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James H. G. Chapple

First published: February, 1924



PREFACE

There is no apology for writing this book. It is not long since my book The Divine Need of the Rebel was published. This is to supplement it. The author is a New Zealander, who found the multitudes of overseas tourists rushing away together, before the winter set in. Passenger boats were full. The wet, cold summer had frightened visitors, and they wondered what winter was like! One said in leaving, England had nine months winter and three months bad weather! So, while waiting for an empty berth, the author sought out the Cumberland Lake District, when the bracken was browning on the hills, and the leaves were goldening and russeting, and eddying about and aeroplaning down in an English Fall. Some of the most beautiful days of my sixty years have been spent here writing this book. There have been difficulties; my library is in the Southern Hemisphere, and the small town of Grasmere has no library. So the reader must be indulgent of the abrupt style and other defects in places. The old lady, after reading her dictionary through from cover to cover, said it was not a bad story, only it seemed a little disconnected here and there in places. So with this.

Opposite the window where I write, and a little distance off, is the old Swan Hotel. Scott used to go there, when staying at Dove Cottage with Wordsworth and Dorothy. The guest room where he slept was smaller than the modern bathroom. The story goes that the food at the festive board was as scanty as the bedroom space. So Scott used occasionally (like the Arabs) to steal silently away and have a good dinner at the Swan. It is a district richly associated with poets and writers. The reader will forgive my getting the scribbling-itch in such a place; described by Wordsworth as “the loveliest spot man hath yet found.”

The contents are the thoughts of a Rebel. Truthful, sincere thoughts at least. The social conditions that made the great war possible also made me a Rebel against such conditions: I continue a Rebel. This book and the previous Divine Need of the Rebel, is to try and Right the wrong and wrong nothing that is Right! As Baba ‘o’ llah said: “We desire but the good of the world and the happiness of the nations, yet they deem us a stirrer up of strife and sedition, worthy of bondage and banishment.” It is possible that one in New Zealand may be able to see things in better proportion and in truer perspective than the English people who are so close to events. At least, if they disagree, the impact of ideas and the collision of thought must be good. The writer has not the British Empire so much in mind as the world. As Marcus Aurelius said: “That which is not in the interests of the whole swarm, is not in the interest of a single bee.” The writer is the happier for being marooned in England, and thus enabled to unburden himself. The effort is small, but one never knows results. It has been said that if Cleopatra’s nose had been half-an-inch shorter it would have altered the whole history of the world. So this is a small protest against the social and political state that allowed the war to result, and will yet bring about another shambles unless some Rebels arise. Asked Tolstoy: “Is it right that most men can eat and work only by the will of others?” The parasites must be eliminated and there must be one hundred per cent. for the workers. The word “Worker” in this book includes also the brain worker and any doing service on the earth.

The religious views are wide, and unorthodox. The writer has been an orthodox clergyman, and his contention is that the fundamental weakness of the Christian theology is that it is not true. Intelligent ministers to-day know this, and by a strange paradox they still remain in the pulpits and become splendid liars for God!

There is much Idealism in the pages; but Lord Thompson said: “The flower of Idealism must have its roots in the soul of common sense.” So be it! Whatever Idealism or even Mysticism is found herein leads to Spiritual Activism! The doubter may ask, as did a doubter once to good Keir Hardie: “Is there any hope?” The answer given to that is also my answer. “The gravediggers and the mid-wives are on our side.”

There are many quotations of prose and verse used, but for the most part they are new and unknown. For many of them there is little hope of being preserved in book form. There will be, then, a rescuing here from an otherwise literary grave. The fine poem of Angela Morgan is an instance. The writer valued it so much that in his services at times he has read it as a lesson from the Wider Bible of Literature. He came across it in a periodical about thirteen years ago. Penned by a woman, it is of double interest, for in feminine rebellion lies the betterment of the world. Writes another woman, Florence K. Franks. It is a short poem called “You.” It is my attitude to the reader:—

CONTENTS

A Rebel's Vision Splendid

THE CULTURE OF THE GLAD-EYE

It is necessary to give a keynote to this book on “The Vision Splendid.” It is done without hesitation, for the writer is an optimist. The best way to cultivate this optimism is to try and understand the universe, then to try and understand God, without the orthodox limitations, and finally to try and understand our relations to both God and the universe. To see man, that is, Divine man creating the new earth by the Universal Divine Spirit within him. The result of this understanding is a radiant optimism. The new world being created in this age of science means that in the near future disease will be gone, poverty will be gone, war will be gone, and insanity will be gone. So the reader of this book will now know that the writer has diligently cultured the glad-eye. A right understanding develops optimism. A wrong understanding means pessimism. As an orthodox parson he was a pessimist, for he ever referred to the world as having been created six thousand years ago. Now he has learnt the world has never been created at all, but is being created. That creation never ceases! The divinity in man is the creator; man is now co-operating with God; the world is in the making, and we are learning at last our social responsibilities, and the improvement of society is our happy work. To help God create a world of sunshine for everybody. In this duty we learn the deep sense of our importance and we can join in the great adventure. The cause of so much gloom and misunderstanding is the forgetting that man himself is responsible for the creation of the better world. Man himself is responsible for the social injustices as they stand. God wills the happiness of all, while man, assisted by the orthodox creeds, crushes the divinity within him and prefers to dwell on the depravity within. Man at present is a victim of competitive capitalism, and this evil system interferes with God’s goodness. God’s moral law of happiness is thus interfered with, but when man learns to co-operate with God he will find that God’s benevolence leads on to Communism, but not the fictitious Communism abroad to-day—that of force, violence and dictatorships, but the Communism of love and brotherhood.

While the writer of “The Vision Splendid” is a radiant optimist, yet he fully knows the agonies to be suffered during the birth of the new age which is upon us. The mother of the expected child also anticipates the travailing, but she is an optimist and knows the result will be worth it. If it was an ordeal too easy, the sense of the ultimate value would be lost or at least lessened. So with the birth of the new era; we have to endure the throes, they are overdue and almost upon us, but the results will be worth it; the agonies endured in the process will be as nothing compared to the new world, where the unity of all human creatures is recognised and where the well-being of each is the well-being of all, and vice versa.

At the present time our system—and we are all more or less the victims of it—the capitalist system—interferes with God’s law of happiness. The social habit of rent, interest and profit perverts God’s moral law. Capitalism pulls awry, like the perturbations of Neptune. There is a Divine law of natural obligation, and it cannot be fulfilled under present conditions. It was Ruskin who taught that all interest is usury if it burdens anyone. Well, it does—it burdens ninety out of every hundred. We must away with the whole moral code, away with it because it is immoral, and not of God. Under its baneful influence poverty and crime can be forecasted as accurately as the moon’s eclipse. We refuse to bend God’s moral law to fit a crooked society. We refuse to conform further to the evil and immoral system. It is an evil and wicked thing, and we are responsible for its existence; we have the power, by the divinity within us, to lessen the evil, to wipe it out, and thereby to increase the common good. The person who refuses to join us in this, the person who wilfully defends the present immoral social injustices, is a mental and moral pigmy; he suffers with a mental and moral cataract. His mental attitude must be changed and this book of “The Vision Splendid” is written for the purpose of opening the windows of the soul. God’s universe is good! There is more light than shadow! Through man’s selfish and so-called sacred (?) laws of property, there is a temporary eclipse; society is darkened by the nationalist, imperialist, capitalist and military monsters, who make life hardly worth living. They fill society with the slimy shapes of jealousy—the muddy forms of fear—the vampires of worry—and reptilian class hate. While at the same time God’s splendid universe is full of light and love, and it is free for everybody; yes, and free of income-tax, too, if people will only leave the frosty side and walk in the sun. The frosty side cannot be left until the social order is radically changed.

The tree of capitalism cannot be trimmed, clipped or pruned; it has to be uprooted. Otherwise humanity cannot be happy, for the pleasures of yesterday were spoilt by fret and to-day is spoilt by the fear of to-morrow, so man is ever to be, but never is blest. Yet God is Love!

My object in starting this book by writing a chapter on “The Culture of the Glad-eye” is to point out that a true Divine optimism ends in serenity. Someone has truly said the last lesson of culture is serenity. To thinking people who at times are perturbed by the thought of the volcanic disturbances of the near future, to such let me say, there is a real optimism that ends in bringing about that beautiful jewel: “Calmness,” the result of an attitude of mind—a mental poise. Emerson cultured it during the American Civil War. Compare this calmness of soul with the opposite state of fuss, fume, worry and so on, where there is little or no poise of mind. Contrast it with the uncontrolled passion, the ungoverned grief, or the tempestuous anxiety so often seen amid the crash and turmoil of things. There is something very attractive about the right mental poise. The Carpenter of Nazareth surely had it when the storm was raging and he, asleep! Yes, there is an attraction here, for we all reverence strength of that sort. Most of us are not admirers of the late Andrew Carnegie, but a visitor sleeping in Skibo Castle saw on the mantlepiece these lines:

This is fine philosophy, and shows that even a millionaire can be troubled with a flash of reason at times, although very few of them have that Divine flash. It is more often found with a Buddha, a Socrates, a Jesus, or a George Fox. Why? Because the mental poise of serenity is the result of The Vision Splendid. After all, these so-called impractical visions or ideals are the seedlings of realities, just as the oak sleeps in the acorn, or the bird in the egg. To be candid, the visionary idealists are the world’s saviours, and ever have been and ever will be, and he who cherishes the ideal is aware of it by a higher intuition and besides he is apt to realise it:

All this leads me to and opens up the subject of this book on “The Vision Splendid.” Our thoughts, our ideals, can affect circumstances; the thoughts and ideals we weave within will help to weave the circumstances without, for the Divinity that shapes our ends is very much within—good thoughts cannot produce bad results, nor bad thoughts good results. When one says of a fallen friend: “It was a sudden fall!” Just retort: “No”—it was preceded by long secret thoughts and wrong ideals. The mind is a garden or a wilderness—plants or weeds—and plants are the result of culture. A man may not altogether choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and thoughts shape his circumstances. He can go down to a selfish and evil brutism, or he can rise to The Vision Splendid and cultivate the Divinity within:

 So let us see that man is a growth by mental law, and the future God-like man will be the result of the law of continued right thinking, we will:

THE VISION SPLENDID

Most of the intelligent beings on the earth at the present time are looking forward. They sense a crisis ahead, and are likewise concerned about the immediate results, well knowing that the ultimate results will be for the social benefit of the human race. The prophet ever did look ahead; it was this habit that made him hated; hated because he was thereby dangerous; to look ahead was to idealise, to visionise, and by doing that the present was made rather insecure. It was the priest that looked back; the priest is ever conservative, and usually he becomes fat and smug by so doing. In other words, “it pays.” The prophet is a lean, hungry man—a lonely and a thinking man. The priest thinks other people’s thoughts—thoughts of the traditional past; he is a backward-looker. The prophet has initiative, originality and daring, and is not a gramophone record; he has not a rubber-stamp message. God’s Spirit finds a channel for the forward-looking message in his (the prophet’s) dangerous personality. He is a lonely man—often as lonely as the man of Gethsemane. So it is an easily seen cleavage—the forward-lookers versus the backward-lookers. Yes, the past has lessons for us, for the past has made the present, and also we of the present are to make the future.

To-day we have reached the point of conscious evolution; evolution is no longer blind and groping, but has become conscious in thinking man. Man looks back, and the farther he looks back the slower he sees the evolutionary movement to have been. To-day he sees how rapid and almost revolutionary the evolutionary movement to-day may be, for conscious man may guide it and hurry it forward. The long slow stone age reached a crisis when the polished axe was made. The modern man reached a crisis when the steam engine was made. To-day we reach the greatest crisis of all in World-Brotherhood and the United States of Humanity! The farther we go, the greater the momentum. To-day the movement becomes faster, as we see more clearly the goal for humanity hardening up through the mists. Thinking people are gradually getting an enthusiastic love for the general good; they are beginning to curb the narrow national feeling, and also to doubt the morality of commercial rivalry. They see at last, that way lies war!

To be candid, what is needed is a Universal New Heart; and that is being born. This Divine ethic is evolving from the ranks of the industrial classes, where in the history of the world all Divine ethics do arise. Strange to say, it does not arise in the Church—the Church is too much concerned with a personal new heart, and the universal new heart seems of little consequence. The Church puts the query to the individual—are you saved? Also society puts the query to the individual—are you wealthy? Hence the Church can well support the nation in its trade rivalries, its commercial greed and its glorified John-Bullism. Of course, John Bull always quotes a text from his Bible, but his real inspiration comes not from there, but from trade and the cash register. Other nations in irony point to England and her oversea dominions, and say: “See the result of England’s three commodities—Beer, Bullets and Bibles!” This ever blessed trinity has caused her flag to fly over one fifth part of the globe. The danger is they fasten on the second element in the trinity—bullets, the logic of which is what the British Empire got by naval and military force, why may we not also get by the same force? This is the essence of imperialism everywhere. Until this is swept out of the way there can be no Universal New Heart.

What hinders, then, this aspect of The Vision Splendid? There is a double hindrance. It is to be found in the following two terms: Conservatism is Feudalism. Liberalism is Commercialism. It is tweedledum versus tweedledee. They both support imperialism, and are both supporters of a soulless commercial system. Also they both support militarism. In war time a Liberal is not distinguishable from a Conservative, for patriotism and profits kiss each other, and in times of peace the only difference is in their phraseology. The industrial world is quick to see it, and so they designate them both to one class, and the result is on the one side there is class ascendency and on the other side the increasing solidarity of the workers.

And in The Vision Splendid there is to be an ever-decreasing conservatism in the feminine mind. To many women still there is a great attraction in soldiering. Flags, buttons, uniforms, colors and khaki fascinate and hoodwink them. But the thinking mothers see the folly of this spirit of bloodshed; the reflective mothers are saying: “Shall we in the future sit silent and see piled up this mountain of corpses? Are we to sit silent and agonise over this—the result of the greed of a few individuals? Are we to be silent while the great god competition runs the earth? Are we women ever to be the victims of this vulgar, ill-bred wealth? We are beginning to see and learn that competitive trade is a continual warfare, and nationalism and imperialism use the naval and military castes to carry out their designs. Then when war is declared the patriotic stop is pulled out, while they fleece us of our sons and money.” So thinking women are reasoning, and it is a good omen, for class-rule and a fake old civilization must go. When the women take a hand its days are numbered.

So in The Vision Splendid we see the Universal New Heart is necessary. The rise of the industrial classes is the finest sign of the times. In the unity of workers all round the earth lies our hope. Not in any League of Nations, but in a League of Working Peoples. The former is based on force, and the latter is based on brotherhood. Therein lies a difference—and it is the real vital difference. Peoples don’t hate! Their interests are the same! The enemy of one people is the same enemy of all peoples—i.e., the exploiter! That is the only enemy the people of any country has. Every country is vulgarised by these champions of trade greed. It is they who whoop for war when they think the national totem or symbol is insulted. Totem is the correct word; it sounds aboriginal, and so it is, for the lower branches of the human family had as a totem an emu, kangaroo, buffalo or, maybe, a snake or lizard. Woe be to the neighbouring tribe who dared to insult the totem. But the so-called modern civilized nations have their totems too. It may be an eagle, a rising sun, a lion, a bull-dog, stars and stripes, or a Union Jack. Insult one of these, and war results. As with savages, so with moderns! There is no difference. If there be a difference, the savages have the advantage, for they cannot kill so splendidly; they have no bombs, mines, machine guns or poison-gas. Savagery is here more civilized! What irony!

The result of this Universal New Heart in The Vision Splendid will be some form of Communism. The real Communism of love and brotherhood, not of force and dictatorship. Communism is really inherent in the human race from the beginning, and the secret of life is in the spirit of it. We see to-day it begins to divide the world into two camps. The cleavage becomes wider—Communism or Capitalism? Love expresses itself in all things common! The great enemy is private property of those things God meant to be socialised—land, ships, railways, machines, and so on. It is not to be an equal dividing up of everything; only the vulgarisers of Communism talk that way; even as the vulgarisers of Evolution talk of monkeys and missing links. The possessive instinct in things essential has to go; it is the opposite of love and brotherhood, and love is evolving and is the strongest. When we come to think deeply, much of the lust for private property is really the illusion of dead matter. Let me ask—is it sanity to spend one’s life in collecting a heap of metal discs we call money, and then after a few years, when the heap is just about big enough, the hearse to be at the door? To spend our days gathering a heap of “matter” which a jackdaw or a magpie, or a raven, or a maori-hen does! What will God say to these mentally undeveloped individuals, who pull down their barns to build greater to pack their material wealth in? But great souls are indifferent to ownership. The possessive instinct arose in aboriginal malice, and the possessive instinct yet arouses malignant passions. The possessive instinct in centripetal—indrawing. The communal instinct is centrifugal—a scattering out. One is selfish and egoistic, the other is altruistic and serving. The Nazarene took a towel and served! They who knew his teaching and example best, they who dwelt upon his words, had all things common. The words common, communion, communism and common-union all come from the same root. Yet what a comedy the Communion service of the orthodox churches has become! What a burlesque is orthodox Christianity to-day!

The religion of Jesus should have softened the position caused by private property, should rather have revolutionised it. Our laws protect private property, our politics defend it, our morality perverts the conscience on private property, yet modern science increases it, while custom casts a spell on it and even art panders to it, in order to get bread and butter cheques. But the masses see the incongruity of it all, and begin to stir and to stretch out hands of amity across the seas. They begin to discover there is the same soul under the heart of all peoples. That the same private property curse is causing all peoples to suffer. Since the days of Marx they are learning that the surplus profits of the workers are really stolen to buy land, mines, stocks, shares, bonds, jewels, furs, flash gowns and expensive cars for parasites, who have the impudence to call the surplus profits of industry private property, and even to talk of the “Sacredness” of it. But great days are looming up; science will yet in greater quantities create life’s necessaries, and also see they are scientifically distributed. Science will yet give greater leisure to all. Science at present is a victim of the capitalist conditions; it is used to give to, and increase, the wealth of the few. It does not ease toil, nor does the machinery add to the people’s ease and plenty. Herbert Spencer defined progress as the release of humanity from toil, and to-day one train does the work of four hundred thousand men, yet how are the people bettered by it? Science talks of capturing tidal-power and sun-power, and the power is to be released from radium and the atom. Very good; but are the people to benefit? Or are these sources of power to be exploited by the money-makers?

Said one of the professors of science: “There will yet be little need to earn bread by sweat!” True; there is little need now for any person to work more than five hours per day, but the exploiters and parasites see to it that you do, and the law protects them in their exploitation. Civilization so far is a failure, and only protects the few, but in The Vision Splendid every child will have its opportunity, every mother will have her rights, every man will have his full reward for labour, every youth will be free from the body-snatching military curse. Tell your parson he is wrong—the Garden of Eden is not behind, the Garden of Eden is ahead and Divine man is the creator of it.

This is a day of optimism, not pessimism. The world of to-morrow is beyond all your dreams. Say with Browning: “The best is yet to be.” We march out of a past as black as night and we march to a future full of joy, full of light, full of sweetness. Give to your children The Vision Splendid; tell them they are creators and co-workers with God in shaping the new world. Tell them to vision the Kingdom of God and that the greatest dreamer of all was Jesus. Teach the children these lines:

A NEW ORIENTATION AND NOT MATERIALISTIC

There is a fresh facing, a new bearing. The hour strikes for truth, and it is the duty for everyone who sees below the surface of things to speak or write in order to get mental comfort and soul satisfaction. To criticise and challenge what is wrong and to encourage what is right; but it is the rebel and heretic who knows the right and sees the truth most clearly. The hands stretched towards heaven to-day are the hands of the heretics. Said one, in a kind of chuckling glee: “To-day, in order to find God, one has to leave the traditional churches!” This is the result of a new orientation, and it is not an orientation of materialism, but the reverse. Neither is it confined to religion, for it means a new orientation in the political sphere. There is a new power, a new force, abroad, and it is of the Spirit. The poor people who make the wealth and who are overburdened with rents, dear food and uncertain employment are beginning to feel their power and are arousing themselves. On looking back, one is almost staggered at their patience and docility.

Said a recent speaker: “England wants quiet peace and pre-war conditions.” Does she? Well, until she sweeps away her social injustices she won’t get these things. The writer is a New Zealander, but at the present time in beautiful little Grasmere, in Westmorland, the spot that Wordsworth said was “The loveliest spot that man hath yet found.” During the past months he has travelled with open eyes over the domain reaching from London to Inverness, to and fro, hither and thither, and he asserts that the old time quiet peace and pre-war conditions cannot and will not return. May the good God forbid it! That fake peace allowing the upper classes to spend their days (when the London and Continental season closes) in shooting grouse, partridges and pheasants! At the beginning of the grouse season in Scotland the trains from the south were so overcrowded that additional trains were needed. One rich gun-man from the south ran out of cartridges for his specially designed gun when on the moors. An aeroplane was hired to go to Paris for a thousand cartridges, which cost six hundred pounds by the time the aeronaut got back. Think of it; about sixteen shillings per shot, while multitudes are on the dole, while the third estate toils on, if they are lucky enough to get work, and while the fourth estate live in slums and dirt. So meanwhile kings, castes and political parties—Tory and Liberal—are dreading the unknown forces; and well they might, for thus far shalt thou go and no farther.

Well did Emerson write: “The dice of God are loaded!” Truly the dice of God are loaded against them, and they cannot win out—they may stave off—even by the development of an English Fascisti movement—they may stave off the evil day, but they cannot win out. God’s dice are loaded against them! The odds seem to lie the other way, for the political patriots are aiming at the old competitive trade conditions in order to get wealth and power by the workers’ surplus profit; the hydra-headed journalists are encouraging them, while the pulpiteers who have Iscariotised the religion of the Nazarene and turned Christianity into a caricature are trying unwittingly to hustle God out of His Universe. But the dice of God are loaded against them! The nation without a vision will perish!

The clock of destiny has a long pendulum. The man-made profiteering and imperialistic war has loaded dice to contend with, for God’s thunderbolt is going to hit the mark, for the dice of God are loaded on the side of love, peace, truth, justice, co-operation, internationalism, brotherhood and universalism. What a wonderful nest of words! Yet to the nationalists and imperialists these are all more or less poison. The imperialists, too, have a nest of words they roll over on the tongue like sweet morsels, i.e. competition, nationalism, imperialism, capitalism and militarism. All these come from the dusty chambers of thought and are the outgrowth of feudalism; it infests the whole atmosphere of thought and results in that modern trinity of evil P’s—Press, Pulpit, Politics. All arrayed and in seeming collusion against God’s Kingdom on the earth; but the dice of God are loaded.

The Conservative soul is dull at forecasting. Confucius said: “The good man is able to presage.” But in this the Conservative does not answer the requirements. The vulgar grasping soul of the money-making bourgeoise is also dull at forecasting. There is no moral ideal in either class—Tory or Liberal. We have to look elsewhere—in the ranks of Labour, and God’s dice are heavily loaded for and on the industrial side. The revolt of Labour is the Spirit of Humanity (which is, too, the Spirit of God) in revolt! It is the upheaval of the Divine Spirit! It is the voice of the one Common Humanity in articulation—it is the Spirit of God—even as the candle-light is the same as the sunlight only in lesser degree. The awakened soul sees this and rejoices in the new orientation—the new orientation of ethics: ethics that will outlaw all that makes war possible:

Yes—a new orientation in morals and religion, we who presage, see the grey dawn of internationalism in politics and also universalism in religion. All the world will yet be represented in one parliament, and all the world will yet worship in one temple. The day of the priest will go. The day of the prophet is at hand, and we shall learn that Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus and Mahomet were ONE! There are hindrances to this grand conception, and Labour will remove them. There are obstacles, and Labour will remove them, but the new birth will be painful—all births are—and this social birth especially so, for imperialism in politics, millionairism in finance, wage-slavery in industry, and militarism over all cannot be jettisoned easily. Says Edwin Markham:

A great stumbling-block in the way of The Vision Splendid is the materialistic outlook in the minds of so many to-day. They blunder over the fallacy that man is of one uniform substance, that matter is everything and there is nothing else, that mind is only a function of the brain and such-ike fallacies. A materialism so rank that one public man’s jibe was: “They seem to revel in their mud-bath!” Mind is that which knows and thinks, and matter is that which is known by mind.

Said Descartes: “The essence of mind is thought, and the essence of matter is extension.” Let us explain that in sculpture the matter may be rough marble, but the sculptor is able to communicate spirit to the marble! Which is the greater, matter or spirit? Says the housemaid: “I swept the house with a broom.” Partly so—yes, but she swept the house with her “WILL.” Which is the greater, the broom or the “WILL”?

“It is very easy to make a statue like this,” said the guide, pointing to a figure beautifully carved in Carrara marble. “How?” asked the tourist, somewhat comically puzzled by the remark. “Well,” the guide said, “you only have to chip off the part you don’t want!” To do that requires the Divinity within! That is the work of the inward creator! That is beyond matter. That artistic spirit transcends matter—it is part of God the great Creator!

Said one thinker: “The sun is an unthinkable mass of matter in its immensity,” but surely the mind of man, which is able to measure the sun, is thereby greater than the sun, and is more permanent and indestructible than the sun? If not, then why not? Rational thought has led me to these conclusions, and that shallow rationalist when passing from the study of matter to the study of spirit is at once confronted with difficulties. Materialism may be useful in physiology and medicine, but it does not explain the spirit in man. The mental there argues a higher mental elsewhere. The Greeks were right. In the beginning the LOGOS, the IDEA, the WORD. The word “spirit” correctly means “real.” Where, then, is reality in spirit or matter?

In art we see the great revealer of spirit. Then reason from particulars to universals. If the picture or statue requires a creator, so does the solar system and the constellation. The book is not solely made of type, paper, and binding—there is a spirit within and it is that that gives light, knowledge and warmth, and that is quite beyond matter. One might argue from music, poetry and architecture. Said the poet John Davidson:

To which I might say, it is all nonsense if the poet did not know a Divine Spirit immanent in and through all, and which we call God. The things of the spirit irrigate our minds, enlarge our imagination, expand our judgment and kindle our love. They also give us The Vision Splendid. The money-rushing life knows little of this—rather it atrophies and kills the idealism: for idealism is the contra word to materialism. The craving of the idealist is for perfection and beauty, and he cannot rest in the vulgarities and commonplaces of materialism. He can find no resting place for the soles of his feet in mere objective facts apart from spiritual suggestion. Said John Keats, very truly:

Said a materialist, who was also a physicist: “Tears! I have analysed them and found them to be phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium and water!” But what of the fountains of the great deep that had burst up from the depths of the troubled soul and found vent in a flood of tears? Reality lies there and not in analysis! Truly man lives not by bread alone, and in the new orientation we learn it. We attack a coarse, vulgar, and brutal materialism, for it is a challenge to The Vision Splendid. We stand to-day at the parting of the ways when the orthodox creeds and political creeds and imperial creeds are in the melting-pot, and there is still a danger of the brutalization of man by another war of materialism. Man must head for love, beauty and brotherhood, and all these are things of the spirit and not matter. Said Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

THE VISION RESENTED—A WAR OF IDEAS

People to-day are thinking alien thoughts from each other. Friend passes friend in the street and market-place, and neither knows nor guesses what the other’s opinion on different matters may be; but both anticipate a change of some sort, and it is not good for business or social status to express opinions. Besides, it is dangerous, especially so, to express opinions that do not hang plumb with prevailing notions. The mere fact that men and women fear to give forth their ideas is suggestive that something is out of joint with humanity, for it is man alone who has ideas and the power to express them. It is of little use having ideas if one is not allowed to express them. Freethought is of little value unless there be also free speech. There must be no coercion of ideas. Yet the tendency is that way. The time sends forth a clarion call for brave thinkers; better still, brave thinkers who will not fear to speak and write. Thinkers who know truth and love it, having no axe to grind. Above all, let us put little trust in political thinkers. The very word “politician” to-day has an evil sound. The word “statesman” still has a good sound. They differ in this—the politician has his eye on the next election and the statesman looks beyond the ballot-box to futurity.

There is a war of ideas about militarism. Does it protect our liberties or rob us of them? Do we need an army of defence or do we not? Is soldiering and warfare morally and physically good? Why should the killing of an individual be a crime while collective homicide is a virtue? Note the following:

There is a war of ideas over education. It is a strange comedy to see our militarists, imperialists and capitalists wanting Bible teaching in the public schools while the prophetic souls with The Vision Splendid don’t want it. There is food for reflection here. The message for all progressive people to-day is: Go get that child! Our attitude towards the child denotes the real point we have reached in our civilization. When Treherne asked: “Is it not strange a little child should be heir to the whole world?” he saw the point. Then let us live for our children and give to them The Vision Splendid. In the old days of Roman decadence the child was not wanted by many, and was accordingly exposed, abandoned; became a slave or chattel or died. Modern Britain has somewhat altered the method, she deliberately plans not to have the child. Every doctor and chemist could reveal some unpleasant facts here. In the war of ideas that idea will win that is closest to nature, and thereby closest to God. There must be a new attitude towards the child, for the promise and flower of the world to-day centres in the child, if we can only successfully say to the nationalist, militarist, capitalist and imperialist,—“Hands off!” The peace of the world, the brotherhood of the world and the unity of the great human family all centres in the child. The child is the most hopeful of all created things, and all the glorious future centres in the child. In a word, the millenium will come by the child—a little child shall lead them. But the educational system must be controlled by another spirit than the present, for in that:

The present child lover revolts at the conventionally unclean and immoral tricks to limit births—especially eugenic births. The three finest words in our language are Home, Love, and Child, and in those quarters of deliberate childlessness they sin against God by practising the great denial of life. The God of nature has made the sex instinct strong and the enjoyment of it beautiful in order that the earth may be a great birth place, made so by incessant renewals—the Divine soul rings true in this—let us idealise sex matters and forget the Victorian age with its nasty sentiment and bogus morality. There is the dawning of a new orientation on this subject, and the rise of the industrial class will sweeten the social atmosphere and usher in a more wholesome sex ethic. Science will eliminate the dysgenic and encourage better births of health, genius and sanity. Labour, hand in hand with science, will give us better houses, healthier work, better wages, and more gladsome conditions generally. Under Tory and Liberal influences the money now goes in war and destruction. When Labour really rules the money will be spent in peace and construction. Says Francis Brown:

There is also a war of ideas over the modern newspapers. A few are even putting the awkward question—Is journalism an ethical way to earn a living? The greatest menace of the day is the menace of the newspapers, and the most dangerous newspaper of all is able to pay for sky-writing by aeroplane smoke-letters! Oh, the prostitute Press! Note the following:

But a special chapter had better be reserved for the newspapers, as they are one of the greatest hindrances to The Vision Splendid. There are some exceptions, and therein lies our hope. For the most part they are the channels of the propaganda necessary for the vested interests, and have no better advice to offer to the workers who make the vested interests possible, than to “work faster,” and, if necessary, “eat less.” While they sit at the graceless table d’hote dinners and luncheons they leave the worker with this grace:

Strangest of all, in this war of ideas about The Vision Splendid, the place where we should expect the vision of a better world to be cherished most, we find the opposite; in that place it is cherished least—the orthodox Churches! Truly in America there has been a great and bitter controversy, and the cleavage has developed into Modernism versus Fundamentalism; the beginnings of this word battle and idea battle which promises to divide homes and friends are also to be seen in England. Fundamentalism is really the entrenched theological position of the Middle Ages, while Modernism is inspired by modern science and is the new revelation of God to man. Modernism does not destroy but really fulfils God’s law. But Fundamentalism, alas, is popular because men and women like to avoid the intolerable toil of thought, and the real trouble is that intelligent people number only about two in every hundred. Also—it has been pointed out in America—they vote! Carolina has joined Oklahoma in voting out all teaching of evolution in the public schools. To many of us the controversy has been closed since Huxley wiped the floor with Wilberforce at Oxford many decades ago. A debate about evolution in these days seems as silly and absurd as a debate about the earth’s movement. Intelligent clergymen surely know the position; but alas, alack, for the most part they are dumb dogs that will not bark, and so the Churches trade on the people’s lack of knowledge. No wonder the intelligentzia are leaving the Church; they feel the truth of Swinburne’s lines:

To-day brains are searching for truth and philosophy; certainly brains are not to be found in the Churches of tradition.

This is veracious: A clergyman from Cambridge, Mass., had occasion to preach to the inmates of an insane hospital. During his sermon he noticed that one of the patients paid the closest attention, his eyes riveted upon the preacher’s face, his body bent eagerly forward. Such interest was most flattering. After the service, the speaker noticed that the man spoke to the superintendent, so as soon as possible the preacher inquired, “Didn’t that man speak to you about my sermon?” “Yes.” “Would you mind telling me what he said?” The superintendent tried to sidestep, but the preacher insisted. “Well,” he said at last, “What the man said was, ‘Just think, he’s out and I’m in.’ ”

So the clergy keep on repeating the old words—have faith and not reason—forgetting that the human reason is part of the Divine reason. A wit repeated as a pleasantry that a parson with brain trouble went to a medical man, who was a specialist in mental troubles. He put the patient under chloroform and neatly removed the top of the skull, placing the clerical brains in a basin of water, when at that point another special and urgent case was announced by the maid. The doctor hurriedly placed the piece of skull on, bandaged the head, got the patient back to consciousness and sent him home in a taxi. But the replacing of the brains was overlooked, they were still in the basin. When Sunday was over, the doctor sent word to the Rev. Boreham that he had gone without his brains, to which he replied that he was an orthodox parson and did not need them, as he had got through his Sunday services splendidly without them!

There is a great call to-day for a truthful Church and an honest religion. The minister should be in harmony with the best thought of the day. A congregation should be able to listen and worship with minds open to all truth, whether it is in line with creeds or not. Science and reason have not to be squared with creeds, but creeds have to be squared with science and reason. If not, then so much the worse for the creeds. The Churches must grow mentally as well as spiritually. We approach a second Renaissance, and the Church to survive the shock of things will have a simple belief in the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man—a Church broad enough to take in all. The older the writer gets the shorter becomes his creed. It has now, only four words—love God; love Man. Like Olive Schreiner, he could not step back into the valley of superstitions, having once stepped out. To attempt to do so would be as impossible as for a chick to step back into the broken shell it had struggled out from. But God has become more real than ever. God now is a life, an experience, not a mental affirmation, not a credal assent:

God remains! And we are as indestructible as God, for God is immanent in all, and especially so in man made conscious. True religion is a stimulus to love, and love prompts to service. The truth comes down two thousand years: “The greatest among you is he that serveth.” Ye shall know the truth (of science and evolution) and the truth shall make you free (from superstitions). But this life is not all:

The stumbling-block in the road of progress is bibliolatry. A sealed book is the cause of the conflict. To the traditionalists inspiration is closed two thousand years ago, and so to-day there are two bibles, the superstitious bible of the Fundamentalists and the enlightened bible of modern scholarship. The first throws the world back and is a foul dogmatism of ignorant men, the lovers of miracles and superstitions. To the enlightened mind, a God who resorted to miracles would be a kind of almighty juggler, who resorted to tricks in order to convince the vulgar. A God of inflexible law we can love and respect. For all the Biblical miracles and all other so-called miracles there is a rational explanation. A lady collecting for one of the charities, met a young curate and asked him for a donation. “Sorry, madam, but I haven’t a coin on me.” “Oh, sir,” said she, “the Lord told me to ask you, and I am sure he knows better than you do. Now, you just search your pockets, and I am sure you will find a coin.” To please the lady he began searching his pockets; as his hand came out of each pocket he would smile, and say: “None there you see!” But on putting his hand into the trousers pocket he found half-a-crown. His surprise was great, and on arriving at his house he began excitedly to tell the Bishop who was staying with him.

“My Lord,” said he, “when I left home I had absolutely no money on me, and yet I found a half-crown in my trousers pocket. It was a miracle, my Lord.”

“Miracle? Miracle be blowed,” said his Lordship. “Why, man, you’ve got my pants on.”

There is a great call for sincerity. The pulpit should be the most truthful spot in the world; and a great spirit is passing over the earth demanding that it be so. “In proportion,” said Channing, “as a man suppresses his convictions in order to save his orthodoxy from suspicion, or distorts language from its common use that he may stand well with his party, in that proportion he clouds and degrades his intellect as well as undermines the integrity of his character.” This is peculiarly to the point to-day in the subject of evolution. Is the fact of evolution to be accepted? The word “fact” is used, for evolution is no longer a “theory.” Is evolution valid or is it a dream? If valid, then the fall of man is a myth, and all the bogus theology built upon the fall has to go. But God remains, and so does religion.

There is no conflict between fundamental religion, but only fundamental theology. Religion is not a system of doctrine, but a way of life. Religion is not faith ABOUT Jesus, or faith IN Jesus, but the faith OF Jesus, and the faith OF Jesus was simple THEISM: he believed in the Fatherhood of God. He believed in the brotherhood of man. All great truths are simple, and so is religious truth. There is a war of ideas, and in religion this simple idea will win. Said Victor Hugo: “An invasion of armies can be resisted; not so an invasion of ideas.” The Church must be cleansed from non-essentials; the nightmares of superstition must go. The Church, too, must be socially awakened. It must not only know the evidences of evolution, but it must vision the social goal; in a simple phrase, it must be devoted to God’s kingdom on the earth. But fundamentalism remains indifferent to all this, and there is a cost to indifference; the Church will learn it too late in the crisis.

There is an old story of a man who began to shingle his house in a rain storm. When asked why he did not shingle it before it rained, he replied, that it did not need shingling until it rained! The truth is, there is another Reformation needed. Luther’s was an incomplete task. Luther even referred to Copernicus as, “that fool Copernicus!” What would Luther have said about Darwin? Could Luther have understood that creation by God’s evolutionary law is better than creation by supposed Divine fiat? The Luther of a higher morality has yet to appear, and when he comes, preaching an all round higher ethic, he will be called by the fundamentalists an Anti-Christ—immoralist.

Let me add that no one is so full of optimism, no one so full of idealism as the well informed intelligent Evolutionist. It is he who to-day, altogether outside the Church, lives the really religious life; deeper and better, too, than the theological life. He knows that creation never ceases, and is thereby enabled to vision the goal in the distance. He knows too that man is being created, is at present hardly out of the cradle; in fact in the larval stage. This is the man with real faith, and he peers through the mists: and is somewhat better than the truth loving poet, who said:

VISION OF MAN THE CREATOR

Divine man now has become the creator! Also he has two ideals to create—one is the perfect city (that stands for environment) and the second is the perfect race (that stands for nature). The Divine Spirit in nature struggles to produce by evolutionary laws, wild plants, wild flowers, wild fruit, wild animals and wild men, and seemingly comes to a stop, wanting a centralised, incarnated, personal and conscious intelligence, and man has evolved to that point, or at least some men have (and women too). He is now able to take hold of the crude plants of nature and produce cultured forms in great and wonderful variety. The human plant so far has been neglected. He was supposed to have been created perfect and fallen, until Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Ibsen, Shaw and Nietzsche taught us the truth. When Nietzsche said, whenever he thought of a woman he also thought of a whip, he meant it only as a stinging satire. He simply meant that the breeding of the perfect race is impossible until women know that the responsibility of the eugenic choice rests upon their shoulders. She is guided by the maternal instinct, or should be in a divinely natural society; man is guided by his passions, and makes many blunders.

At the present, convention would hold it to be very improper for a woman to make sexual suggestions to the man the Divine Spirit told her was the right man. Society says she must wait until the wrong Mr. Wright proposes and makes overtures. The result is disastrous to the evolving of a higher race. The gifts of one are neutralised by the lack of gifts in the other. Occasionally there has been an accident by the appearance of a Shakespeare, but for the most part it has been a pure accident. Convention, education (or lack of it), politics, pulpit and press are all alike guilty in this; one and all burn a grain of incense at the shrine of Mrs. Grundy. So our silly conventions succeed in turning men and women into mechanical creatures lacking initiative, mere stereo-copies, trailers, echoes, rubber stamps and gramophones. Artistic personality cannot be widely developed under the present capitalist conditions; if an occasional one does appear he or she of necessity becomes a heretic in the Church and a rebel in the State. That splendid little book of Oscar Wilde’s, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, will give my meaning in full. It is only under Socialism there can be proper individualism; under capitalism it is crushed. Capitalist society demands conformity and punishes the rebel.

When man learns that he himself is the creator, he will also recognise that everyone has something original to give to the world, and it will become part of his plan of education to teach that the surest way to fail is to imitate someone else. Parents, listen! Don’t try to make your boy or girl another you. That is our educational flaw at the present moment; it aims to make machine reproductions. The Church does the same thing in its sectarian educational institutions, to turn out men and women of a particular tint or brand.

Says Emerson: “Imitation is suicide,” and he also thanked God he had no religious training. Had he been handicapped with that dead weight, he could never have become the man he did. Real growth is original growth, and Emerson had it. An original act or an original thought seems folly to many. The first steamboat made by Robert Fulton was called by the wiseacres “Fulton’s Folly”! It was much the same with the first sewing machine, the first efforts with the telephone. Absurd conventions ever seek to crush man’s Divine creative and artistic genius. Man the creator has been ever crushed by the State! Man the creator has been ever crushed by the Church! Ye gods! It makes sad reading, the history of the Church—Catholic and Protestant. There is little difference, except in this, the children of one are weaned on the Protestant Book of Martyrs, and the children of the other are weaned on the Catholic Book of Martyrs. Take your choice. To be candid, to-day the superstitions of Protestantism are no more in line with science and modern scholarship than are the superstitions of Catholicism. If I had to swallow one I would swallow the latter, boots and all.

So Divine man the creator is also crushed by the law, the press and the school. Man is still the victim of the whole gamut of mortmain influences. The dead hand grips him by the living throat and creates that worst enemy of all initiative—FEAR. There is religious fear from the cradle to the grave. There is social fear likewise. Columbus rose above fear and sailed west. So did Cook and Magellan in sailing to other points. Their Divine assets were not in the Church or the State; their assets were inside themselves. By listening to altar and throne they would have passed out of the world as pigmies instead of as giants. Any dead fish can go with the stream; it takes a live fish to swim up against the stream. Said Emerson again: “Do the thing and you will have the power.” Reader, man or woman, ponder here, for you have latent power within. What is the use of a splendid car locked up in a garage? Of what use is a splendid ship in a dry dock—never launched?

Under Socialism you will be helped, for then man’s Divine creative genius will expand. Man is an artist and is more precious than anything he creates. But at the present, under capitalist society, goods are sheltered and men sleep in parks. Man loves to create, but he is unemployed by the million. Even when lucky enough to get work, the wage-slave system tends to destroy man’s creative genius. It is a demand for “greater output” not “greater artistic work.” Man is crushed between wagery and the machine.

The crowds of workers vomited forth from the factories have no more initiative than a bundle of slats. Yet all these men and women in a greater or lesser degree have the creative artistic spirit latent within them. It is crushed out by the industrial car of Juggernaut. They are all in fear of starvation in a world of plenty, pushed and dragged along a beaten path. It is a matter of obedience to the system or universal stagnation. Will it startle anyone if the sentence is penned—“Disobedience is a condition of progress.” Yet it was so with Galileo, Bruno, Vannini, Vesalius and a host of others. The State hated them and the Church hated them; neither the throne nor the altar ever loved an original thinker who dared to think opposite to them. Even Luther fought for the right of private judgment, but your private judgment must not go beyond his. Protestants have clung closely to Luther in his mental limitations, and their town straitjacket creeds. The Indian will take a young infant, while the skull is plastic, and bandage it tightly between two pieces of bark, in order to produce the slant in the forehead they delight to see. Orthodox Churches outstrip the Indian, for they deliberately dwarf the mind by mental bandages. This evil will pass! Yes—but it will only pass by the protest of God’s heretics, and rebels. The Divine artists in the world already see that Man is a God in the making. They see the work of the Immanent Artist in the flowers, the sunsets, and the starry systems, and they, too, at the same time feel the stir of the Divinity within them. As Grace Jones so beautifully wrote:

Very good—but man shares this artistic witchery. Capitalism with its machinery seeks to crush it. It succeeds in doing so. What is wanted is an aristocratic attitude towards work. The root of the word in the Greek is “best.” Aristocratic work—the best work—not the “most” work that vested interests demand, and by doing so thereby crushes the Divinity within man. From the dawn of consciousness man has ever felt the Divine artist stirring within him. Cavemen felt it. Ancient Egyptians in their pictorial writing and Maories as well in carving their canoes and barge-boards of their dwelling. All lands show the same evidences. Art on utensils, platters, clubs and shields. From a utilitarian point of view it was all unnecessary, but there is a Divinity within man that demands food for the soul as well as the body, and woe betide that country or system that dares to crush it. It may succeed for a time, but will only end in revolutions. Man cannot and will not live by bread alone. The extra work involved in art means joy to the worker, and therein lies the secret, and happy and prosperous will be the land that learns the secret of happy work. The vital living spark of artistic work is ever joy! Blow the spark and the Divine fire will soon spread and general content and happiness be the result. The utilitarian school of Manchester and the commercial spirit of so-called Liberalism has a lot to learn yet. The object of art is pleasure, and not merely production. The beautiful ever has a subtle influence, and every man more or less is sensitive to natural beauty. Especially so is it with the feminine part of humanity.

The higher the point in evolution the race reaches, the greater will be the increased sensitiveness to art. The unrest to-day is greatly the result of the crushing of this. The workers will not be satisfied with the art on hoardings either. They will not be insulted by this. Satisfaction for the Divine craving will not be found there. It must be found in pleasurable life employment. There may be some folk inferior to all this; we do not all reach the same evolutionary status at the same time. Many prefer to spend their money in drink rather than in beauty; but the sordid daily grind, too, is largely responsible for that. Even a bird will decorate its nest and add beauty to it.

It is war, poverty and the system generally that hinders art; the love of art lies dormant in the poor, in the drunkard and the criminal too. It may show itself in the stuffed birds of the parlour, wax and wool flowers under shades, china cats and dogs, and strange looking wool and cotton antimacassars. Vulgar art, says one; the vulgar rich as well often have bad taste. The love of art is there in the poorest, and it needs educating. The pride in beautiful things is good and means a finer morality. But the true aim of art cannot be profit, and the capitalist values can never be art values. The Socialist era will make an era of renaissance in art. At the present the average man ranks below the birds, for man’s nest is either in the slums or some insanitary, unbeautiful and rack-rented spot. Said the Artist-Artizan of Galilee: “Consider the lilies”! Again: “The birds of the air have nests,” etc. True art fosters a love for God and nature. Art passes on a thrill experienced; art is a flight from soul to soul; art quickens the stony-hearted into beauty-lovers; art truly gives sight to the blind, and so the Divine Artist, incarnated in humanity, is in revolt and the rebellious spirit will increase. Let us beware, for the dead hand of the past is on the living present. The Garden of Eden is ahead! All hail the future.

“Beauty,” says one, “resides in the soul of the beholder.” Well and truly said; it is very similar to Emerson’s: “What we have within, that only can we see without.” Plato, in the Republic, insisted on beautiful and decorative art. His ideal state, nor anyone else’s ideal state, could not exist without art. War, poverty and disease are blots upon the landscape. They must go! Tolstoy said the task of Christian art was to establish brotherhood among men, so arts and morals are closely related. Tennyson, too, saw that:

A VISION OF THE REVIVAL OF ART
UNDER SOCIALISM

It all depends upon what you mean by the word Socialism. A few decades ago Prof. Flint wrote a book on Socialism, and quite a number of pages were taken up in giving various definitions of the word. It occurs to me that old Webster of dictionary fame gave a simple and safe definition, i.e. “Socialism: a better state of society than has heretofore existed.” Who then can object to that?

What then is the meaning of “Art”? Like the words “Time,” “Space,” and “God,” there can be no perfectly satisfactory definition. In Tolstoy’s sentence can be found the best meaning of the word “art,” with all its connotations put in simple form: “The object of the true artist is the welfare of men.” Hidden behind this you get the meaning of art if you sense it out. True art satisfies the soul of the worker, and he is happy. In the real full sense of the word he becomes an artisan. But art cannot be genuinely inspired by hire or by fame. The artificial and unnatural life of the system of to-day seldom inspires art. It should be humiliating to the rich to remember that few scenes in their unnatural life inspires the artist, except, of course, the artist is for hire, and that kills inspiration. It is not the well-toppered gentleman, or the well-gowned woman with all their display of wealth that catches the eye of a true artist; it is rather the “man with the hoe,” or a bare-footed girl with a milk pail on her head. It is not the gaiety of a royal pageantry, but rather the hungry and famished threatenings of an unemployed crowd that inspires to real art. Truly wrote Thomas Hardy:

It is not a king’s procession that stirs the Divinity in the artist soul; rather he would find an inspired subject when the first Communist in the House of Commons stood in flashing defiance, and, referring to the opening ceremony in the House of Lords, exclaimed: “If they only spent less money on that tomfool show!” (Loud cries of “Order.”) The rest of the speech was punctuated with interruptions. There’s a picture! Another Communist in Cheshire said: “We are bringing thousands of unemployed to London, and we don’t care a damn whether or not they are brought back in coffins, so long as they win the fight”! The artist soul would feel inspiration in getting that on the canvass, and he would miserably fail in depicting the false glories of a stately bedecked and bejewelled ball-room! True art is ever moral. Tolstoy was right. True art to-day should show (and would only for the bread-and-butter-hire-system):

All these subjects have to do with a higher morality, and are close to the human soul; but the erotic mania to-day is not of true art. If our society was truly in line with Nature, no one would be interested in such things. The everlasting state of sex-swelter caused by the modern novel and many of the modern pictures is caused by the Puritan spirit still abroad; a spirit that makes life artificial and especially sex-life—it hides, it suppresses. Thereby it makes life unclean, and fills society with a crowd of Peeping Toms, and Peeping Jennies. Professional artists under the system cater to it—it sells! There is not only hypocrisy in religion, but also in art. This is not a tilt against the nude. The nude figure in a pure and natural social order will not excite to lust and desire. What excites to lust is the Puritanic hiding and suppressing. A nude figure should no more excite anyone than any other figure. The savages have the better of us in this, and are cleaner in mind accordingly. What they see every hour has little interest for them. The Japanese (and they are no savages) think our Christian sweethearting very unclean and likewise our novels, kissing, hugging and desiring in a long love swelter. They are in a great sense right, for they knew nothing of sexual diseases until the Christians came to them.

Under the New Order which is upon us the enemies of art will be overcome. The machines and the dollar hunters are the enemies. These drive art into blind alleys. Art cannot be truly inspired by wages or bribes of any sort. The money-changers have to be whipped out of the temple of art! What can a man crushed by toil know about art? Yet that man may be a potential Rembrandt! It is freedom, brotherhood, and the kingdom of God that will inspire art and allow the suppressed Divinity within to escape. What is there at present of poetry and colour in the worker’s life? What is there in the grinding wagery of the day to encourage the latent love of the beautiful in the souls of the man and woman living in the fear of want? How silly the following lines would appear to the mass of industrialists in England!

Only they who are free from the fear of want and have the Divine right of leisure could understand it. But they yet will, even though it means a revolution. Art is associated with beauty, and poverty is a blot on the landscape, and God ever expresses Himself in the form of beauty—we see it in the flowers, the plumage of birds, and the sunsets. The Divine thought shines and shows itself through matter to men. The closer you get to the spirit of real Communism (not force and dictatorships) and brotherhood, the clearer does this become. Radix said: “The foundations of all true art are the seeing eye and the understanding heart, and these Socialism will cultivate.”

To-day all are more or less victims of the market—all are driven. There is little time for art in the sordid competition that only places wealth in the hands of the few—blights and mildews art. America has no art, except that she buys! Art is not a thing of dollars; it is a thing of the spirit. Art is of God, and therefore it is creative. Art is simple, and is to be found in the book of Bunyan’s, or in the poems of Burns. Art comes from the natural and simple life. Said Emerson: “All great actions, all great pictures are simple.” There are pages of art in Knut Hamsun’s book, The Growth of the Soil. There is true art in the lines following:

Under Socialism, that means under natural conditions, art will be a factor making for race-union and thereby sonship with God. Art will teach all their common Divinity. Art will then satisfy the true religious instinct. War and armaments divides nations, but art unites nations and is infectious. Art has a refining influence; it does not make people coarse and vicious. War does. Poverty does. The prostitution of art, when it panders to what is saleable, may often have a coarsening effect. It does with human beings, especially when womanly attractions become saleable, either on the street, or saleable to a money-bug in the matrimonial market. That neither is of God and nature; for these attractions are intended by the God of nature for maternity. Both art and femininity in this may be decked out as prostitutes and made attractive. True art is simple, natural, universal and Divine, and will be so under Socialism. But under the system that now bears the Divine curse there can be little love of the good, the true and the beautiful. The sad poet John Davidson knew that when he sang:

In some of the old cathedrals, even the hidden gargoyles, away from the eyes of people, are beautifully carved and chiselled, thereby indicating the workers’ liberty; but what do the so-called artizans, say, in a chair factory turning out chairs to pattern and by the speed-limit for a grinding wage, know about art? When the day’s toil is over they return to hideous homes and the artistic sense is again atrophied. Their wall pictures are framed calendars, and colored supplements. What the writer is driving at is this. In all work there must be The Vision Splendid! The question for all workers can be seen in the question—

How do you visualize your job? The story of the three stone-cutters leaves nothing of wisdom to be said. They were working on a stone. A stranger asked the first what he was doing. “I’m working for $7.50 a day,” he replied. “And you?” the stranger asked the second. “I’m cutting this stone,” growled the labourer. When the question was put to the third stone-cutter, he answered, “I’m building a cathedral.”

The guilds of the Middle Ages touched the fringe of Socialism, but feudalism was too strong for them and they perished, while modern capitalism arose out of feudalism. At least they gave to us the most wonderful and the most beautifully artistic buildings the world has ever seen. The great art evolved by capitalism and imperialism is the art of militarism as exemplified in Rheims and Louvain. Don’t blame the Germans. The reason for that destruction was because the Allies could not get to Berlin and repeat the destruction. Said our own Lord Fisher: “Moderation in violence is imbecility; hit quick, hit hard and hit anywhere!”

Art must be in charge and be guided by the people who have the moral sense, and the moral sense is to be found to-day in the industrial field. The people found there are the people who eschew the ideals of nationalists, imperialists, capitalists and militarists; the values of these immoralists are hated by the workers, who are stretching hands across the seas and feeling for the Internationale and universal brotherhood, and when they win through to their Divine ideals we shall enter the true renaissance of art. The chief patron of art will then be the people, and the great incentive to labour will not be a livelihood but the creation of a soul emanated thing. The thing produced will be the work of an inspired artist—a revelation from soul to soul, whether the result be a chair, an editorial article, a poem, a speech or a picture. The market will then be our servant and not our master.

The system of commercial tyranny must go. Work must be a pleasure, not a drudgery. The witchery of the artist soul cannot be produced in an atmosphere of anxiety and weariness. To-day the boss wants not a soul, not an artist, but he wants a HAND. So man becomes a servant to the machine and not a Divine creative artist. The market has become the master and the man has become the wage-slave. Markets are the misery of the poor and the luxury of the rich. Let us learn the Divinity of the beautiful! Let us learn how art really is the expression of man’s inward Divinity—the expression of the highest in man. Art is not an idle pastime, but it is a picture of the ideal. Man will yet be as the gods! All work will be social and brotherly. To-day workers are concerned with a bare livelihood; they are not thinking of art wares. These wonderfully evolved hands of ours were made for art purposes. The more wonderfully evolved brain that guides the hands, also was evolved for art purposes. At present we are all victims of the system, and as we look around amid this hideous industrialism we say with the old prophet: “Can these bones live?” Yes, they will yet stand up an exceeding great army; the Spirit of the great Creative Artist will breathe upon them and they will arise and make the world beautiful. The man without a country now will yet own all. The following from the Llano Colonist will explain my meaning:

DIVINE TRUTH AND MAN’S TRADITIONS

People who look back for their guidance and inspiration are confronted with man’s traditions and the many difficulties they suggest. Man’s silly traditions about witchcraft should have taught the world something. Learned men, among whom were judges in big-wigs, wrote mighty tomes full of learned arguments proving that witchcraft was true and it was folly and wicked to say otherwise. John Wesley said: “To disbelieve in witchcraft is to disbelieve in the Bible.” It seems unbelievable that this folly persisted down to American history and that a young land like America put witches (so called) to death. Yet it was so. Yet who to-day believes in witches? Where are the traditionalists who would now defend the subject of witchcraft? There are still a few who on scriptural grounds refuse to believe that the earth moves. To them the sun moves round the earth; for did not Joshua command the sun to stand still! That is quite enough for them. So the same Bible says: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

What can you do with people who make these hoary traditions hinder the world and chuckle in a religiously (?) happy way over the supposed fact. The same stupid and well meaning traditionalists have traditions about creation, the fall, everlasting burnings, the Sabbath, miracles and devils, all of which severally or jointly paralyses the mind and hinders the world’s progress. The Bible is valuable in the sense that it proves the truth of evolution. We can trace in it the unfolding of the moral sense and the unfolding of the God idea—the God who was supposed to be pleased with the sacrifice of the firstborn, as with Abraham and Isaac, right on to the God of immanence that Jesus, believed in—“I and my Father are one, even as ye are all one.” What the Nazarene Reformer said here every man and woman can say—“I and my Father are one!” We rebels and heretics duly recognise the Divinity of Jesus as we do the Divinity of Shelley, and as we do the Divinity of ourselves, but we do object to Jesus being made a Deity, which is a very different matter. To be candid, he becomes very precious to us as a man of like passions to ourselves, born of natural parents like ourselves. But they who worship tradition will have none of this, and thereby they lose much inspiration and calling to service and goodness. They cling tight to the false traditions and silly and absurd superstitious about Jesus being God and yet they have given up the false traditions about witchcraft, and about eclipses being the cause of famines, plagues and war. Truly they have a hard row to hoe! The days are driving them into very dark and intricate corners and the end is not yet. The creeds and catechisms have become very complex and very befogging, while the simple truth about God being a spirit, and in whom we live and move and have our being, is not only simple as all truth is, but exceedingly beautiful. The essence of worship is simply to worship Him in truth and in spirit, and we can do that in the best cathedral of all, the open air by the sea, the mountain tops, the woods and gardens. One is nearer to God amid the songs of bird choristers maybe than in a dusty germ laden atmosphere of a traditional church. A place where the preacher more often than enough doubts his own theology, yet tries to defend it, and coaxes himself into the belief that it is a virtue to stand in the pulpit and become a sort of splendid liar for God! Is the child’s definition of faith the correct one? Believing a thing to be true that we know is not true! Even the great and scholarly Benjamin Jowett is said to have got over the difficulty of repeating the creed by repeating his own revised opening sentence: “I used to believe,” then going through the whole Apostle Creed, which, by the way, the Apostles did very well without.

Let me ask whether this dishonesty is pleasing to the God of Truth and Love? Has it become a religious virtue to be a theological juggler or thimble-rigger for God? We admire a clever juggler on the theatre platform or in a circus, but a pulpit juggler is quite another thing. The following verses by Bliss Carmen are very good, and call forth our admiration when performed by the professional wizard or in some gypsies’ tent of legerdemain, but in God’s temple it is quite another thing:

Will the reader pardon at this point a little autobiography, for my heresies have driven me nearer to God and made God more real. About fourteen years ago, when a Presbyterian clergyman in New Zealand, there came a point in my thinking when I had either to step out of my ministerial charge or become a theological juggler. The living was fairly good, with a manse and glebe. At that time there was a wife to keep and thirteen children. My departure from the orthodox creed was detected in my sermons and newspaper writings. Things went on till Session trouble started and then Presbytery trouble; the heresy-hunt ended in forcing my resignation. All this might have been avoided by a little judicious juggling in the pulpit and juggling cleverly with my pen. It is surprising how expert one may get tossing up theological balls, each with a word written on it—Fall—Devil—Hell—Atonement—Blood—Saviour—Miracles—Inerrent Bible—Bodily Resurrection and so on. At the same time, modern science and modern scholarship, and a clean knowledge of evolution, which given the golden key to unlock many mysteries, remains at the back of the parsonic brain while the spiritual three-card trick goes on in the pulpit. The point was—was I to become an unholy victim to this juggling? The mental agony of it! The darkened hell of it! God knew the torturing mental and soul agony and came to my aid. I resigned!

Well do I remember my last visit to the church, over the road from the manse. Yes, I would go over, before quitting the manse, and have a last look at it. It was evening, the sun was westering, and the golden rays were striking through the coloured glass windows as I opened the door of the empty building. I walked up the aisle slowly and stepped into the pulpit. I looked at the old Bible, the empty seats, the splashes of colour here and there on them from the sunlight on the windows. I saw the patch on the carpet, the nap worn off by my standing on the spot for so many years. The spot where I had regularly dispensed the Communion to the people who had trusted me and believed in me. To this spot and the messages from this spot, I had consecrated my life, had been ordained, too, on this very spot. So this was the end of it and the last visit. I knelt down on that spot for the last time. I had never really knelt there before, but I did now and re-consecrated my life to God and Social Service and Truth at all costs. If God was the God of Truth then He would come to me. If God was the God of Love He would rally to me and to my wife and thirteen children also (one, the fourteenth, was added later). With these vows I rose to my feet, and since then I have never been on my knees! There is something better than that—it is never getting out of touch with the unseen forces—continuing instant in prayer.

In the morning, on taking up the Herald newspaper, I read the result of my application among eighty and over other applicants for the position of librarian to a library—“The Rev J. H. G. Chapple appointed.” Very good. Space is too short for subsequent history. The point is for all who are tempted to juggle in Divine things for a living, for one at least to testify that God since then has been real in a wonderful sense. To find God I had to leave the Church! What a paradox! God is no longer a mental assent, but an experience—a life. Reader, forgive this! I should have felt mean and in a sense unhappy if silent. But God’s truth transcends man’s vain traditions. From that day, over thirteen years ago, God has never left me, but helped me over every trial:

THE VISION OF A PROGRESSIVE RELIGION

Progress is the keynote of the universe. Everything moves! This, too, is the central thought in Einstein’s philosophy of relativity. Yes, everything moves except the Church. That remains stock-still, or at least tries to do so. “As-it-was-in-the-beginning- is-now-and-ever-shall-be-world-withhout-end-Amen.” This old wheeze has done duty in the past, but it has come to a dead-end, for evolution has taught us the mind and method of God, for we now know that religion did not, Minerva-like, spring complete—perfect from heaven. Religion itself, with its concept of God is subject to the same laws of evolution. All religions so far have needed some outward concrete form to picture their God, whether it takes the personality of a Buddha, a Mahomet or a Jesus. The great multitude of worshippers yet need cling to anthropomorphism in some dim way. So far pure Theism is only for the top-notchers (so to speak). The great multitude will evolve to it in time. Pure spirit, without bodily form and shape in some way, is hard to grasp, but slowly the new transcends the old. Intelligent clergymen to-day are very much in the same plight that the priests of the Roman Empire were in during the early centuries of the Christian era; if they met in the streets they were afraid to look at each other, for fear of laughing outright!

Crowds still cling to the Church, for it means loss of trade, business, influence and social status in some quarters. One is reminded of the character of the young doctor in one of Dickens’ books, who arranged to sit in the middle of the congregation, while a page boy in buttons came up the aisle to find him with an urgent message during the middle of the sermon. It made quite a commotion in the service, and ladies heads went together and whispered. “That’s the young doctor,” they say. “He’s so clever. That’s a special call from some patient!” So on and so on—all very clever and a finely thought out advertisement. It reminds one of the Horatio Bottomley patriotism, and peeping from the back room into the hall before speaking—“Ah—there’s a hundred pound house to-night; I’ll give them the ‘Prince’.” But this is a dig for those who deal out not so much patriotic dope as religious dope. Even in these matters the writer is an optimist, for soon there will be a great grand drift to honesty and reason. The Catholic Church place their emphasis for authority on the Church. The Protestants place their emphasis for authority on the Bible. The Churches of the future will place their emphasis for authority on reason. Reason will yet be honoured, and should be, for the human reason is part of the Divine reason. At the present it is crushed and insulted and made to appear as the enemy of faith. In order to harmonise the two, reason and faith, resort is made to mental reservations, and all kinds of intellectual dishonesty results. So the church becomes more unethical than the market-place. Fancy a deal in business with a mental reservation! Many straight business men would not tolerate the Church ethic here! Is this a light thing? Said one:

Another clergyman puts his complaint in the following words:

There is a purpose in calling these evidences from other sources, for some may think the charges and complaints are personal rather than general. The poor laity hardly know the position; they follow their blind leaders, and the blind leading the blind, both fall into the ditch together. Progressive-religion is leading to pure Theism, as it should do. We lose nothing except the bogies, nightmares and superstitions of the past. God remains! In those two words lie the centre and circumference of all the religions of the world. At the heart of all the world religions there is the search for God! After the husks and rubbishing forms are torn off and destroyed—God remains! I have seen the gold sluicers in New Zealand attack a large hillock with their hydraulic water pressure; the dirt, rubbish and boulders roll away down the shutes. Go again in a few weeks and look at the scene. The hillock has vanished, and at the washing up there remains in a very small compass, grains of gold! So likewise after all the sluicings in the religious world; the Church and religion becomes the purer for the process—God remains! Said Amiel: “After a Jesus religion we shall have the religion OF Jesus.”

There you have it! The religion OF Jesus was Theism. So was it Theism of Buddha; so it was of Mahomet. But the illiterate unthinking mind likes to visualise God as a person. There is no personal God! Within a few miles of me, on the brow of Friar’s Crag, at Derwentwater, there is the Ruskin monument. On one side are these words: “The Spirit of God is around you in the air that you breathe; His glory in the light that you see; the fruitfulness of the earth and the joy of its creation. He has written for you day by day His revelation and He has granted to you day by day His daily bread.” Ruskin, as all thinkers know in their better moments, knew that God is a presence and not a person. All truly enlightened religious men and women should to-day strongly object to the word person as related to God, for it tends to confirm the aboriginal anthropomorphic habit in us which is fatal to progress.

Said the Rebel, Heretic, Reformer of Nazareth: “God is Spirit”; not God is “A” Spirit, but, correctly translated: “God is Spirit!” Let us try and learn what that means and we may get to understand what Tennyson meant by:

Let the poor weak souls who still need the weak crutches of an infallible book and a personal God not look askance at others who can walk without such crude supports; let them remember that they have not been where we are, but we have been where they are. They still find comfort—it may be so—so do the Buddhists, the Moslems and the Confucians in their errors, but as the fine old proverb has it: “All the breath and bloom of the year are not in the bag of one bee!” In point of fact, it is very questionable whether the orthodox bee to-day has any honey left in the bag at all, or whether it is possible to gather any honey, when the sublime truths of science, scholarship and therefore the truths of God are not in the traditional gardens at all. While the fall of man is stubbornly held to, the truth of evolution cannot be accepted.

Says a religious newspaper:

Another progressive tendency to-day in modern religious thought is to find in the Universal Spirit of Humanity the spirit of Communism. But there are bewildering ideas of Communism abroad reaching from Plato to Lenin. At least, it must not be a burlesque of Communism, ending in a revival of militarism and dictatorships. It must be towards humanism, and, as George Fox put it: “God must be over all.” Here religion touches a deep—and deep calls to deep! It is a call to inclusiveness and the kingdom of God! There must be an ascent to oneness, and brotherhood is not to be thought of as a MAY-BE, but as a SHALL-BE. So far, apparently, no part of the world is moral enough to see it but the industrial world. All religions spring out of the ONE root! Every religion is Divine there, in the thought of God. The more they close the eye to racial differences, the more Divine they are. The purifying spirit is Love and Union, and thereby Communion and Communism. Isolation promotes distrust and is not of God; intimacy and brotherhood promotes trust and is of God.

There is a spiritual relationship of all; let us seek it. Newton found and proved there were all colours in the one yellow light. Says the Bab: “Glory not in your land; glory rather in your KIND!” So the God-mind, the master-mind, to-day breaks away from all limitations and parochialisms; he breaks the cage of sectarianism and soars into the heights of God and certainty, he climbs the hills of ascent to oneness. Away with dualisms, pluralities, and ascend to the heaven of oneness! Open your nostrils to the beautiful fragrance of God, and climb out of the dust and germs of traditional limitations—drink the Divine wine of oneness. There is a religion here that satisfies—a religion here facing the same ideal as science—a religion that explains the mysteries of life; here is a religion with an ideal—a religion with a goal—a religion that shows and proves man to be a God in the germ! It is just at this point you can say: “Behold I make all things new!” When the mass are attracted by this Vision Splendid they will soon make a new heaven and a new earth! The new heaven will be ON the earth! and by these things they shall know they are the servants of God. They will cease singing (in fact the blasphemy of it will dawn upon them in a world of plenty) they will refuse to sing: 

Progressive-religion to-day has a Divine gospel of discontent. It is blasphemy to preach content in a world of plenty. Let the orthodox parsons turn their churches (when war is declared) into recruiting centres, and when war is over and starvation and unemployment reigns let them continue to teach a gospel of:

One may ask: Does the author of this book teach his children these things? The dear children ever touch us on a sore point. The answer is YES he does! The following verses were written by the eldest daughter years ago, and they contain the essence of the father’s spirit and beliefs—a spirit and belief he wants to die with:

THE GOD OF NATURE—LISTENING TO THE
HARMONIES

Many men of science refuse to reason beyond Nature to the God of Nature. They stop short and refuse to go beyond what they see and feel in a tangible way. Christians, on the other hand, try to believe in a God who is apart from Nature—in a sense extraneous to it. A being who about six thousand years ago set everything working and spinning and then stood apart from it and watched it spin. We are learning to think and see now that God is incarnated in Nature, and that man is a part of Nature made conscious. That man is not only in the chain of Nature, but the top link in that chain, and that in a very special way, for God is incarnated in humanity, and man has infinite heights to evolve and bounds to reach, and where a race of gods may result.

To-day there is a dawning renaissance. The renaissance of the thirteenth century and on was a breaking away of the human spirit. Altars and thrones were suffocating it. It was a liberation from the bondage of circumstances; it was the captive spirit of man awaking and becoming conscious—in a word, it was the Divine Spirit in the throes of a struggle to be released. We are to-day entering a second renaissance. The awakening consciousness of the Universal Mind of God is astir, and the religious mind now is not so much concerned with belief in God as it is in realising God. The whole world is crying out for the real God, and not the God of dogma and theology. The puzzling three-word sentence of Diderot is beginning to be understood at last: “Release your God!” That means enlarge your conceptions. To the average Englishman God is British to the backbone. He is a kind of magnified John Bull. If the orthodox Dutchman tried to picture his God in personal form, he would have wooden clogs and baggy trousers. If a Chinaman tried it, of course his deity would be in the national garb and with a pig-tail at the back. The following illustrates my meaning in a somewhat different way: An Irishman went into a church and fell asleep. The sexton roused him and told him he was closing up. “What do you mean?” said the Irishman. “The cathedral never closes.” “This is not the cathedral,” said the sexton. “This is a Presbyterian church.” The Irishman looked around him. On the walls were paintings of the apostles. “Isn’t that Saint Luke over there?” he inquired. “It is,” said the sexton. “And Saint Mark just beyond him?” “Yes.” “And Saint Thomas further on?” “Yes.” “Tell me,” he said, “since when did they all become Presbyterians?”

Said Huxley once: “God is not an Englishman twelve feet high.” It may not be easy to think of God as Universal Mind, or to think of God as the Soul of the Universe. But neither is it easy to try and grasp a knowledge of astronomy. Some refuse to face astronomy on that ground; it makes the mind reel, they say, to try and imagine three hundred millions of worlds! But then they are faced with much the same problem with a microscope and a drop of water.

We are learning slowly that the greatest study of all is the study of the mind. Modern psychology arouses an intense interest at present, and well it might, for man’s mind is in process of evolution. In fact, the psychic part of man’s nature is in process of creation, and when man gets proper data this evolution of man’s psychic part can be accelerated by judicious unions and matings—and will be. It is in this sphere of the science of mental processes—the science of self—that we are to look for positive proof of man’s divinity. Whence comes this mind? It is part of the Infinite and Universal Mind. Man is discovering his God within! This, too, is not in disharmony with the truth of science. Materialism, here, has no message beyond words and their mechanistic ideas. The man who broadened his mind by putting his head under the steam-roller was a Socrates in materialist philosophy compared with many modern materialist reasoners. Pen, ink and paper do not explain the “In Memoriam” of Tennyson. Because we have discovered the method of evolution let us not think we have thereby discovered the cause of evolution.

Said the materialistic Tyndal: “Evolution cannot explain the origin of anything.” He might have added: “There is some unknown power and intelligence involved!” God is not behind the world but IN the world. “It is God that worketh IN you,” and man—conscious man—now becomes the creator and evolver, and he becomes so by the God within him! Reader, birth is not the beginning of you! You will get the meaning of this by carefully reading the “Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth there, was as close to the truth as ever he was. Butler, of Erehwon fame, has a quaint note in one of his notebooks. The reason a chick pecks its way out of a shell is because it has done the same thing a million times before, and so knows how to do it! By the God working in us to-day we poor humans are pecking our way out of the shell of conventional thought, and it is quite as impossible for the awakened mind to retreat into the old shell of orthodoxy as it would be for a chick to return to its old shell. Said Olive Schreiner: “Once having stepped out of the valley of superstitions, it is impossible to step back.” Man’s mind is in process of creation—there is a psychic, ZOIC evolution of mind and spirit going on, but it is wrong to speak of mind and spirit as something that man HAS—mind and spirit is what man IS! When you reach this truthful knowledge you can reflect and say: Death now has no fears for me—death cannot touch ME. The visitors to the condemned Socrates asked the question: “Shall we bury you?” “Yes,” said the wise old philosopher, “if you can catch ME!”

Yes, we are on the track of a new renaissance; We are beginning to understand a little of the God in Nature and ourselves as a part of Nature—the highest part of Nature—the conscious part of Nature. This will lead us to the new birth of socialisation and the United States of Humanity. Divine man will be the creator of this. He begins to have The Vision Splendid now. Jesus had a glimpse of that vision when he prayed, “Thy kingdom come,” but he has been lost amid rubbishing dogmas and theologies, and he has yet to be found in social idealism. When we learn this we shall emerge into a complete religious and economic freedom—we shall experience the joy of living; we shall at last understand the words: “Ye shall have life and life more abundantly.”

Said the poetess:

But amid the welter of discords the men and women who live in God’s presence and understand His laws can and do listen for the harmonies. The folk who have trained themselves to listen become incurable optimists—they have drilled themselves into the fine art of listening. They have trained themselves to hear, and you hear best what you are trained to hear. The following will explain: There is a man named Kellogg who knows birds. He studies their habits, imitates their notes and songs, singles them out one from another in the woods. One day he was walking with our friend on a busy street in New York, not far from a little park. Suddenly he stopped. “Do you hear a cricket?” he inquired. No, his companion heard only the shuffle of feet and the voices of passers-by, the clatter of wagons, and the rumble of trains. “Come with me,” said Kellogg. He went straight, it may be fifty feet, to the sill of a bakery window, below the street level. In the corner he found the chirping cricket. He said: “That is not so wonderful. I’ll show you something else.” They were back in the traffic of the sidewalk again. He took a ten-cent piece from his pocket and quietly dropped it to the pavement. The people for twenty feet around stopped and looked. Yet it was the least sound in the street. “How do you explain it?” inquired the wondering friends. “It is simple,” said Kellogg; “you hear what you are trained to hear.”

Then listen for the harmonies, and not the discords. The harmonies in Nature. There is a kinship of Nature—all Nature is ONE. So there is too a universal kinship in humanity, if we can only grope out of vested interests and imperial aggrandisement. By the discovery of this kinship all life becomes harmony. There is good at the heart of men, but capitalist competition causes a babel of tuneless caterwauling. The great failure of competitive society is the great poverty in the midst of great plenty. It also ends in periodical wars connected with trade rivalries and jealousies. Note the description of the Verdun battle ground:

But to-day’s paradox! The industrial world has a great love for the Carpenter of Nazareth and a great contempt for Christianity, or, as they are wise enough to call it, Churchianity. The workers are slowly learning that man is not matter but spirit. That Socialism and Communism are things of the spirit, and soul-hunger demands Communism. They know that nationalism, imperialism, militarism and capitalism are one and all ANTI-SOCIAL, and they are determined to move away from these evil shadows and semblances to the truth. They know by a Divine intuition quite outside Church influence that Love is of God—in fact, Love is God. Evolution has taught them that the element of love can be traced right back into the inorganic; right back into chemical affinities and right on to mother-love and again on to love of race and Communism. They know that love is not a material thing—that there is an unseen reality around you and within you. In their W.E.A. classes they are learning the truths and revelations of modern psychology; that is, an identity of the mind and the underlying reality—call it God for want of a better name.

William James’ definition of God is to the point here: “God, the stream of ideal tendency, deeply embedded in the eternal structure of the mind.” Our knowledge is that modern civilization hinders the life of reality—our work is to bring in the new civilization, where real life will be an inner and spiritual thing. The workers are in a state of transition, but they know the truth. Whittier voiced their coming faith:



A VISION OF THE LIFE OF REALITY

Nothing is more injurious to the life of reality than the heaping up of money and property. At this moment, as I write, England is in the vortex of a lightning election,^[1] and the party newspapers are very amusing. Especially so is an Independent (?) paper known as ——. Let its name be blotted out. At least it sounds a little like each and all of them, or, as the bankers say, jointly and severally. It is funnier than Ally Sloper; there is a scream in almost every line. Yes, a wail over everything, making for peace and goodwill. Yes, it is a true snail in the path of progress. Yes, a flail is going all the time belaboring one and all who dare to have a vision. This paper is kept before the public by huge lettering on the Strand and other places, and on fine days by sky-writing from an aeroplane, the operator letting off behind streams of dense smoke that form into letters. Crowds of folk read this comical wheezing in a serious way. No one with a vision of the life of reality could do so. It is read by the rich class that lives by owning.

Said Lord Cecil: “To interfere with property is theft, and theft is crime.” This is very true, but the noble lord himself represents that class of property owners and exploiters who for centuries have been the thieves of property that should have been held in common. He that steals the goose from off the common is gaoled, and he that steals the common from the goose is titled. So this system defended by the lords and the newspapers they love is a system making man inhuman to man, when the same human nature is teaming with ethical treasures if it could only be released from the system.

Communal life will be a life of the Spirit. Human nature has all the qualities necessary for this when it becomes possible to apply love and justice to common life. Whatever there may be in the future life of reality in the way of profits will be used for mutual aid, at the present these profits are filched by all sorts of crafty methods from the less shrewd. The profiteers of the system are in truth the weasels and skunks of society preying on domestic fowls. The foxes of society are loose among the lambs. It is really not the good, guileless man who becomes rich; it is the human fox, the human wolf, the shark. The person who idealises realty in property and not in the life of reality—the life of the Spirit.

How splendid that the word “spirit” is derived from the word “REAL”! Many people to-day are understanding this, and thereby refuse to be content living every man for himself—the spirit of service-motive is supplanting profit-motive. The interest and the happiness of ONE is to be the interest and profit of the community, and also vice versa. The poor man is rich with the communal spirit, and the rich man is poor without it. The love of human service will be the actuating motive—kindnesses done by all without anything up the sleeve; gifts made without strings tied to them. This cannot be until people understand universal life, and this life is the ultimate destiny of mankind. It is the final goal of humanity. “Mine” and “THINE” will be swept off the earth! Not wars and empire, but peace and goodwill! It is harmonic and altruistic, and the Nazarene would have such a life preparatory to the future life. “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven.” He was wiser than his time, and he called to a common cause; the essence of his religion was bearing one another’s burdens. But has he failed as an idealist? Is the life of reality absurd and impossible? The parsons for the most part say Yes, but the heretics say No! Listen to this heretic.

From the preface to Androcles and the Lion—George Bernard Shaw:

This is how Shaw sums up the teaching of Jesus.

Many of these religious rebels and heretics defy the system in much the same way that Jesus defied the Roman Empire. But the Church and the symbol of the Cross has become very respectable and meaningless. Had Jesus been put to death for sedition and blasphemy in London to-day, the instrument would not be now a cross, but a hempen rope, and the future bishops and followers would have for a symbol a rope with a noose on the end of it attached to a gibbet! Shocking—but it is the truth. Sit down and think it out. Death on the cross was more shocking to the Romans than death by the rope is to English seditionists to-day. This is not the sort of gospel preached to-day—no, but it is the gospel, and it is the heretics now who have the gospel.

The finest and truest life of Jesus ever written is The Call of the Carpenter, by Bonck White. Jesus in his time was to the Romans a dangerous rebel, and to the Jews a heretic and blasphemer. If the Carpenter of Nazareth was in England to-day his attitude towards the Union Jack would be much the same as his attitude was towards the Roman eagle nearly two thousand years ago. The two empires have much in common. The ages have changed, but the love of power and greed are much on a par. The most revolutionary song ever uttered—a hundred times more so than the “Red Flag” song—was the song of Mary, the rebellious mother of Jesus—so called the Magnificat. It looks very pretty and harmless in the Church of England Prayer-book. Properly understood, it contains the quintessence of Bolshevism. Listen!

This is practically what was done in Russia at the Revolution, and if it was not for the hatred and uneasiness of the imperial and capitalist nations, the spirit of it would be carried out almost to the letter to-day. In the world of vested interests there is a universal nervousness in regard to Russia—all nations are fearful she may get on her feet and prosper. That would never do—but the last chapter of Christianity has to be written, and when that is written the religious world may look up into the English sky some clear morning and not see written in trailing clouds of smoke “The——” but in letters of gold emblazoned in trailing clouds of glory across the sky—“Thou pale Galilean, thou hast conquered!”

The Communism of Jesus will win, and the imperialism of Paul will die. Paul succeeded in his questionable expediency and compromising in switching the Divine Communism of Jesus and his disciples on to an imperialist track. The little Jew of Asia Minor meant well, maybe, with his mental philosophical mixture of Judaism and Hellenism, but he thereby made it possible for Christianity to become imperialised and Iscariotised. So it became, when later Constantine became a disgraceful convert. Had the Church remained true to the message of the Annunciation: “Peace on earth Goodwill towards men”—had it remained true to the Nazarene’s hatred of Mammon (which is only the ancient word for modern capitalism), both war and vested interests would have been swept out of the world a thousand years ago.

These devilish discords are causing man to listen to the human harmony there is in the coming Communism—real Communism, not the prostitution of the gloriously Divine word, but a social symphony of love and brotherhood, where the agony of one will be the agony of all and the joy of one be joy of all! God is the contriver of universal harmony. We detect this even in the inorganic world—to wit, in the crystals in the formation of snow and the frost pattern on the window pane, and in the realm of vibrations, even though it be the vibrations applied to a tray of sand. The peace loving person vibrates in unison with God. There is power, too, in harmony, and all can, if they have sufficient mental and moral courage to defy orthodoxy and convention, thus cultivate the inner harmonies. If they have pluck to throw aside the sordid and unlovely and stand for the wholeness of things. There is a cosmic Divine pull; there is a universal kinship; it is to be found in the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. It is to be found in the shortest creed on the earth—four words: love God; LOVE MAN. Says science, every drop of water is tied to the moon; every grain of sand is tied to the earth’s centre. So in that four-word creed can be found the cosmic pull. Be a human note of harmony in the great cathedral of God! Get a mental poise of melody! There is a connection between health and harmony. Stray away from this and one soon feels the present social and conventional suffocations. Miss F. A. Palmer has well put it:

THE IMMORALISTS: AND THE EVOLUTION OF A
HIGHER MORALITY

People would be able to clarify their thinking on the subject of morality if they would see it in the light of an unfolding. Evolution is here again the golden key! The moral law evolves, also God and the moral law are not to be separated. Kant was impressed with the existence of God by two things: “The starry heavens above and the moral law within.” Here, too, we have the thought of a transcendent and an immanent Deity, but the two are one. There can be no sun without sunbeams and no sunbeams without sun. We learn from science to-day that every atom and every electron is not only a centre of power but also an overflow of power. So with God’s Spirit, it not only fills and floods the starry heavens but fills and floods the soul. Said Jesus: “Thou Father in me and I in Thee.” Transcendence and immanence are two beautiful and also harmonious truths. An evolving ethic allows us to be tolerant and kindly to all religion, for we see the immanent Divine Spirit within all. The truly religious spirit is as broad and generous as the sunshine. Goethe when asked “To which of these religions do you belong?” truly and wisely answered: “To all; for all taken together constitute that true religion.”

The Bible becomes a very useful book to us when studying the evolution of morality. Primitive folk and illiterate folk to-day are fond of negatives. The unschooled parent is ever repeating to children, Don’t do that; Don’t do this and Don’t do the other! Don’t don’t, don’t, instead of Do, do, do! A modern Moses would not now write out a ten words of “Thou shalt nots!” but rather, “Do this and live.” The negative belongs to the primitive, and the positive is of a higher morality. We see this to-day on municipal and state properties. The olden notice in parks and other places took the form of “Don’t walk on the grass,” “Don’t mark or cut the seats, or you will be prosecuted,” etc. To-day we are beginning to read: “Protect your own property.” It all marks an evolving ethic; the race is emerging from its primitive cradle, and is told to be good without the threat of primitive punishments.

The old morality was a suffocating thing, whether in civil or religious matters. The old morality is in an ever-decreasing circle; it resembles, in a way, one of its old immoral and medieval tortures; the contracting room, that slowly kept day by day closing in upon the prisoner until he was crushed to death. The newer morality is an outspanning and enlarging thing; a tolerant and kindly spirit that demands even a kinder theology. Many devotees still try to prop up the old tottering creeds and moralities and hold them sacred, but they are doomed. Even a Roman Catholic, Faber, could not help broadening his theology and thereby defending the moral character of God by writing:

These lines, sure, are a sign of a higher ethic. They contrast favourably with the words of Melancthon when dying: “I’m glad to die. Oh, the hatreds of these theologians!” When the Churches really become moral there will soon be a higher ethical tone in all State affairs. Hark back to 1914 and listen to the bishops and clergy of the religion of “Peace on earth, goodwill towards men.” Said one bishop: “The way to the higher Christian life is through the trenches.” Another: “Jesus himself would lead a bayonet charge.” Yet another Christian leader: “Throw your ideals to the winds and trust the God of a million bayonets!” And so on. What did this bogus and savage morality mean? Read the following:

The great avenue leading to God to-day is the avenue of an evolving morality. An ethical outlook that will oppose everything of an anti-social nature. Let us remember that the moral sphere is higher than either the physical or the intellectual, and also impress it on the mind in an indelible way that morality as it evolves is not the blind hap of a mindless evolution, but that it is of God and is slowly being written within and the moral mystery of Good is an avenue that leads to God. In leading there, there may be an apparent want of ethical idealism, but it is only fanciful and not real. I have the exaggerated and uncharitable reports of the Press in mind that are dealt out to us at breakfast time each morning, in penny and twopenny doses, about the Communist movement in Russia.

 Mark Twain reasoned about it in his half-humorous and philosophical way—for Mark Twain was a very serious philosopher when the spell was upon him. He was in this quotation referring to the French Revolution, but it applies equally so, or more so, to the great moral upheaval in Russia:

The real trouble in the world at the present time (it appears almost in every country) is, morality is suffering from growing pains, and the strange thing is, to the old moralists the new moralists appear as immoralists, and the moralists of the old school appear to the new moralists as flagrant immoralists. So they are! The new morality is striving to break the bounds of nationalism and militarism and unfold into internationalism and world brotherhood.

It is a painful process, a truly ethical, but all new births are exceedingly painful, and especially so the birth-pangs of a new ethical idea. Perhaps in the Divine wisdom it is rightly painful in its travailing, for what is brought forth in agony becomes doubly precious and is guarded and cared for when won. This point of my reasoning keeps my mind upon Russia; she suffers the birth throes at the present time of a new morality. Strange to say, Russia the last has become the first. Read this prophecy by Victor Hugo:

All see now that Victor Hugo was a good man, and the good man being closely in touch (as all truly prophetic souls are) with the Divine Goodness, that is God, they know by a higher reasoning—intuition. This intuitive knowledge is not new, for Confucius said 500 years B.C.: “The good man is able to pre-sage.”

The world suffers from the birth of a higher morality, both in religion and in social matters. We see it breaking out in almost every sphere. Not so many months ago, when a man and a woman were executed for a tragedy at Ilford the following scene was reported in the papers:

This is very different to the days Dickens described, when public executions were a kind of holiday or heyday for all and sundry. An evolving morality turns us into incurable optimists! The rate of the unfolding of morality is only brought about by the exercise of reason, and the human reason is part of the eternal reason, which, strange to say, man is somewhat afraid of. No wonder, for the Churches are still shy of reason, and put faith before it. But the old morality is slowly being superseded by a better—not only in Church teaching but in sociology as well. The new moralists are shocked over wage-slavery, false patriotism, poverty, insanitation and slums.

On the front page of the Westminster Gazette recently appeared the following in reference to Devonport slums, and it bears me out in remarks about the evolution of a higher morality:—

NO WINDOWS

The reason for these changes of attitude towards social injustices is the cumulative knowledge gathered during past decades, especially since the days of Charles Darwin. He gave us a new view of God, the world and the human race. Knowledge that caused us to doubt, for doubt is the result of knowledge, and doubt helps in the evolution of morality and religion. The word “doubter” and “unbeliever” have at last ceased to suggest evil.

So “doubt” is a great factor in helping the human race to struggle up through ignorance and cruelty. The Divine Spirit within is slowly (or rather rapidly) unfolding. But mark! It is only as the orthodox theology wanes and the power of the traditional Churches becomes weaker. History proves that the nations enslaved by theologians and their superstitions are seldom kind. To-day the growing revolt against militarism and war increases, but not by the help of either the Church or even by the help of the university; both of them still call the rebels and heretics, dangerous peoples, or sickly sentimentalists.

Said Adam Smith: “Universities are the sanctuaries in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world.” So in the universities to-day shelter and protection are found for such immoralities as nationalism, imperialism, militarism, and capitalism, but they are being hunted out of other corners, and that without mercy, although all find a comfortable corner in the Church. Ruskin explained it in a sentence: “Our national religion is the performance of Church ceremonies and the preaching of soporific truths (or UNTRUTHS) to keep the mob quiet while we amuse ourselves.” But at last the Divine Spirit of an evolving morality is unfolding in the masses, and they are learning to think universally—learning to know that the moral order is hidden in their own breasts—that in the moral order there is a continual becoming and not a FINALITY!

Wrote James Russel Lowell:

PAN HUMANISM: ABOVE ALL NATIONS, HUMANITY

As we know, the word “Pan” is the Greek for ALL, and the world is hungry to-day for universal ideals. Divine consciences feel it, human hearts feel it, and wise intellects. All politics are mean and threadbare that do not get beyond the national and imperial parish pump. All religions are annoying and irritating that do not reach out and become all-inclusive by enlarging to the pan-concepts.

Man’s upward struggle points to the goal as truly as the compass needle points to the north. The direction becomes of more consequence than the goal. The course we are on is the real thing that matters. When the bishop was asked by the wag the way to heaven, he replied “Turn to the right and go straight ahead.” True—the turning to the right and going straight ahead was of more consequence than heaven itself. So searching for universal concepts is of more interest just now than the thing in itself. The Divine man is ever a diligent searcher.

Said Lessing: “Did the Almighty, holding in His hand truth and in the other hand search for truth, deign to offer me the one I might prefer, in all humility, but without hesitation, I should request search for truth.” There are very few who prefer truth to fashionable beliefs. There are very few who prefer sincerity before success. There are very few who prefer to be right with the few than wrong with the many. What a beautiful word is the word “sincerity”! Says one:

Truly the history of some of our words is an education. Sincerity in thinking points one way, and that way is to universal thinking, to pan-humanism and above all nations humanity. Those with an axe to grind, those seeking the plums of officialdom, those flirting with popularity and ogling for patronage will not be attracted with the ideal. The test of a man’s goodness whether in a political party or a Church sect is whether he prefers to fraternise or proselytise. Allow this thought to test the imperialists: “Do you prefer to aim at a fraternity of nations or a highly armed nationalism?” The illogical absurdities of these minds obsessed seldom strikes the holder of these bogus ideals. It is a form of mono-mania.

Under the heading of “To be Continued,” American Life prints the following by Walter G. Doty:

Keep that up for about ninety-nine stanzas, and then try this:

At least one man in America had a flash of reason when he penned that, inspired by a nursery rhyme. There is more truth and vision in some of the nursery rhymes than in the imperialist philosophy. Some people will not learn; they seem incapable of absorbing truth or facts at all. It is said of Clarke, the commentator, that when a boy he was at school the dullest of all. He simply could not learn. One day when at mathematics of the simplest sort, he put forth a tremendous mental effort, with the result that there was an explosion, a report in his head, he said, like a pistol going off. Something, sure, had cracked! From that on he did splendidly in learning. So with the nationalists, militarists and imperialists—something has to crack inside their skulls before there is any possibility of their learning anything. Unless they experienced the crack on the inside they may yet learn from the crack outside from which some of us who are opposed to violence are trying to save them. One would think the lesson of folly could be learnt in Britain at the present time.

During recent months the writer has motored and moved about from the south of England right up to Inverness. In all the centres there stand the war memorials for the glorious dead, until an outsider like myself feels the truth of the lesson: i.e. that Britain has become a vast cemetery or burial place, not for the aged and worn-out, but an extended burial-ground for the young and fit, from Lands End to John o’ Groats. And the poor deluded people seem to rejoice in their own destruction! At least the self-deluded imperialists and the coterie they find affinity amongst. Even Marshal Haig has publicly advocated a religion of imperialism! In a skull like that is there not need for something to crack? There will be a crack yet!

The workers are awaking, even if their so-called betters are not.

There is to be a grand belt of brotherhood around the earth; some of us by voice and pen have our lives consecrated to that, and we will bend all to the establishment of God’s republic. It is not an easy thing to do this and rise above public opinion, popular feeling, political heat, pay, praise and abuse. If you think so, try it and see. Yes; war brings praise and profits. Read the following from a New Zealand paper at the time of the Lloyd George Turkish war scare: “The prospect of another war has caused the farmer to prick up his ears. The foolishness of the Turk is inclined to bring about a revival, much needed in the beef market. In anticipation of a big flare-up in Asia, some local farmers, are talking of hanging on to their bullocks.” Mark! There is no shame in this! It is part and parcel of Marshal Haig’s religion of imperialism. In contrast to this we must stand for a universal religion of pan-humanism.

Because other world religions are different from ours is no proof they are wrong. Most folk get their religion in the same way they get their names and complexions. The greatest cure for intolerance is a wider knowledge. It was not a bad idea of some Russian Soviets to have schools on ships and sail round the world, calling at the different countries. This would be the school to graduate in. Young people the world over would soon learn they were the complements of each other. They would soon learn that there must be all round appreciation and a common recognition of communal necessity. But our prostituted form of Christianity compels it to be more anxious to proselytise than to fraternise. The Christian hatred of the Jew to the Turk has become a proverb. Turn up the collect on the subject in the Anglican Prayer-book! How splendid the thought of Harold Johnson:

It will come as a shock to the orthodox when told that Christianity has always been a persecuting religion—a religion of the sword. That while they demanded liberty for themselves to think, they did not freely allow others the same privilege. Someone has written a book called Seventy Years Among Savages.^[2] But the satire of it! Those seventy years were lived in England!

The cure for this contracted thought that hinders the pan-human ideal is a better pan-racial education, more travel and wider reading. Under Socialism every man and woman will be free every few years, if they so desire, to travel on full pay. If not—why not? Why should a select few of the privileged, every year or so, be able to pack their grips, roll up their rugs and set off wherever they like? The change will not come in an hour, but it will come—it is coming even now? Our goal is pan-humanism; we do know where we are going; the orthodox clergy don’t know. They are like the dog put on the train with a label of destination tied to him, which he ate in course of transit. They, the officers, didn’t know where he was going. The Church has no goal! Their fascination is away beyond the clouds, and they resemble the rooster mesmerised within a chalk-ring—it seems impossible for them to walk out of the ring of other worldliness! They have all discovered “A” religion, but they have not discovered “The” religion. They like still to read into the Bible their little shibboleth.

A coloured minister of the Baptist church, so runs the story, in order to strengthen and confirm the faith of his congregation, took as his text: “In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea.” “Oh,” said he, “how I like to read these precious words in the blessed Bible! You don’t read anywhere about John the Presbyterian, or John the Methodist, or John the Episcopalian. No, brethren, it is John the Baptist.”

But these exclusions and ignorant assumptions must be cast out and the pan-human thought must take its place. It is slowly doing so. The gravediggers and the mid-wives are helping us! Dig deep the world over and we find much the same clay and rock. Visit all lands, and the peoples have much the same brain, nerve, tears and laughter! The birds of nature are somewhat careless of geographical limits. The skylarks sing as sweetly in Germany as France. The same sunshine, the same fresh wind touches and freshens with health and colour all cheeks. Forward to the ideal! L. W. Rogers inspires us:

TAXING THE PEOPLE THROUGH THE MOUTH—HINDRANCES
TO THE VISION SPLENDID—WANTED,
A FISCAL REVOLT!

This chapter apparently has truer application to the overseas part of the Empire than to England, yet the so-called Free Trade of the homeland is not genuine or in any way is it thorough. Imperial Preference is not Free Trade. The vested interests in England see to it that there remains a protective tariff sufficient to ensure that wealth can be piled up by the few, at the expense of the many. The subject of this chapter has forced itself upon me, for Free Trade is not only a moral but also a religious subject. The root of the word “religion,” is a “binding together.” In that meaning lies the quintessence of morality.

Commerce must not be a grasping for gain, but it has to become a fraternising power in civilization. As our leaders cease to be provincial and so become universal it will be so. Emerson may have felt the deep underlying brotherhood of man when he said genuine “Commerce is carrying things from where they are plentiful to where they are needed.” It occurs to me, when leaving San Francisco a few years ago, that a great catch of fish had been made outside the Californian port. The market was glutted with fish. The reader will know that the Bay cities—Berkeley, Alameda, Oakland and San Francisco have over a million population. Then for once there should have been cheap fish for everybody. No! Cheap fish would interfere with the market, so the fish were taken out to sea and dumped overboard! On arrival in Sydney three weeks later, there was a glut of fruit in the fruit market. Tons and tons of fruit that could not find buyers at middlemen’s prices. Surely here was a chance for housewives to make jam and such-like preserves! No! It would interfere with market prices and the overplus—hundreds of tons—was sent to the Moore Park destructor. Here we find the food gifts of nature and God deliberately thwarted and checked and the laws of the universe defied. More or less this evil principle permeates all trade, and we can truly say that every loaf is leavened with injustice.

The perfect law of liberty is not ours—free thought, free speech, free ports and free trade. The politicians are our greatest enemies, and too often they go hand in hand with the clergy who also support the taxes, direct and indirect, upon the necessaries of life; and anything in the way of a tax upon food is the devil’s work under the cloak of Christianity. Dr. C. W. Saleeby has said:

So by the Protections and Preferences the industrial efforts are frustrated. An out and out Free-trader among the politicians is almost as scarce as the dodo. There ever seems to be an “if” or a “but” of some sort. They face both ways. The ancestor of our Facing-Both-Ways politicians has been discovered. It is a small fish, known as the blenny, which can so move its eyes that while one optic is looking straight ahead, the other is squinting in the direction of its tail.

One would think that the moral principle involved would find a few sterling characters even among politicians; they who would reason higher than the votes of the next election. To Cobden the struggle for Free Trade was a struggle against class preponderance. Free Trade to him was the dawn of higher ideals in civilization. He knew what snob-sneers were and so did Bright. They were both burnt in effigy! Their arguments were (and they were irresistible, too) that no government has any more right to tax food than air, rain or sunshine, and that the people’s food should flow just as easily and naturally. Said Jefferson to John Adams, in 1795: “All the world would benefit and gain by setting commerce at perfect liberty!” But a true statesman looks at ultimate results, while the petty parliamentary careerists look at the immediate interests. As Cobden said the immediate interests created trade war between countries, resulting in commercial jealousies and then real war, and when the first shot is fired reason flees! When life and trade becomes artificial and not natural war results. God the Author of Nature has once and for all established Free Trade, and any form of Protection is artificial and it sets aside the Divine and moral laws. While food, clothes, houses and necessaries are produced for profit it must be so. Our pessimistic Dean Inge gets a flash of reason sometimes; it was so when he said:

To produce for use and not for profit is the great change needed. The workers of the world are beginning to articulate this great truth. A story much to the point is the following, for it explains the fallacy of the traders’ cry to the industrialists—greater output. The things produced at present cannot be got by the workers. If they produce too much, they are locked up in warehouses until prices are right, or thrown in the sea or put in the destructor!

An applicant for work at the Ford plant asked a veteran Ford employee if it were true that the company was always finding methods of speeding up production by using fewer men. The veteran replied: “Most certainly. In fact,” he continued, “I just had a dream which illustrates the point. Mr. Ford was dead and I could see the pallbearers carrying his body. Suddenly the procession stopped. Mr. Ford had come to life. As soon as the casket was opened he sat upright, and, on seeing six pallbearers, cried out at once: ‘Put this casket on wheels and lay off five men.’ ”

A clergyman once retorted to Cobden: “Scarcity has nothing to do with dearness!” “Then,” replied Cobden, “abundance cannot produce cheapness!” Neither does it! We see that in New Zealand, for when there is an overplus of meat, butter or cheese, the refrigeration machinery keeps it in the coolers for years if need be, and if the stores be overcrowded, wings and additions are added, and the food is accommodated till prices are right. Thus the machines and inventions of working men’s brains become, in the hands of profiteers, the same working men’s worst enemies. Said Disraeli once: “Free Trade is not a principle but an expedient.” In four words Cobden answered him truly: “The reverse is true!” Manufacturers like Protection, for it is from the Tariff laws a private pipeline to add to their wealth. Not so the worker who makes the wealth. Said the sallow man, gloomily, “I have difficulty with my eating.” “So do I,” responded the young man, brightly. “Where is your trouble?” asked the sallow man. “Mine is here,” he added, drawing his hand across his stomach. “Oh,” exclaimed the robust young man, “mine is here!” and he slapped his hand on his trousers pocket, where a few dimes gave faint response. The two men were facing the problem of nutrition, but at different angles. One’s difficulty was within, the other’s was without.

There are certain fallacies that tariffs protect labour, and they seem very attractive; but there were also splendid arguments produced to defend slavery, monarchy, aristocracy, and even an established Church. A cunning brain can always build up figures and arguments. “Figures cannot lie,” says one. True; but liars can figure! When the clerk was asked by his employer to produce some figures, he naïvely asked “Which side do you want to support, sir?” Then why does Protection retain its popularity in so many circles? Principally through the capitalist press, which is run of course by advertisers and the cash register; and on the other hand Protection is held to by the dulness of so many workers. They are indoctrinated by what they read daily in the capitalist papers. Thereby the vested interests become the gainers.

Said Macaulay: “If interests gained by denying the law of gravitation they would find champions.” The fallacy is this, that Protection stimulates industry by preventing trade! Thereby Protection punishes employment and increases wages! What paradoxes! Profiteers cry out that it is to protect labour! Truly! So in a way does the lion protect the lamb! So would the fox protect the hen-roost! These soft cooing phrases remind one of the dulcet tones used to catch a horse. Sometimes, too, by rattling corn in a tin. Farmers, too, protect lambs and sheep when fattening them for the butcher!

Protection means a tax on food either by way of a direct tax, or, what is more popular with politicians, an indirect tax. The difference is very subtle! Say, a government official had to call in every provision dealer’s shop and collect twenty-five per cent. tax, what an outcry at such a direct tax! True; but they are in their day and generation too foxy for that. What they do is to force a penny or so on all necessaries, or at least most of the indispensables, and by that system of indirect taxation there is little outcry even if it be thirty or forty per cent. increase.

If a man knocks you down and robs you it is direct, but the other robbery is ever fresh and continuous; you are paying this tax over the counter all the time. This kind of indirect tax is a popular way of plucking the goose without making him squeak! But in the ultimate he that withholdeth the corn, the people shall curse him. Protection, sure, makes more wealth; but the profiteers scramble for it and also get it. One has likened it to the big and little pigs feeding at a trough. A big strong pig gets into the trough and lies down, to protect it! Wealth? Yes; but who gets it?

To go to India and see the bejewelled rajahs—is that a sign of wealth? What of the impoverished million? The Carnegie and Rockefellers roll in wealth! True; but see the crowds at Pittsburgh! Doctors may become wealthy, too, attending to the limbs of soldiers! When the pneumonic influenza was ravaging some undertakers began to roll in wealth! We are told that in China when the bubonic plague was taking off millions, and when the new serum was being introduced to deal with it, and the fleas and rats were to be destroyed, that the coffin-trusts objected—trade must be protected!

My last chapter on Pan-Humanism makes this on Free Trade imperative, for without Free Trade there can be no peace of a firm and universal character. It is a free and open commerce that will wear down prejudice. Man is a trading animal, and without trade he is a savage. The universal law of liberty is helped by Free Trade and in this a true civilization rises above the artificial and unnatural hindrances of so-called Protection. True political economy is not complex and difficult, neither is true religion. Both are simple! In the first it is the lion of vested interests in the way. In the latter it is the lion of ecclesiastical interests in the way. But a higher morality in both must be ushered in. Every political and also every theological truth must become a moral truth! At the present both conflict with an evolving morality. A higher ethic teaches us that so-called rivals are really co-operators. Tariffs, custom houses, and protection policies are of a low ethic; they all lead to spies, searchings, lies, seizures and deceits. People know instinctively that to dodge tariffs is no moral crime. It may be a crime by law, but it is no crime in morals, for our highest good is to be sought in the good of others, and Protection thinks nought of the good of others; only the good of ourselves. And yet it is not the good of ourselves—only the profiteers among ourselves. The specious arguments put up by Protectionists will soon have had their day, and they will be the joke of future generations. It is the old game of the pea and the thimble! The manipulators keep shifting the pea and humbugging the docile workers, but they only put off the evil day.

To keep up prosperity by any system of Protection is of the same order as a hen eating this day’s egg in order to lay an egg to-morrow. It is a bogus prosperity! It is as prosperous as a hungry shark having a dinner off his own tail? There is some clever manipulation going on now between the commercialists in England and the commercialists in the overseas dominions over Imperial Preferences. The boodle is skilfully extracted in both spheres from the industrial pockets without the workers knowing how it is done. The successful operators are innocently saying, “We are doing no harm!” Wait! God and Divine Man will yet see to it that humanity’s produce shall have no artificial restrictions. We are (some of us) consecrated to seeing the change brought about, and the splendid lines of Angela Morgan a few years ago in Nash’s Magazine are full of inspiration; they truly belong to the Wider Bible of Literature:

ANOTHER HINDRANCE TO THE VISION—THE PSEUDO-PRESS
AND PARTY GAMMON—MODERN JOURNALISM
AND DOCTORED NEWS

Taking the line of least resistance is what makes rivers and journalists so crooked. Under Socialism the same journalists might be honest, good men. It is a very difficult thing for them to be intellectually honest when victims of the vested interests. Newspapers to-day are the greatest menace we have to combat. A modern and revised version of the Psalms, the text might well be rendered: “I said in my haste all men are editors!” As a huge joke, there is no need for buying a Punch or an Alley Sloper. Yet it suddenly dawns upon one that this is the serious and regular mental pabulum for multitudes! Surely the crime of credulity is not only found in religious literature but also to-day in political journalism. To read it seriously one would have to become angry and indignant over the insult to intelligence. But said Barnum, the circus professional, “The people like to be humbugged!” This sentence is in full alignment with Carlyle’s dictum “England has forty millions, mostly fools.” The millionaires of journalism know this too and exploit it to the fullest extent; they have full faith in the dictums of both Barnum and Carlyle.

Wrote Bacon in Elizabethan days: “Mankind is possessed of a natural but corrupt love of the lie itself!” So we live in a day of journalism, and bad journalism. The editorial sleight of hand tricks are the star turns in most of the party papers. I could mention some glorious exceptions; but alas, these papers are struggling to keep their heads above water. It must be so until the people are taught HOW to think instead of being taught WHAT to think.

There is little doubt that modern journalism arose and grew with the evil curse of capitalism. With this system it has grown, and it serves it like a helot. It has risen with it, and become powerful with it, and, glory be, it will in the nearing future pass out with it also. It is the advertiser and the cash register who decide its ethics and dictate its policy. We are often reminded that the newspaper may cost twopence to produce while it can be sold to the public for one penny. This in itself should make the dullest think. Many of the leading party newspapers are in the hands of a few rich people, and so become the wicked instruments of propaganda for commercial enterprise.

The editors, so often talented men, become merely hired men, who select news to suit the vested interests, garble news to suit Mammon, boycott news and warp judgment all in the way of rent, interest and profit. Their greatest power of evil lies in extending and falsifying false news, and making it appear truthful, as in the time of strikes, elections and wars. Their greatest wickedness lies in their collusion and power to combine in a soulless and mechanical similarity. Yet the same journalism may become, and will become, a golden key to unlock the new world of universal brotherhood. At the present this golden-key is securely held by the plutocracy.

Was it not St. Francis who said of all kinds of garbage and filth, rotten lilies was the worst! So it is with journalism as it stands to-day. Hilaire Belloc has cruelly said: “A few lucky guttersnipes become millionaires and buy papers!” They seek then to control elections, to control Parliament and also to control industrialism. Yet as the ethical and religious power of a discarded theology wanes in the ecclesiastical world, so should the ethical and religious power of journalism increase. It will! My pen is the pen of an optimist! Join hands, O peoples!

The people will yet with sling in hand meet this ruthless giant, and not only destroy him but found another journalism on the lines of sure reason and ethics. It will be secular and at the same time sacred too. All life then will become sacred, for the words secular and sacred will become one.

The greatest tragedy in modern journalism is the prostitution of talent by those who have fallen victims to it. Editors who are clever and scholarly, and literary hacks also who show the same talent have to sacrifice truth and that most sacred thing initiative for a living. Through the bread and butter necessity they fall into the financial temptation. Thus they sin against the light. They have culture—they have knowledge—they love truth and goodness, but they are the victims of the newspaper owners who are rich and often vulgar yet are able to control the editors by holding the sword of Damocles over their heads by the power of advancement or dismissal.

Yes; modern journalism is wicked, but it is often very clever! The cleverness of the fox! A cleverness not confined to one party alone; it is detected in Liberal, in Tory and also in Independent (?) circles. So far as the things that really matter are concerned, there is no difference between the Liberals and the Tories. It is a sham fight! Yes; there is a difference—one party twirls their thumbs this way and the other party twirls their thumbs the other way. If the Tories succeed by their campaign of misrepresentations in getting the power in Parliament they walk “to and fro,” and if the Liberals displace them later by their falsehoods, they in Parliament begin not to walk “to and fro,” but to walk “fro and to!” Yes; there is a difference, and that is it! The darkest hour is before the dawn, and we are now in a dark age. As Zangwill says: “An age dark with ink!” An age of press-Parliaments and journalistic Star-chambers! Said Horace Greeley: “Give me control of the news distributing agencies and I will control the lives and liberties of the people.”

Is the world of industry (and that is the only world that matters) learning the lesson? Is the Labour world going to allow this Ananias club of journalism to hold sway? How long are the people to be ruled by controlling the sources of information? Has this false press world of decoys, cobwebs, trap-doors, false-bottoms and sliding panels, to hold sway much longer? Listen, ye devotees of The Vision Splendid, only just so long as ye decide whether to remain human oysters or human vertebrates. Only till you discover you are a rational being with a reason that is a part of the Eternal Reason.

When will there be a revolt heading for sanity? I think it was G. B. Shaw who said: “The longer I live the more I am sure this earth is used by the other planets as a lunatic asylum!” It is very much in line with Voltaire’s: “I very much fear that our terraqueous little globe is the lunatic asylum of the universe!” My advice to the Labour people in Britain and the outlying parts of the Empire is to get your own papers going at once; support those papers in existence and struggling for a higher morality. Cultivate the truths of Socialism, Internationalism, and a United States of Humanity. In other words, pan-humanism, and found and support papers to fit these ideals. Learn your Divinity, and then the journals of depravity will be discarded. With just one word altered the following suffices:—

The truth is distorted to suit commercialism and imperialism. It is not always what is written as what is not written. In horse-dealing, it is not what the dealer tells you about the horse so much as what he doesn’t tell you. Asked a boy: “An editor is a man who puts things in the paper, isn’t he?” “Oh, no, my son; an editor keeps things out of the paper.”

So the poor editor’s work is to foster prejudices, use puff, expediency and embroidery whenever and wherever necessary. In America they have a system of keeping books in some banks by machinery. Why not some sort of machinery for writing editorials? We know what any party paper will say on any given subject!

The author of Erehwon humorously and in a half serious way prophesied that the intelligence would pass from the man into the machine, and the man would become the machine. It seems to be so in the world of journalism, for there is lack of editorial initiative, lack of soul writing. If war was to be declared with some country to-morrow—say, France—the same old articles would do as appeared between 1914 and 1918. Just alter the word German and replace it with France and hey presto! The same editorial pen would write Germany up and France down, and use the word Hun for the latter!

It is time to protest! The party papers are all pledged to anti-social movements. They all fail to truly represent democracy—they cry democracy and yet hate democracy. They are the enemies of internationalism, while all peoples by the promptings of a finer ethic within are trying to rise to the Internationale. We might well ask modern journalism—what is progress? What is civilization? Is it motor cars, wireless, aeroplanes, telephones or phonographs? Or is it not rather, co-operation, brotherhood, peace, goodwill and universalism? The peoples are surely heading for the latter. Said Confucius: “Heaven sees through the eyes of the people.” But modern journalism sees through the eyes of privilege and vested interests.

Why could not a newspaper, quite without advertisements be issued? A paper endowed by all progressive movements and trades unions. In that paper there could be three leading articles daily written on the same subject, by talented writers. Say the first article by a literary man, written from the Tory point of view. The second article from the Liberal standpoint (if any Liberal party survives). The third from the Labour Socialist position. People then would be treated as rational beings fit to judge. At the present time the partisan spirit is very irrational, because not one in a thousand reads papers representative of the three different positions. Such a paper, by its collision of thought and impact of ideas would mark a new era in journalism and help confused people to get at the truth. He who respects the Truth would raise no objection—the others might!

We demand a journalism where all editors can press their souls against the white paper and write—write as pleaders for earnest causes—write with a sublime contempt for all influence and wire-pulling, pledged to the ideas of world republicanism, garden cities, a perfect race and absolute free trade—to press its fingers on the military throat until it is throttled—to see life steadily and to see it whole, as M. Arnold said—to be the enemy of privilege, the community watch-dog, a challenge and not a truce—to possess a high literary tone withal.

GOD AND THE PEOPLE—MILITARISM THE ASSASSIN OF DEMOS

The history of militarism is the history of the ruled and the oppressed. It is the history of the civil code struggling against the moral code. No people ever made war! They may be inflamed and excited to it by lying newspapers, but if left to themselves they would not make war in these days. Among savages perhaps the people of the tribe in the next bay may be in continual feud, and from infancy may be trained to be in a state of war, for any day enemy canoes may be seen approaching round the point. But have we not moved ahead from that? Yes, we have moved from it, and would move ahead and leave it far in the wake, were it not for commercial rivalry—a rivalry based on profits and interest. Achille Loria made a study of about three hundred wars, and found that nearly all were due to economic causes and trade greed. The people who manipulate the strings so that war is declared are not the masses, but the few who so far have managed to mislead the multitude. There is a good sign abroad, a growing contempt for all and everything connected with militarism. At the present time an election is in full swing; in the Daily Mail there is an account of a candidate who happens to be a military colonel, but he could not speak, owing to the din and interruptions—yells of “Attention!” “By your right!” “Steady!” “Quick march!” and so on—and had to give up the effort. It is not a bad sign, although we like free speech, even for representatives of militarism. The good sign is that militarism becomes more difficult as democracy evolves, and the military spirit to-day is beginning to challenge democracy. The choice will soon be between the military nineteenth century and the twentieth century of liberty!

The two forces in many varying phases will soon be in deadly conflict. In the past it has successfully duped the people, especially on the plea of defence, but never aggression; and mark you, it has also duped the pretended enemy in the same way exactly. Militarists like war, for no one knows better when war is once declared the democratic spirit is at once crushed, and it becomes a crime against the State to exercise the democratic spirit. To speak the truth then becomes sedition. So to-day militarism and imperialism challenge democracy. But Demos awakes!

Yes, there is a glorious awakening, and every real man and woman should thank God to-day they are alive to take sides in the conflict. In the near future there will be no place for the trimmer or the rail-sitter. It will give confidence to those who oppose the military curse to know that God is on their side. God is ever for Demos! Vox populi, vox Dei is often questioned, but the centuries have proved the truth of the adage. How does militarism assassinate democracy? It refuses to acknowledge or cultivate the world conscience. It makes a mockery of it. Talk to any grand vizier of militarism and see! It laughs at, and not only that, it blasts the new spirit and ideal of internationalism! There is no preciousness of human life or liberty in that quarter; it prefers to pit human life against diabolical machines. It is interested in “death rays” and not in “life rays.” The words: “Ye shall have life, and have it more abundantly” is a joke to militarists. Its life work is on stated occasions to congregate in all its gay uniforms in Westminster Abbey, to worship and admire each other, and then to go forth to rank working men to kill those who have no grudge against any other working men. In a word, it tortures and twists the whole social fabric, and it burdens our children with staggering debts; debts that can only be paid by the chronic mortgaging of labour for centuries.

Which, then, is to survive—militarism or democracy? You cannot have a military democracy, nor can you have a democratic militarism. It is a contradiction of terms. There can be no compromise—no half-way house. “If God be God, then serve Him; if Baal, then serve him.” The year 1914 taught the logic of militarism, and it has miserably and completely failed, but it will not die without a struggle. In fact, like the whale, its dying struggle may be the worst. It may be like the gambler who loses and then risks all. Militarism, with all its bogus victories and we-won-the-war talk, leads us nowhere. It is like the squirrel in the cage—the faster you go the more quickly you go nowhere. Yes, you do; you land in national debt and national decadence. But we now see lining up the real truth—the past and false civilization has rested on the soldier, and the new and real civilization will rest on the civilian and citizen.

It is a day when multitudes of workers resent the sound of the word “God,” and also the word “religion.” And little wonder! But for all that, man is God-thinking, and will remain so, but with a great difference. God as a heavenly despot will go. It originated in the East; it savours of Orientalism two thousand years ago, with the result that God has been pictured (and still is in the sphere of imperialism) as an arbitrary despot. Not in any way is He pictured to encourage the thought of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, notwithstanding the opening sentence of the Lord’s prayer. In the Presbyterian Confession of Faith there are about thirty-three chapters, and not one of them on the Fatherhood of God! Also in the thirty-nine articles in the Church of England, not one of them affirms the Fatherhood of God! To neither of them has intelligence evolved beyond God as a King of Kings and Lord of Lords! Quite Oriental, and that of the old order of the Orient! But man’s free spirit unfolds, and it is learning to express itself in the thought of a Mother-Father-God. A change of thought in the God-concept will mean rapid changes.

When the thought of God suggests to the mind democracy instead of autocracy, the present plight of humanity will begin to move towards the message of the annunciation—Peace on earth and goodwill towards men. We should have been there many centuries ago, had the early Church been true to the Nazarene. Instead of that Christianity degenerated into Paulinism, and in the early centuries sold out bag and baggage to the Emperor Constantine and imperialism.

Man’s recovery to right thoughts of God will mean a changed and regenerated world. Divine immanence means that God is not a personal despot in the skies, but it means that the Divine Spirit is distributed, is incarnated in humanity. Think out what that means, and you learn at once it means the very essence of democracy! Kings are doomed and theocracy takes their place! Every man becomes a king—every woman a queen—every chair becomes a throne! Jesus saw that! “Not lo here, not lo there, but the kingdom of God is within you!” The means of recovery man has yet to find is WITHIN! Some of us have found it! Within are the immeasurable sources of power! Once the working world sees that, then imperialism, millionairism and its necessary system of wage-slavery is doomed.

Bibliolatry, with its teaching of chosen peoples, its racial egoisms and its special revelations will pass. The barriers of creed, the blockades of frontiers and custom-house tariffs will then disappear as the mists of miasma before the sun. The world-girdle of love will come! When in religious and also secular thought the mind is lifted to HUMANITY as well as Divine unity, then and then only will all nations see the possibility of a genuine catholicity and also the democracy of God. That religious concept will rise from the nation to the universe and make for brotherhood, justice and peace.

Alas! the world is still harassed with the old Deity passed on from the Orient two thousand years ago, when the heavenly King was supposed to appoint the earthly king, and so on. If this was a fact, and God did appoint the kings of the earth—He often showed a great lack of wisdom in his choice, for more often than enough even a sublime ignorance and blundering resulted. The oft sung hymn “Oh worship the King, all glorious above” will soon be excised from the books, when humanity learns that all Divinity is not above and all depravity centred on the earth. There is a new democratic thought of Divine immanence emerging that will revolutionise the earth; it will result in most of the old symbols being thrown over. The old monarchies—the theologies, the old politics, the old diplomacies will be found to be all-of-a-piece—they will be destroyed and thrown on the scrap heap. Maybe the coming historian will be able to see that the guns of the Somme battered them down! The splendid irony of it!

There is a gradual re-shaping of the Divine idea, and it will be found that a democratic Deity requires no blood offerings, and he could not select “one” for a victim. The THREE-IN-ONE will be re-placed by the ONE-IN-ALL. We climb to a spiritual relationship with God; we emerge into a pure Divine democracy.

When Copernicus shattered the old cosmogony, he was but the forerunner of Darwin, who shattered the old theology. The true God of the Divine democracy needs no hell tortures. The world steps up to the awful verge of manhood! There is to be a community of minds, a commingling of souls; at the present, clans, nations, and kings are all out of alignment, but we begin to see the folly, and that is much. The Vision Splendid dawns:

The point to remember is that when humanity changes its view of God it will at the same time change the world. It will learn the human element in God and at the same time learn the Divine element in man. It will learn that God and man are “one.” Then, after that lesson learnt, universal love and sympathy will dawn! All real thinkers and philosophers to-day are full of a God-like hope. Note the lines of Ernest Crosby:

In a sentence, all this means a Kingdom of the Spirit—a Theocracy—Thy kingdom come. The Universal Spirit is its source and a united humanity is its object. One common humanity and one Divine Spirit, in and through all. Truly says an old book: “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord!” We might add in the name of modern science, that the light of the candle and the light of the sun are “one” light! So God is the great hospitable breast of the universe. He will never un-father a soul. Said splendid old Job: “God is mighty and despiseth not any!” So away with the national and sectarian shibboleths! We are all bound together in the same eternal life, and the religion to survive the shock of things will be a Divine orchestration of all religions:

Only the truly godly people can at present climb to this. The orthodox folk cannot who still cling to past revelations, instead of seeking a revelation of their own. Until God becomes a reality, an experience, instead of an object or a person, it is not possible. When the right concept of God dawns upon them, they will get a glimpse of His great social plan and will see behind this mad world and discover the psychic ethical, social and Divine Spirit within. Once you fully know that, you will know the Divine commonwealth of humanity, and thereby you will know God! While the creeds are in the melting-pot and amid the shock of things to come that Divine concept of brotherhood remains sure. “By this shall ye know God, if ye love the brethren.” This is the world’s social purpose—brotherhood! This is the world-order unfolding Divinity itself. It puts you quite beyond; in fact it makes absurd all national anthems, all rule Britannias or star spangled banners!



THE WORLD’S DISEASE: NATIONALISM—ITS CAUSE AND CURE

We have only to look at Europe to-day to see the disease of Nationalism. It is a phase of the world’s social and political evolution. From the clan to the tribe, on to the province and the nation, at the present we are trying to struggle ahead against great odds to the international and the universal. It seems to be the one fault of Ireland in rightly struggling for her Republic—her faulty cry of “Ourselves alone!” She is wrong there, but perhaps when she rejoices in her Free Republic she will then soon be in a fit spirit and condition to join the world’s circle of republics and the united states of the earth.

The disease of Nationalism is chronic and age-long, and the only cure for it is in the increase of Labour’s power and ethics. Strange paradox—that real culture—that culture of world-wide vision is found in the bumper on the wharf, the begrimed man in the mine, the sailor in the forecastle and the man cleaning gutters, and so seldom in the university man! Yet so it is. God’s true nobility—they who have attained real culture—are to be found in odd unlikely places. While the educational system is controlled by a bogus nobility there can be little betterment in evolutionary progress towards the international. The national idea is associated with titles, medals, pensions, scarlet uniforms, ribbands and all sorts of gee-gaws. There is a struggle against great odds, but we shall win; nature, God and evolution are with us.

Emerson said: “Things are now in the saddle and ride mankind.” Tolstoy likewise: “The privileged class will do anything for the labouring class except get off their backs.” Strange, too, the fact that the parasites, almost to a man and a woman, are all intensely national and devoted to the false patriotism attached to it. The Churches, too, who are supposed to follow the first Internationalist—Jesus—are so far Iscariotised that they are intensely national, almost as dogmatic on that as they are on a speculative theology.

Said Elbert Hubbard: “No man should dogmatise except on the subject of theology. Here he can take his stand, and by throwing the burden of proof on the opposition he is invincible. We have to die to find out whether he is right!” Very good? But with the mundane subject of Nationalism we have not to die in order to find out if it is right or wrong, for the evil is seen on all sides. It breaks out in Farmers’ Unions, Chambers of Commerce, and all sorts of Mercantile Guilds and Overseas Clubs. Nationalism is really the same disease as sectarianism, only writ large, and they who suffer with either have no real perspective and cannot see things in their right proportion. They ever see things with either a concave or a convex squint. Said one: “Why force a man to see through your concave, or be forced to read through his convex? You will both read wrong, or not read at all.”

Apply this to both nationalists and sectarians. But the hundred per cent. Americans, the glorified John Bulls and the Union Jacks generally are not conscious of any squint—for profits and big business lie along the track of Nationalism, and the Kingdom of God on earth has no place in their thinking. Emerson diagnosed it well in a few words: “It is the lie of one idea! It is the ignorance of God!” There you have it! All Nationalism, like all sectarianism, is an overstatement, an outraged truth. It is the outcome of a blurred vision, and they who suffer from the disease can have no wings to the soul, no thought of The Vision Splendid.

Yes, both Nationalism and sectarianism are the result of the fixed idea and therefore a form of insanity. Said a military Colonel C., in Christchurch, New Zealand, when being presented with a wristlet watch: “I would rather shoot myself than live under any other flag than the Union Jack!” This was reported next day in the Press, yet no nationalist or imperialist objects to it, for they are all bitten with the monomaniac microbe. As Rousseau once said: “If a sane man were to stand amid a group like that, he would appear to them insane, but the truth would be that the crowd was mad and he the only rational man among them!” There is a great cure for this form of fanaticism, and that is to get them to love truth above all things, and the test of truth is universality. One would think that the war-shambles of a few years ago, where ten millions of the pick of the human race were destroyed and twenty millions broken, would be sufficient to impress upon all the wickedness of Nationalism and war—but no! They ever accept the broadcasted answer: “War always was and always will be!”

It was a sign, not only of high culture, but also of a fine rationality in Emerson to say: “Offensive to me is a company of soldiers.” The first nation that refuses to fight will go down to posterity as the finest nation that ever evolved on the earth. That nation, paradoxical as it sounds, will overcome all invaders; it will succeed in making the invader look absurd and ridiculous and the contagion will set in the other way, for the inward Divinity will help it. All will then learn the soul and its oneness. The ONE that is revealed in human life has differentiated itself into about two thousand million souls, and are they now at the command of an insane Nationalism to blow the souls out of each other and out of God at the same time? Strange that anyone should doubt who has once genuinely looked into the eyes of another. The centre of God and of the universe is in you! Get right thoughts about God—then and then alone will the national insanity be cured. Cease to say God WAS—say God IS! Cease to say God SPAKE—say God SPEAKS! Well the writer knows this attitude exposes one to attack and calumny of all sorts, but calumny ever pelts the one whose views of God are ahead of the conventional views.

To find the truth of the Universal Mind consult your own bosom. The aim of nations, sects and political parties is to drill either in physical or mental matters, but the aim of God and reason is to progress to freedom and to create. All true creation is an efflux of God—whoever creates is God. These are curative thoughts, and will, if cultivated, banish disease. Wherever you walk you will find choristers and cathedrals, for all the world becomes an altar, and every bush will be afire with God. Pettiness and paltriness will vanish and you will be able to stand erect as an universal man. Embrace these Divine truths and you will soon see all things working for you. Try it! At that point you will learn that Nationalism and sectarianism are both the ignorance of God; also that world-brotherhood and world-religion are both the knowledge of God.

Ever remember that Nationalism is an inherited thing, and not a rational conviction. It is a vestige, a rudiment from savage ignorance. No one chooses either their parents or their nation. But a Divine unrest is in the heart of humanity, and a choice must be made between world-wide brotherhood on the one side and on the other side Nationalism with militarism. A narrow patriotism is akin to a narrow religion. The workers at least have risen to a finer culture and have outgrown the absurdities. Hark back!

It is as well to remember this, for peoples don’t hate each other; the moral principle within is too highly evolved for that. It is the immoral system they are victims of that demands hate. “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” If persisted in, then world-wide revolution will result.

Man’s inward ethic is ahead of the conservative institutions of the day. There are forced upon man the mental habits of theological errors, social errors, national errors and imperial errors. The politicians and newspapers know this, and depend upon it in a crisis. Then the victims of habit and association to-day in a half-hearted and also questioning way respond to it. The world is at a parting of the ways, and the cleavage will be between the system and brotherhood. The choice, too, will have to be made in religion; on the one side the system of Christianity and on the other, the religion of Jesus, i.e. pure Theism.

National disease, with its outgrowth of Protection and profits: in a word, the Manchester-school morality, or rather immorality, will have to pass. Lincoln said, with negro slavery in mind: “No man shall eat bread by sweat of another’s brow.” If alive to-day, with our modern problems he would say: “No man shall eat bread by the sweat of a wage-slave’s brow!” If persisted in, then the gathering forces of a world cyclone will come. The Samson Demos is awakening and in a dim blind way feeling his strength and also feeling for the pillars of a spurious society. The fall will be great and disastrous to many, for when goaded, it is possible for nations as well as individuals to go mad. The cyclone, too, will be of God! If rulers will not learn the sign of the times, then God in transcendence will combine with God in immanence (the two are one) and the result will be a clean sweep of a bogus civilization! The plough of God moves along:

There is a social beyond, and we have to get to it; a place where the whole life of humanity will be collective; a place where the new habit of a world-conscience will have free play, and the new habit of free open trade will be possible. Where the goods natural for one country to produce will be exchanged for the goods another country can naturally produce, and that not for profit but for use. The stone age had a beyond in the bronze; the bronze age had a beyond in the iron; the iron age in which we live, has a beyond in the electric age, to which we are moving. Life—that is Divine life—has a perpetual end that is never reached—so on to the new! on to the surprising! on to the unexpected! In the narrow Liberal and Conservative outlooks there is no Vision Splendid. But there are signs of impending change. The following was first sung in public at the last Fourth of July demonstration in Browning Hall, Walworth. The singer was a young French lady, Mlle. Amy by name, one of the principal singers in the Moody-Manners Opera Company. It was received with much enthusiasm.

THE NEW ERA AND THE SPLENDOUR OF SERVICE

The history of the human race is a great story, and we are not half-way through yet. From the anthropoids to the cave-man, from the cave-man to Edison and Burbank. The greater and the more splendid part of man’s history lies ahead. We are only at the beginning, for he as yet has barely found his dignity; he just begins to feel it. The upper classes may have been conscious of dignity, but not so the workers in the past. To-day they begin to learn in a dim way that the so-called upper classes have no congenital superiority at all. The old landmarks between class and class are vanishing and the new landmarks are not fixed. Probably they will never be, for whatever class divisions there may be will certainly be brought about by the distinction of merit and not birth! On the cricket field the players from the industrial world meet the gentlemen and often soundly thrash them too. In physique they are not one whit behind; nay, but for the twistings of body by hard work, they are often better. There is a growing discernment that the gentry are not really “our betters.” “Our betters” forsooth! The very term to-day begins to arouse a sullen, dangerous mood. Very few of the elite know of this changed feeling abroad. The writer has of set purpose, moved about in trades halls and Socialist halls for many years, and the following was a typewritten notice he found fixed with brass pins to a green baize notice-board for all members and visitors to read mark, learn and inwardly digest: 

All this means a new spirit, and if the educational system is once captured by people with this spirit, there will speedily be a radical change. In fact, everything lies in the educational system. Children must not be drilled in passivity and automatism. There must be the sacred unfolding of personality. In fact the character-end must be as important as the knowledge-end. Many reams of paper have been used in describing the evils of cramming, and even the ordinary people are learning that real education is a drawing-out, instead of a cramming-in, which much resembles the French way of fattening poultry for the market. A machine grips the bird by the neck and another part of the machinery stuffs the food down, whether it is needed or not. So with school cramming. The suppression of personality in the children is about the most absurd part of the system. It is almost as wicked as the suppression of personality amongst soldiers. Soldiering allows no sacred and Divine personality! All must step and move together. The superior officer must think for them. Thereby is Divinity insulted!

But there is a new social conscience born, and the world grows better by the decay of State and Church. Peter the Hermit could not to-day arouse a crusade! Philip II and Torquemada could not to-day revive the Inquisition! The Southern States of America could not to-day lapse back into negro slavery!

There is dawning a larger hope, and we are unlearning the pessimism that we are all sinners and prisoners on probation. The real Christianity is a life of lovers! The kingdom of God is a kingdom of love! This means all national antipathies are going, economic justice is at hand, a rise in the tide of social freedom. Men are linking together—women are getting wider horizons—a new day is waiting to be born; a new age is knocking at the door; the grand ideal of a united world is upon us!

It is the duty of all who love progress to learn the Divine laws of evolution, and make the consecration to the splendours of service. It is here you learn the meaning of life. Open these ideals to friends, relations, and above all croon them into the ears of the children. By so doing you will breathe the new breath upon society and then inwardly mutter: “Receive ye the Holy Spirit!” So there will follow fair-mindedness, moral courage, and truthfulness; a new atmosphere results! Soon to be followed by a new heaven and a new earth. Optimism? Of course! Nothing makes for hopefulness like getting an idea of wholeness. The pessimist ever was a separatist! Ever was in a narrowing circle. Breathe the larger life and learn the oneness of God—then comes light in darkness, ever remembering the love of God carries the love of man with it, for God and man are one!

Your true self is God; that means also that your true self is your fellow-man. It is a great and glorious lesson to learn—the intuition of totality—one world—one life—one spirit—one God! Well and wisely did the great educationalist, Froebel, say; “The end of education is union with God!” Sit down and think that out; then slowly repeat the words; man, too, is part of the Universal Spirit; man, too, can hear the echo of his own voice in the universe. If God is a Creator then man must of necessity be a creator too. This great truth becomes the guide to the splendour of service. Having wealth or means of any kind should not be a cosy refuge from service. A luxurious shelter is a poor satisfaction, if it takes the place of service. There are untold pleasures in service! The secret meaning of the Nazarene’s “Ye shall have life, and have it more abundantly,” is to be found in service. But that service may be one of unpopularity—the folk of convention and custom may resist it—the dogmatists and the superstitionists certainly will not appreciate it. How can they know? They are strumming on the low note of “self,” not knowing there is a whole splendid and harmonious octave above! It is service that helps in self-creation.

In the Greek the word POET means DOER or MAKER. Perhaps Longfellow had that in mind when penning:

It is in this, particularly, that man surpasses the animal kingdom; man can breathe his splendour of service by words on the platform, by colours on the canvas, by mallet and chisel on the marble; by pen on the paper. In such service man becomes a meeting place for the cosmic forces. God and humanity call for a great willingness to the service splendid. A service that is an attachment to high principles. Sure. It is here you learn the meaning of life.

Said a dear friend in a letter to me—one who is verging on fifty years of age: “I have never created anything!” This same aspect of things is beginning to trouble many to-day who have had a glimpse of The Vision Splendid. The age we move into is, above all things, to be a new era of service, and it will result in an age of peace, plenty and goodwill. Some refuse to see it! So be it. If people will pull down the blinds and shut out the light, it is their own responsibility, and they are the poorer thereby. Like the stubborn wilful nation, they perish for lack of vision. The words visionary, dreamer, academic doctrinaire, they may roll like sweet morsels under the tongue, with a superior feeling the while, but the despised dreamer is the creator and also the co-operator with God.

It is the effort of service that counts, even though the attainment of the dream does not eventuate quickly. The “well done” is for the “good and faithful” not for the “good and successful” servant. The one who framed the sentence: “I am among you as one that serveth” did not see much success either, but for one and all, life is made worth living by the splendour of service. And the best of all—if one rises above self and Mammon to a consecrated service to the new era, allured on by The Vision Splendid, such a service will not only interpret life’s true meaning, but it will explain the meaning of death. Nay, there will come, as there came to Joan of Arc, unknown impulses from the unseen! These unseen influences prompt you to service, as they did the Maid of Dalremy. Said Rothe: “These inspiring hosts are the developed human personalities to whom death has been the last refinement.” Says an old writing: “Are there not ministering spirits?” We might well add: “Yes; and they also are at our elbow when we are busy with the splendours of service and this consecrated life to the new era will at the passing put a sweetener into death! Said Henley:

THE CAREER AND GOAL OF HUMANITY

It is a great question: From whence do we come? It leads one back to ape-man, half erect, learning to handle sticks and stones, articulating sounds of fear and pleasure, then monosyllables; learning the use of fire, taming animals for domestic use, cultivating the grass seeds into cereals, making clay vessels, using slaves, founding feudalism, capitalism and then wage-slavery as we have it to-day. To-day these same wage-slave laws are being indicted; the arbitration courts and even the parliamentary methods are on trial. Well did Eugene Debs say in his address to the judge in an American court (it also applies to all world citizens and all world institutions):

All such scenes and utterances are landmarks in the career of humanity. We see the evolution of the social ideal in English literature, from Piers Plowman to More’s Utopia and on to William Morris and modern Labour writings. At the present we are learning that society is not static but dynamic. Herbert Spencer taught us rightly to look upon society as an organism. The result of this thought is, we learn we are only in part civilized; in fact we have reached merely that stage in man’s career where he is stepping out of the cradle. He has not yet ceased to be predatory—he has only touched the fringe of co-operation and brotherhood. He cannot move far along the road of progress until he bursts the bands of the system of privilege.

Surely the meanest word in the English language is “Privilege”! What is there more bemeaning, more belittling than to see fine brainy men tied to a pick and shovel, while educated but less brainy rule in high places? But the Divine Spirit is in the evolution of humanism. If these natural laws of unfolding are frustrated by the system, then so much the worse for the system. If great wealth for the few only means augmenting great poverty for the many; if men, women and children starve and are unemployed simply because they produce too much, then we move towards a catastrophe.

The only exasperating remedy the system of privilege has for the worker is the cry of greater economy and increased production, which means work faster and eat less! The folk who talk this way are the real dangerous classes, the real anarchists. A woman asks in a Labour paper:

There is a gathering industrial convulsion. All the Tory world is agog and jubilant over a victorious election to them. Little they know their victory hastens the revolution. Said Disraeli in his day with his keen Jewish vision: “The social question of to-day is only a zephyr which rustles the leaves, but will soon become a hurricane!” Through the gigantic efforts of modern commercialism the energies of nature are well under human control. They give unprecedented wealth; but just glance at the uneven distribution! People suffer, not by producing a shortage, but by making too much! Punished for over-production! The workers make wealth that goes to the non-producers! The rich few are not able to consume the products, and the masses are unable to buy what they have produced! Could insanity go farther? Wherever a man receives a pound he has not earned another man earns a pound he did not receive! So Mammon still remains God’s inveterate foe! The money-interest rides upon the back of human-interest. It will continue to ride if navies and armies can keep it so. Privilege will ever whoop for its Napoleons.

Said Marshal Foch: “Once more there is a dazzling career for a military man!” Their salvation (and destruction too) lies that way. Their myopic vision, is as the blind leading the blind into the ditch. The workers are seeing The Vision Splendid and learning that the real saviours are the world’s Caxtons, Morses, Lesseps, Edisons and Burbanks. Who is right?

Then to what goal are we moving? The answer is—to a world-republic—to some form of international Communism, but based on brotherhood not dictatorship. Some social state where the proletariat shall rule and not the profitariat. In the career of humanity we move away from military power to industrial power; we move away from faith in the king to faith in the average man. We saw that when during the war the people by the vote turned down conscription in Australia. Ethically the people were superior to the little world of privilege. There are many helpful influences bringing world communism, i.e. steam, canals, railways, postal service, wireless, aeroplanes, and in fact all inventions. Labour’s increasing power and influence is the greatest factor of all in leading humanity towards the goal.

If Labour controlled affairs, the sect malice would disappear—the overseas policy of trade greed would dissolve—women would no longer be worried over grocers’, drapers’ and butchers’ bills. There would be no hungry children. The age-long history of prostitution would cease. Alms and doles would vanish. Slums and disease would be wiped out, and the garden city and the perfect race would adorn and beautify the earth. God’s kingdom would come! The writer holds that the goal cannot be reached by parliamentary methods, for all parliaments are opposed to the watchword of human brotherhood. They have little interest in a broad catholicity of aim and spirit. Humanity, is not in any parliamentary repertoire—neither can it be while money rules. For attaining the goal of humanity the parliamentary method is fast becoming obsolete. What does it know of one God, one humanity and one law of right? What can it know, when the whole thing is resting on Mammon? Then what is the Labour way to reach the goal?

My last clause (9) is lengthy, but very necessary, for so many Trades Unionists have little vision. With an extra half-crown in wages in one pocket got by the pressure of their Union, they become smug and contented, forgetting that the increase of cost in living has taken two shillings and nine-pence out of the other pocket at the same time. The movement of the increase of wage is the movement of the squirrel in the cage—the faster you go, the faster you get nowhere. Workers must arouse themselves and get to mental grips industrially. The industrial parliament is the way. It is a power growing up within the State, and by its increase eventually will burst its shell, step out and take possession. Make your watchword—think or surrender! Capitalism, militarism, or imperial greed can never be voted out.

John Bryce was no Socialist, but in Modern Democracies, Vol. I. p. 56, he spoke well on the vital impulse of Democracy:

The advocacy of the industrial parliament needs fearless thinkers to concentrate on it. Emerson said: “Beware when God lets loose a thinking man on the planet!” Modern governments don’t like thinkers; they prefer, as in the dark ages, to hinder and coerce thought. Our time calls for serious thought, and especially to those who wish to avoid violence. Marx complimented the people of England by saying that the one country where the revolution was possible without bloodshed was England.

The papers are busy confusing thought, and colouring ideas. When they alter the procedure it is in some trivial way to divert attention from serious issues. New Zealand papers print a cable from America about a Charlie Chaplin film—or a cable from England about Lloyd George catching a ten pound trout. The following pabulum to regale dissatisfied workers appeared in the Press:

All this silly news, because privilege fears the growing mind. The human brain grows, but the Church doesn’t; the human mind expands, but the State doesn’t! There’s a Divine call to every age, and the liberty struggle never ceases. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God! Women have to think or surrender. Working men have to think or surrender. Said Lord Rosebery, prior to the war: “The situation in Europe is such that the fall of a leaf will start a movement that will change the world!” Alter the word “Europe” to “Industry” and the sentence is quite up-to-date and on-the-nail.

Man’s career at the present reaches a critical stage; the Empire grows rich and humanity remains poor—the interest-payers are riding ramshackle bicycles and the interest-takers are in expensive and luxurious motor-cars. And the struggle ahead is between the productive class and the enjoying class. The following lines are much to the point:—

THE FEMININE VISION SPLENDID

The most difficult part of the evolutionary laws is that part which applies to the unfolding of morality. The higher morality in its initial stages is ever immoral to the stagnant mind. Very few can easily learn the lesson. Nietzsche set out in his pregnant sentence: “Learn to revalue your values.” It is difficult to revalue antiquated ethics and set out a higher moral value, especially so when it applies to sex ethics. An obsolete Church has pronounced values for all time. Yet every thinking man and woman knows better; but juggling with truth is seemingly allowable here. All give an inward and invisible Jonathan wink to the other on the subject of a higher sex ethic. Sex matters are supposed to be fleshly and unclean, and the Church says “Amen” to it. Every parson also who pronounces the “Amen” at the same time reflects upon his own mother. Hush! is the word for all matters of sex. Our boys still learn the sacred and Divine truth regarding sex from unclean scribblings and drawings in public conveniences, and also from sly smutty stories from other boys. No wonder Nietzsche in his iconoclastic way said: “On sex matters the whole of Christendom is one vast lunatic asylum.” It is so indeed!

It is quite moral to discuss any form of questionable money-making, any tricky share or bond business, but as the economist Keynes says: “The nineteenth century was able to forget the fertility of the species in a contemplation of the dizzy virtues of compound interest.” Let the nastiness of the Victorian age pass—it is passing, and there is already a dim groping for a higher and saner good.

There is a moral mystery of good in sex matters that leads to God. The strong and beautiful sex instinct in all normal beings is not a wicked thing, nor is it the blind hap of a mindless evolution. Reason is outgrowing the old sex-morality, based on a superstitious theology. A society reeking with sexual diseases is calling a halt. A century or so ago the same society called a halt in the burning of witches. Society felt it was time to revalue the values. Things working in an anti-social way are at last brought under the focus of moral and rational principles of right and wrong. This is good, for it drives into a corner Rabbinical narrowness, Pharisaic and Puritan hypocrisy and all theological hair splittings.

In the old times theology took morality (especially sex-morality) under its wing; to-day morality is taking theology under its wing. Morality has been twisted and distorted into a kind of monstrosity by the convex and concave credal mirrors. We are learning that the natural clean and Divine sex instinct has been perverted by those who laboured under the delusion that they had a monopoly of the Divine Spirit. The same dupes have championed war, militarism, nationalism, imperialism and capitalism, thinking they were doing God service; but their day is almost over.

The human body is not depraved; with healthy living, fresh air, simple diet, cleanliness and plenty, it is a holy and sanctified temple of God. Darwin opened a wonderful vista of man’s future in moral things; Westermarck, too, followed it up. The moral law within evolves. God and it are one. God and nature are also one, and what works against nature is unnatural, and therefore not of God. It is a very simple logic, and he who seeks can find. The want of logic in our unnatural sex ethics to-day, old Euclid by his simple rules could easily prove to be absurd. Mark Twain, when in serious and philosophical mood, was very rational: “We have no real morals, but only artificial ones, created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts.” This occurs in one of his later letters, when his mind was matured.

Women must rise above the low and vulgar ethic of the past. There is a higher altitude. Some progressive feminine minds see it. The late Ella Wheeler Wilcox did.

It is strange to have to assert that the emancipation of women has been hindered by Christianity, or at least by Churchianity. A caricatured Christianity which is not Christianity at all, but Paulinism, holds the ground to-day, and it has succeeded in degrading sex and women with it. It has done so by holding to the Oriental myth of the fall of man and also by holding up the ideal of virginity through so many centuries. Paul taught that woman was as inferior to man as man was inferior to God.

St. Jerome said: “Woman is the demon’s door and the scorpion’s sting.” St. Anthony: “Woman is not a wild beast, but the devil in person.” St. Augustine was artistic and luxurious in extravagant insults to women. Gregory the Great: “Woman has no moral sense.” St. Chrysostom bellowed at women and blamed them for the fall. Let us be grateful that as orthodoxy wanes so women rise in power, and also give promise of a cleaner sex ethical code. When we get to the root of the subject and think fearlessly, and see at once there is nothing on the earth so Divinely beautiful and so attractive as the presence and power of sex.

Read Grant Allen on the subject:

How different all this is to the teaching of the Church fathers! But Grant Allen was outside the Church, and moral thereby. The real immoralists are the Church Fathers, and they who think with them. Certainly they are not in line with nature nor in touch with the God of nature. Besides—God and nature will win—are winning!

In The Vision Splendid for women there will be an idealising, a sublimation of sex, and all that grows out of it. Everything will centre in the eugenic child! The old proverb will be understood at last: “What God cannot do the child can!” Through the selfish economic system marriage has been and is still “woman-possession”; it is based on the property laws, and modern marriage has its root in the old patriarchal system of chattel owning. The new era visions for women a matriarchal system, where the mother will rank the highest. War and militarism will then cease. The slaughter of the innocents will be over, and the world will not any longer be full of Rachels weeping for her children. A good soul wrote:

Yes; in the past women have been useful for soldier-bearing. Their value has been gauged by that! But progressive women and men too are revalueing the values, and a lot of dusty and worm eaten ethics are being hauled down from the social shelves and being discarded and thrown to the garbage cans and scrap heaps. By marriage degenerating to mere woman-possession the sexual desire was satisfied for selfish purposes. This Divinely sacred and creative love-act became a lustful thing, and the child was the last thing thought of or wanted. Every doctor, every chemist and druggist could a tale unfold!

The wicked economic system, happily on its last legs, is largely responsible for this sex indulgence, this prostitution of the body. It has forced sex gratifications into abnormal manifestations, and man becomes worse than any animal. If the sex nature is deliberately frustrated and yet indulged in, so called holy wedlock (?) what is it but the prostitution of the body? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit? There is need for a new and highly ethical reformer and teacher, who will not only whip out of the temple, the militarists and the money-changers, but also the sexual perverts, who deliberately marry to hoodwink the laws of nature and trick in a hundred ways the God of nature.

We demand a higher morality, where a natural normal, clean, deliberate, desire for the eugenic child will result. It will come—is coming. Says the old proverb: “When the true gods arrive, the false gods and devils disappear.”

The British Empire has become the Niobe of empires! Niobe is the classical name for the type of one proud of her children and who lost them all. Ovid says she had seven sons and seven daughters and her pride provoked Apollo and Diana, who slew them all. Niobe wept till she turned to stone, but it was too late! So the British Empire becomes the Niobe of empires, for she throws her sons beneath the military juggernaut, and the cradle is emptying. In the overseas especially the grain of incense is thrown at the shrine of Mars, and not at the shrine of Venus. The cannons become the idols, and not the cradles. They are worshippers at the shrine of Onan—out of marriage and also in marriage! Whether the sacred seed falls upon the floor or is received by the desecrated body of an unholy and unnatural partner, it is in the sight of God and nature Onanism; and thereby prostitution at the same time. It is time someone blurted out the truth!

We think of France; armed, nervous, and infertile, depending upon her black troops for protection, declining not only by luxury but also by the dysgenic law of militarism, whereby the best eugenic types of manhood are selected for slaughter. A nation at her wits end! Note the recent legislation to cope with the evil:

The newer countries are in worse plight, and are the greater sinners, for a new land should increase fertility, and would do so if allowed. Think of America with apartment houses, where married people are faced as applicants, with the first question: “Have you any dogs or children?” No wonder the most popular shops in America are the drug stores, where a middle-aged woman is usually kept as assistant behind a secluded counter, where women can safely approach and purchase their rubber goods and unholy nostrums for their own prostituted married lives. Nature exacts the uttermost farthing. It seldom occurs to them that the unclean quackeries used in marriage become a temptation for their husbands to use elsewhere. The divorce court proceedings prove that in multitudes of sacred home-spots there results a cruel awakening! Time was when the average American had one wife and seven children. To-day it would be nearer the truth to say they had one child and seven wives! These be thy gods, O Israel!

If eugenic knowledge has taught us anything, and the data is easily gathered, it is, that after the third child the talented child is likely to appear. The genius is usually some Benjamin later on in the family. A moment’s thought will show why? As parents grow older their minds become more mature. The first children of young, healthy parents make for physical energy, and the later children for mental power. So at present by the family-limitation parents place a penalty upon themselves. They succeed in eliminating talent and genius. So the clever thwarting of nature brings its Nemesis in many ways. Besides, the use of contraceptives results in pathological consequences—frigidity, sterility, ovarian cancer and psycho-neurosis. A Divine and natural human act is defeated and penalty follows, as darkness follows the light.

In this kind of marriage there soon comes loss of respect, disharmony (the nostrums are sure love-killers) and divorce, or separation. The love of the child is the grandest love on the earth, and every heart that is not dead has a child enshrined. Why should that wee bundle of pink and white helplessness be so objectionable? Why? Because it is cursed by the competitive and unnatural economic system. Is this sufficient excuse then for refusing to become parents? No! No! Consecrate your sex-love to God and the new era, and bring your children up as rebels. It was not an unwise Marxian maxim: “The more workers, the more misery, and the sooner comes the revolution.”

There is the lesson of history for us to learn, i.e. that permanent empires are not built on cannons but on cradles. It will not be Japan’s full cradles that causes her future onslaught on Australia and New Zealand, but the latter’s empty cradles will be the cause of it, if it ever comes. The Malthusian practices in these young lands are shaking their foundation of security. The deliberate and blind selfishness of marriage in these new countries turns the home of connubial bliss into a house of prostitution—a house of mammonistic Hedonism—a house anti-social and strictly individualistic. A man who takes a woman to such a home offers her the most studied insult a man can offer a woman. A woman who freely submits to it and sells her maternal soul, deserves the snapping of the love-bonds. Her Divine duty is, not to thwart the natural law but to guide it to the super-race, to steer it to HOMO-SUPERIORIS. The root idea of morality is involved in this, and the true and permanent social state will sublimate sex and idealise maternity. The reader here may question the writer. Well and good! He is the father of eight girls and six boys—fourteen in all. Every one full of vim and vigour, every one clear-eyed, keen-witted and clean-limbed. The mother too, happy and young looking and not a gray hair on her dear old brown head.

In The Vision Splendid for women all sex ideals should be symbollized by Love for the Child, but there should be no forced maternity, neither there will be where pure love exists. It is this child-love that makes the world go round. In a truly delightful way Hugh R. Orr writes:—

THE VISION SPLENDID FOR NEW ZEALAND

The love of Una Currie is also the writer’s love. New Zealand is the fairest of all. This too by one who is a native of Australia, one who has lived in America and England, one who has travelled and seen the world, and who has lived in New Zealand over thirty years. He also feels the land of his adoption to be the “fairest of all.”

New Zealand is approaching the cross-roads. She has to choose whether there is to be a New Zealand of imperialism or a New Zealand of social democracy.

There can be no imperialised democracy, neither can there be any democratic imperialism. There has been, and still is, an effort to graft democracy on to imperialism but democracy is not a graft but a root, deep in the heart of humanity; it is the outgrowth of man’s love of liberty. The object of the great war was to make imperial and financial authority safer. All the nations were then out to make the exploiting system safer. The secret underlying aim was to keep the aggressive industrial world in subjection, and nothing was so likely to make the plan so successful as militarism and conscription.

War is the assassin of democracy and ever has been. War makes authority and privilege safer. All this had a special incidence in New Zealand, for it was above all a land of rich and varied produce. It was a fine picture for imperialists, for one end of a 13,000 mile rope, to be held in the London war office, and the other noose-end of the rope to be around the neck of New Zealand labour! By war this financial imperialism was to become safer and more powerful. It had to do with foreign markets, surplus wealth and dollar diplomacy.

It was surplus wealth (that is material wealth, bogus-wealth. Ruskin truly said, there is no wealth but life) that lured Britain into Egypt and with the Suez Canal at one end and Gibraltar at the other, turned the Mediterranean into an English sea. It was surplus wealth that developed the Boer war and put its strangling grip on Persia. Young New Zealand was blind to all this prior to 1914. She is awakening! In the interests of world trade and financial junkerism she threw 17,000 of her finest sons into the European slaughter house and allowed 40,000 others to be broken and for the most part unfitted for parentage. This, too, with a declining birth-rate. If there is no wealth but life, then under imperial sway New Zealand is rapidly being impoverished. Says a New Zealand poet and thinker:

There is growing up in young New Zealand a very different view of things. A different psychology. A view of the State—a State to be founded on the citizen and not the soldier. All empires are founded on bayonets, and that is why no such empire has ever been permanent. Not only has German militarism or French militarism to be done away with, but ALL militarism has to be crushed.

For three decades almost imperial Germany was blamed for sinister craving for dominion and a place in the sun, but what a grim ironic mockery, when all the time British imperialism throttled the independence of the South African Republics, established a protectorate over Egypt, partitioned Persia, helped Japan to grip China, and also helped France to build up immense interests in Tunis, Morocco and also China. All arranged by the sordid promptings of a balance-of-power conscience.

There is a rubbing of eyes in New Zealand. The half-educated workers have been pitted against each other by the war-mongers. But the last effort of imperialism to crush democracy is at hand. The political ideals are changing—the imperial group conscience is to be replaced by a cosmopolitan conscience. Hitherto the clan-craziness of the militarists, nationalists and imperialists, all hypocritically dressed in the livery of heaven, has held sway. The innocents, by a false education based on a fictitious history, have hitherto answered the call of war drum and flag. A false patriotism has worked successfully, but, as Dr. W. Crane says, “That patriotism is a savage blood lust!”

The choice for New Zealand is either to follow the aggrandisement of England in navalism and annexation, or, on the other hand, to follow a peaceful development with world-wide brotherhood. The new spirit unfolds apace, and Divine culture is the moral growth of the masses. The imperial State aims to stereotype, navalism and war, to make militarism more effective. Marshal Haig goes the innocent limit, by advocating an imperial religion. Its prayer-book would possibly include Mark Twain’s:

New Zealand and Australia are new lands, and God has made them, isolated as they are in the Southern Hemisphere, the custodians of a larger truth and a real culture. We refuse to join issue any longer in the time worn blood feuds of Europe. The preparedness mania has to be turned down. New Zealand will be a safer country to live in with every rifle, every ounce of powder dropped in the sea. The building up of armaments, paradoxical though it seems, only means in the ultimate the anarchy and sabotage of Flanders and Gallipoli over again. Says Dr. Starr Jordan: “A nation is like a bee—as it stings, so it dies!”

 In this new land there is a great and glorious chance to set the world an example—the greatest moral example in the history of the world—to turn away from imperialism and follow world-wide humanitarianism. Are we to pursue European politics to suit the bankers? Have our younger children to die in India and Africa for Mammon? Have military ideals to take the place of social reforms? In a word, has New Zealand no soul apart from the war juggernaut, under whose wheels our best young life is being periodically crushed? Choose—is it to be democracy or imperialism? You cannot have both. Where are we marching? Why not say with Victor Hugo: “What matters the tempest? I have my compass!” Democracy! The democracy that keeps man a predatory animal of the jungle instead of leading him on to co-operation and peace. World-labour is learning the lesson:

During the past two decades New Zealand has been fooled, is still being fooled, and it is not pleasant to be fooled. The war was to have made the world safe for democracy. To-day even the word “Democracy” has a bad odour. Hardly any Labour man uses the word. The word makes him smile. So called “democracy” turned him into a conscript and a military slave (the worst slave of all) and seventeen thousand slaves died to make the world safe for profiteers! The next war will, no doubt, in the new imperial acquisitions make the world safe for petroleum. A war when the dupes and the innocents will be told they fight the Turks not for oil-fields, but in a holy-war to uphold the Cross against the Crescent!

Some labouring people have rubbed their eyes and awakened out of lethargy. Many others are still caressing their chains. And others only too realistically exemplify the truth of Voltaire: “It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”

The great query for all healthy and free-thinking New Zealanders is, has England’s imperial policy to set the pace for them? A policy that is shaped by the hatreds of Europe. A Europe cradled in blood since Homer and Virgil! If so, then may a kindly plague, a Divinely-guided comet, or something easier still, i.e., a beneficent earthquake, sink New Zealand under the sea! Let us all be honest and say we have been fooled! And never again! Let us cry out to the God of peace and goodwill, we will stand for the common cause of humanity. Let us not be fooled with the words, “we-won-the-war,” The Sydney Morning Herald asked on the anniversary of the outbreak of the war, and with awful solemnity:

While monarchs, secret diplomacy, and the military curse remain, every decade or so war will result, and result, too, in a successful way, so far as recruits are concerned, for there is always a crop of innocent men coming on who know not the devilry of war; they only know the false glories of it as read in school books.

Asked an Englishman of an American: “How far can you throw a dollar?” “I don’t know,” replied he, “but I know Washington once threw a Sovereign across the Atlantic!” Then let us learn the Divine lesson. Monarchs and diplomats are the tools of big trade, which is the cause of war.

Kings, diplomats, exploiters do not go to the trenches to be killed; they do not breathe poison gas; they stay at home and get rich. A post-war banquet found one toasting the King in these words: “We have now a thousand new channels for wealth! God save the King!”

In America a Wall Street crowd of banqueters had a speaker who defended the Christian Church in these words: “The value of our investments depends upon the strength of our Churches. The religion of the community is really the bulwark of our investments. Let us business men get behind the Churches.” But these men have no sense of humour. They capture the thrones and capture the altars for their dividends. The workers become their cannon fodder during war, profit-fodder during peace, and out-of-work fodder to bring wages down at the present time. Yet Labour makes all the wealth!

New Zealand must make a new mind and capture the children; teach them a new ethic, that disobedience to imperial tyranny is obedience to God. Teach them that civilization in New Zealand is to be a serious thing and not a joke! Teach them that there is a God to be worshipped; but it is not the false God who blesses war. Tell them that the best casualty in the great war was that false god. Teach them there is real religion in the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.

Since the war, imperialism has forced the Pacific to be the storm centre. Young New Zealanders must resent it, or these Pacific southern seas will be tinged crimson. Our Divine slogan must be “Hands-around-the-Pacific!” Ever remember we are the holy custodians of a wider truth. There is goodwill in abundance—but with imperial policies dominant, and preferential trading, goodwill is helpless! Learn, young New Zealanders, that imperialism is not of God, it is an evil infatuation that ends in collective homicide.

The curse of collective egotism leads to it. Learn that once Mammon is dethroned, Mars falls! Remember, too, that the old word Mammon is but the modern word Capitalism! Throw Malthusian fallacies to the winds and keep the cradle full. When God blesses you with a child say—this child is an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven, and this child must inherit the kingdom of earth too. When the child’s intelligence dawns, croon the truth into the ear, that all nations are members one of another, and that the God of one is the God of all. As the child grows, show how the whole body politic is sick, and that New Zealand can find a remedy—Hands around the Pacific!

There must be the fearless application to the ideal. Cultivate the philosophy of oneness, wholeness. We refuse to transplant European hates to this fairest land of all! We refuse to worship a detached tribal deity, but we revere the immanent God, who is the Soul of the Universe. And as the tree hides in the seed, so God the Whole can hide in the human heart!

The conquering ideal for New Zealand lies not in an arrogant imperialism; but in international brotherhood. Let us broaden our political faith, our social faith, our national faith, and also our religious faith, for “the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.” Let us learn that God is incarnated in the whole human family.

New Zealanders must have soul! Initiative! Ideals! Remember what seventeen thousand from the fairest land on God’s earth died for. A war to end war! Keep the war bill ever before you; never forget it! The greater the Empire the greater the chance of war.

With this, my call to New Zealand ends. A dreamer? So be it! An idealist? Well and good! With Plato I agree, that the idea of the object is greater than the object itself. Destroy the material object, and the idea remains, and can produce another. But the real dreamers, and stupid dreamers, at that, are the imperialists. Says truly the late Anatole France:

Let us who live on these island jewels of the Southern Pacific seas be true to the Pacific Ideal. Let us remember that the greatest blessing of all is The Vision Splendid, and that a nation without a vision perishes. Even the great imperialist, Cecil Rhodes said: “Since the Lord God Almighty thinks in constellations, it will be pleasure to Him to find men trying to think in continents. But better than the imperialist, and more Divine, too, is the man or woman who can transcend imperialism and from a higher altitude think universally.”

THE PASSING: AND THE VISION SPLENDID

Man’s real worth must lie quite outside of “matter.” The spirit of man (and even the mind) lies beyond the chemist. The crucible, the microscope, and the laboratory with all its delicate instruments, have no power to examine accurately, and lead right into the life of things. The outer shell is the limit—the inner spirit is untouched and unexamined. The real, the vital, remains unexplored:

When Wordsworth wrote: “We are greater than we know,” he suggested a valuable and pregnant truth, for the present self may be only a fractional part of the total self. We now are only gods in the germ compared to our real transcendental self. Perhaps that was in Franklin’s mind when he said: “We are not really born until we die.” The oyster mind of the materialist will be amused in a superficially wise way at all this; but no philosophy of matter can destroy the fact. The materialist is getting greatly hustled in these days. He has to extend himself to keep going. To him death is a terminus; to the idealist it is a passage. It is not an end, but a door. The passing, to the wise, is an experience in a career, and the present life is creating the future life. Says Dora Greewell: “Not only the changes we call death, but probably the whole of this our mortal life is only a slow and difficult and painful birth into a higher existence; the very breath we draw is part of the travail of creation towards a yet but partially fulfilled aim.”

But where is the sphere of future existence? To an astronomer that would suggest no problem. The little speck of star-dust we live on, called the planet earth, is a very insignificant part, even of the solar system, placing aside the sidereal heavens. Even in our system there is room for many upward gradations, in the many moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Where is heaven? Who knows! There is room enough, and, as one suggests, harps and wings, may after all be very useful figures of speech. At least, music means happiness, and wings mean power. It is enough to happily know that the hell and devil of the dark ages are impossible. God is too good to damn any soul, and every soul is too good to be damned. Some, sure, will have a lot of leeway to make up after the passing, but we can away with all dismal trappings and funeral dirges. The “Dead March” will yet be turned into a “Hallelujah Chorus!”

It simplifies the subject to educate the mind to the scientific truth, that eternal life is not an experience to be begun at the dissolution of the material body, but is a present possession. Well says T. R. Slicer:

True! Love itself forbids the very thought of death or extinction. Love is fundamental and demands continuance. Love is the keynote of the universe, and as Henry Drummond said, “Love is the greatest thing in the world.” It may be so strong that even those who have passed on still interest themselves in us, nay, they may exert themselves to help and protect us. Do they send messages? I doubt it! The loss of the five material senses may close the avenue; and as our two-feet rule cannot measure their message, on the other side their rule may be too long for our limitations. I doubt the helpfulness of the whole phenomena connected with mediums and séances. When a departed spirit will come to me with a message on my lawn at midday I will pay attention, but I refuse to go groping about in the shadows and the dark.

But human opinion is for survival, and the finest minds, the most highly evolved minds, are also strong for survival. There is an inwrought horror at extinction, for it means all ideals would fail, and it would also be a reversal of instinct. Tennyson felt that:

In a dim primitive way the idea was in the early race of mankind, for some were buried in a kneeling posture, others with food, weapons, and with their dogs, horses and slaves. The old Tibetans bored a hole in the skull to allow the soul to escape. It is an instinct as deep and old as humanity, and there is some reality to meet it. But the Church, with its bodily resurrection, is quite beside the mark. It is as absurd as philosophic materialism. Dr. Talmage, although logical, from a point of orthodoxy, reached the limit of absurdity by describing a picture of bodies, legs, arms, and limbs from battle-fields, etc., all flying through the air when the resurrection trumpet sounded! Besides, death did not come through sin; the geological record reaches back ages before man was evolved on the earth; and death was the law then. What is called “death” is a good gift like “life.” The Christian dread of death is the result of a false theology, and a good sign of the times is the re-action against it. It results in an unworthy view of things. It gives inadequate ideals of immortality. The old theology is discredited; with its baby heavens, its toy paradises, and its golden clouds! It is a great reflection on traditional Christianity that it destroys the dignity of death. A dignity that some pagan religions were not without. Read the meditations of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. A quotation from a magazine of the better sort is to the point:

New and correct thought makes this world a place of education; the old and false theology made it a place of probation. This life is a school, not a court-house. The new thought is we are trained here for a higher life, while the old turned this sphere into a sort of criminal trial for depraved creatures!

The history of the world is a perpetual Day of Judgment—it comes to persons, to nations, to institutions, to creeds, to customs and to religions. This judgment is pressing close at the present hour! Great condemnations are pronounced to-day.

The subject of our future passing should be used by all clergymen, not to emphasise the importance of the continued life, but the importance of this life. There is a great evil in other worldliness! Said wise old Holyoake to Gladstone: “I hope there is a future life; and if so, my not being sure of it will not prevent it, and I know of no better way of deserving it than by constant service to humanity.” It was sane and in harmony with the one who wrote: “If man hath no second life, pitch this one high.” It is for this reason, probably, that all spiritualistic phenomena is so unsatisfactory and ends in a blind road. The Universal Reason wishes us to pay attention to this world and establish thereon the kingdom of God.

In dwelling upon the passing and The Vision Splendid, we might well emphasise, that the answer of intuition is survival. We might well ask, Why this hope, if it is only to be tantalized? What of human miseries? No future for those who have suffered thus? What of human injustices? No future rightings? What of a perfected humanity? No place ahead to gain perfection? What of our imperfect knowledge? No place where human greatness can expand? Is the urn of ashes at the end to contain all? Who was it said, “Not one of these little ones shall perish”? A mind that can measure the sun will surely survive the sun! What of all those unrecorded heroisms and sacrifices? No place of recognition! What of those with talent for poetry and science and invention? They died with no chance to unfold! Are they blocked and baffled by death? If so, then there is no law of conservation for moral and spiritual energy—only a law of conservation for mechanical forces, and the materialist wins! A thousand times No! What of human affection? Is it nought? Read the memorial notices in the press daily. Is there not something—the real thing—the urn and the grave cannot hold captive?

Recall Cowper’s address to his mother’s picture:

As man evolves and the earth shrinks, man demands more, not less! As man grows, so God greatens! God is present in nature, God is present in man, God is also in the expanded future. After the passing the law of evolution does not cease; there is progress. Remember, too, that so-called death is as natural as birth, and quite as painless. Said Tithonus: “Happy men that have the power to die!” The man who thinks fearlessly will not be afraid of the loneliness of the passing. Perhaps God has made the passing lonely, so that the passer may turn to Him. Some are afraid of being lonely even in every day life.

But a man who knows nature should never be lonely. It was Thoreau who said: “Even if you are ever lost on the hills or in the woods, remember God is as close to you there as at your home fireside.” So when you come to the passing, though loved ones are around your bedside, yet you pass alone.

The cry for survival is not the child’s cry for the moon; the desire for it is a sign of reason and not the want of it. Human life is a senseless fiasco without it. There is in man a homing instinct, and it is in line with human affection and love of kin. Love, too, is of God, and is immortal, and at the passing you are perfectly safe, with all your failings, in the hands of the loving Mother-Father-God. Let us be modest—we know little of the incorporeal! Let us be modest—we know little of the immaterial! But after all is said, spirit is REALITY! Say to yourself—“I was not, yet I exist.” Again follow the logic to the end, and say to yourself: “I exist, therefore I shall exist!” Also quite apart from the words “Spirit” and “Reality,” recall that “Man is Mind and not matter!”

To the unthinking, evolution is supposed to destroy all hope; but to the thoughtful evolution becomes the key to unlock the mystery. Said John Fiske: “Evolution does not dismiss immortality but endorses it.” The very desire for the erect form in man brought it about! The very desire for articulate speech produced it! The agelong desire for survival may, too, have evolved it. Besides, science knows no annihilation. The candle burns, but the form only changes. The Spirit of man, too, is the candle of the Lord!

If the evolution of the material universe is all, then what a senseless progress of useless forces! Is the purpose of creation to travel towards and reach the end of life’s road and find nothing? There must be a meaning—there must be a use—there must be a worth. Where, then, do we seek and find the purpose? Not in the visible, but in the invisible. The one of old endured as seeing the invisible! It is in the realm of mind, spirit, ideals and love we search for the secret. “If,” says one, “the mind can be evolved that longs for survival, then potentially it may be able to achieve survival.” Every man is a body, plus something else. The plus something else—the soul—is the real man. That man is a soul and has a body is the truth! You cannot with a microscope see the life of the seed. Neither can you with the same instrument detect what gravitation is; nor can you see thought. The invisible things are the real things after all. The seen is only temporal; the unseen is eternal. The letter killeth, the spirit giveth life! When a preacher was speaking on this subject he was interrupted by a materialist, who shouted out: “I expect to die like a dog!” “Well,” retorted the speaker, “I have been speaking to feed the soul, but I should have brought you a bone!” A good retort, too! The truest sentence in all literature is: “Man cannot live by bread alone!” So, dear God:

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A cover was created for this eBook and is placed in the public domain.

[The end of A Rebel's Vision Splendid by James Chapple]