LECTURE I
THE NEW AGE: ITS EVIDENCE
LECTURE I
THE NEW AGE: ITS EVIDENCE
SOME such theme as I have chosen for these lectures—A New Mind for the New Age—seems well-nigh unavoidable. It is fairly thrust upon one by the critical conditions of the time, as a problem that will not down. All thoughtful men, indeed, are so inevitably turning these questions over in their minds, that one may hope in unusual degree for that quick interplay of thought that keeps a discussion even of familiar themes stimulating and vital. Each one of us, moreover, is a factor in the problem we are to discuss, and in its solution. It concerns us mightily. No merely academic consideration, therefore, to which one might be moved by simple intellectual curiosity will suffice. For, as Professor Giddings says:A powerful barbarism is an appalling menace; but it is not the supreme menace that threatens civilization at this hour. The supreme menace is the indifferentism, the negligence, and the procrastination, the paralysis of will that seems to be affecting the civilized minority of the world's population.
The imperative need, that is, in our time as at, the Christian era, is for a new mind. For the ringing call both of John the Baptist and of Christ was: Repent,—Change your minds, Get a new mind. And that new mind, we may be sure, will still include that utter truth to the trust of one's own individuality, and that willingness to take one's full share in the hard and disagreeable tasks in the world, which challenge us again out of that far-away time: "Stir into flame the gift of God, which is in thee;" "Take thy part in suffering hardship." This threefold individual challenge, at least, our theme contains from the start.
That the theme contains a like manifold challenge to classes and parties and churches and nations and races—for the restoration and creation of good-will and trust, for the full preservation and achievement of freedom, for a truer and more thoroughgoing democracy, for international relations that are not blind to the solidarity of the world, for a deeper and more penetrating spirituality—is hardly less plain. No study of world reconstruction can well help having its political, industrial, social, educational, moral, religious, and missionary applications. But perhaps they may all be grouped under the three general aspects,—political, economic, and social; educational; and moral and religious.
We are to think, then, of the New Age—its evidence, its perils, and its values; and of the New Mind needed for that age—the political, economic, and social challenge; the educational challenge; and the moral and religious challenge.
But have we any right to speak of a "new age"? Can we say that we have passed into a new age, whether for better or for worse? What is the evidence of a distinct change in the world-order, of a crisis in history, of a revolution? Is there in our time anything corresponding to the crisis at the Christian era, for example, or at the Renaissance, and the Reformation, or at the French Revolution? Many men have been thinking of world reconstruction. Is it more than a vain dream?
I
Critical Points in Evolution
To these questions it may be said, in the first place, that it is true, no doubt, that we are not to look for an absolute break in cause and effect relations in any crisis in history, however marked or disturbing. There is a continuous evolution that can be more or less definitely traced. But this is not to say that evolution must be uniform, with no critical points or periods; or that human history knows no crises that are unmistakable. No dogmatic theory of evolution can dictate the facts.
II
Disillusionment and Reaction Part of the Crisis
But even if the possibility of outstanding crises and revolutions in human history is fully recognized, do not the disillusionment and reaction that have set in since the war, already evince that there was none too much difference among the Powers in war aims, and that we are living in the "same old world," from which we may expect no great advances or even changes?
The reality of that disillusionment and reaction it is certainly impossible to question. Let one recall, for example, the solemn statement of our aims by President Wilson at America's declaration of war, and see how far we are, in spite of an Allied military victory over Germany, from a fulfillment of those aims;
There are, it may be, many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.
It was of these sentences that the London Evening Star wrote:
We are not ashamed to say that these words are destined to echo through the ages and to be read by free men with grateful hearts. They fill our eyes with tears of pride and gratitude. . . . Here and now the future of humanity is being shaped and moulded for all time.
That was then our hope and faith. Can we hold them still?
We shall have to face with some definiteness of detail this general disillusionment and reaction which have set in, when we consider the perils of our age. Here it concerns us clearly to see that the wide-spread disillusionment and reaction, following upon so stupendous a war, and sapping our energies and our moral ambitions, are themselves a part of the desperateness of our need—a part of the evidence of the crisis of the new age, in which humanity finds itself now involved.
III
No Ordinary War
This general reaction, moreover, and the sickening spectacle of the renewal of the old selfish scramble among the nations, tend to call in question the significance of the whole war. And this tendency is strengthened by a careless and undiscriminating good-nature, that cares little for ideals, and that, on the easy-going policy of letting bygones be bygones, would throw away all the lessons of the war. Even a fine and honest desire to show a spirit of Christlike forgiveness—always to be demanded—may be unconsciously bent to a like purpose.
Now one would be glad, in a discussion like this, if he could be justified in leaving the war and its issues altogether behind him. But the Christian civilization of the world came quite too near to utter collapse in this war to warrant such a course. We have no right to forget the lessons of the war, if we are to understand at all this new age, and its imperative tasks. For it is just because this war was no ordinary war, that the human race now stands at perhaps the greatest crisis in its history.
Not, then, to stir hatred and bad blood, or to keep alive the antagonisms of the war, but honestly to face essential issues, we need straightly to see what made this war so terrible and so fateful.
1. Its length, the unexampled extent to which it engulfed the world, and its desperate intensity, were all signs of its extraordinary significance. But the secret of its terror does not lie in any of these outward characteristics.
2. We come a little nearer to its deeper meaning, when we remember that one thing which made this war the most terrible of wars was because all the resources of modern science were laid under tribute for destructive purposes, until the world stood aghast; so that Saloman Reinach, anticipating the Peace Conference, was driven to say:
At the future Congress, among the seats reserved for the delegates of the great Powers, one seat should remain vacant, as reserved to the greatest, the most redoubtable, though youngest of Powers: science in scarlet robes. That is the new fact; that is what diplomacy should not ignore; if that imminent and execrable scandal is to be averted—the whole of civilization falling a victim to science, her dearest daughter, brought forth and nurtured by her, now ready to deal her the death-blow. The all-important question is the muzzling of the mad dog. Science, as subservient to the will to destroy, must be put in chains; science must be exclusively adapted to the works of peace.
To like effect, in recent weeks, Professor Giddings has written:
More than half of the population of the world is still barbaric in feeling and in purpose. It has not become humane or peace loving. . . . Into the hands of barbarians science has placed weapons of terrible effectiveness: arts of military organization and maneuver, explosives of terrific force, deadly gases, aeroplanes and submarines. Barbarism is equipped, or soon will be equipped, to try out its plan to conquer and to dominate.
It is facts like these that make the threat of war so terrible, as I have elsewhere [Fundamental Questions, p. 219] quoted Mr. Wells as saying:
the thought of war will sit like a giant over all human affairs for the next two decades. It will say to us all: "Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will certainly come again. I have taken all your men between eighteen and fifty, and killed and maimed such as I pleased—millions of them. I have wasted your substance contemptuously. Now you have multitudes of male children between the ages of nine and nineteen running about among you, delightful and beloved boys. And behind them come millions of delightful babies. Of these I have scarcely smashed and starved a paltry hundred thousand perhaps. But go on muddling, each for himself and his parish and his family, and none for all the world, go on in the old way, stick to your rights, stick to your claims, each one of you, make no concessions and no sacrifices, obstruct, waste, squabble, and presently I will come back again and take all that fresh harvest of life—all those millions that are now sweet children and dear little boys and youths—and I will squeeze it into red jam between my hands, and mix it with the mud of trenches and feast on it before your eyes, even more damnably than I have done with your grown-up sons and young men. And I have taken most of your superfluities already; next time I will take your barest necessities." So—war; and in these days of universal education the great mass of people will understand plainly now that that is his message and intention. Men who cannot be swayed by the love of order and creation may be swayed by the thought of death and destruction.
3. The very fact, too, that America felt compelled against all her traditions finally to come into this war in which it had no slightest political or territorial concern, is itself evidence that it had become plain practically to the entire American people, that this war was no ordinary war, but of the most fateful human interest; "civilization itself," in President Wilson's words, "seeming to be in the balance."
Mr. Hoover's cablegram to President Wilson upon America's declaration of war, speaking for the members of the American Commission for Relief in Belgium, was written out of such knowledge of the contending forces as scarcely another man had. It bore similar testimony to the fateful significance of this war.
We wish to tell you that there is no word in your historic statement to Congress that does not find a response in all our hearts. For two and one-half years we have been obliged to remain silent witnesses of the character of the forces dominating this war. But we are now at liberty to say that, although we break with great regret our association with many German individuals who have given sympathetic support to our work, yet your message enunciates our conviction born of our intimate experience and contact, that there is no hope for democracy or liberalism and consequently for the real peace and safety of our country, unless the system which brought the world into this unfathomable misery can be stamped out once for all.
4. But the heart of the matter lies even deeper than all this. Why did this war finally seem so different, for example, from the Franco-Prussian war? Why did Germany's cause come in the end to appear like a kind of embodiment of intrinsic evil? The explanation does not lie in the exaggerations of national hates. The fact is that men felt a sort of moral horror of the German position, that meant much more than that, even when they had not thought the situation through. There need be no attempt to disguise the faults of the allied nations, or to hold them free from blame in the remoter causes of the war. Their previous record had been most vulnerable. But men came gradually to see that what Germany had done was this: with her customary logical thoroughness she had taken what was worst in the selfish aggressions of the nations, and not only copied them, and justified them, but carried them to their farthest logical conclusion in an anti-Christian and immoral philosophy of civilization, of the State, of national life, and of the world structure. And this meant in literal truth a death grapple with such degree of Christian civilization as the world had thus far attained. Little by little it became clear to men that all the highest interests of humanity and even the possibility of a decent civilization were at stake in this war.
One can trace with some clearness the steps which Germany had taken, for she proceeded to develop with wonted thoroughness an apologetic for selfish aggressive wars as a profitable and proper business for a State.
She built that apologetic, first of all, on her unspeakably arrogant view of the Germans as a super-race, so superlatively gifted that the world could afford to have the contribution of all other races blotted out; of a "Kultur" so transcendent as to make its dominance over the world the highest good of the whole human race. The expressions of this arrogance before and during the war were such as to constitute nothing less than an indecent moral exposure of the attitude of a great people. The doctrine of the Germans as "the chosen people" was the major premise of all their frightfulness throughout the war. Anything that might be supposed to put this divine race in its proper place of world dominion was counted as thereby justified and sanctified. And other nations need to be sure that they, too, do not fall, in a slightly disguised form, into a like arrogance.
She built her apologetic, in the second place, upon an essentially immoral theory of the universe, in her doctrine of the State as above all moral obligations of every kind—as free, therefore, absolutely without scruple to take any course that seemed selfishly profitable. There was nothing so terrible that it could not be defended by this doctrine.
She built her apologetic, in the third place, upon a materialistic interpretation of evolution and "the survival of the fittest" according to which only physical force and material gains are to be taken into account, and in which might at any stage was to be taken forthwith as the proof of right. In Treitschke's words: "Among all political sins, the sin of feebleness is the most contemptible. It is the political sin against the Holy Ghost."
In this threefold doctrine, it is now to be noted, Germany persistently schooled her entire people, until they stood as a virtual unit behind her war ambitions. In Frederick Harrison's searching words: In all the world's history, no race has been so drilled, schooled, sermonized into a sort of inverted religion of hate, envy, jealousy, greed, cruelty, and arrogance. Man and woman, girl and boy have been taught from childhood this inhuman vainglory and lust of power. It has grown to be their Gospel, Creed, Hymnal and Prayer Book. Britain and America cannot comprehend how a great and intelligent people can have come to a cult so Satanic.
That is a terrible indictment; but its essential truth is evinced by the almost complete lack of any note of penitence among the German people for a frightfulness which was far worse than native barbarism—a frightfulness deliberately adopted, scientifically developed, and philosophically defended. For a savage may have inconsistent streaks of kindness. A theory has no bowels of compassion. Nothing so much concerns Germany herself as utterly to repudiate her whole philosophy of national greatness.
In fact, it may be doubted whether there has ever been before so conscious, deliberate, and stupendous an attempt to reverse the moral standards of the race. Kipling states the case with incisive insight when he says of the German:
He thought out the hell he wished to create; he built it up seriously and scientifically with his best hands and brains; he breathed into it his own spirit that it might grow with his needs; and at the hour that he judged best he let it loose on the world that till then had believed there were limits beyond which men born of women might not sin. . . . For it is the peculiar essence of German Kultur, which is the German religion, that it is Germany's moral duty to break every tie, every restriction, that binds man to fellow-man, if she thinks it will pay. Therefore, all mankind are against her. Therefore, all mankind must be against her till she learns that no race can make its way, or break its way, outside the borders of humanity.
In literal truth, the worst possible thing that could have happened to the German people themselves was success in so wicked a war. On the other hand, the greatest kindness to them is that they should find that the war has been thoroughly unprofitable. But no mere sorrow for consequences will replace the necessity of genuine penitence. For the fruits of penitence cannot be had without penitence itself. And one of the most sinister elements in the world's life to-day is this very general lack of penitence on the part of the German nation, not so much for particular deeds, as for their whole anti-Christian philosophy of national life. For it suggests the possibility of a like war to follow.
One is most reluctant to say these things in times of peace. But to forget essential moral differences is to forget the great ends for which our dead gave their lives, and to dishonour their memory—If ye break faith with us who die, We shall not sleep tho' poppies grow In Flanders' fields.
Moreover, to forget essential moral differences is finally to cry, "Peace, peace, when there is no peace." We may not "prophesy smooth things" here. To gloss over the plain fact that this war has been in essence a head-on collision of irreconcilable ideals not only helps nothing, it confuses the issue, and it destroys from the beginning the possibility of the restoration of honest relations. Even decent relations between nations on the German theory are simply impossible. Unless, therefore, the whole cause of the Allies has been a false one; unless the human race is passively to resign itself to repetitions of this war on a still more terrible scale, truly friendly and cooperative relations with the Central Powers imperatively demand that Germany renounce forever her entire philosophy of the State, and come into some honest agreement with the Allies as to the fundamental aims and standards of civilization and of international relations.
This is what the war at bottom meant. This is what we mean, too, when we say that the supremely significant fact about this war is that on the part of the Allies it was a war for fundamentally moral and religious aims; that it was a war for the conviction that the moral law extends to nations as truly as to individuals; that the principles of morals and Christianity either has no warrant at all, or holds in full force for classes and nations and races.
IV
The Changing World-Order
But it is not only this epoch-making character of the great war which has brought a new crisis in our time. Besides the war's awesome application of modern science to destructive purposes and the relatively new immoral philosophy of the State and of national life, that aimed at reversing the moral standards of the race, there are other characteristics of our time which indicate a changing world-order and so something that may fittingly be called a new age.
1. Its characteristics. It is possible, at this point, to do little more than name some of the outstanding characteristics of this changing world-order. These characteristics may be said to be: the constantly intensifying world solidarity; the prodigious increase in the last century through modern science of the world's resources of power and wealth and knowledge; forced scientific cooperation and organization on a scale and to a degree never before seen; the almost world-wide trend toward democracy and universal education; the establishment of a League of Nations; a steadily growing internationalism; and the deepening sense of the necessity of larger and more significant goals than organized humanity has yet cherished. These characteristics all bear witness to the reality of a new age.
2. The World Still Plastic. We may also hope that with these characteristics, the world may prove still plastic enough to give assurance of greater achievements than have yet come out of the war.
Even the strong reactionary tendency seen in many quarters cannot wholly escape some vision of the fact that "Humpty-Dumpty" cannot be put together again, and that in any case all of the old is not good enough to deserve preservation. Reaction cannot, one would think, be permanently blind to the constantly recurring conflict, in which progress is always involved,—the conflict between "historic legitimate right" and "abstract natural right"; so that mere reaction is self-confessed wrong.
On the other hand, there is a wide-spread tendency to call everything into question. Perhaps Laski does not exaggerate this trend when he writes:
We have concentrated into the fury of the past five years a generation of eager experience. Certainly no such intellectual upheaval has been known since the spectacle of Revolutionary France burst upon a world divided between fear and admiration. Over and above the spectacle of a world amazed at the prevalence of dissent from acknowledged dogma in art and science and religion, we have a wide-spread attack upon social notions not a decade ago conceived as fundamental. . . . Every generation must think out anew the conditions of its freedom. . . . What we fail consistently to realize is how much the overwhelming force of society is always opposed to novelty. We live by our routines. [The New Republic, Feb. 18, 1920.]
While we can be sure, then, that both the radical and conservative instincts are at work, we may hope that we shall not be so mastered by old habit and routine as to fail to make full use of such plasticity as exists in the world-order for a great forward advance. From this point of view, Bolshevism—however one interprets it—may have a world service to render, in compelling us all to face new problems, and to refuse to accept shallow, easy-going solutions.
V
The Significance of These After-the-war Days
The simple fact is, that one writes in these times under the constant sense of the inadequacy of human language to express either the possible losses or the possible gains of these fateful days.
Mr. Wells made Mr. Britling say early in the war: "This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution . . . and we live in it." If that was true when Mr. Wells wrote those words, it is still more true now. For we are only beginning to see that the world has been shaken to its centre in this war, as it was not shaken even by the French Revolution. And in these days Dawson's words yet hold: "We are living at a time when days and weeks have the fullness and significance of years and decades."
The immeasurable cost of the peace which has come makes any other view a blasphemy. Let one make real to himself the cost in the treasure of wealth, handicapping constructive enterprises of good for decades to come. Let him put vividly before himself in terms of individuals the sacrifice of life. Let him remember that France alone lost in those killed in battle one million, four hundred thousand men. Great Britain's number of slain brings the total, simply for those two nations, up to more than two millions. Russia estimates a toll of not less than seven millions. The Copenhagen Society for the Study of the Consequences of the War concludes that the total cost of the world war in lives has reached the appalling figure of 35,380,000. And this is to say nothing of those other millions of wrecked lives and wrecked homes. Well may one repeat Simons' words: "Millions have died that the trampling war madness might end. It is better to see that they have not died in vain than to bewail their dying." If, then, we are to keep our faith at all in a God of truth and righteousness, in the fundamental honesty of the universe, we must believe that such unimaginable sacrifices have not been poured out in vain. No small advances will answer the moral demands which men will here inevitably make.
Rupert Brooke, the brilliant young Briton, who himself a little later in the war joined the company of those whom he calls "the rich dead," shadowed forth both their untold sacrifices and their divine gifts to men, in words which are a perpetual challenge to the living, to keep these gifts true as the permanent spiritual fruit of the war;
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain;
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage.
And for the civilians, a cartoon in the Chicago Evening Post strikes home to every thoughtful man. It represents "our better selves," from the vantage ground of unstinted, unselfish service, looking back at "our old selfish existence" in its scramble for gain, and asking musingly: "Is it possible we will go back to it?" And the significance of the question lies not simply in the deterioration of the individual there threatened, but in the unspeakable losses for the race so involved.
For we have now come to the most critical time of all in this whole world struggle. Have we really won this war? That is still to be determined. There is such a thing as a decisive military victory, coupled at the same time with an equally decisive defeat of the high aims for which the war was fought. If we reinstate in power, under other names, the same great evils against which we fought, these millions will have died in vain, and we shall have a still more terrible war to fight over again in the years ahead. And these after-the-war days bear depressing witness how easily our frail human nature slumps back into the old ways—the old indulgences, the old antagonisms, the old injustices.
No wonder that Lloyd George said so passionately to a labour deputation in the midst of the war: "Don't always be thinking of getting back to where you were before the war. Get a really new world. . . . The readier we are to cut away from the past, the better we are likely to succeed. Think out new ways, new methods of dealing with old problems. Get a new world."
My chief fear for all the later months of the war was that when peace came, it would come suddenly (as it did), and that we should all be so war-weary, so sick and disgusted with the whole strife and its consequences, so anxious to get back to the old ways, and to any kind of a patched-up peace, that we should nervelessly let slip out of our hands the largest single opportunity that the race has ever had for a great advance. Just here lies the significance of these after-the-war days.