It is a deeply significant fact that in recent times the defence of Christianity takes much more often the form of a claim that it is socially useful than that of an attempt to prove it true. The argument from utility is indeed an old one: it is an error to say, as did J. S. Mill, that men have been little concerned to put it in competition with the argument from truth; but the former is now in special favour. Insofar as it proceeds upon a survey of Christian history it may here be left to the test of confrontation with the facts; but as it is constantly urged with regard to the actual state of life and faith, it is necessary to consider it in conclusion.

The chief difficulty in such an inquiry is that the most irreconcilable formulas are put forth on the side and in the name of belief. Commonly it is claimed that all that is good in current morality is derived from Christian sources; that morally scrupulous unbelievers are so because of their religious training or environment; and that a removal of the scaffolding of creed will bring to ruin the edifice of conduct that is held to have been reared by its means. It is not usually realized that such an argument ends in crediting to paganism and Judaism the alleged moral merits of the first Christians. It might indeed be suggested, as against the traditional account of their pre-eminent goodness, that either they, in turn, owed their character to their antecedents, or their creed lost its efficacy after the first generation. But the historic answer to the claim is that there has never been any such moralizing virtue in the Christian or any other creed in historically familiar times as need alarm any one for the moral consequences of its gradual disappearance. All sudden and revolutionary changes in popular moral standards certainly appear to be harmful; but the great majority of such changes in the Christian era have been worked under the auspices of faith, having consisted not in the abandonment of belief, but in the restatement of ethics in terms of “inspiration.” Unbelief proceeds with no such cataclysmic speed. It is not conceivable that the gradual dissolution of supernaturalist notions will ever of itself work such evil as is told of in the story of the military evangel of Christianity in the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Albigensian massacres, the conquests of Mexico and Peru, the Anabaptist movement at the outset of the Reformation, or the massacre of St. Bartholomew, to say nothing of the death-roll of the Inquisition and the mania against witchcraft. Even the bloodshed of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, wrought under peculiar political perturbation, was under the auspices not of atheists but of theists.

If it be asked wherein lies the specific value of dogma as a moral restraint, in terms of actual observation, there are to be found no facts that can induce a scientific inquirer to struggle for the maintenance of a creed believed to be untrue in the hope that it will prove morally useful. Moral evils may for the purposes of such an inquiry be broadly classed under the heads of vice, crime, poverty, and war; and only in regard to the first is there even a plausible pretence that supernaturalist belief is a preventive. It might indeed seem likely, on first thought, that a cancelling of supernaturalist vetoes on the pleasures of the senses may lead to increased indulgence; but those vetoes apply to all sensual indulgence alike, and no one now pretends that unbelievers are more given to gluttony and drunkenness than believers; though the latter may doubtless claim, in respect of the Catholic Church, to include a larger number of extreme ascetics, as do the votaries of faiths pronounced by Catholics to be false. While, then, there may and do arise modifications of the religious formulas of ethics, there is absolutely no reason to apprehend that any form of conduct will be less considerate on naturalist than on supernaturalist principles. The Christian doctrine of forgiveness for sins must do more to encourage licence than can be done by any rationalistic ethic. Even where naturalism might give a sanction which Christian dogma withholds, as in the case of suicides, it is not found that any statistical change is set up by unbelief. Poverty, again, has probably been normally worse in Christian Europe throughout the whole Christian era than in any previous or non-Christian civilization; and the most systematic schemes for its extinction in recent times are of non-Christian origin, though a personal and habitual effort to modify the stress of poverty is one of the more creditable features of organized Christian work. As regards crime, the case is much the same. The vast majority of criminals hold supernaturalist beliefs, atheism being extremely rare among them; and while many Christians have in the past done good and zealous work towards a humane and rational treatment of criminals, the only scientific and comprehensive schemes now on foot are framed on naturalist lines, and are denounced by professed Christians on theological lines, either as being sinfully lenient to wrongdoing or as being “cold-blooded.” Thus supernaturalism remains prone to a cruel and irrational ideal of retribution, even while some of its champions profess to combat scientific methods in the name of humanity.

It is in regard to the influence of religious teaching on international relations, however, that the saddest conclusions are forced upon the student of Christian history. The foregoing pages have shown how potent has been organized Christianity to promote strife and slaughter, how impotent to restrain them. If any instance could be found in history of a definite prevention of war on grounds of Christian as distinguished from prudential motive, it would have been there recorded. So flagrant is the record that when it is cited the Christian defence veers round from the position above viewed to one which unconsciously places the source of civilization in human reason. Yet even thus the historic facts are misstated. The enormity of Christian strifes in the past is now apologetically accounted for by the fantastic theorem that hitherto men have not “understood” Christianity, and that only in modern times have its founder’s teachings been properly comprehended. Obviously there has been no such development: the gospel’s inculcations of love and concord are as simple as may be, and have at all times been perfectly intelligible: what has been lacking is the habit of mind and will that secures the fulfilment of such precepts. And recent experience has painfully proved, once for all, that the religious or “believer’s” temper, instead of being normally conducive to such action, is normally the worst hindrance to it.

An explanation is to be found in a study of the normal results of guiding conduct by emotional leanings rather than by critical reflection. The former is peculiarly the process of evangelical religion. Hence comes the practical inefficacy of a love of peace derived either inertly through acceptance of a form of words declared to be sacred, or through an emotional assent to such words emotionally propounded. Emotions so evolved are of the surface, and are erased as easily as they are induced, by stronger emotions proceeding from the animal nature. Only a small minority of Christians, accordingly, are found to resist the rush of warlike passions; and some who call most excitedly for peace when there is no war are found among those most excited by the war passion as soon as the contagion stirs. It may be noted as a decisive fact in religious history that in regard to the war which raged while these pages were first being penned,1 the movement of critical opposition and expostulation succeeded almost in the ratio of men’s remoteness from the Christian faith. Among the Quaker sect, so long honourably distinguished by its testimony against war, there was a considerable reversion to the normal temper, as if the old conviction had been in many cases lost in the process of merely hereditary transmission. Among the Christian Churches so called, by far the most peace-loving is the Unitarian, which rejects the central Christian dogma. And among the public men associated with the protest against the war, the number known to be rationalists was proportionally as large as that of the supernaturalists was small. The personal excellence and elevation of moral feeling shown among the latter group is thus no warrant for seeing the cause in their creed. In such matters there is no invariable rule, every section exhibiting psychical divergence within itself; but it is now statistically clear that the standing claim for the conventional creed as being peculiarly helpful to the cause of peace is false. The title of “Bible-loving” had for a generation been applied to England by its pietists. The same title is confessedly applicable to the Boers of South Africa. Yet no consciousness of a common creed ever availed to restrain the hatred of the Christian mass in England towards their “enemy.”

The recent history of the near East conveys a similar lesson. For generations the Turkish autocracy was able to keep down the Christian peoples under its rule by means of their mutual hates. It was not community of religion that brought about the Balkan and Greek combination of 1912: it was military and political calculation; and the overthrow of Turkey was no sooner completed than the Christian combatants were on the verge of war with each other. Between Greek and Bulgarian there seems to be to-day the same animosity as existed in the Dark Ages; and Greek orthodoxy declaims against the “irreligion” of educated Bulgaria, while the mass of the Bulgarian people remains as superstitious as that of Greece. As regards standards of conduct, the former seem to have capped every savagery of which Turkish irregulars have ever been guilty. Whatever may be the outcome of freedom for self-development in the light of western civilization, there is plainly nothing to choose as between Christian and Moslem moral material in those regions after two thousand years of Christianity. Such facts bring out once for all the sociological truth as to the part played by Christianity in civilization. The progress of the more advanced States has not been caused by creed. If that were the lifting factor, Abyssinia should be on the same plane with the leading European States. Once more, it is not Christianity that has civilized modern Europe, but the variously caused and conditioned progress of Europe that has civilized Christianity; even as the conditions and forces of ancient Hellas civilized its paganism.

Such tests are of course not those that will be first put by a scrupulous mind seeking to know whether the Christian creed be true. Rather they are forced on such a mind by the tactics of believers, who as a rule seek to evade the fundamental issue. It is not unlikely, therefore, in view of present painful experience, that for some time to come the stress of defence will shift to the attempt, never entirely abandoned, to defend the faith on evidential or philosophic grounds. We have thus to consider finally the apparent effects of Christian credences and institutions on the intellectual life of the time.

So far as it can be historically traced, the intellectual influence of Christianity was relatively at its best when it began to be propounded as a creed in critical relation to Judaism. Intellectual gain was checked as soon as it became a substantive creed, demanding submissive acceptance. From that point forward it becomes a restraint on intellectual freedom, save insofar as it stirred believers to a one-sided criticism of pagan beliefs, a process of which the educational effect was promptly annulled by a veto on its extension to the beliefs of the critics. It has been argued indeed that modern science has been signally advanced by the mental bias that goes with monotheism; but the historical fact is that Jewish monotheism was much less friendly to science than Babylonian polytheism; that the beginnings of Greek science were among polytheists and, perhaps, atheists; that Saracen monotheism owed its scientific stimulus to the recovered thought of polytheistic Greece; and that, whatever impulse a truly monotheistic philosophy may have given to modern science, the usual influence of Christian belief has been to override the idea of invariable causation in nature. Even after the belief in recurrent miracles is disavowed, the doctrine and practice of prayer remain to represent the old concept.

On the other hand, the kind of violence done to the instinct for concrete or historical truth by the frauds and delusions of the early and medieval Church, though greatly attenuated in modern times, has never ended. Critical judgment has only slowly recovered the strength and stature it had in the pre-Christian world; and wherever faith has plenary rule such judgment is liable to arbitrary interdict. It is true that even in the nineteenth century some great servants of science have been either orthodox Christians or devout theists. Faraday and Joule, Pasteur and Kelvin, are cases in point. But instead of the religious creed having in such cases furnished the cue or the motive to the scientific work done, it is found to be out of all logical relation to it, and to be a mere obstruction to the scientific use of the reason on the religious problem itself.

To a considerable extent the rigid adherence to religious beliefs or professions in defiance of evidence is on all fours with any other form of conservatism, as the social and the political. Inasmuch, however, as religion proffers both a specific comfort in this life and a specific reward in another, it has a power of intellectual fixation with which no other can compare; and there is something unique in the spectacle of religious doctrines kept in an unchanged form by means of an economic basis consecrated to them. It has been seen in the foregoing history that for two thousand years no creed with such a basis has been overthrown either wholly or locally save by a force which confiscated its endowments or suppressed its worship. Thus, and thus only, did Christianity triumph over southern and northern paganism; thus did Islam triumph over Christianity in parts of its world, and fall again before it in others; and thus did Protestantism expel Catholicism from many countries and suffer expulsion in turn from some of them. Where endowments can subsist, with freedom of worship, no form of doctrine that is wedded to the endowments ever yields directly to criticism.

Christianity has thus had in the modern world a relatively more sinister influence on the intellectual life than was wrought by any phase of paganism even in periods when the intelligence of the ancient world was divorced from its established religion. The divorce is now more complete than ever before; but the bribe to conformity is greater than ever, relatively at least to the light of the time. The result is a maximum of insincerity, whether or not the bribe is given by a standing endowment. Dissenting or voluntary churches in the Protestant countries offer an income to more or less educated men on condition of propounding the creed of the past; and the more intelligent minority within the churches are weighed down in every effort at a modification of doctrine by the orthodoxy of the uncritical or fanatical many, who control the endowments. Social and commercial life conform to the conditions, and everywhere the profession of belief is far in excess of the actuality—a state of things unfavourable to all morality. The very attempt to adjust the system to the pressure of modern thought exhibits the process of demoralization. From the clergy we have neither straightforward defence nor straightforward avowal of old error. Christianity is defended not as being true but as being socially useful and privately comforting; and a general pretence is made of maintaining the continuity of a historic creed whose central and fundamental dogmas are no longer held save by the most uncritical.

It is not only in religion and ethics that the influence of endowed and organized Christianity is thus intellectually baneful. Every science in turn, from the days of Galileo, has had to fight for its life against the sanctified ignorance of all the churches; and while the physical sciences, which can be taught without open reference to traditional error, have carried their point and received endowment in turn, happily without being tied down to any documents, the moral sciences are either kept in tutelage to theology in the universities of many countries, our own included, or forced to leave out of their scope the phenomena of religion itself, and in particular the sociological problem of Christian history. At the beginning of the present century there was not a single chair of sociology in a British university2; and even in the United States, where such chairs are common, they and the historical chairs alike are barred from any free treatment of religious evolution. Ethical teaching is similarly limited; and a science which on that side threatened to turn the flank of religious doctrine—to wit, phrenology—was at an early stage of its progress in the first half of the nineteenth century successfully ostracized, so that, lacking the expert handling without which no science can be kept sound, it has been relegated even for most naturalists to the limbo of exploded error, without ever having been scientifically developed or confuted.

In fine, the science of society, the most momentous of all, is by reason of the very nature of organized religion kept in trammels, lest it should undermine the reign of faith. It makes its way in virtue of the whole scientific movement of the age, and is perhaps most progressive in the countries where, as in France and Italy, an official Catholicism has prevented the academic compromise between faith and science which is effected in the Protestant world, but is powerless to keep independent science out of the universities. In those countries, however, there are compromises of other kinds; and in modern France there has been seen, in the case of Captain Dreyfus, the spectacle of the clerical influence combining with that of the army to enforce an insensate act of injustice, less from any intelligent motive of a direct bearing than for the sake of a general alliance in which each of the two great conservative and anti-progressive institutions backs the other for general reactionary ends. Thus religious feeling abets social and political malice; and such movements as that of anti-Semitism, fostered by Christian organizations, can secure support from others as the price of clerical support.

As a result of its autocratic and centralized system, further, Catholicism is a special force of political conservatism in Catholic countries, with the single exception of Ireland, where its dependence on the mass of the people has thus far kept it in close alliance with their nationalist movement in despite of any papal restrictions. Such an alliance is of course unfavourable to intellectual progress on other lines; and English Protestant policy, largely directed by sectarian feeling, has thus preserved in Ireland the type of Catholicism it fears. Such Catholicism still tends to retard popular education; and the one general advantage the Protestant countries can claim over the Catholic is their lower degree of illiteracy. On the other hand, the rationalism of the more enlightened Catholic countries, where the Church lacks official power, is as a rule more explicit, more awake to the nature of the force opposed to it; while in Protestant Germany it is little concerned to oppose a Church with small organized or academic influence, and till lately attempted little popular criticism of faith. Every country thus presents some special type of intellectual harm or drawback resulting from the presence of organized Christianity; and in all alike it makes in varying degrees an obstacle to light.

In the highest degree does this seem to be true of the land where it has had the longest continuous life. Alone among the nations Greece contributes nothing to the world’s renovation. Italy, despite the papacy, has a swarm of eager and questioning thinkers, working at the human sciences; Spain stirs under all the leaden folds of clericalism; but Greece, where the faith has never undergone eclipse since Justinian’s day, remains intellectually almost Byzantine, vainly divided between Christian dogma and an external classic tradition, neither ancient nor modern. Yet this is the one European country where belief is ostensibly untroubled by its enemy. It is hard to say how far the surface of orthodoxy conforms to the mental life underneath; but there is no escape from the conclusion that a new mental life can return to the land of Aristotle only in the measure in which it fully readmits from the West the spirit of search and challenge which he and Socrates left to re-inspire a world growing moribund under the spell of faith.

It follows from the foregoing history and survey that Christianity, regarded by its adherents as either the one progressive and civilizing religion or the one most helpful to progress and civilization, is in no way vitally different from the others which have a theistic basis, and is in itself neither more nor less a force of amelioration than any other founding on sacred books and supernaturalist dogmas. Enlightened Christians with progressive instincts have justified them in terms of Christian doctrine, even as enlightened Moslems, Brahmans, and Buddhists have justified their higher ideals in terms of their doctrine; and the special fortune of Christianity has lain in this, that after nearly a thousand years in which it was relatively retrograde as compared with Islam, which during a large part of the time was progressive, both being what they were in virtue of institutions and environment, the environment was so far politically changed that the Christian countries gradually progressed, while the Moslem countries lost ground. To-day it is becoming clear to instructed eyes that the faiths were not the causal forces; and in Asia the rapid development of Japan in the past generation has vividly demonstrated the fallacy of the Christian view. As there was great progress under ancient paganism, under each one of the great creeds or cults of Asia, under Islam, and under Christianity, so there may be much greater progress in the absence of them all, in virtue of a wider knowledge, a more scientific polity, and a more diffused culture.

The ultimate problem is to forecast the future. A confident faith in continual progress is one of the commonest states of mind of the present, the consciously scientific age; and in view of the unmistakable decadence of the creeds as such, it is natural to rationalists to expect an early reduction of Christianity to the status now held by “folk-lore,” a species of survival dependent on ignorance upon the one hand and antiquarian curiosity on the other. But while this may be called probable, there can be no scientific certainty in the matter. For one thing, the process must for economic reasons be much slower than used to be thought likely, for instance, in the time of Voltaire, who allowed a century for the extinction of the Christian creed. Voltaire was so far right that a century has seen Christianity abandoned, after a reaction, by a large part of the best intelligence of our age, as it was by that of his. But there may be more reactions; and there is always a conceivable possibility of a total decadence, such as overtook the civilization of the old Mediterranean world.

The question is at bottom one of political science. Greek and Roman civilization failed primarily through the incapacity of the ancient States to set up a polity of international peace, secondarily through the effects of the military despotism which that failure superinduced. As the problem is all of a piece, avoidance of the old error will presumably mean avoidance of the old doom. A similar political failure in the modern world would in all likelihood mean the same sequence of military imperialism, possibly with better economic management, but with the same phenomena of intellectual decline and reversion to fanaticism and superstition among populations debarred from political activity and free speech. It is indeed dimly conceivable that, as has been suggested by way of fiction, the mere warfare of capital and labour may end in the degradation of the people, and the consequent reduction of upper-class life to the plane of mere sensuous gratification and “practical” science. In either event, a religion now seen by instructed men to be incredible may be preserved by a community neither instructed nor religious.

The hope of the cause of reason then lies with the political ideals and movements which best promise to save democracy and to elevate the mass. It is hopefully significant that, as we have seen, the most systematic and scientific of these movements are pronouncedly rationalistic; and it is safe to say that their ultimate success depends on their rationalism. All past movements for the social salvation of the mass have failed for lack of social science; and dogmatic Christianity in its most humane and sympathetic forms remains the negation of such science. What is called “Christianity without dogma” is merely humane sentiment misnamed.

It is essential to a durable advance, however, that it should be pure of violence, and utterly tolerant. When popular education has emptied all or any of the churches, as it has already gone some way towards doing, the spontaneous revenue of those which are voluntary bodies will in the main have ceased; and by that time the majority will be in a position to dispose of national funds in the social interest. Such a course will be facile to a society which provides work for all and sustains all; and when the bribe of sectarian endowment is thus made void, the more factitious life of ancient error will be at an end. But the most speculative construction of the future provides for the widest individual and psychological freedom; and there will have been no true triumph of reason if philosophic and historic error, recognized as such, have not a free field. The Utopia of rationalism will be reached when supernaturalism in the present sense of the term shall have passed away as the belief in witchcraft has done, without pressure of pains and penalties. And that Utopia will be the rendezvous, belike, of more than one social ideal—of all, indeed, which trust to reason for the attainment of righteousness.