some scholars regard as contemporary w i t h the Book o f Job. W i t h o u t destroying the former teaching concerning judgment, they superimpose upon that teaching a remarkable piece o f further interpretation, i n which catastrophe is no longer construed as the mark o f God's special anger against the victims o f i t . The original idea that catastrophe was a judgment is not eliminated, and still lies at the basis o f everything—indeed i f we took i t away the fifty-third chapter o f Isaiah w o u l d lose much o f its meaning — b u t so much which is new is built upon i t that i t is c o m pletely transcended. I n this connection the same type o f

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reasoning applies, mutatis mutandis, whatever particular version o f the Suffering Servant is adopted, but for purposes o f example we may take a fairly conservative and central reading o f i t . O n this view the Suffering Servant is the nation Israel, and i f she suffered adversities and even national extinction, i t is n o w realised that this was not because she was wickeder and worse than Assyria or Babylon or Persia, but precisely because she was better, or at least because she had a mission, her sufferings being a necessary part o f a Divine Plan. The nation Israel suffered as God's messenger, suffered i n order to expiate the sins o f the Gentiles; she took their guilt and punishment upon herself, and accepted the consequences o f their sins. Israel suffered for all mankind—so that when the Gentiles should hear o f i t and realise i t themselves, even that knowledge alone w o u l d move them and exert a redeeming influence upon them — t h e very spectacle w o u l d move the nations to penitence. A n d behind the whole argument is the assumption that i f Israel as a nation could realise that this was her role i n the w o r l d , she w o u l d become reconciled to her suffering and see some meaning i n i t , and w o u l d no longer cry out against God or complain against the apparent injustice o f i t . I f the picture o f the Suffering Servant is to be read as i m p l y i n g the nation Israel, as so many people have thought, there can be no doubt o f its remarkable applicability to the case o f the ancient Jews. This whole piece o f teaching also marks i n an extraordinarily v i v i d way the widening o f the horizon o f that people—the transition to the realisation that Jehovah is the God o f all the nations, and is planning to capture all the Gentiles into his fold. I should be incompetent to discuss the high theological implications o f this teaching, but these i n any case do not concern us at the moment. I am also unable to estimate its i m p o r tance i n the history o f man's moral life, though so far as I can see i t marks a stage—and perhaps i t is the first coherent summary o f that stage, or at any rate the first that most o f us are likely to come across—in the development o f still a new and

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transformed conception o f righteousness, a new posture o f human beings under the sun, and a new role to be performed by man i n the whole human drama. I n a curious sense, however, this particular teaching (wrapped up i n the most moving poetry) is i n any case the last voice to posterity f r o m the heart o f catastrophic history at its most despairing depths. I f J were to pretend to say anything i n order to reconcile a people to a calamitous history, you might very well ask me what do I k n o w o f calamity i n any case? I f I answered that all m y views on the subject were echoed f r o m people w h o cried out o f the bottom pit o f tragedy, you might still say that we must not take any notice o f victims like these, because such sufferers are always given to nostalgias, day-dreams and wishful thinking. I never feel quite sure that i t is legitimate to use both o f these arguments at once. Even granting that i t is justifiable, however, the objections are inapplicable i n the present case. Y o u cannot by any f o r m o f reasoning evade the tragedy o f history, any more than by merely holding a particular scientific theory y o u can make even a cut f r o m a penknife hurt any less. Y o u cannot by philosophy alter the fact—supposing i t were a fact and also i t were w o r t h bothering about—that i t may be possible for scientists, ten years hence, shall we say, to disintegrate the earth itself. B u t the picture o f the Suffering Servant, unlike the more superficial political messianism o f the ancient Jews, takes i n the tragedy as i t actually exists and embraces i t w i t h both arms. The writer does not complain n o w that the catastrophe o f the nation is against the rules, but accepts i t as part o f the game, recognising that i t has its place i n the scheme o f things. He even goes further and induces us to see that, far f r o m being meaningless, i t provides the nearest thing to a clue for those w h o wish to make anything out o f the human drama. A n d that d i m clue, even i f we only take i t at the ordinary human level, is left, like all the important things i n life, for each person to follow up i n his o w n way; just as we all k n o w that men fall i n love but we do not merely imitate one another, and

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i f we could see inside one another we should no doubt find that i t means different things to different people, precisely because, where things are intimate, they arise as a new creation inside each person. N o b o d y can pretend to see the meaning o f this human drama as a god might see i t , any more than one could hope to foresee die future—what one acquires is a vision for w o r k i n g purposes i n the w o r l d , and one gains i t by adopting an attitude, assuming a certain role w i t h i n the drama itself. For any reconciliation to be achieved, i t requires to be assumed, at this point i n O l d Testament thought, that the nation has great spiritual resources and recognises a Divine plan i n history, recognises also that i t has a mission i n that scheme, a mission which, though prescribed by God, must be accepted as selfassumed. I t w i l l then read its o w n sufferings as part o f the plan and part o f the mission, and w i l l regard them as undertaken vicariously on behalf o f others. I t must do this, i n a certain sense, o f its o w n motion, because nobody has any right to tell anybody else to see his sufferings i n that way. Ultimately our interpretation o f the whole human drama depends on an intimately personal decision concerning the part that we mean to play i n i t . I t is as though we were to say to ourselves: 'There is dissonance i n the universe, but i f I strike the right note i t becomes harmony and reconciliation — a n d though they may k i l l me for i t they cannot spoil that harmony.' A n d here is where the thought o f the ancient Jews goes one note higher than the top o f the piano, so to speak, and meditation upon history drives one into ultra-historical realms—the interpretation o f the human drama is t h r o w n back into the intimate recesses o f our personal experience. Here also is the place where the O l d Testament most gives the impression that i t is trying to break into the N e w . I t has often been pointed out that y o u cannot moralise history or achieve a reconciliation w i t h i t except by some development o f a doctrine o f vicarious suffering. That thesis is still important,

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the question o f supernatural religion apart—important as a thesis about history considered merely as a study o f human relations. A n d though i t might be a remarkable thing to find an example o f the Suffering Servant existing i n its absolute p u r i t y — t h o u g h there may have been only one perfect fulfilment o f i t i n history—it is impossible to deny this picture its place as the pattern or the working-model o f ideas which do i n fact operate throughout the ages, helping to reconcile man w i t h his destiny. W e must note also that the ancient Jews, w h o i n their attitude to history seemed to attach too much to the idea o f the solidarity o f their nation as an organic whole, began to break that idea d o w n and came to achieve a heightened sense o f the importance o f the individual person— but only to go further and establish the solidarity o f the human race at a higher level o f thought altogether. Vicarious suffering—and especially the idea o f one man taking on himself the sins o f others—implies a solidarity o f this kind, achieved this time not on anything like what we call the herd-level, but by a principle o f love, and actually even by a heightened conception o f personality. Indeed i t w o u l d appear that only i n a w o r l d where suffering is possible, and vicarious suffering attainable, can human beings measure the heights and depths o f love and reach the finer music o f life. Because there is tragedy i n history love itself is brought to burn w i t h an intenser flame i n human experience. The whole conception seems the more remarkable when we consider that i t has to be superimposed upon that picture o f human nature i n history, which we discussed at an earlier stage i n these lectures. Even so, i t is not possible to convince oneself that the men o f the O l d Testament had resolved the paradoxes o f history or found a completely satisfactory interpretation o f the human drama. Many significant things seem to have been discovered i n the interval between the O l d Testament and the N e w . The O l d Testament interpretation o f secular history is a necessary substratum to Christianity, or i t provides the ground-plan for the edifice. I t is difficult to see h o w anybody could

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understand an 'historical religion'—or accept a Christian view o f history—without this initial substratum. There is another aspect o f human vicissitude w h i c h ought to be considered when we attempt to take stock o f the whole spectacle o f world-history; and that is the tragic element w h i c h so often appears i n the wars and struggles o f mankind, though the belligerents themselves are often too passionately engaged to recognise this element o f tragedy, having eyes for nothing save the crimes o f the enemy. The great conflicts that occur between vast bodies o f human beings w o u l d obviously not have taken place i f all men had been perfect saints or had been competing w i t h one another i n self-sacrifice. Yet—as i n the great struggles between Protestant and Catholic i n the sixteenth century—it has often happened that both o f the parties carrying on the warfare have devoutly felt themselves to be i n the right. I t is even true that many o f the inhuman conflicts o f mankind w o u l d probably never have taken place i f the situation had been one o f completely righteous men confronted by undiluted and unmitigated crime. One can hardly fail to recognise the element o f tragedy i n many conflicts which take place between one half-right that is perhaps too w i l f u l , and another half-right that is perhaps too proud. I t is even possible that great wars should come about because idealists are too egotistical concerni n g their o w n plans o f salvation for mankind, and because the righteous are stiff-necked. Here is a side o f human history which makes i t necessary to reflect further on the nature o f human beings. I t is not always easy to realise h o w i n modern times we have come to adopt as our initial conception o f a human being a pattern that w o u l d be more fitting for gods. A speaker once put forward the view that a person w h o was unable to write poetry was hardly a complete man; he did not extend the principle to the w r i t i n g o f music, but he had caught f r o m the liberals a view o f man w h i c h was beyond the range o f mortals. Those w h o are scholars and philosophers too easily believe that the unlettered do not really taste life, or that people w h o are

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ignorant i n some field o f knowledge are less than men. Let us be clear: The whole human race together may compass a great range o f knowledge, experience and capacities; but all these are terribly broken and splintered between all the individuals that go to compose the race; and all o f us lack a multitude o f those things which the liberal w o u l d regard as essential to a complete man or a completely rounded view o f life. The splintering, however, is much more serious and goes much deeper, for i t even extends to our vision. Each o f us is more or less restricted to a narrow vision, gravely conditioned by time, temperament and age, and by the platform on which w e happen to be standing. The most friendly foreign offices, the most friendly historians belonging to different nationalities, find somewhere or other the place where they cannot enter into one another's points o f view. The Marxists are right when they assume that a member o f a certain social class, even i f he is unselfish, is liable to be limited i n his outlook by the fact that he sees things f r o m the platform o f that social class. W e may think that we have a spacious vision, level and equal as i t takes i n wide horizons; but i n reality each o f us looks upon the w o r l d from a special peep-hole o f his o w n . Where actual interests complicate a question and a certain amount o f wishful thinking may give a bias to our minds, i t is doubtful whether i t is possible for any o f us to survey a problem comprehensively. A n d i t is certain that we fail to realise our incompetence i n an art that is o f the greatest importance for human relations—the simple art o f putting ourselves i n the other person's place. The situation is still further complicated by a certain human predicament which we are too seldom conscious of, and w h i c h I can only call the predicament o f Hobbesian fear—Hobbesian because i t was subjected to particular analysis by the seventeenth-century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. I f y o u imagine yourself locked i n a r o o m w i t h another person w i t h w h o m y o u have often been on the most bitterly hostile terms i n the past, and suppose that each o f y o u has a pistol, y o u may find yourself i n a predicament i n w h i c h both o f y o u w o u l d

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like to t h r o w the pistols out o f the w i n d o w , yet i t defeats the intelligence to find a way o f doing i t . I f y o u throw yours out the first you rob the other man o f the only reason he had for getting r i d o f his o w n , and for anything y o u k n o w he may break the bargain. I f both o f y o u swear to t h r o w the pistols out together, y o u may feel that he may make the gesture o f hurling his away, but i n reality hold tight to i t , while you, i f y o u have done the honest thing, w o u l d then be at his mercy. Y o u may even have an arrière-pensée that he may possibly be concealing a second pistol somewhere about his person. B o t h o f you i n fact may have an equal justification for suspecting one another, and both o f you may be men w h o i n all predicaments save this had appeared reasonably well-behaved and well-intentioned. Y o u may both o f you be utterly honest i n your desire to be at peace and to put an end to the predicament, i f only i n order to enable you to get on w i t h your business. I f some great bully were to come into the r o o m and t r y to take your pistols f r o m you, then as likely as not you w o u l d both combine against h i m , y o u w o u l d find yourselves cherished allies, find yourselves for the time being as thick as thieves. Only, after y o u had eliminated this intruder, y o u w o u l d discover to your horrible surprise that y o u were back i n the original predicament again. In international affairs i t is this situation o f Hobbesian fear which, so far as I can see, has hitherto defeated all the endeavour o f the human intellect. N o t only may both sides feel utterly self-righteous, but where a great obstruction occurs—as over the question o f toleration i n the sixteenth century, and that o f disarmament i n the twentieth—both may feel utterly baffled and frustrated; and sometimes even allies fall to blaming one another, as on one occasion papers o f all complexions i n England, out o f pure exasperation, blamed France for the failure o f the Disarmament Conference. Though one side may have more justice than another i n the particular occasion o f a conflict, there is a sense i n which war as such is i n reality a judgment on all o f us. The fundamental predicament w o u l d 4

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not exist i f men i n general were as righteous as the situation requires, and o f course the fundamental predicament is itself so maddening and exasperating that men sometimes resort to desperate measures w i t h an idea o f cutting the Gordian knot. Even i f vested interests did not enter more directly into the problem o f war, therefore, this situation o f Hobbesian fear, as I have called i t , w o u l d make i t difficult for historiography i n the long run to regard the great wars between nations or creeds as clear straight conflicts o f right against w r o n g . W e are right i f we want to see our history i n moral terms, but we are not permitted to erect the human drama into a great conflict between good and evil i n this particular way. I f there is a fundamental fight between good and evil i n history, therefore, as I think there is, we must regard i t as being waged not directly between Catholics and Protestants i n the sixteenth century, or between Germans and Russians i n the twentieth, but i n a deeper realm for the most part out o f reach o f the technical historian. I n reality the essential strategies i n the war o f good against evil are conducted w i t h i n the intimate interior o f personalities. A n d i f Christianity fights i n the w o r l d i t does not (when Churches are i n their right mind) wage war on actual flesh and blood. Like the spread o f charity or o f education and like most o f the good things o f the w o r l d , i t carries on a campaign only i n the sense that the leaven may be said to carry on a campaign when i t seeks to leaven the whole lump. For this reason the historian does not content himself w i t h a simple picture o f good men fighting bad, and he turns the crude melodrama that some people see i n life into a more m o v i n g kind o f tragedy. I n the last resort he sees human history as a pilgrimage o f all mankind, and human achievement as a grand co-operative endeavour, i n which whigs and tories complement one another, both equally necessary to the picture. I n the last resort even tories and socialists are to the historian only allies w h o happen to have fallen out w i t h one another. I n modern history this view is all the more necessary i n that,

9

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o w i n g to the complicated character o f society, moral responsibility is so subtly diffused and so camouflaged and dispersed that the forces i n a democracy may drive a government to war, or may perpetuate a grave abuse, and i t yet may be impossible to p i n the precise responsibility for this anywhere. D u r i n g the conflicts o f actual life we may have neither the time nor the materials for the understanding o f the enemy o f the moment; and i f a madman is attacking a child, one may have to take action against the madman very quickly, though one might be rather sorry for h i m i n his turn afterwards. B u t once battles are over the human race becomes i n a certain sense one again; and just as Christianity tries to bind i t together i n love, so the role o f the technical historian is that o f a reconciling m i n d that seeks to comprehend. Taking things retrospectively and recollecting i n tranquillity, the historian works over the past to cover the conflicts w i t h understanding, and explains the unlikenesses between men and makes us sensible o f their terrible predicaments; until at the finish—when all is as remote as the tale o f T r o y — w e are able at last perhaps to be a litde sorry for everybody. A n d this is particularly the case since, as L o r d Acton once pointed out, the people w h o are fighting i n real life rarely have clear vision, even o f the issues w h i c h brought them into conflict w i t h one another. Poor things—• they need the historian to follow upon their tracks sometimes i n order to discover what the bother was really about.

CHAPTER

PROVIDENCE

FIVE

A N D T H E H I S T O R I C A L PROCESS

I N a sense everything w i t h w h i c h we deal when we are discussing Christianity and history—judgment, cataclysm, p r o gress, and tragic conflict—must be a commentary on the ways o f Providence. W h a t I am proposing to do at the moment is really to give a homely h o m i l y on certain principles o f conduct which seem to me to f o l l o w f r o m the very processes o f history. A t the same time i t may be useful to enquire whether the study o f history can tell us anything about the constitution o f the providential order, and whether those w h o hold the Christian faith are likely to be affected by i t i n their most intimate feelings w i t h respect to the processes o f time. I t w o u l d be true to say o f all o f us—and i t w o u l d be particularly trtje i n our case because we happen to be living i n a democratic state—that not merely by our votes but by our actions and by all the interplay that goes on between us we are engaged i n a w o r k o f history-making—engaged i n weaving that fabric o f events upon which the historians o f the future w i l l have to w r i t e and speculate. I t is necessary, however, to remember that the pattern o f the history-making w h i c h we shall carry out w i l l not be the product o f m y w i l l or o f yours or indeed o f anybody else's, but w i l l represent i n one sense rather what m i g h t almost seem to be a compounding o f these wills or at least o f their effects—something which sometimes no single person w i l l either have intended or anticipated. A n d even so the pattern w i l l be complicated by certain other factors superadded—factors which i t is sometimes difficult for the historian either to analyse or to explain. N o b o d y ever sat d o w n w i t h a plan i n his m i n d and said, 'Go t o — l e t us n o w produce a thing called the capitalist system', or 'Let us have an industrial revolution'; and those w h o came nearest to planning the Protestant 93

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Reformation and the French Revolution threw up their hands w i t h horror when they saw the things which actually took place—swearing that they had never intended to produce anything like this. A very considerable part o f the attention o f historians is concentrated i n fact upon that kind o f history-making which goes on so to speak over our heads, n o w deflecting the results o f our actions, n o w taking our purposes out o f our hands, and n o w turning our endeavours to ends not realised. Indeed one may be carried to such depths i n one's analysis o f this, that, however many things the historian may say about the processes o f t me, he can never feel that he has uttered the last w o r d on the subject —never feel that by the technique o f his particular science he has really got to the truth that lies at the bottom o f the well. Ranke, one o f the greatest analysts o f the historical process, more than once called attention to something subtle i n history which remained at the finish as a sort o f residuum, unexplained. He said that i t felt sometimes as though an occult force were at w o r k i n the midst o f the apparent confusion. W e might say that this human story is like a piece o f orchestral music that we are playing over for the first time. I n our presumption we may act as though we were the c o m poser o f the piece or t r y to bring out our o w n particular part as the leading one. B u t i n reality I personally only see the part of, shall we say, the second clarinet, and o f course even w i t h i n the limits o f that I never k n o w what is coming after the page that n o w lies open before me. None o f us can k n o w what the whole score amounts to except as far as we have already played i t over together, and even so the meaning o f a passage may not be clear all at once—just as the events o f 1914 only begin to be seen i n perspective i n the i94o's. I f I am sure that B flat is the next note that I have to play l ean never feel certain that i t w i l l not come w i t h surprising implications until I have heard what the other people are going to play at the same moment. A n d no single person i n the orchestra can have any idea when or where this piece o f music is going to end. ;

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PROCESS

Even this analogy is not sufficiently flexible to do justice to the processes o f time; and to make the comparison more authentic we must imagine that the composer himself is only composing the music inch by inch as the orchestra is playing i t ; so that i f you and I play w r o n g notes he changes his m i n d and gives a different turn to the bars that come immediately afterwards, as though saying to himself: ' W e can only straighten out this piece o f untidiness i f we pass for a moment from the major into the minor key.' Indeed the composer o f the piece leaves himself r o o m for great elasticity, until we ourselves have shown what we are going to do next; although when the music has actually been played over and has become a thing o f the past we may be tempted to imagine that i t is just as he had intended i t to be all the time—that the whole course o f things had been inevitable f r o m the first. I f we were helping a small boy to ride a bicycle on an indefinite stretch o f sand, we should not feel that each time he swerved and then tried to right h i m self we had to rectify his aberrations by bringing the course back into something like the straight line on which we had started the ride. W e should be prepared for a considerable elasticity i n regard to the general drift and direction o f the whole expedition. I n fact we should be playing Providence over a free creature; though I have no doubt that the particles i n the fabric o f the bicycle w o u l d be able to prove that the machine was guiding itself. I f we read out o f the picture for the moment the richness and multiplicity o f history, which i n every generation presents us w i t h a jungle o f human life and interactions more or less as varied and complicated as the w o r l d at the present d a y — i f we clear away the brushwood i n order to isolate certain things i n the past for purposes o f a more selective study—it easily becomes clear to us that there are elements o f fixity i n the course o f human story. For i n the first place there is a Providence that we must regard as lying i n the very constitution o f things. Whether we are Christians or not, whether we believe i n a Divine Providence or not, we are liable to

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serious technical errors i f we do not regard ourselves as born into a providential order. W e are not by any means sovereign i n any action that w e take i n regard to that order, and not by any means i n a position to recreate i t to the heart's desire. I have already said that, so far as I can see, one's u l t i mate values—or the general meaning o f life—can never be based on the idea o f progress, w h i c h affects n o t man himself but the framework and the conditions o f life. B u t I think that I may differ f r o m some people i n feeling that progress all the same is itself the w o r k o f Providence, and is part o f that providential order, part o f that history-making w h i c h goes on almost, so to speak, above our heads. For men did not just decide that history should move—so far as concerns certain particular matters—either as an ascending ladder or as a spiral staircase or as though i t were a g r o w i n g plant. They d i d not say to themselves: ' N o w we w i l l establish progress.' O n the contrary they looked back and discovered to their amazement that here was a thing called progress w h i c h had already been taking place—in other words they arrived at the idea by postrationalism. Millions o f m e n i n a given century, conscious o f nothing save o f going about their o w n business, have together woven a fabric better i n many respects than any o f them knew. A n d sometimes i t has only been their successors w h o have recognised that the resulting picture had a pattern, and that that particular period o f history was characterised by an overarching theme. I n some respects—and particularly i n the knowledge that relates to man's most intimate experience—each new generation has to start learning the lessons o f life almost f r o m the very beginning again. Because o f this there is no reason w h y a man o f forty i n the twentieth century should be a p r o founder artist or poet, shall we say, than a man w h o was forty 2,000 years ago. There are other forms o f k n o w ledge, less intimately related to our personal experience, h o w ever, which g r o w by sheer accumulation i n the course o f centuries, or which permit o f a new generation continuing its

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advance f r o m the point where the previous generation left off. Here is one o f the bases o f a k i n d o f progress which comes f r o m no merit o f ours and implies no necessary improvement i n our essential personalities, but is part o f the system o f things, part o f the providential order. As a result o f it, men w i t h much less intellect and much less wisdom than the ancient Aristotle may n o w be much superior to h i m i n their knowledge o f the mechanics o f the universe. Something similar is true i n regard to the development towards larger organisations—from the city-state and inter-municipal trade, to the nation-state and international trade, and finally to our vast imperial systems and a w o r l d economy. I n these cases men have cupidities and, as we see them i n history, they are engrossed i n the task o f pushing their private business on. B u t they are agents o f deeper p r o cesses than those o f which they are aware, instruments o f a providence that combines their labours and works them into a larger pattern. Whenever we see anything like an evolutionary development we should be w r o n g to imagine that this takes place because an individual has consciously tried to give that particular turn to the future history o f the species. L o r d Acton i n his later liberal days, and w i t h only recent centuries i n m i n d , thought that Providence was progress and progress was the raison d'etre o f history. B u t we have seen that on a longer view o f human affairs there is also i n the dispensation o f Providence a judgment w h i c h falls on our orders and systems, particularly when the progress implies a one-sided development, and works itself into paradoxes and dilemmas w i t h events tying themselves into knots. Providence therefore does not guarantee the progress—does not promise an ascending course no matter h o w human beings behave. I n any case there are regions where such progress cannot be regarded as having effective play. I n those cases where the most intimate parts o f human wisdom and experience are concerned, each generation, each individual, has to start, i n a certain sense, at the beginning again.

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Apart f r o m the Providence w h i c h lies i n the very constitution o f things, there exists another k i n d o f Providence which i t may be permissible to call human. I t produces the impression—though we ought not to lay too much stress on the mere impression—that i t represents the operation upon the story o f something like the collective wisdom o f the human race, or that History herself has risen up and determined to have a hand i n the game. I t is as though, once the history has happened, w i t h all its accidents and tragedies, i t is further worked upon by the reflecting activity o f an ordaining and reconciling m i n d ; or as though, once a handful o f chance notes have been struck together on the piano, some person refuses to let the matter He there and sets out to resolve the discord. This is a providence, i n fact^ w h i c h moves over history w i t h the function o f creating good out o f evil; and L o r d Acton, at an earlier and more religious period o f his historical activity defined i t exacdy i n this w a y — a view which he seems to have acquired i n reality from some o f his German religious friends. Indeed, i f history is o f the character that I have described, i t might seem to require the operation o f a Providence upon i t — a Providence capable o f bringing good out o f evil. Once the Fire o f London had taken place, and the tragedy could not be undone, the m i n d o f man, confronted by a new situation and making the best o f it, decided to rebuild the city and took the opportunity o f building i t on a superior plan. The result is that historians may give the impression that the Fire o f London itself was beneficial—as though i t were a good thing to have had such a catastrophe—an impression all the more easy to acquire since so quickly we lose the power o f bringing home to ourselves the sorrows o f the original sufferers. Once the medieval Church had been split by the Reformation, the wars o f Protestants and Catholics, precisely because they were so horrible, led to a different set o f conditions, and brought about a new order which the modern w o r l d , f r o m a certain point o f view, w o u l d regard as superior, i n that i t was based on toleration. Initially neither party

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wanted toleration nor even conceived i t as an ideal; but reflecting on that tragedy and making virtue o f necessity, men i n the after-period established toleration, and came to rejoice i n i t — came, not merely to recognise i t as the best thing Providence could arrange i n a w o r l d o f religious differences, but even to be glad that a religious schism had taken place to make such a benefit possible. I n a similar way the disasters o f a given generation may be somewhat redeemed when, by a process o f after-reflection, one people or another learns to profit by experience. The loss o f our American colonies i n the reign o f George I I I taught this country so to change her attitude to the question o f overseas dominion that we were led to present the w o r l d w i t h a new idea o f empire. The initial mistake was still a mistake and the very lesson that we learned was the lesson never to allow such a thing to happen again; but i t is almost tempting to be thankful that George I I I made his blunders, because i t seems as i f only through an initial tragedy o f a spectacular kind could we have been stimulated to produce an idea o f empire so novel and original. A l l this is merely a secular analysis o f the way i n which history happens. I t only amounts to saying that we can save ourselves f r o m errors o f inelasticity provided we picture the course o f things as i f its final shape were under the direction o f a superintending intellect. Such analysis is equally true for the Christian and the non-Christian, so that i n a certain sense i t might be argued that i t does not particularly concern the Christian religion at all. Even this limited view o f the Providence that lies i n the very structure o f history, however, ought to affect our conception o f human action and o f the role o f human beings i n the w o r l d ; and even at this mundane level we reach a stage higher i n human consciousness and we improve our relations w i t h the universe i f we conceive ourselves not as sovereign makers o f history but as born to co-operate w i t h Providence. I t is useless to say that y o u w i l l achieve a particular purpose i n the w o r l d or impose a certain pattern on society

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or bring about a certain condition o f things i n the course o f your lifetime. Y o u may succeed i n committing this or that action, but y o u are w o r k i n g on material which is alive and w h i c h may rebel against you, and there is a Providence w h i c h complicates the effects o f your action. I t is this Providence which i n fact has the last w o r d to say about the results. I t is true that i f y o u are a Hitler y o u may arrogantly decide that y o u w i l l impose some ideal o f your o w n upon the presentday w o r l d or upon the future, cost what i t may; and on these terms y o u may even on occasion achieve your purpose. Nevertheless that policy implies a willingness to fly i n the face o f Providence—you may achieve your end, but i n such a process y o u are liable to wreak such havoc i n the w o r l d that the object i n question ceases to have any point i n the new situation o f things. Providence may even give y o u what y o u want i n order to destroy y o u w i t h i t . Even Napoleon, w h o was so determined to stride the w o r l d like a god and to fly i n the face o f history, was so impressed by the resistance w h i c h he found i n the very nature o f things that he w o u l d speak o f himself—and came to feel himself—as the prisoner o f necessity, the plaything o f a relentless destiny. Bismarck, whose discussions o f policy show not merely a great insight but also the effect o f a religious m i n d , was more emphatic on this subject than possibly any other statesman i n modern history. H e w o u l d say: 'The statesman cannot create the stream o f time, he can only navigate upon i t . ' 'The statesman must t r y and reach for the hem when he hears the garment o f God rustling through events/ W h e n people urged h i m to hasten the u n i f i cation o f Germany he w o u l d argue: ' W e can advance the clock but time itself does not move any more quickly for that/ Even i n 1869, the year before Germany's unification, he said on this subject: ' A h arbitrary and merely w i l f u l interference w i t h the course o f history has always resulted only i n beating o f f fruits that were not ripe.' Yet i n spite o f his consistency i n this k i n d o f philosophy w e should still hold, I think, that even Bismarck d i d not go far enough i n this view—even he

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tried too hard on occasion to force the hands o f Providence. I remember listening some years ago to a group o f historians w h o were discussing the peace treaties o f 1919; and they took the line o f saying that mistakes i n those treaties could hardly have been avoidable i f we consider the range and the complexity o f the issues that had to be dealt w i t h then. One person remarked that i f we took the case merely o f the f r o n tiers o f Yugoslavia, no single human being could compass all the factors, all the local knowledge, all the historical background necessary for a proper judgment; no person could hold all these things i n his m i n d , balancing one kind o f consideration against another, and producing a rational result; or, i f there did happen to exist a man sufficiently expert i n this, the very fact o f his expertness w o u l d give h i m a professional interest that might make h i m liable to the imputation o f bias. W h a t a task i t must have been, therefore, for the handful o f statesmen w h o at Versailles remodelled the map o f the European continent as a whole! A l l this argument brought to m y m i n d very v i v i d l y the maxims inherent i n that very imposing science o f diplomacy which existed i n the eighteenth century; for though the minds o f the eighteenth century were losing the religious idea o f Providence, they clung very tightly to that purely secular conception o f a providential order w h i c h I have already mentioned. They told themselves that they ought to be on guard against presumption when i t was a question o f a radical break w i t h that providential order. Precisely because no human m i n d can compass all the factors or command the complexities, precisely because no man can predict the forces that may be let loose when the fundamentals o f an existing system are uprooted, precisely because the slightest miscalculation might release the w o r l d upon a current o f unforeseeable, uncontrollable change, the eighteenth century kept that conception o f a providential order w h i c h i t was thought necessary i n general to maintain—a conception w h i c h like a number o f other things seemed to survive as a k i n d o f shell after the

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religion, which had given i t some reality, had evaporated out o f i t . Precisely because i t is vain for man to think that he can ordain his o w n history or completely play the part o f P r o v i dence for himself, even a Metternich foresaw our tragedies a century before they came and put his finger on a fundamental cause o f them, when he said that what frightened h i m was the human presumption that had become so evident. The peace-makers o f 1919 may have had little option, since they were w o r k i n g i n a w o r l d already uprooted. I t is still true, however, that we have at great cost produced i n thirtyodd years a map o f Europe more disturbing than that o f 1914; and we ourselves must suffer greatly as things develop for the sin o f having played too high a game w i t h Providence. The older diplomatic science w o u l d have said that i f there was a risk o f producing a situation that w o u l d run out o f control, i t w o u l d be better even to keep an ancient frontier, though i t was not perfect; for i f a frontier has lasted hundreds o f years, then i t has at least got over one o f the hurdles, has at least the virtue o f custom on its side, whereas to have new men discontented and unsettled under the conditions o f new frontiers—or at least to have too many o f them i n the w o r l d — m i g h t produce a danger more incalculable, as w e l l as deranging the balance o f forces over the whole continent. A n d the principles o f the eighteenth-century science o f diplomacy, which I am describing, w o u l d have regarded as an illegitimate interference w i t h the providential order any deliberate attempt to go further than mere defeat and actually to destroy a great state—to wipe your enemy off the map; for the new disposition o f forces which comes about when y o u destroy the enemy power altogether is bound to be still less calculable, still less amenable to control. They took the line, therefore, that we ought never to forget that the enemy o f to-day may be needed as an ally against some other power t o - m o r r o w : i n other words, that wars should be regarded as quarrels between allies w h o happen to have fallen out. Somewhere or other there exists a point at which our ambitions, however w e l l -

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meaning, do become a defiance o f the providential order. A t that point there w o u l d be better hope for the w o r l d i f we w o u l d t r y to see rather h o w to make the best o f it, and accept some o f our limitations and discomforts as the decree o f P r o v i dence, lest by too feverish an activity w e only make matters worse. It was the fault o f the Germans i n t w o wars that they repeatedly gambled everything on a colossal system o f policy which, i f it had been a hundred per cent, successful, w o u l d have been brilliant i n its results, but w h i c h challenged time and circumstance too boldly i n that i f i t only ninety per cent, succeeded—or even ninety-nine, apparently, sometimes—it utterly failed. A l l i n fact was dependent on the ability to calculate all possible contingencies and absolutely h i t the bull'seye; and i f the object were missed, i f i t were only nearly achieved, this was irretrievable tragedy, since everything was then worse than before. This is too great a challenge to offer to high Heaven and i t has the weakness o f the academic or professorial m i n d which sometimes erects policy into colossal systems, carefully calculated and accurately dove-tailed—all w i t h o u t sufficient allowance for the unpredictable things that happen, and all liable to be ruined i f a single link i n the chain proves unexpectedly weak. The English have often 'muddled through' w i t h a system which, i f i t was sixty per cent, successful, at least gave a sixty per cent, return. A n d by a certain elasticity they have sometimes gained further advantage f r o m the unexpected ways i n which time and chance itself w i l l occasionally t h r o w i n a helping hand. I n other words, they have often found a less arrogant way o f co-operating w i t h P r o v i dence. I f all this represents a true picture o f the way i n which things happen—if this is the texture o f that fabric which men and events are weaving throughout the centuries—then there are various forms o f modern messianism (not confined to Nazis or Communists) against which the twentieth century ought to be on its guard. There is danger nowadays that one generation

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after another w i l l be asked to lay itself o n the altar for sacrifice,

taught by the successive prophets o f one Utopia after another that this self-immolation w i l l lead to a new heaven and new earth i n the time, shall we say, o f their great-grandchildren. A n d i n such circumstances the sacrifice o f the present generat i o n o f real live men is definitive and irretrievable, while the Utopia w h i c h is supposed to serve as the compensation for i t is hypothetical at best, since i t is remote and depends o n the concurrence o f other favourable factors too. I f history is o f the texture which I have described, then men can calculate the immediate consequences o f their actions, and they are heavily responsible for those consequences. B u t the remoter consequences, and the effect o n the distant future, are matters w h i c h always He i n other hands. The hardest strokes o f heaven fall i n history upon those w h o imagine that they can control things i n a sovereign manner, as though they were kings o f the earth, playing Providence not only for themselves but for the far future—reaching out into the future w i t h the w r o n g k i n d o f far-sightedness, and gambling on a l o t o f risky calculations i n w h i c h there must never be a single mistake. A n d i t is a defect i n such enthusiasts that they seem u n w i l l i n g to leave anything to Providence, u n w i l l i n g even to leave the future flexible, as one must do; and they forget that i n any case, for all we k n o w , our successors may decide to switch ideals and l o o k for a different Utopia before any o f our long shots have reached their objective, or any o f our long-range projects have had fulfilment. I t is agreeable to all the processes o f history, therefore, that each o f us should rather do die good that is straight under our noses. Those people w o r k more wisely w h o seek to achieve good i n their o w n small corner o f the w o r l d and then leave the leaven t o leaven the whole l u m p , than those w h o are for ever thinking that life is vain unless one can act through the central government, carry legislation, achieve political power and do big things. There is a further inference that we can make f r o m history i f

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its nature and texture are such as I have described. I t is not open to any o f us to say that we w i l l postpone what p h i l osophers call 'the good life'—postpone any o f the higher purposes o f m a n k i n d — u n t i l the w o r l d is more happily placed or the environment more congenial. Some people have become accustomed to arguing, for example, that we must not pretend to have any art to-day—for h o w can a man w r i t e poetry when society is still so disjointed? I have even heard i t said that we must put aside all thought o f the arts until the w o r l d has been made safe for democracy. I f men had taken that attitude i n the past there never w o u l d have been a civilisation or a civilised ideal for us to inherit; and I do not k n o w that Providence has ever promised to men either the Arcadian bliss or the reign o f justice which this argument seems to have i n view. A l l the time i t has been a case o f plucking beauty out o f dangerous crags and crevices, and making sure that there should be music somewhere though apparently the w o r l d was generally near the edge o f the abyss. A n d we must have our Elizabethan literature even though the Spanish Armada may be coming, because i t is always part o f the game that the good life must be attained n o w , no matter at what date i n history y o u place the 'now*. Similarly there are people whose attitude is based on the conviction that all w o u l d have been w e l l i f their immediate predecessors had not made the irretrievable mistake—the w o r l d was sp6iled just before they were b o r n — f o r then the last irrecoverable pass had been sold by somebody. They too, i f they are querulous for this reason, are rebels against Providence, w h i c h leaves them to punish themselves and w a l k lame i n the w o r l d — f o r here is just the problem set to every generation: to see what i t can make o f the mess left by its predecessors. A n d there is another class o f people not much different—those w h o think that the Fall o f M a n is just about to occur—that the irretrievable disaster is reserved for the mid-twentieth century when war may take place or Communism may triumph, and the history o f the human

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race, they say, w i l l never be the same again after that. Against all these w i t h their doctrine o f the Fall we may say that the very disaster they trouble themselves about—this Fall o f Man—is certainly possible; only i t happened a long time ago, long before the O l d Testament was written, and o f course i t is true that the history o f the human race has never been the same since—always i t is history just gone w r o n g and desperately i n need o f salvaging. Those w h o do not believe i n the doctrine o f the Fall can hardly deny that human history has always been history under the terms and conditions o f the Fall. Those w h o write history as though the w o r l d went w r o n g at the Renaissance, or as though i t was the Reformation which spoiled everything, or as though things took the w r o n g turn at the beginning o f the Age o f Reason, are suffering from a delusion—history is always a story i n which P r o v i dence is countered by human aberration. O n the other hand, part o f the horror w h i c h men feel when they look to the possible future is due to a lack o f elasticity, an unwillingness to imagine that life can still hold its essential values when our local historical order has been superseded. I t is simply a distrust o f the resources o f Providence. A n d i n the days when Providence lets the wicked prosper i t is the case that we may become too fretful, and by an excessive desire to control the destiny o f mankind we may create disaster and only enlarge the area o f the original disorder—a feat w h i c h I should regard as the principal historical achievement o f the generation immediately preceding and overlapping w i t h m y o w n . I t is even a possible thesis that through a distrust o f Providence the gravest political mistakes o f the last forty years i n one country after another have been due to fear and overanxiety—the besetting sin o f amateur politicians unaccustomed to the awful responsibilities o f government, and one o f the serious dangers therefore i n a democratic society. W e are flying i n the face o f Providence i f we even demand too great security for the future—demand that one hundred per cent, certainty i n all contingencies which some o f the Germans

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I N HISTORY

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apparently imagined that i t was a grievance not to possess. W h a t is not permissible, for a Church at any rate, is to believe that Providence is going to cease its care for the w o r l d or rob even disasters o f their possible compensations, whatever the next turn i n the story may be, or whoever may w i n the next war. I do not think that any man can ever arrive at his interpretation o f the human drama by merely casting his eye over the course o f the centuries i n the way that a student o f history might do. I am unable to see h o w a man can find the hand o f God i n secular history, unless he has first found that he has an assurance o f it i n his personal experience. I f it is objected that God is revealed in history through Christ, I cannot think that this can be true for the mere external observer, w h o puts on the thinking-cap o f the ordinary historical student. I t only becomes effective for those w h o have carried the narrative to intimate regions inside themselves, where certain o f the issues are brought home to human beings. I n this sense our interpretation o f the human drama throughout the ages rests finally on our interpretation o f our most private experience o f life, and stands as merely an extension to i t . A t the same time I am not sure that any part o f history has been properly appropriated until we have brought i t home to ourselves i n the same intimate way, so that i t has been k n i t into one fabric continuous w i t h our inner experience. Those w h o say that everything i n history can be explained without bringing God into the argument w o u l d be doing no more than walking round i n a circle, even i f i t were true that anything i n history—or even a blade o f grass—had yet been fully explained. A w o r l d o f blind men might equally maintain that their universe was explicable to them w i t h o u t the introduction o f a foreign concept like the notion o f light. Whatever the claim the natural scientists might make, i t is clear that the historian can never be sure that he has collected all the relevant factors into his hands. He has been able to set out the story o f the sixteenth century i n a way that seemed selfcomplete and self-explanatory, and then i t has been discovered

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P R O V I D E N C E A N D T H E H I S T O R I C A L PROCESS

later that he had left out o f account one o f the most important and widely operative factors i n modern history, namely the remarkable price-rise that affected so many aspects o f that period. There is no such closed and interlocking system i n history as forbids us to believe that some totally new factor may not be discovered to alter our interpretation o f a given episode. There is no such self-contained intellectual system as w o u l d forbid a man w h o was an historian to believe that God Himself is a factor i n history—all the harder to discover perhaps i f His hand was i n operation everywhere. A n d o f course no historian can deny the power o f religious fitith i n history, even though that faith m i g h t be dismissed as a delusion or a f o r m o f inebriation. W h e n we are concerned w i t h that k i n d o f history-making which goes on over our heads i n the way I have tried to show, i t is remarkable h o w often we do our thinking i n symbols, or by means o f patterns; but I think we are deceived by our o w n devices unless the symbols are personal ones, and that is w h y I have already said o f this k i n d o f history-making that i t was as though History herself had decided to stand up and take a hand i n the game. Some people have seen the course o f this historymaking as a spiral; they point for example to civilisations w h i c h seem to come i n cycles, developing and decaying, each new one beginning its cycle a litde higher up than die previous one. Some think o f history almost as though i t were a mechanistic system—interests colliding w i t h one another, w i t h diagrams o f forces, and everything interacting like the parts o f a great machine. Others, having i n m i n d the g r o w t h o f society or the evolution o f a branch o f knowledge, have drawn their analogies f r o m organisms i n biology. Such symbols or patterns, however, have reference only to selected parcels o f historical events, isolated from the rest o f the complex fabric o f historical happening. They are dangerous, for none o f them is sufficiendy flexible, and history as a whole must be very subde i n pattern-—for i t must be subde enough to include and c o m bine all these other partial patterns. Those w h o — t h i n k i n g i n

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109

pictures somewhat, or i n diagrams—imagined i n 1919 that history was an ascending process, or that, having taken a curve i n the nineteenth century i t w o u l d continue that curve i n the twentieth century—those w h o i n 1919 thought that since the w o r l d had become more liberal and democratic for a century i t could n o w only become more liberal and democratic still—were actually handicapped i n their historical knowledge, because they had r u n i t into too rigid a pattern. They did not remember what a live thing history is, and h o w w i l f u l l y i t may break away f r o m the railway-lines which the prophets and pedants may have set for i t . I t is better worldly-wisdom, even when we are only looking for a pictorial representation, to think o f history as though an intelligence were m o v i n g over the story, taking its bearings afresh after everything men do, and making its decisions as i t goes along—decisions sometimes unpredictable and carrying our purposes further than we wanted them to go. There is no symbolic representation that w i l l do justice to history save the composer I have already mentioned, w h o composes the music as we go along, and, when we slip into aberrations, switches his course i n order to make the best o f everything. History is like the w o r k o f a person i n that its course—even i n the things that may affect our personal fate and fortunes six months hence—is so unpredictable; while yet there is some fixity i n i t too, and even when the unpredictable has happened we can go back and account for i t retrospectively, we can show that there was organisation i n i t all the same. Indeed, though we sometimes become slaves to purely technical modes o f study and thought, we cannot go too far i n regarding the whole human drama i n intimately personal terms, doing a very personal k i n d o f thinking about it—almost thinking w i t h our sympathies. Furthermore, we lack the proper feeling for history, I think, unless w e are aware o f what I should call the subdety and delicacy o f its texture. Sometimes we are extremely coarsefingered i n our handling o f i t , as our predecessors once were i n their ideas on the structure o f matter. I n history as i n the

no

PROVIDENCE AND THE HISTORICAL PROCESS

natural sciences y o u can put the microscope on the smallest particle o f the fabric and you seem to find still another solar system lying before y o u for still more minute study. A n d just as hard matter seems to refine itself n o w into something too subtle and ethereal and unsubstantial for our minds to grasp, so the whole network o f historical events (which seems to stand as so fixed and rigid a system i n abridged textbooks) turns out to be intricate and exquisitely interlaced, and alias l i g h t as gossamer. History is o f so subtle a texture that we cannot study even the ponderous political actions o f heavy-handed statesmen— we cannot study even the Ems telegram o f 1870 or the causes o f the war o f 1914, for example—without being carried to the intimate interior o f the personalities concerned, until w e are inevitably brought to a halt before those final recesses w h i c h the technical historian cannot reach. I t is o f so subtle a texture that a few microbes i n Washington, and a disease carrying off many statesmen at once so as to produce a temporary dislocation there, might decide i n a short period w h o was to be the master o f Europe; and the w o r l d , turning on even so small a pivot, m i g h t find itself wheeling into a new course. Professor Bury, after having been too rigid i n his initial scientific assumptions, came to the conclusion that the shape o f Cleopatra's nose altered the course o f history ; and the human m i n d can never have sufficient elasticity to allow for the infinite surprises that m i g h t emerge f r o m the intricate interactions taking place i n history. The texture o f history is i n this sense as light as gossamer, light as the thought o f a person merely thinking i t , and its patterns seem to change as easily as the patterns o f w i n d on water. W h e n we look back upon the past we see things fixed and frozen as they happened, and they become rigid i n our minds, so that we think they must always have been inevitable—we hardly imagine h o w anything else could have happened. B u t when we look to the future, while it is still fluid, we can hardly fail to realise its unspeakable liquidity. Indeed, i f M r . Churchill had been i l l or had lost

T H E DELICATE T E X T U R E OF

HISTORY

heart i n 1940 the m i n d must reel before the multitude o f alternative courses that the w o r l d m i g h t have taken. W h e n we think o f the action o f God i n history—and present i t to ourselves i n pictures, as we are almost bound to do — w e need not imagine a heavy hand interposed to interfere w i t h the w o r k i n g o f a heavy piece o f machinery. Perhaps a better picture o f our situation w o u l d be that o f a child w h o played her piece very badly when she was alone, but when the music-teacher sat at her side played i t passably well, though the music-teacher never touched her, never said anything, but operated by pure sympathetic attraction and by just being there. Perhaps history is a thing that w o u l d stop happening i f God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think o f something else. L o r d Acton surrendered unduly to the spirit o f his age when he said that w i t h o u t progress there could be no Divine Providence, and complained that Cardinal N e w m a n could not see God i n this k i n d o f pattern i n history, but only i n biography, i n the intimate interior o f personalities. T o a religious m i n d all those providential dispositions which I have attempted to describe must appear as Divine, as the orderings o f God Himself; and i n the workings o f history there must be felt the movement o f a living God. Combined w i t h things we have noticed i n previous lectures, they constitute a kind o f history the end o f which does not He i n history itselr or i n any o f the patterns and schématisations which appear i n our textbooks—patterns and schématisations which are sometimes presumed to be the very purpose o f the whole human drama. These dispositions constitute a k i n d o f w o r l d which is a discipline for the soul and they provide for men an end, an object to strive for, which is not merely laid up for the last generation that may happen to live on the earth. They i m p l y also that history, by the very fact that i t is so personal, is essentially a moral affair—in so far as we take a purely mundane point o f v i e w — m o r a l , not intermittently (as when we resort to morality for the purpose o f exposing the character o f our enemies), but through and through, i n the way that the O l d

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P R O V I D E N C E A N D T H E H I S T O R I C A L PROCESS

Testament was developing its interpretation. The patterns that matter i n history are patterns that end i n personalities, w h o are the blossom and the fruit—they are posterity, they are the heirs o f all the ages, w h o m creation groaned through so many astronomical eras and such long geological epochs to produce. M e n w o r k for progress, but w i t h o u t regarding i t as die end which gives meaning to history. They are subordinate only to the glory o f God. A l l these things considered I do not see w h y Christians should be shy o f trusting i n Providence, therefore, floating on i t so t o speak, leaning on i t and making alliance w i t h i t , regarding i t as a living and active agency both i n ourselves and i n its movement over the length and breadth o f history. I t is a special Providence for the religious m i n d and i n the history o f Christianity—a special Providence for those w h o consciously seek to be i n alliance w i t h i t — b u t we cannot make terms w i t h i t or demand that i t give us either victory i n war or exemption f r o m cataclysm, and even for Christians Richard Baxter provided an object-lesson when he wrote concerning the Great Plague: ' A t first so few o f the religiouser sort were taken away that (according to the mode o f too many such) they began to be puffed up and boast o f the great differences which God d i d make. B u t quickly after that they all fell alike/ F r o m w h i c h we must conclude that Providence at least is not a thing to be presumed upon; and indeed the Christian knows that i t gives h i m no guarantee against m a r t y r d o m for the faith. W h a t i t does guarantee so exultandy i n the N e w Testament is a mission i n the w o r l d and the kind o f triumph that may come out o f apparent defeat—the k i n d o f good that can be wrested out o f evil.

CHAPTER SIX

C H R I S T I A N I T Y AS

A N HISTORICAL RELIGION

O N E o f the most fundamental o f the differences between people must be the question whether they believe i n God or not; for on that depends their whole interpretation o f the u n i verse and o f history—on that depends their answer to so many other questions. I t can hardly be doubted at the present day that a man has to build up his whole outlook on the one decision or the other, for those w h o think that they are sitting on the fence are entirely deluding themselves. Yet the decision is no easy one for what might be called the scholarly kind o f intellect; and on this subject philosophers seem to chase one another round i n circles. I do not personally feel convinced by people on either side w h o claim that on this particular plane they can decide the matter w i t h an unanswerable argument. Though I must believe that the human m i n d is not a mere deceiver or a distorting mirror, I am still sure that i t does not reign i n a sovereign manner as k i n g o f the universe. T h o u g h this m i n d o f ours takes us on the road to truth I am certain that i t does not carry us completely there—it cannot even p r o vide the scientific demonstration necessary for the most i m p o r tant decision that we have to make i n regard to our outlook on life. Whatever that decision may be, i t is bound to stand for any o f us, initially at least, as a certain way o f setting our personalities and confronting the universe. Whatever answer we give, we make a venture o f faith; and we have to choose a direction, though we cannot see the landscape as a whole. I t has already been suggested i n the course o f these lectures, however, that, to a degree which we rarely keep i n m i n d , certain moral factors do enter into the constitution o f what we often look upon as mere intellectual mistakes. I t is not "3

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C H R I S T I A N I T Y AS A N H I S T O R I C A L R E L I G I O N

possible to feel sure that these moral factors are not the things which play a considerable part in-the fundamental decisions that we make about life. There are some people w h o seem to be half in revolt against everything, l i v i n g w i t h a sort o f grudge against the universe; and that particular posture is bound to affect the answers that they give to those problems which otherwise might seem so evenly balanced as to be undeterminable. The same w o u l d apply i n the case o f people so exhilarated, so full o f themselves-, so on top o f the w o r l d , that they feel themselves to be gods and kings o f the universe and never give themselves a moment i n which to become conscious o f any mystery at all. I am coming to believe that our fundamental attitude to life is not i n reality decided by abstruse mathematical calculations made about the universe over the midnight o i l , or by complicated reflections on the subject o f astronomy, though often we keep up an unfortunate kind o f pretence i n this respect. I n any case the essential thing that we do, anterior to these other things, the primary movement that we make, is that we comm i t ourselves to an assertion about the human intellect. Either we feel i t to be the k i n g o f the universe or we check our enthusiasm w i t h the recollection that this human m i n d is a limited affair—something short o f royal—for otherwise i t w o u l d hardly have come to so sad a triumph i n the atomic bomb. Indeed the position is even simpler than this; for we do not even make an assertion about the intellect: we make a decision about ourselves. W e decide whether we w i l l see ourselves as gods or kings o f the universe (as absolute ends i n ourselves), or whether the things which inside n s are most lofty and most luminous are not really almost rather the broken reflections o f a greater light. Because o f this I am never quite sure that i t is not a subtle f o r m o f intellectual pride which really turns the scale when we are deciding our basic attitude and our fundamental belief. Sometimes at any rate the obstructions do resolve themselves on the last analysis into that k i n d o f crust which is intellectual

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115

arrogance, and which i n every field o f thought seems to d i m the clarity o f the mind. W h e n i t comes to the essential things i n human experience I think that a humble peasant may fall i n love more profoundly and marry more successfully than some o f the people who have been great scholars. B o t h i n history and i n life i t is a phenomenon by no means rare to meet w i t h comparatively unlettered people w h o seem to have struck profound spiritual depths and reached the real poetry o f things—reached what I should regard as the very quintessence o f the good l i f e — while there are highly educated people o f w h o m one feels that they are performing clever antics w i t h their minds to cover a gaping hollowness that lies w i t h i n . Some o f the men w h o lived most fully and reflected on experience most profoundly w o u l d not bear comparison w i t h an average English schoolboy to-day i f we judged them by their book-learning and by their scientific knowledge—of which Jesus Christ Himself must have had very little. I n regard to some o f the pretentious systems o f the w o r l d — a n d even the elaborate intellectual constructs— there is so much humbug i n them sometimes that nothing more w o u l d seem to be required than for a child to come along and just say, like the child in the fairy-tale, that 'the king hasn't got a shirt on'. Even i n the study o f history a kind o f acquired simplicity is needed just to see things as they really are, just to see things naked, instead o f envisaging them in the categories which historians have created to fit them into—attributing things to the Renaissance when the Renaissance is a mere label that historians have chosen to apply to a generation o f people. It might well be required o f any religion that its truth should be open to the vision o f the humble and poor, o f those w h o can be as little children, though that truth might be hidden f r o m the wise by those intellectual systems which they have built for themselves, and which, even i n historical study, can be a screen between oneself and reality. For practical purposes, and w i t h out pretending to speak at any abstruse philosophical level,

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CHRISTIANITY

AS A N H I S T O R I C A L

RELIGION

I should say that one o f the fundamental differences between men resolves into the issue: whether any vision is open to those w h o are humble and w h o achieve simplicity—any vision w h i c h is closed t o the men w h o are w o r l d l y and wise. The phenomenon o f religious experience is a thing which appears w i t h indubitable power i n history; and the question is: do the people w h o claim to possess this experience interpret i t properly when they describe i t as spiritual, or are they to be regarded as being under some illusion concerning its character? I t has already been suggested i n these lectures h o w difficult i t is to accept as the last w o r d the ordinary use o f the distinction between good men and bad men—a distinction which tends to harden as our age becomes more pagan, because i t is based on a pagan view o f righteousness. I t has been noted h o w even current secular thought is liable to forget the degree to w h i c h fortunate and unfortunate conditions—as between one man and another-—have their effect on the appearances w h i c h people present i n a w o r l d where all are imperfect. If, h o w ever, i n the course o f ages, we are to be told that there must be a division between sheep and goats amongst the race o f men, the only one which w o u l d seem to be fair all round—fair to the unlettered as w e l l as to the educated, to the unfortunate as w e l l as the fortunate—would have to be based on the distinction mentioned just n o w : namely, that capacity to attain a certain childlike quality. There is a sense i n w h i c h this may take the place o f virtue for the time being, i n that i t dissolves the crust over human nature, i t softens the thick hide and opens the gateway to more hopeful things. I t is clearly the only attitude that permits o f entrance to the K i n g d o m o f God. B u t , taking f o r granted that this hurdle is passed o v e r — taking for granted i n the first place a religious view o f l i f e — then, not only is our interpretation o f history, that is to say o f the whole human drama, affected at every inch o f the story, but the reading o f one's most intimate experience (as w e l l as the nature o f the experience itself) is radically transformed. One can have confidence that certain things which are deeply felt

T H E SCREEN B E T W E E N

MAN AND

GOD

are not the mere illusions that some men t r y to demonstrate them to be. Indeed there is a consequence which seems to me to be absolutely irresistible, namely that f r o m a certain point o f view one must say that a thinner film separates the divine f r o m the human w o r l d than many people are i n the habit o f believing at the present day. I n other words there is not even the thickness o f an egg-shell between the egg and the hen w h i c h is hatching i t ; and i f the screen seems thick and hard the old thesis is true that this is because o f the blur w h i c h is over our o w n eyes. The cosmos is more mysterious to-day than ever i t was, and I doubt whether any one o f us has a system o f the universe formed i n his m i n d such as does not leave out o f the reckoning certain discrepant and disturbing phenomena. I k n o w that there are some men w h o sparkle when drunk but are very dull when sober; and putting together what I read i n history w i t h the gleams and hints and hunches that I get i n life, I cannot tell what limits to set to the vision which is open to the spiritual m i n d i n a state o f exaltation, and I think we k n o w very little o f even the physical manifestations which accompany such a phenomenon. I am not sure that i n the modern age, w h i c h has produced such a tremendous preoccupation w i t h material things, and has issued i n a worldliness hitherto unachieved i n our part o f the globe, we have not ourselves thickened unnecessarily that screen which amongst the ancient Hebrews was so thin and i n some respects so transparent; especially as we, inhabitants o f cities, w h o yet have never really learned h o w to live i n cities, have so greatly lost the art o f meditating. I t w o u l d be the Christian view that this screen between man and God ought not to exist at all, and is created by man himself; and, furthermore, that i t is continually being pierced; though any man may keep the screen as thick as he likes and therefore i t is no wonder that some deny the authenticity o f man's spiritual experiences throughout the ages. I t is the further view o f traditional Christianity that the film which I have mentioned was so to speak torn and broken i n the person o f Jesus

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CHRISTIANITY

AS A N H I S T O R I C A L

RELIGION

Christ, i n other words that the divine—always apparent to the religious m i n d i n human history, always very near the surface o f things—stepped straight on to the stage and broke i n t o the story. I t is here that we are brought up against the technical question o f Christianity as an historical religion. I t is not m y intention to shock any devout m i n d i f I say that I am always greatly touched by a poem, not perhaps o f the highest quality i n itself, written by Rupert Brooke to depict a fish's idea o f Heaven, and no doubt intended to mock at Christians a little—indeed I choose to take i t that the laugh is really against me. Brooke depicts the fishes telling one another how . .. somewhere, beyond Space and Time, Is wetter water, slimier slime. And there [they trust) there swimmeth One Who swam ere rivers were begun, Immense, offishy form and mind, Squamous, omnipotent and kind; And under that Almighty Fin, The littlest fish may enter in. The truth is, o f course, that we are i n this respect like the fish, and Rupert Brooke is right i f he is telling us that we are locked i n a w o r l d o f partial visions, only capable o f conceiving divinity when i t is brought d o w n to our o w n terms. Although our minds are to be trusted w i t h i n their limits, they do have their limits and we are like creatures o f three dimensions trying to picture to ourselves a universe o f four. I t is like the case o f those cards which used to be handed round to puzzle us at children's parties, when I was a boy. There w o u l d be flat photographs o f common objects—candle-sticks, walkingsticks etc.—which were reproduced i n such odd perspectives or so curiously fore-shortened that i t was very difficult to identify them. O f course I cannot think o f God without these narrowings and fore-shortenings—in fact w i t h o u t being anthropomorphic—and i n that sense I am for ever i n the

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OF

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presence o f a mystery. I am sure He is all that personality means, and more still; but the very w o r d personality has its aspect as a limitation—as setting a frontier—and i f I do not believe that God is limited I am carried to something that is beyond m y conception. W h a t I must not do, however, is to make God less than a person—hanging as a shapeless vapour or an undifferentiated ooze, which is what people seem to arrive at when they want to believe in H i m w i t h o u t committing themselves to anything. A n d nothing seems to me to be more absurd than the picture which seemed to exist at one time o f God as a sort o f urge w i t h i n matter itself—gradually discovering Himself and coming to consciousness i n the course o f ages as man developed. I f there were to be a revelation o f God to man, only a human being more human than we are w o u l d give us a vision that we should be capable o f comprehending—one whose humanity was genuine and authentic, whose flesh was real flesh, so that i f you pricked i t i t w o u l d hurt and bleed—one w h o actually got tired at the end o f a day. I personally w o u l d feel strongly that i t must be a human being under our conditions—limited i n his knowledge, so limited that even his consciousness o f his mission only came gradually, i n a groping way at first; so limited that even the temptations which he suffered must be regarded as having been real to h i m and not a mere shadowshow. A l l religions must have their founders, teachers and prophets, and i t does not matter i f some o f these are anonymous or i f the historian proves that one or other name amongst them was legendary. Traditional Christianity, however, claims to be an historical religion i n a more technical sense; for certain historical events are held to be a part o f the religion itself—they are considered to have a spiritual content and to represent the divine breaking i n upon history. T o a m i n d which accepts this as revelation—as giving an authentic insight into the real nature o f things—there can be no doubt that the whole character o f religion itself is seriously affected by the fact. I n

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Christian belief the scriptural revelation, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are events w h i c h happen i n time but i t is claimed that they have an extra dimension, so to speak, and they carry a fulness o f meaning calculated almost to break the vessel that contains i t . T o the l i m i t that is possible w i t h finite things we regard them as capturing into time a portion o f eternity. So at least we are not left w i t h a religion o f nebulous love and mere sentimental good fellowship; and we are not asked to grope hazily for an unidentifiable God, shapeless as vapour and w i t h o u t any qualities. Neither do we aspire vaguely and nostalgically after an amorphous k i n d o f infinity w i t h out having even a hint so to speak o f the colour o f it. W e w h o flounder so much when left to our o w n devices i n a realm o f purely disembodied truths and abstract nouns, are told that at least we can take a firm grip o f the b o t t o m rungs o f the ladder o f truth, and get hold o f something concrete. I t is all as though the light o f eternity, which w o u l d blind us i f i t came full i n the face, is broken into colours that our eyes can make something o f — i t has been refracted into a piece o f historical narrative. So a religion, which otherwise might have been too diaphanous—too subtly compounded o f mere spirit and light—comes to us as a thing w i t h a geographical location, w i t h a place i n the historical scheme o f things, and w i t h many o f its truths condensed so to speak into historical events. I t comes to us w i t h its central idea o f divinity made incarnate i n a personality more human than the human one. A n historical religion by the terms o f its very existence implies a certain conception o f God, a certain view o f the u n i verse, a certain doctrine about human life and a certain idea concerning the course o f things i n time. B y its fundamental assumptions i t insists upon a God w h o stretches out His arms to human beings presumed to be groping i n grave distress and blind bewilderment. I t asserts that eternity is brought into relation w i t h time, and that the supra-terrestrial realm, the k i n g d o m o f the spirit, is not locked away, for i t is here and

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n o w , and the t w o planes o f existence intersect. I t has always been realised i n the main tradition o f Christianity that i f the W o r d was made flesh, matter can never be regarded as evil i n itself. I n a similar way, i f one moment o f time could hold so much as this, then y o u cannot brush time away and say that any moment o f i t is mere vanity. Every instant o f time becomes more momentous than ever—every instant is 'eschatological', or, as one person has put i t , like the point i n the fairy-story where the clock is just about to strike twelve. O n this view there can be no case o f an absentee God leaving mankind at the mercy o f chance i n a universe blind, stark and bleak. A n d a real drama—not a madman's nightmare or a tissue o f flimsy dreams—is being enacted on the stage o f all human history—a real conflict between good and evil is taking place, events do matter, and something is being achieved irrespective o f our apparent success or failure. Even those w h o do not accept the paradoxes o f an historical religion can hardly deny certain remarkable implications i n the life o f Christ, which must make His years on earth appear i n any case as the most central date i n even the ordinary secular history o f our part o f the globe. A l l that we have been examining i n this course o f lectures—judgment, tragedy, vicarious suffering, Providence—are brought into stronger focus at this point; so that we meet the issues n o w i n a purer state, so to speak, than elsewhere. A n d to anybody considering this moral aspect o f the human drama, here is the climax and crisis o f the story—the place where we can discern something fundamental about the very nature o f history. W h e n I consider the paltriness o f the literature which the twentieth century p r o duces about its o w n tragedy and think only o f the doctrine o f love as i t is explored i n the N e w Testament I must confess that I k n o w o f no language that seems to me strong enough to indicate the contrast. A n d i f i t is the humble w h o are the special care o f Providence i t is not insignificant that the God w h o m we should not k n o w h o w to worship, should be presented to us i n the f o r m o f a man to w h o m the humblest

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can be faithful and w h o m the poorest can t r y to follow. One o f the greatest deficiencies o f our time is the failure o f the imagination or the intellect to bring home to itself the portentous character o f human sin. Glib prophets tell us that we had better be good, or they blithely take i t for granted that we w i l l be good—and at worst they w i l l threaten us w i t h the atomic bomb i n case we are not good or refuse to do what they want—and they seem utterly unaware o f the magnitude o f the issues that he behind these facile words. I n time o f war the spectacle o f sin and evil seems to be envisaged i n a highlycoloured f o r m ; and i f I l o o k at history i t is n o w the French, n o w the Russians, n o w the Germans, w h o have at the convenient moment, become- for Englishmen the seat o f all the sin that there is i n the w o r l d . A t the expense o f each i n turn all the thunders o f ancient prophets and the curses o f ancient priests are brought cumbrously into gear again— sometimes (as i n the case o f an allied indoctrination film which I saw recently), i n a manner I should regard as degrading t o the human m i n d . I f we imagine the w o r l d as a w o r l d o f generally righteous men w i t h — a t any given m o m e n t — o n l y one especially wicked nation i n i t , we shall never envisage the seriousness o f that situation w i t h which Christianity sets out to deal. A l l the horrors that can occur over the length and breadth o f the European continent have ultimately to be presented to our m i n d as the sign and the consequence o f the general problem o f human sin. Otherwise i t is clear that even i n our political attempts t o reduce or rectify the miseries o f the w o r l d we shall only be i n danger o f enlarging the area o f the mischief. I t w o u l d be a good thing i f only we w o u l d confront the moral issue, and face this problem o f evil, but this is another o f the cases where mere history books w i l l never carry us deep enough into human beings, and our ultimate decisions must come as we move f r o m history to self-analysis. I t w o u l d be good i f we w o u l d set before ourselves the worst episode we ever encountered i n the whole o f our observation o f the w o r l d , and ask: ' W h a t is to be

FOOLISHNESS T O T H E GREEKS

done when men have committed the unforgivable sin?' Even so, the question is too easy, and has not been properly faced, i f we merely take the occasion to indulge our passion against an enemy or our anger against the foreigner. T o be sure that we are not distorting things by any illusions about ourselves or any hatred against others, let i t be clear i n our minds that w e are all charged w i t h things that we blush to remember—we face the issue squarely i f we imagine that w e ourselves are the culprit i n question, or that some child o f ours, w h o m w e love, is being accused. I t was once argued against Christianity that the purposes o f God w o u l d be entirely defeated supposing all men had committed (as they are free to do), the unforgivable sin; but there, where Christianity was supposed to come to an end, is precisely the point at which its argument begins. I f we ask what is to be done i n such a case we must say: what is to be done when, by definition, the sinful men i n question are still not merely animals to be slaughtered, not mere insects to be smeared o f f the map? The life o f Christ—a life otherwise so full o f gentleness and poetry that i t turns some superficial observers into mere sentimentalists—meets the whole issue w i t h such starkness that here again i t stands at the central point i n any k i n d o f argument on the subject. The matter is one which we can only confront i n the interior o f our personalities, but no man, faced by the teaching o f the N e w Testament on the subject, can make a decision i n regard to this, w h i c h — t h o u g h primarily a decision about himself—does not determine his whole interpretation o f the human drama. The most critical problem that the panorama o f history presents to us is therefore one which, while affecting our map o f all the ages, passes out o f the hands o f the historian entirely. A l l this has its degree o f truth and has a certain relevance even for those people w h o do not accept the higher dogmas o f an historical religion. I am not clear, however, that i t w o u l d ever be easy or ever be the natural m o t i o n o f men to accept these particular Christian dogmas save i n those medieval conditions

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which I for m y part do not desire to see repeated, when people were credulous i n general concerning the supernatural, and when i t was possible to transmit religion as a tradition w i t h o u t any great obstruction or any serious disturbance o f the general framework o f ideas. O n the other hand, i f we think that these Christian beliefs are out o f keeping w i t h the twentieth century, there is good ground for saying that they must have been almost equally anomalous i n the R o m a n Empire o f the early centuries o f the Christian era, which itself i n any case represented a high degree o f civilisation. N e w Testament writers were w e l l aware that their teaching was foolishness to the Greeks—conscious o f the fact that the highbrows o f the contemporary w o r l d w o u l d reproach them for holding beliefs that were out o f keeping w i t h the philosophy and the spirit o f their age. Bertrand Russell once pointed out that the quarrels o f modern philosophy have turned on fundamental issues which were the subject o f controversy before the time o f Socrates. The B o o k o f the W i s d o m o f Solomon i n the Apocrypha has a beautiful and sympathetic passage concerning the difficulties o f the agnostic and the pitfalls o f atheism. I am not sure about the existence o f any modern obstruction to religious belief which, when we come to the essential point, does not resolve itself into a fundamental difficulty o f which the w o r l d was already cognisant t w o or three thousand years ago. Neither the difficulties nor the options before us are as modern as many people think. They are not any less important for that. They are simply a standing issue i n history and i n life. I t might be expected, therefore, that I should say a w o r d on the subject o f the Gospel narratives, especially as, to a certain degree, they come w i t h i n the class o f literature which I mentioned i n m y first lecture—the compilation o f the chronicler, the k i n d o f thing which was criticised by Ranke i n so damaging a manner, because i t was so much less reliable for a scientific student than the primary documentary evidence. O f course there are some writings so clear i n their integrity, and so

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transparent i n certain respects, that w i t h i n their p r o p e r realm they c o u l d almost be described as c a r r y i n g their o w n selfratification w i t h t h e m ; and I t h i n k that the Gospels, w h e n c o n strued f o r certain essential purposes, must be regarded belonging

t o this class.

as

O n e aspect o f revelation itself is

illustrated i n the case o f truths w h i c h one c o u l d h a r d l y i m a g i n e a m a n h a v i n g the spiritual exaltation t o reach, b u t w h i c h w h e n presented t o us authenticate themselves instantaneously i n o u r m i n d s , l i k e some o f the m o r e remarkable teaching about l o v e i n the N e w Testament.

W e should be p l a y i n g tricks w i t h o u r -

selves, h o w e v e r , i f w e i m a g i n e d that such a t h e o r y o f selfratification w o u l d be a sufficient g r o u n d i n g f o r truths o f the k i n d i n w h i c h the technical historian is interested; and certainly this m e t h o d w o u l d n o t serve the purpose o f authenticating Gospel h i s t o r y t o a person n o t already predisposed t o beg questions o n this subject.

This is m o r e especially the case i n that

mere v i r t u e and honest i n t e n t are n o t sufficient t o guarantee the accuracy f o r a l l purposes (and i n all details), o f any particular piece o f historical w r i t i n g .

I t is clear that the most f a i t h f u l o f

people, i f they lack certain things that require something l i k e a technical t r a i n i n g , w i l l fail t o realise pitfalls i n the use o f e v i dence, o r w i l l neglect t o show the required scepticism concerni n g some i n f o r m a t i o n that has come t o their ears.

I f I were to

say that, i n spite o f great differences i n o p i n i o n and i n t e r p r e t a t i o n , N e w Testament scholars d o seem i n general t o agree that the Gospel narratives give us something authentic o n w h i c h t o b u i l d , I should d o u b t the final value o f even that j u d g m e n t t o any outsider w h o has a disposition t o be sceptical.

F o r any-

t h i n g w e k n o w this g r o u p o f scholars m a y f o r m a r i n g o r be professionally-minded.

A l t e r n a t i v e l y there m a y be a l a w i n

accordance w i t h w h i c h those w h o d o n o t have f a i t h i n these documents either cease ipso facto t o be N e w Testament scholars o r s i m p l y keep o u t o f that branch o f study.

I f w e remember as

a solemn fact that those w h o saw C h r i s t a n d heard H i m w e r e still d i v i d e d i n o p i n i o n about H i m , w e m i g h t d o u b t w h e t h e r a n y t h i n g i n the w r i t t e n Gospels o r a n y t h i n g that historical

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science may discover w i l l overcome such obstructions as exist or obliterate those factors which made possible so great a difference o f opinion amongst those w h o saw the historical Jesus i n the flesh. A n d even i f those w h o disbelieved were obstructed b y some intellectual pride or by being stiff-necked or by being prisoners o f contemporary schématisations and systems o f thought, i t is still true that historical scholarship w i l l never settle the issues that are presented by a problem o f this particular kind. I f instead o f the present narratives we had an undoubted autobiography o f Christ; i f He instead o f St. Paul had left us great Epistles o f unchallenged authenticity; i f we had state documents concerning the public events o f His life, I am not clear that the differences o f judgment to-day w o u l d be a w h i t less sharp than they are, or the distribution o f opinion very different. For the truth is that the essential question is not one o f scholarship at all. I n any case the conditions for a universal religion w o u l d not be satisfied by a religion which demanded that men should be experts i n N e w Testament criticism—and capable o f making up their minds where the highest experts differ—before they were i n a state to make the essential choice between belief and unbelief. W e have already seen h o w some people have complained o f the vanity o f an academic k i n d o f history which stranded them i n discussions concerning the causes o f the W a r o f Jenkins* Ear or the w o r k i n g o f some constitutional device, when what they wanted was an interpretation o f the human drama i n general, what troubled them was rather the moral-historical problem presented by all the centuries. The Gospels, however, belong precisely to that other class o f historical w r i t i n g , w h i c h seems to be i n such demand—the k i n d i n w h i c h the facts are wrapped up i n their interpretation, the story is embedded i n a v i e w o f life; and a whole synthesis is presented to us—presented not merely to technical historical analysis but to the whole personality o f each o f us. I t has always been the case that the writers o f this kind o f literature are highly selective i n regard to the facts—they w i l l tend to seize upon precisely those facts w h i c h

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have rung a bell i n their minds, those facts which have struck them because they illustrated their interpretation o f history so aptly. Such men may be so interested i n the essential points— and particularly i n the moral issues—that they do not greatly concern themselves about the question whether an event happened on Wednesday or on Friday, i n Birmingham or i n Bristol. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that, when we are confronted w i t h historical w r i t i n g o f this kind, our attitude to i t must depend primarily on the decision which we make i n regard to its whole system o f interpretation. I t is total history or totalitarian history—it is one's appropriation o f the whole human drama—that is i n question, and our attitude on this essential point carries many o f the other important issues along w i t h i t , for i t represents our decision about the whole universe and our relation to i t . I t is at the same time our decision about ourselves—our answer to whatever challenge the Gospels may present to our personal l i f e — f o r i n choosing our attitude to the whole drama o f world-history we are at the same time making the most intimate decision about ourselves. I n anything that has reference to concrete, measurable phenomena, the apparatus o f the technical historian can claim great authority; and we should not only be prepared w i t h o u t fear to accept the results o f established scholarship-^ think that we ought to practise a certain elasticity o f m i n d i n regard to such matters as create great differences o f opinion amongst experts i n this technical realm, because on such matters we may strongly feel that we are right w i t h o u t actually being right. W e ought even to have a further region o f elasticity out o f deference to the strange things that may happen i n technical scholarship i n the next hundred years; for great distress is p r o duced amongst Christians and some harm is done to religion when too anxious an attempt is made to tie Christianity to the state o f the various empirical sciences as they exist i n 1849 or 1949. W e must not lose sight o f the fact that scholarship throughout history—like the various sciences—has shown an

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aggressive tendency, so that i n every age men claim that things are proved when they have not really been proved, or they make inferences which their apparatus and their evidence could never have qualified them to make. Those w h o believe that God is i n history, and those w h o say that there is no God i n history can hardly help offering what are really concealed arguments i n a circle whenever they talk about the subject. B u t i t is possible to distinguish where the historian is keeping w i t h i n the limits o f what is authorised by his apparatus and his evidence, and where he is deluding us w i t h his concealed assumptions and his arguments i n a circle. I n other words, Christians make a mistake i f either they are afraid o f scholarship (as they often have been) or i f they become superstitious concerning its infallibility and its competence. They make a mistake i f they think that the technical historian can decide for or against the spiritual view o f fife w h i c h we have been discussing, and which greatly affects one's attitude to the Gospels. They make a mistake i f they forget that the discoveries achieved by the apparatus and the evidence available to historians and natural scientists still leave our minds w i t h r o o m to range, r o o m to reign over the decisions w h i c h we make i n the things that really matter. Once w e have put technical history i n its proper place, however, and once we have confined its competence w i t h i n the appropriate frontiers, then those w h o have accepted an historical religion can never be justified i n trying to steal f r o m academic and critical history the authority which i t possesses i n regard to some very tangible and concrete things. Christianity could hardly have persisted i n its traditional f o r m i f scholarship had succeeded i n demonstrating that Christ Himself should be regarded as a mythical figure. A n historical religion w o u l d be precariously rooted i f i t did not carry w i t h i t a fervent interest i n an historical Jesus. I f documents were to come to fight showing beyond doubt that H e had red hair or walked w i t h a l i m p or had a curious trick w i t h His hand when speaking i n public, not only w o u l d the student o f history be interested

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but any Christian ought to be; for i t is the characteristic o f an historical religion to be rooted i n earthiness and to have a v i v i d apprehension o f material things. One o f the things i n history which reveal a strange and powerful insight and seem to point to a providential order, is the extraordinary firmness shown i n this matter by the Church i n the early centuries, which w o u l d have no tampering w i t h the flesh o f Christ, no conjuring tricks and optical illusions, but insisted on real flesh that could suffer real pain—insisted that the religion should be authentically rooted i n history. Some o f the b e w i l dering controversies i n early Church history become more manageable to our minds i f we realise that the central object o f the Church was to maintain the full humanity as w e l l as the full divinity o f Christ. These people had a clear image i n their minds o f what they were determined to require, though there might be difficulty i n securing a water-tight f o r m o f words to represent it—difficulty i n finding agreement on a formula that w o u l d guard against one error w i t h o u t threatening to t h r o w the Church into the opposite one. The quest for the historical Jesus did not begin i n the nineteenth century, though that century was the first v i v i d l y to realise the science and the discipline which such a task required. A n d i t w o u l d be a dangerous error to imagine that the characteristics o f an historical religion w o u l d be maintained i f the Christ o f the theologians were divorced f r o m the Jesus o f history.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

HISTORY, RELIGION A N D T H E PRESENT D A Y HITHERTO i n these lectures I have attempted to show w h y I think that the general course o f history is so shaped that a Christian is i n the right relation w i t h i t ; and this o f course means that throughout the centuries i t has been possible for the simplest Christians to be right i n this matter, while clever doctrinaires were being misled by academic simplifications w h i c h have come and gone, each having its turn as die current fashion. Also I have tried to illustrate the Christian attitude to the human drama by certain kinds o f historical analysis. I f I say that I see nothing which is likely to touch the present situation o f the w o r l d except Christianity, I do not mean that i t is the function o f religion to save civilisation or that Christianity is a thing to which we resort to rescue a system and order that are either decrepit or under the judgment o f Heaven. One could not say that such a faith is properly appropriated when i t is adopted w i t h the object o f getting society out o f a scrape. I n speaking o f religion, furthermore, I have had i n m i n d nothing that is at all novel, but a Christianity that is ancient, something w h i c h has been available t o anybody i n our part o f the w o r l d for fifteen hundred years—a religion o f the spirit, other-worldly i f y o u like, preaching charity and humility, trusting Providence and submitting to i t , and setting its heart and its treasure i n heaven. Such a religion does at least save men from making gods out o f sticks and stones, and offering vast human sacrifices to abstract nouns, and running amok w i t h myths o f righteousness, especially myths o f self-righteousness, as people have so often done i n the twentieth century. A n d i f y o u set your direction by a distant star y o u do assure that all your other affections and purposes are properly balanced—the 130

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131

things which are merely means to ends are not allowed to become absolute ends i n themselves. For those w h o are interested i n the relation o f religion to the problems o f the present day, i t is possible that a note about Christianity i n history may provide some material for consideration; for here are certain signposts f r o m which we may take our bearings. The point is more relevant i n that this is a subject upon which the ordinary student o f the past is often liable to an optical illusion. Even serious students, like our great Cambridge historian, L o r d Acton, have been greatly interested i n church history while regarding i t as a f o r m o f politicoecclesiastical history, and they have tended to overlook that more intimate thing, the inner spiritual life o f the Church. The ordinary historian, when he comes, shall we say, to the year 1800 does not think to point out to his readers that i n this year, still, as i n so many previous years, thousands and t h o u sands o f priests and ministers were preaching the Gospel week i n and week out, constandy reminding the farmer and the shopkeeper o f charity and humility, persuading them to think for a moment about the great issues o f life, and inducing them to confess their sins. Yet this was a phenomenon calculated greatly to alter the quality o f life and the very texture o f human history; and i t has been the standing w o r k o f the Church throughout the ages—even under the worst o f popes here was a light that never went out. A n d i n another respect the Church never failed; for, amongst all peoples, whether lettered or unlettered, there have always been those w h o reached the highest peaks o f the spiritual life; and as Professor Powicke once pointed out, we can all call to m i n d any number o f people w h o needed to w a i t for no millenium. As i t only needs a comparatively small number o f communists to upset a state— because o f their intent purposefulness—so i t only needs a c o m paratively small number o f these kinds o f Christians to operate as a leaven that leavens the whole l u m p . I t is impossible to measure the vast difference that ordinary Christian piety has made to the last t w o thousand years o f European history; but

i 2 3

HISTORY, RELIGION AND THE PRESENT DAY

we shall have some inkling o f that difference i f the w o r l d continues i n its present drift towards paganism. Here is a fact which blots out and supersedes everything that can be said against the churches i n European history. O n the other hand, though I consider that a religious interpretation o f the whole drama o f human life is the only one that is tenable for a moment, I cannot personally accept those forms o f what I call ecclesiastical interpretation w h i c h are sometimes put forward for polemical purposes. I notice that the supporters o f what I should call the ecclesiastical interpretation o f history tend to speak o f toleration, political liberty, the democratic f o r m o f government, and the establishment o f social justice as though these were due to the operation o f the Christian spirit i n society and even as though the credit for them should go to the churches. I have grave misgivings concerning that f o r m o f polemical history which seeks to promote the cause o f Christianity by these mundane forms o f justification, and w h i c h really rather attempts to justify churchmen and ecclesiastical systems. The genuine victory o f toleration i n Europe, for example, seems to me to have been due to the g r o w i n g power i n the w o r l d o f secular interests and secular considerations. The churches seem to me to have refrained f r o m persecution—or reconciled themselves to the abandonment o f i t — v e r y much i n proportion as churchmen lost the government o f society, or lacked the power to behave as they wished. Indeed to me one o f the terrible things i n history — a n issue w h i c h I cannot be satisfied to evade—is the fact that the Christian Church began a cruel policy o f persecution f r o m the earliest moment when i t was i n a position (and had the power) to do so; while at the other end o f the story both Catholic and Protestant churches fought to the last point o f cruelty not merely to maintain their persecuting p o w e r — b u t fought a separate war for each separate weapon o f persecution that was being taken f r o m them. A l l this is not i n any sense an argument against Christianity itself, but i t is a serious comment on human nature even as i t appears i n ecclesiastical history.

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Similarly, though I am aware o f certain exceptions, I am not convinced that those advances i n social justice which have taken place i n modern times have taken place because a Christian spirit had widened the generosity o f the more favoured classes, or even o f the clergy, w h o (even those o f them at a very high level sometimes) seem to me to have bitterly resisted the changes. Some o f the most signal improvements seem to me to have taken place because the w o r k i n g classes, organising themselves as an interested party, had become a power too formidable to be ignored. A n d i f I am told h o w many programmes o f social benefit go back to movements like those o f the Anabaptists i n sixteenth-century or those o f the Puritan sects i n seventeenth-century England, I cannot escape the fact that even i n these cases the impulse to social change was an aspect o f a rebellion against ecclesiastical authority. Sometimes, indeed, as i n the case o f freedom o f conscience, the Church has bitterly fought the w o r l d , and I am confronted by the anomaly that i t was the w o r l d w h i c h stood for the cause n o w regarded as the right one even by the clergy themselves. These are a few o f the initial paradoxes and they have repercussions that are more serious still. W h e n I hear churchmen condemning communism to-day and saying that only liberal democracy is admissible for a Christian f o r m o f society, I am faced by the fact that so far as I can see ecclesiastical authority at the critical moment once condemned democracy i n the same way. I was reading only the other day the things Englishmen said about the French Revolution and they were uncomfortably similar to the things we have said about the Russian one. Suppose for a moment that communism were ever to be established i n the w o r l d , then the Church which n o w claims to stand for democracy w o u l d be following the pattern o f its former behaviour if, a hundred years hence, i t were to turn round and tell us that after all nothing could be more Christian than the classless society. The answer whicR could easily be made to the k i n d o f objection I am raising here w o u l d be that communism to-day o f course stands before us associated w i t h

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unbelief, atrocities, persecution and aggression. B u t that is just the point: so d i d democracy i n the age o f the French R e v o l u tion. Socialism itself comes d o w n to us curiously tied up w i t h secularism, anti-clericalism and unbelief. M a n y o f the things w h i c h the twentieth century n o w prizes so much may have been born o f Christian charity i n the last resort, but they often had to fight t i e dominant voice i n the Church and established their footing i n history too often as anti-Christian movements. A l l this presents a serious argument against a certain kind o f ecclesiastical interpretation o f history, especially the kind i n which churchmen seem concerned to establish or justify a k i n g d o m o f this w o r l d . The whole argument may be shortcircuited, however, i f the issue is discussed at a higher level and we insist that Christianity is n o t tied to the ideals—particularly the political ideals—of the twentieth century. Toleration, democracy, political liberty, social equality, the classless society—these may be the dreams o f the twentieth century; but w e have not proved that any one o f them is practicable y e t — we have only to look at France i n our time to realise this—and we have not proved that human nature is up to diem. I n any case, i t may be argued, the Church has higher things to achieve, more important things that i t wants to do w i t h human beings. I personally w o u l d attach myself to this view, which I think the more religious one, especially as, to m y m i n d , the rôle o f the Church i n history is not satisfactorily explained on any other basis. I have never been quite convinced by die accounts I have seen—though I may have been very defective i n m y knowledge o f them—that the Christian Church was responsible for the emancipation o f slaves i n the R o m a n Empire. B u t I am utterly convinced and a thousand times more impressed by the original teaching o f Christianity—namely that i n Christ a man was free, actually felt himself exultantly free, and could be conscious o f reaching the profoundest depths i n life, even though he was a slave. O n this view, furthermore, w e can say that Christianity flourishes independent o f régimes and political orders—it may capture any

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régime—and I have yet to be convinced that political regimes can ever really destroy i t . I do not think, however, that ecclesiastical authority i n history can quite escape judgment i n the mundane aspects o f its activity, even on this argument. T o o often i t d i d tie itself to régimes and privileged orderings o f society, even i n the face o f movements which we n o w regard as having served to ease the l o t o f the poor. F r o m the time when the conversion o f the Emperor Constantine first placed the power o f the R o m a n Empire on the side o f Christianity, the history o f churches is beset w i t h anomalies. Indeed after a period o f fifteen hundred years or so we can just about begin to say that at last no man is n o w a Christian because o f government compulsion, or because i t is the way to procure favour at court, or because i t is necessary i n order to qualify for public office, or because public opinion demands conformity, or because he w o u l d lose customers i f he did not go to church, or even because habit and intellectual indolence keep the mind i n the appointed groove. This fact makes the present day the most important and the most exhilarating period i n the history o f Christianity for fifteen hundred years; and the removal o f so many kinds o f inducement and compulsion makes nonsense o f any argument based on the decline i n the numbers o f professing Christians i n the twentieth century. W e are back for the first time i n something like the earliest centuries o f Christianity, and those early centuries afford some relevant clues to the k i n d o f attitude to adopt. B y its alliance w i t h power for fifteen hundred years, h o w ever, the Church committed itself to being on the whole the cement o f society, the buttress o f whatever was the existing order, and the defender o f the status quo—at one time thinking that its interests were bound up w i t h absolute monarchy, at another time clinging to a f o r m o f aristocracy, w i t h all the fervour w i t h which we might n o w expect i t to cling to liberal democracy. Indeed almost f r o m the earliest days o f that alliance one can hardly read the story w i t h o u t the most serious misgivings, and w i t h i n the Church itself we are presented i n a

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v i v i d way w i t h the problem we have previously discussed—the problem o f human nature i n history. D u r i n g those fifteen hundred years its leaders were too often the conscious accomplices i n things that we deplore to-day, and much more often still they engaged i n those unconscious complicities w h i c h always arise when there is an alliance w i t h power, or else they were engaged i n the game o f power themselves. The story o f Protestantism is not i n this respect structurally different f r o m the story o f R o m a n Catholicism. I f we took a succession o f wars and examined the role o f ecclesiastical authority i n a given national church w i t h respect to the whole series o f them throughout a century or t w o , or i f we took the case o f a single war and collated the voices o f the several different and hostile national churches which were involved i n that conflict, I am not clear f r o m what I have seen that the result w o u l d be a very comforting one to a student o f international Christianity, and i n this connection i t does not seem to me to matter greatly whether the churches i n question are established or not. F r o m a different point o f view, I sometimes wonder whether i t w i l l take generations or perhaps only decades to heal certain deepseated and understandable resentments against ecclesiastical authorities and systems, resentments w h i c h are certainly not so great to-day as they once were, but which are still a serious obstruction to Christianity. Such an attitude is w r o n g but I cannot merely condemn i t w i t h o u t any trace o f fellow-feeling for those w h o hold i t ; and sometimes I have felt i n reading history that Christianity can be unattractive and almost an intolerable religion i n some o f its manifestations, when not accompanied by humility and charity. I f people w o u l d turn, however, f r o m politico-ecclesiastical history to the intimate fife o f the Church throughout the ages, and the spiritual w o r k done by humble men over the face o f the continent for fifteen hundred years, they w o u l d find i t the most m o v i n g spectacle that history presents, and w o u l d see h o w the spread o f piety does mean a g r o w t h i n charity. I t is even true that some men w h o made what we should regard as w r o n g

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decisions about such things as toleration, democracy and social justice, were men w h o gave abundant evidence o f piety and charitableness day by day through the course o f their lives; and some o f the ecclesiastical statesmen w h o offend us by their policies, when we read an outline o f these i n general history, prove on more intimate acquaintance to have been most m o v ing figures i n the ordinary course o f their w o r k and influence. Since i t is part o f m y purpose to discuss h o w Christians might envisage the ordinary events o f secular history and the general spectacle o f human vicissitude, i t may be useful to see h o w we may mount our picture o f the twentieth century. I n this way we may round off our study o f the problem o f modern war. I n the conflicts that succeeded the Reformation the addition o f the religious motive to whatever other issues were involved, d i d not mitigate the hostility but rendered i t more bitter and uncompromising, especially as i t provided the excuse for treati n g enemies as sub-human, on the ground that they were agents o f the devil or an abomination to the L o r d . Before the end o f the sixteenth century we see pofitically-minded men protesting and actually arguing that though i t might be the ideal thing to destroy heretics, such horrors must not be allowed to continue even for the sake o f religion. I t was perhaps the advance o f secular civilisation—a civilisation leavened, no doubt, by some Christian charity—which made the eighteenth century deprecate the turning o f wars into 'wars for righteousness', though that century had fairly clear ideas on the very different question o f what technically constituted a just war'. They rejected the fanaticism which felt that God and all His angels w o u l d be thwarted i f you failed to defeat the enemy; and they argued that i t was better to say clearly that y o u were fighting for a province, fighting for Alsace, for example, and then when y o u were tired o f fighting y o u could divide the territory or arrange a system o f compensation, while i n a 'war for righteousness' y o u could never compromise. D o n ' t awaken the moral indignation o f the masses,

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they said, because y o u may want to w i t h d r a w f r o m the war and public opinion w i l l be at fever-heat and w i l l not allow i t . They even said that y o u must keep the moral element out o f war, since, like religion, i t only multiplied the number o f the atrocities. So, not only i n theory but also largely i n practice, the eighteenth century favoured limited liability wars—wars about something concrete, so that y o u knew when y o u were finished w i t h the matter. A n d i f y o u had talked about wars for high objects—wars to promote Christian charity or to further a tolerant spirit or to secure the urbanity which is necessary for the practice o f self-government, then, the higher the object, the more they w o u l d have laughed i n your face. W h e n Charles James Fox opposed the Younger Pitt for going to war w i t h the French Revolution he called upon this body o f familiar maxims, and i t does not matter i f he put them to a use o f which many o f us w o u l d perhaps be unable to approve. He took the line that this was the case o f a war w h i c h was something like a war o f religion; therefore i t could never end and i t could only be a war for total destruction, there being no specific territorial object to mark the limits o f the endeavour. O n the same system o f ideas y o u kept i n m i n d not so much the occasion which had led to the outbreak o f war but rather the question o f the k i n d o f map which y o u were going to produce at the end, i f y o u w o n your victory. A n d i f for any reason y o u found (as people did find sometimes) that y o u were going t o produce a disposition o f forces more unsatisfactory than before, y o u might change your policy even i n the middle o f a war. That principle is one w h i c h ought to be seriously meditated upon n o w i n the fight o f the territorial distribution o f power i n Europe to-day. The French Revolution inaugurated the modern wars o f peoples, opened the age o f self-righteous nationalism, and presented the model case o f the transition to post-democratic dictatorship. There were men i n the nineteenth century w h o predicted that more popular government might intensify the

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problem o f war and we are w r o n g i f we imagine that we could really dispose o f this terrible problem by the mere expedient o f establishing democracy everywhere. Modern wars and modern dictatorships are the products o f untrained democracies—blind, uncomprehending, over-anxious, easily exasperated. T w e n t y five years ago an Italian anti-fascist writer showed h o w , for semi-technical reasons, governments w o u l d stage all future wars as 'wars for righteousness'—that is to say, as totalitarian religious conflicts. W e n o w k n o w that, though Providence may always have something i n store for us that cuts across all expectations, no line o f thought hitherto attempted can give us reason for thinking that these 'wars for righteousness' should ever stop taking place. They can happen w i t h anybody— w i t h people w h o only recently were our allies, for example. The most terrible instance before 1914 was a war between one half and the other half o f the United States. Even i f we had a world-state they might still happen i n the f o r m o f civil wars. These wars, and the revolutions and overturns w h i c h so often arise f r o m them, are responsible for that new spectacle, the phenomenon o f modern barbarism, which, as i t has developed i n one part o f the globe after another, has made us feel sometimes that the civilised w o r l d was dissolving around us. The overthrow o f a customary order o f things; the release o f blind passions that feel themselves to be only a legitimate k i n d o f moral indignation; the sudden rise to power o f men and classes not yet trained and disciplined to the task; the emergence i n so many places o f a younger generation under conditions that give them no chance to g r o w up into the values o f a civilised w o r l d i n the way that we grew up into them—these are confronting us w i t h a k i n d o f barbarisation w h i c h provides the hottest fuel for further wars o f self-righteousness. W e ourselves are nowadays confronted w i t h the possibility o f having to wage war against the very monsters w h i c h we conjured into existence through our previous wars. W h a t are destroyed first o f all i n this process o f barbarisation are the subde

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principles and concealed safeguards on which the preservation o f a civilisation depends. The men o f a given generation are generally unaware o f the degree to w h i c h they envisage their contemporary history w i t h i n an assumed framework, ranging events into certain shapes or running them into certain moulds w h i c h are sometimes adopted almost as i n a day-dream. They may be sublimely unconscious o f the way their minds are constricted by their routine formulation o f the story; and only when the w o r l d is different, and there emerges a new generation not locked f r o m b i r t h i n the accepted framework, does the narrowness o f that framework become apparent to everybody. A n analysis o f France's defeat i n 1940—one w h i c h seems to me to make many other analyses look cheap—has stressed the r i g i d i t y o f m i n d displayed by the French General Staffs a rigidity attributed i n part to the defects o f the educational system i n that country. Such tragic lack o f elasticity has not been confined t o the French or to the military side o f government i n our time, and i t is a solemn fact that amongst the causes o f this intellectual rigidity we must count the learning o f history for purposes o f recapitulation i n examination, i n every case where this is not accompanied by a v i v i d awareness o f the dangers to w h i c h i t gives rise. I n this connection there is one historical fact w h i c h all Englishmen—whether governors, citizens or students—should stare at for a long time. I mean the fact that at the end o f the Napoleonic wars the British were so convinced that the French always w o u l d be the aggressors and the enemies o f mankind that they insisted on installing a strong Prussia i n the Rhineland to fortify Germany, even though the Prussians were unwilling to be aggrandised i n that region and complained that i t w o u l d only bring them into conflict w i t h France. W e have not sufficiently cultivated flexibility or examined the conditions under which n o w one nation and n o w another becomes liable to enter upon a career o f aggression. That the whole popularly-accepted historical framework which we have given to

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the events o f the last fifty years w i l l be revised, and revised so radically that the quarrels between pro-Munich and anti-Munich w i l l seem like the quarrels o f Tweedledum and Tweedledee— this, in spite o f the colossal power o f the vested interests ready to clamp d o w n upon i t , and i n spite o f the hysterias that some people w i l l t r y to raise, is the safest prediction that can be made i n regard to the next twenty years for anything i n the whole range o f historical science. T o take merely one example: when I consider the English fears o f the Russian bogy for so long a period i n the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; when I remember what underlay the Balkan crisis w h i c h precipitated war i n 1914; when I recall the events which led us only a few months after the opening o f that war to promise Constantinople to the Russians—when I reflect on these and a hundred other things I wonder what is going to prevent the future historian f r o m seeing that over a long period not one power but two—Russia as w e l l as Germany—have been plainly struggling for a dominating position i n Europe. I f that should prove to be the general picture o f the first fifty years o f the twentieth century, i t produces vast displacements i n the story and we must tremble to think what our grandchildren w i l l say about us; for, even though the one power m i g h t become a more immediate danger than the other at a given moment, such a situation demands a different type o f thinkingcap, a different type o f diplomacy and even i f necessary a different conception o f war f r o m anything we have had. Indeed there is very good historical precedent for a thesis which belongs to the cream o f diplomatic tradition i n better times—one o f the choicest maxims ever produced for the w o r l d when on the edge o f a precipice—and i f ever anybody re-thinks the whole problem they w i l l no doubt be prepared to consider i t , much as i t goes against prevailing opinion. I t is the thesis that i f t w o rival giants are offering an alternate threat to the existing order o f things on the continent, and i f y o u are unwilling to let the rascals fight i t out by themselves, choose carefully the time o f your intervention i n their struggle

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and see that y o u intervene only i n order to save w h i c h ever o f the t w o i t may be from being destroyed by the other. For, so l o n g as there are t w o o f these giants on the continent the w o r l d can breathe; but i f you devote a war for righteousness to the purpose o f destroying one o f them y o u are using y o u r blood and treasure to build up the other one into a greater monster than ever, and y o u w i l l infallibly have to face i t at the next stage o f the story. I n other words the policy o f ridding the w o r l d o f aggression by the method o f total w a r — o f the war for righteousness—is like using the devil to cast out the devil: i t does not even have the merit o f being practical politics. I t w o u l d follow from various things w h i c h we have studied i n these lectures that there is hardly reason for regarding the problem o f contemporary Russia as radically different for the diplomatist from what i t w o u l d have been i f the régime had been a Tsarist one, or i f that country had even been democratically governed. The general predicament w o u l d have been much the same supposing the Tsars had still been on the throne, possessing the territory, the satellite states, and the sphere o f influence n o w belonging to the Soviet U n i o n ; and this w o u l d virtually have been the situation i n 1919 (save that they w o u l d have held Constantinople too), i f the Revolution had not cut across the avowed aims and cancelled the c o m m i t ments o f allied diplomacy. The history o f Europe does not suggest that the adoption o f a policy o f aggression, when the distribution o f power made such a policy feasible, w o u l d have been prevented i f Russia had still been numbered amongst the Christian states, i n the sense i n which she was so numbered (along w i t h Germany) i n 1914. It is not always realised—though once again the eighteenth century showed clear consciousness o f the point—that the existence o f a number o f states intermediate i n size but authentically controlling their o w n policy, so that they could shift their weight f r o m one side to another, long served to p r o vide ball-bearings for the European states-system, and made self-adjustments i n that system more easy. The virtual

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elimination o f this order o f things after t w o W o r l d Wars, and the reduction o f effective diplomacy to the transactions o f very few great powers, keeps everything taut, so that every episode is a crisis, and i t is difficult to see h o w the tension can be relaxed. I f after 1945 things were so balanced that the predicament o f Hobbesian fear was produced and all had to feel that the future o f Europe depended on Germany—the Western Powers unable to tolerate communism i n that country, Russia determined not to be checkmated by the formation o f an anticommunist government there, and neither side able to afford to withdraw and allow the Germans authentically to determine their o w n future—such a predicament, viewed as the culmination o f forty years o f diplomacy and war, w o u l d look very much like the judgment o f God on the victor nations themselves. It is the tendency o f contemporaries to estimate a revolution too exclusively by its atrocities, while posterity always seems to err through its inability to take these into account or v i v i d l y appreciate them. M a n y o f the atrocities i n various countries i n the twentieth century w o u l d appear to be the concomitant o f almost any order that has come into existence through violent revolution; and we find them i n history even when the revolution avows itself liberal, like that o f 1789, even indeed when i t calls itself Christian. O n the other hand i t is not certain whether such things as mass slavery are not to be associated w i t h Russia and a backward civilisation rather than w i t h anything inherent i n the communist teaching; though, through sympathetic attraction, they are liable to be brought into the West wherever communism is successful. M a n y of the cruelties and the degradation o f personality are at the same time a feature o f what we have called modern barbarism, wherever the phenomenon may appear; and i t is possible that there is no cure for this save peace and a continuity o f development, during which men may grow i n reasonableness. I t is modern technique and organisation, rather than any change i n the quality o f human nature—save, possibly such change as the

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technical developments themselves almost inevitably produce — w h i c h have altered the scale o f atrocities i n the modern w o r l d . Revolution tears up the traditions, withers the urbanities and destroys the subtler values o f a cultured society, falling heavily upon the imponderable things w h i c h spring f r o m an uninterrupted history, and sacrificing a present generation for an end w h i c h must be postponed and highly contingent, i f practicable at aU. B u t war is the father o f modern revolution and there may be justice i n the argument that when a country has already been torn up by war, and government has broken d o w n (as possibly i n the case o f Tsarist Russia) the best that can be hoped for is a revolutionary party which knows what i t wants and has the firmness to seize and hold the reins. I t is not clear that egalitarianism or the classless society are involved as such i n any o f these questions, or that such principles are specifically anti-Christian, even if, like many bodies and movements (including liberalism at one time) they are connected w i t h an anti-religious cause—a cause which Russia has only adopted, i n any case, through the influence o f the West. They represent a utopianism concerning which the Christian may have many misgivings; but even those o f us w h o believe that an hierarchical society has conferred (save perhaps i n material things) many benefits even upon the very class which appeared to be victimised, may be seriously perturbed i f Christianity as such should be marshalled against a programme which, whatever its enemies m i g h t say, has taken up the interests o f what i n some respects are the disinherited. M e n are often governed more by their hatreds than their loves, and some men have more surely hated the capitalists than they have loved the poor; but we should not wish Christianity to be judged by the faults o f its more unworthy adherents. Even i f all present-day Russia were still governed by the Tsars the situation w o u l d be such that war m i g h t humanly speaking be unavoidable. I n view o f all these facts, and supposing i t to be legitimate to envisage history i n the framework which these lectures have described, a serious problem w o u l d be presented

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to churchmen i f war broke out and an attempt were made to erect the issue into a conflict o f Christianity versus C o m munism. So long as there are discontented groups w i t h i n the Western nations, the Soviet U n i o n is perhaps clear-sighted i n its recognition o f the interest i t has i n keeping diplomacy on an ideological basis. I n any case we w h o talk so easily about what w o u l d happen i f this or that power were the victor i n a war, are only just beginning to measure the portentous and farreaching consequences o f war itself, and to see h o w i t emerges as the chief solvent o f the very order o f things we wish to preserve. I n regard to some o f the most important things i n life i t is remarkable h o w little human beings k n o w their l i b e r t y — h o w little they realise that the grand discoveries o f the various inductive sciences still leave us free to range w i t h the upper parts o f our minds. I n these days also when people are so much the prisoners o f systems—especially the prisoners o f those general ideas which mark the spirit o f the age—it is not always realised that belief i n God gives us greater elasticity o f m i n d , rescuing us f r o m too great subservience to intermediate p r i n ciples, whether these are related to nationality or ideology or science. I t even enables us to leave more play i n our minds for the things that nature or history may still have to reveal to us i n the near future. Similarly Christianity is not tied to régimes — n o t compelled to regard the existing order as the very end o f life and the embodiment o f all our values. Christians have too often tried to put the brake on things i n the past, but at the critical turning-points i n history they have less reason than others to be afraid that a new k i n d o f society or civilisation w i l l leave them w i t h nothing to live for. W e are told by many people that our new age needs a new mentality, but so often when one reads these writers further all that they really say is that i f we don't do n o w the things they have been continually telling us to do since 1919 we shall have the atomic bomb and presumably deserve i t . I have nothing to say at the finish

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except that i f one wants a permanent rock i n life and goes deep enough for i t , i t is difficult for historical events to shake i t . There are times when we can never meet the future w i t h sufficient elasticity o f mind, especially i f we are locked i n the contemporary systems o f thought. W e can do worse than remember a principle which both gives us a firm R o c k and leaves us the m a x i m u m elasticity for our minds: the principle: H o l d to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted.