Victory out of Ruin

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

THE ONLY HOPE

'To a large extent the working people of this country do not care any more for the doctrines of Christianity than the upper classes care for the practice of that religion.'—JOHN BRIGHT in the year 1880.

It is wonderful how quickly, when a peril is past, men forget about it and straightway compose themselves to slumbrous dreams again. It was so after the Great War; it is so already regarding the great strikes. 'Don't disturb our repose,' they as good as say; 'we have had an anxious time; do let us sleep.' But wars and strikes are only symptoms of the hidden disease; and the allaying of a symptom without the healing of the disease is of all things the most dangerous. What we must consider is the disease and set ourselves to find a remedy. Then, and then only, will the symptoms harass us no more. It was a little bald man with a straggling beard and one eye that had got a little tired of the long-continued effort to look at the other, who set me thinking. The burden of his contention was that this country and the world at large is sinking back into paganism. Though I endeavour to keep an open mind and refuse to accept opinions ready-made, however much inclined I may be to shirk the preliminary fatigue of forming opinions of my own, yet the opinions of my friend are worth recording. They are at least gropings after the truth.

I

'What is the test of a Christian?' asked the little man, trying to bring his vagrant eye to bear on me; 'if we once settle that we shall be able to judge whether this is now a Christian world. The test is not beliefs or opinions regarding the Founder of Christianity (for trifles such as that men used cheerfully to burn their fellows aforetime, thinking they were doing God service); to find the true test we must go back to the only test known to those who knew Christ. What was their test? It was this—'If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.' That spirit was love enduring even the Cross—love emptying itself that it might serve. Now, apply that test to our social organisation to-day. In the one city you find in one street mansions such as a Roman emperor could only desire in vain; and a few yards away a street of crowded closes and airless dugouts and fetid tenements where little children perish. Herod slaughtered a score of babies and the centuries pour the vials of infamy upon him. But this holocaust goes on, year in year out, ceaselessly. Yet the dwellers in the terraces tolerate that. The causes that produce slums and keep slums full are manifest. Yet they will not rouse themselves to remove them. Is that being a Christian? We assemble in church and recite, "I believe in God the Father," and every fact of the faith we profess condemns our callous indifference. If we realised that God is the Father of these babes, we would die to save them; yet we leave them a prey to vested interests. Is that toleration of evil compatible with Christianity?'

'You forget,' I objected, 'the law of environment....