THE rarest experience in America is a discussion of morals. You can hear morals preached about, but that is not a discussion. You can read about morals in arguments disguised as essays, but these seldom cause discussion. Fully a third of successful American plays and stories turn upon a moral axiom, but one that we accept without argument, like rain in April and the August drouth. One hears very little real discussion of moral questions here because “old Americans,” at least, agree in their moral standards as remarkably as did the Victorians.

In this respect we are, indeed, still Victorians, though in others already a century beyond them. Some of us may (or did) get drunk, but we do not believe in hard drinking; not even the saloon-keepers believed in hard drinking. Some of us make license of our liberty in sex relations; but the public disapproval of promiscuity is, to fall into the current phrase, nation wide. Some of us steal in a large and generous fashion, taking from him who hath not business ability for the benefit of him who hath shrewdness and its fruits. But if these actions can be described in terms of theft or misappropriation, every one will agree that they are wicked, even stock-holders and profiteers. You cannot get up a decent argument on moral questions in America, because, as with small boys in war-time, no one will take the unpopular side. The ethics of America are as definite as a code.

This accepted and not unlofty moral code, with its extension to justice and the rights of individuals, is the force behind our idealism that has made it an international factor to be reckoned with from the days of Jeffersonian ideology to our own. Like the dissenters’ vote in England, it is a dangerous force to oppose. Despite occasional hysteria and sentimentalism, despite its frequent betrayals by an unlovely common sense, it is strong because it has the momentum of tradition and the tenacity of prejudice. Of its worth I am American enough to be convinced. Of its intelligence one cannot be so certain. But what really concerns all lovers of our hard-built civilization is how durable under stress is this moral idealism, under such stress as the approaching change in our social order is sure to bring to morals and morale, as well as to railroad stocks and the Constitution.

Indeed, the inner fire, the spirit, is not easily discoverable in this American idealism with its moral causes. Historically, it is easy to explain it; habit has carried it on, and common sense must usually approve a moral investment that has been profitable; but, nevertheless, it is hard to see a continuing raison d’Être for such idealism in America. It seems, as I have suggested in an earlier chapter, to lack a definable spiritual basis. Its persistence, its weaknesses, its dangers, raise constantly the question as to the status of religion in America.

I remember hearing Graham Wallas—who will not be suspected of bias in this matter—remark that England would not pass out of clouds and darkness until she had made for herself a new and felt interpretation of religion. America, founded by a curious partnership of the religious instinct and economic need and brought up on the moral and material profits of the union, cannot be supposed to be less in need of a fundamental spiritual readjustment. Every socialist and communist, every corporation president and ex-Secretary, every professional intellectual and amateur prophet, is declaring his mind on the one thing needful to save the world and America. I do not know why we, whose profession it is to teach, whose duty it is to interpret and to sympathize with every motion of the American mind, should hesitate to speak out also in this matter. It is, I think, demonstrable that America needs religion as much as steel and automobiles, as much as a better distribution of wealth and cheaper bread and meat.

The status of religion in America has been as peculiar as the status of politics. Our religious attitudes have been profoundly affected and from early periods by the separation of church and state. Struggle against a vested institution, dissent from traditional power, conciliation with sacred authority, have been burning points in the modern history of Europe. They have made great literature in England from Shelley through Tennyson and Arnold and Swinburne. Our first battle against the tyrannical in tradition wherever found was won in the Revolution; our second, in the defeat of the Federalist party in 1800.

In those contests we were freed, perhaps too early and too easily, from the menace of the church as a function of government. Since then we have been, and we still are, freer than the European to seek religion wherever it may be found. Our great religious literature is creative, not protestant. Woolman of the Quakers was a seeker; Emerson, in greater measure, was a seeker, seeking spirituality for Americans, and, like Woolman, fanning their moral enthusiasms. Hawthorne and Thoreau were searchers for a new morality; Whitman and William James, in their fashion, searchers also.

Emerson in his religious attitude belongs a century later than Matthew Arnold. Fed from almost identical intellectual sources, he is the liberated mind seeking new allegiances, Arnold, the rebel not yet free. And in general American religion, without reference to its quality, has had, like American politics, a status some generations ahead of the rest of the world. Hamilton and Jefferson and Lincoln were prophets for Europe. The independent sects of America, none established, all respectable, and the free seekers after new truth which sprang from them, seem to have prefigured a condition that is common in a world growing democratic.

In truth, we old Americans, who with all our faults still best represent America, gained freedom of conscience at the expense of shattering the ideal of a church universal. Religion for us came in general to be a personal matter because the church, separated from the state, lost the visible authority that made it easy—or necessary—to trust to an institution the responsibility for one’s soul. We felt, as was to be expected, the need of new authority, new sanctions for our religion. And we were free, freer than others, to seek and to find a religion for democracy. What has been the result?

The results in bourgeois America, which goes to the theater, wears the commonly advertised collars, sends its children to college, and keeps out of the slums and the police-court, are clearly visible and highly significant. Four classes, interlocking, but distinct enough for definition, may be readily described; and though they do not include the recent immigrant or the fire-new sophists of radicalism, the strongest brains, the most characteristic emotions, and the best character in America belong there with the mass of the mediocre undistinguished who are public opinion and the ultimate America.

There are, first, the militant advance-guards of our idealism, the ethical enthusiasts who carry on the moral fervor of America. They range, like colors of the spectrum, from the rarer violet of the philosophical moralists, inheritors of the New England ethics or the Virginia ideology, through the solid blue of the organizers of great movements in social reform, to the blatant red of the prohibitionists and the Anti-tobacco League. I do not mean to be flippant. The irony, if there is irony, is bred of the sardonic humor aroused by so various an army all certain that by stopping this and beginning that the world can be saved.

It is their certainty that makes them impressive—the same certainty which drove our colonials toward republican government and our pioneers to the conquest of a wilderness. Sneers at their banner, “Progress,” satisfy none but the reactionary. Progress where? Who knows. Progress for whom? It is hard to tell. But only the man who honestly believes in civilization for the benefit of the few can doubt the advance that has been made. I should have preferred the twelfth century to the twentieth if I could have lived in the right Benedictine monastery or been a count in Provence. I should have enjoyed the Elizabethan age more than my own if I could have voyaged—in the cabin—with Raleigh, been Shakespeare’s patron, or possessed a manor neither too near nor too far from London. I still think that life in a good English college, with a taste for letters and the proper port, is superior to any mental or physical luxury we can offer in America. Yet all this is aside from the point. ProvenÇal poetry and perfect social intercourse, high adventure, the intellectual life in an appropriate physical setting, and even good port, may come again somewhere on the line along which our progress is marching. In the meantime, though the war has been a cooling card to optimism, the ethical enthusiasms of the age have made the opportunities of the average man for most good things in life better, have made him, in the most accurate sense of the word, not nobler, but more civilized, and particularly in America, where the fire of opportunity was first set burning.

The moral enthusiasts whose religion has been transformed into ethical idealism are safe from ridicule. Religious persecution, slavery, the tyranny of disease and ignorance, they have already reformed out of the brighter parts of the world, and perhaps alcoholism and poverty are to follow. We can well afford to risk their mistakes and their excesses, their blind trust in works, so long as they are propelled by a sincere energy of will to make the world better. But what lies behind this will? What keeps it from decaying? For these men are seldom religious in the sense that their reforming zeal springs from a deep spiritual need. A part of their energy is moral habit; a part is exactly identical with the energy that builds up a great industrial plant in order to satisfy a craving for laudable action. If the certainty that the community must be bettered, can be bettered, should slacken, where would it find revival? In faith, hope, and charity? But can hope endure and charity be permanent without faith? And what is their faith?

The faith of our moral idealists is as strong, I suppose, as that which supported the Stoics or the clear-sighted reformers of the eighteenth century. They believe in the perfectability of man and the pragmatic value of right-doing. This, for a strong man, may be enough; but it is not a religion. It is questionable whether it would stand adversity. It was not shaken in the war, but it is shaking now. If the enthusiasm of the reformers should be spent or exhausted, they would have little to fall back upon. Their idealism has already shown signs of hysteria, spots of sentimentalism, evidences of a basis in habit and impulse as much as in deep spiritual conviction.

It has become almost a commonplace to say that the spiritual seekers, the second of our observable classes—more numerous, I believe, in America than elsewhere in the white world since the seventeenth century—are products of reaction against the dry moral will that seeks its satisfaction in works, not faith. Yet their importance has not always been grasped. Commercial America has not only been the home of the greatest of modern philanthropies, but also the source of the only powerful religious sect created in the nineteenth century, as well as one of the few new strains in idealistic philosophy. They are not happy in our commercialism or content with ethical reform, those more sensitive spirits whose numbers and weight in bourgeois America are evident whenever an emotional crisis arrives. And the freedom from ecclesiastical restraint which was won for them by their ancestors has left them free to construct new religions.

But as it was the earnestness of the moral enthusiasts that seemed more valuable than any reason they had for goodness, so it is the spiritual craving of American seekers that is more impressive than anything they have found. I do not undervalue the hopeful idealism of Emerson or the strong protest of the Christian Scientists against surrender to petty worry and pain. Yet in so far as we may generalize in so vast a matter, the seekers of spirituality have been singularly out of harmony with the needs of a democracy. They have found religions that solace the optimistic temperament when it has been duly intellectualized; they have found medicine for the ills of prosperous people; but the breadth and often the depth of appeal that must characterize a religion for all men they have missed or failed to seek. The Friends, later called Quakers, began with the will that all the world should become Friends; it was only in later stages that they regarded themselves as a peculiar people with whom only those fitted by temperament should join. But it is with such an exclusiveness that the seekers of to-day who promulgate religion commence. One can prophesy in advance who will or will not be Christian Scientists. And beyond the bounds of sects the spiritual adventure exhausts itself in emotional vagaries, or rises into regions of pure mysticism where, no matter how noble or how satisfying it may be for individual persons, we shall never find the religion for a democracy.

The third group is again a result of that early freeing of America from ecclesiastical control; but its members are those whom such unchartered freedom tires. The reactionaries, if I may call them by that name without offense intended, are the lovers of tradition, whose modern craving for the sanctions of religion leads them back into dependence upon the old rites, the old theologies, the old authority, which many, indeed, never have left. They, in our history, are the Federalists of religion.

And, like the seekers, they, also, have put restrictions of temperament upon their faith. For many Americans of the old stock the breach with authority made by the Reformation is permanent. They could not go back without an intellectual debasement that would be degradation, not humility. For many others the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century has still further unfitted minds for harmony with the forms and pressures of the ecclesiastical past. Sheer scientific materialism as an explanation of God and the universe has broken down. The need for religion emerges from the controversy more palpitating than before. Nevertheless, the science of theology has suffered from the science of inductive research. Tradition carries many a man to the door of past beauty, decorum, and harmonious faith, and he longs to enter. But his way is barred. He leans upon and loves the past. He cannot enter it. The traditionalist, to give him a better and more lovely name, has been a bringer of joy to many; but, like the seeker, his help has been partial only. He is a chaplain attendant upon the regiments of his own faith.

But by far the most significant product of our precocious religiosity in America and our early emancipation from ecclesiastical control has been indifferentism—that American indifferentism which has been easy because of our willingness to be responsible for our own evils, wide-spread because of our necessary obsession with material development, defensible in our century of good luck and the easy optimism that accompanies it.

Here lies the group by all odds the largest, and certainly worthy of the most anxious study. Here belongs the mass of everyday Americans upon whom rests the outcome of the immediate future. What lies beneath the seeming religious indifference of the American who is not ritualist, reformer, or seeker for spiritual consolation, who is, in short, the average American of office, mill, and law-court? That is the crux of the problem.

Indifferentism, of course, is the fashion of the age, and fashions are always delusive. In a Pullman smoker, watching the faces that, like a day of south wind in July, are soggy, unillumined, one despairs of one’s America. The human product of too much selling and buying has never been attractive; our half-education and the semi-intelligence that accompanies it have but defined the ill features, like careful breeding of pig or goat. It was a novel principle of primitive Christianity that lowliness and poverty might hide the noblest soul. If you followed these men home, saw their minds freed from the pressure of competition and out of the atmosphere of distrust, would your opinion alter? Are their religious instincts hidden by the mask of American commercialism, inactive merely because suppressed by custom and fashion? Are they lying fallow? Or are they like seed too long dormant and decaying?

If only we knew by what ingenious statistics these men might be classified, prophecy would not be difficult. If only we knew how many have become mere traffickers in bodily comfort, sensualists in fact, whatever they may be in name. If only we knew how many in their hearts were dumb seekers for some spiritual satisfactions that would raise the heart in adversity, lift the mind above the necessity for safety, pleasure, success, so that all might be pursued, all enjoyed, without flatness and disillusion. But no answer is ready; for there has been no test of the latent religion of America.

It is true that in the mass of American indifferentism the suppressed religious instinct exhibits itself by queer shoots of emotional enthusiasm for high things whether in war or in peace. It shows itself, or rather its suppression, by unexpected sentimentalism in hard places. It touches with melancholy many a typical American face in which one would expect to find self-satisfaction or arrogance. We struggle with our religious emotions in youth, suppress them in the middle years; in old age, deep buried like a hidden disease, they torment us. Old age is proverbially restless in America.

Nevertheless, the test that will reveal how much religion is latent in our democracy has not come yet; nor have our moral enthusiasms, our spiritual adventures, our reachings for tradition, been in our day really tested for the spirit behind them. There is reason to believe that the time is approaching. In a normal evolution of the bourgeois society that has made America, some clear revelation must have come of the religious spirit that as a race and a nation we are developing. Doubtless we would slowly have found our way to an expression more true to our nature than any of the partial modes so far allowed us. But there will be no normal, or at least no slow, evolution in the religious emotions of the old Americans. A factor from without, a sudden emergency, calls for an immediate reckoning of our spiritual assets. All, in every class, who are responsible for the American inheritance of ideals and morale and character are challenged, but especially the indifferents. Those neutrals in the conflict between spirit and matter can stay neutral no longer.

Bourgeois America, which means most of America, is, as every one sees, on the verge of a revolution like the political-social revolution of 1800. For a century we have pursued economics, and now economics is pursuing us. A new class is coming to the front, and yet that, perhaps, is of minor importance in America, where money and a little education extinguish distinctions between classes in two decades. What is coming with more significance is a new social system, wherein a new control of industry and a more equitable distribution of the products thereof is to be substituted for competitive individualism. Many are skeptical of the proposed practices by which this revolution is to be accomplished; few now doubt that its theory is correct and will some day be demonstrated.

But there has never been a revolution of any kind in world history that did not bring with it a revolution of all that tradition had established and custom made familiar. And this revolution, peaceful or otherwise, that is upon us differs from earlier examples in that its economic nature is clearly distinguished and, therefore, its challenge to all that we term esthetic, cultural, spiritual, religious, doubly sharp and direct. Food, clothing, and recreation, not religious or political liberty, are its legitimate, but also its only expressed, objects. If it gains these at the expense of the soul—of what we all understand by the soul in the ancient warning, “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”—if it gains material welfare and material welfare only, it will fail; and if it fails, we all go down with it.

In western Europe, one guesses, the struggle between a socialism always threatening to become purely materialistic and our own imperfect order will be differently conducted. There, and, especially in France and Great Britain, church organizations are powerful politically, socially, and in their grip upon the popular imagination. They will sharpen the conflict and confuse the issues, making the struggle seem to resemble many earlier combats between church and anti-church. But in bourgeois America no such easy and fallacious division will be possible. Here the question as to whether the new order is to satisfy the religious and moral, as well as the economic, needs of society will rest squarely upon the individual person. No church can speak for America, for no church ever has held or ever can hold Americans together. The responsibility here, and ultimately in Europe, must be personal. It will come to the question of how much religion is possessed by the normal American. When he is aroused by a struggle that sweeps into far wider questions than the tariff or the income tax, when his method of working, his method of living, his method of thinking, are all challenged by a new and militant social order, more dormant idealism, more latent cynicisms, intenser passions, will be aroused than one would ever have suspected in that shrewd and easy-going face in the Pullman smoker. Will religion be aroused also?

It is essential that we should bring about a better distribution of wealth; that we should give every child the equal opportunity that Jefferson had in mind when he wrote the vague, but magnificent, phrases of the Declaration of Independence. Democracy cannot be said to have been tried until we have made an economic democracy, and we are too far on the road of democratic experiment to stop half-way. But it is even more essential that we should carry on into the new community our moral enthusiasm, our ideals, and also that reverence for the shaping power, and love for its manifestations that lie behind them, and constitute the religious emotion which I shall not here attempt otherwise to define. Many fear that the nice taste, the trained mind, which have been borne upon the crest of civilization, will go down in the welter of indistinguishable breakers. There is little danger of this, since already it is the intellectuals who direct, and will direct, the new movement; and the professional man stands to gain as much as the laborer by a peaceful revolution. But in a socialistic world, built on the recovery of the unearned increment, standardized by wages, whose raison d’Être is the distribution of wealth, it is the religious instinct, with all that its free development implies for democracy, that is in the gravest danger. If we all become relatively rich—and this is an idea of the earthly paradise that socialism undoubtedly encourages—how many will crawl through the eye of the needle?

The labor party is not immediately responsible for the saving or the freeing of the religious instinct. Its first objectives are the comforts and material opportunities of civilization; and until these are reached we have no right to expect religious leadership from the proletariat. If any one is responsible, it is the old American, the bourgeois American. He has inherited the spiritual tradition of his ancestors; he has profited by emancipation from superstition and institutional tyranny; he has lived in a comfortable world with opportunities to illumine the spirit by literature and the arts and education. He is not going to be crushed or driven out of his inheritance; there are too many of him, and he too closely resembles in everything but habit of life the proletariat that is rising. Upon this American rests the burden of spiritualizing as well as educating his new masters—upon the moral enthusiasts, the traditionalists, the seekers, most of all. It is such a task as the church faced in the dark ages, when barbarians had to be not only spiritualized, but civilized as well. It is a lesser task, for our new invaders are not barbarians, and their leaders are intellectually the equal of ours. Whether the outlook for success is greater, depends upon the spirit we bring to the enterprise. Our knowledge is greater; is our will that man should make more than a market of his time, sleeping and feeding, as great as the great wills of earlier centuries?

No one can answer; but of this we can be assured, that the solution rests in American indifferentism. If the commercial American is as material as he looks, if common sense is his only good, if his idealism is merely inherited habit, if he responds to two impulses only, restlessness and sentimentality, then he will go over to socialism in its most mechanical phase and, instead of saving the new party, he will ruin it. Potentially the most ardent supporters of a purely materialistic socialism, in which the individual person counts for nothing aside from his appetites, are precisely the “practical” business men who now curse the new order most loudly because it threatens their accumulations. For them it is civil war between seekers for the dollar; and civil war is always the bitterest, and the soonest healed. Such men have been our leaders. Is the army behind them?

I think that the rank and file of bourgeois America are less concerned with wealth and the struggle for wealth than we suppose. I think that they are not so much dazzled by millions as in the ’nineties; more anxious for simplicity of heart, which spells content, and worthiness of aim, which satisfies conscience, than one would guess from Wall Street or Broadway or public life in the Middle West. I think that, while distrusting the economic paradise of the more material socialists, they are closer in sympathy to a thoughtful laborer than to a cynical capitalist. If the religious instinct among them emerges as a disgust for petty emotions, as a passionate interest in humanity, as a willingness to sacrifice privilege and prejudice for a fuller life more generously shared, if the religion of our democracy finds no more expression than this, the crisis will pass. If even thus far indifferentism should yield to active spiritual faith, the bourgeoisie would cease being bourgeois, and we could cease to fear the triumph of the proletariate, since, if there was anything good in our old stock, we could convert them to it.

But if the American has lost his religious instincts, if behind his practical common sense and his vigorous idealism and his eager experiments in spirituality there is nothing but a restless energy working upon the momentum of convictions long dead, then let the new Americans absorb us quickly, for we are worn out.

With all humbleness, with a full realization of the trivialities of hustle and bustle in which we have sunk our religion, with concern for our escape from easy-going optimism and skeptical content, I, for one, feel too sure of the depth of our racial legacy of reverence, and the fundamental religiosity of the American character at its truest, to admit for a moment that conclusion of despair.