I Believe and other essays

I speak from personal experience; and when I look back upon the reviews I wrote ten years ago, it is with invariable consternation, and sometimes a real sense of shame.

Nevertheless, there is some criticism of the religious novel which must be taken seriously. I have maintained that men generally in England are in a state of theological confusion, but that they are interested in religion if they can be induced to consider it. There is, as the great African Presbyter wrote seventeen hundred years ago, a natural response in the hearts of men to the chief articles of the Christian Faith. There is a Testimonium animæ naturaliter christianæ. But there are some who can only be described by a quotation: “They are the enemies of the cross of Christ.” They are determined that the Catholic creed shall have no place in the counsels and considerations of social legislation. Of Jesus Christ they have said, “We will not have this man to reign over us;” and if there be any chance that a man’s books may catch the eye of the public and rouse people to think whether opportunism is really statesmanship, and empiricism in politics really prudent, if, in a word, the principles of Christianity are offered as a solution of social problems, then the author is attacked on every side. It is suggested that his intention is insincere, that his knowledge is inadequate. The things which have been part of his painful discipline and development are described as his accepted environment. If a Bishop happens to find an illustration for a sermon in his pages, or a prominent Nonconformist divine recognizes that the laity like to read them, and says so; if any of those true hearts who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity have been ready to see that men who have been rescued de profundis, men who have had experience of [Greek: ta bathea tou satana] are not thereby disqualified for duty in the field of Faith; if, in a word, books which claim for Christianity the first place in the thought of the time are successful, a very malignant hostility is aroused.

It is most probable that this hatred of Christianity will grow and increase. The world has never before been as it is to-day. The system of party politics has placed power in the hands of the democracy. The “working man” has at last discovered what he can do. He must make his choice between the secular and the religious principle. Hitherto the Christian pastors of the people have appealed to his emotions, and not without success. The emotions will always be the chief guides in conduct for many; but the leaders of the working men are hard-headed, well read in social science and politics; and, owing to the insufficient training of the clergy in these subjects, the politicians of the proletariat have conceived a sort of contempt for the parson and the minister and the priest. The small body of Unitarians, wealthy from their constant intermarriage with the great Jewish families, and opposed to an aristocracy which has only in the last forty years been willing to receive them, has been quick to see that the working man must be alienated from the Catholic creed, and his vote secured at any cost. On the railway bookstalls we may note the activity of the Unitarian propaganda committee. Fifty years ago it was not necessary to consider the opinions of the man in the street: the Unitarian minister and his congregation were comfortable in the assurance of their own intellectual culture and their kindly interest for the poorer classes. In politics they were Liberals, for an Established Church interfered with their sense of superiority, and the landed proprietors and the hereditary aristocracy socially ignored them. But they had no notion of calling into existence an electorate which should endanger the supremacy of the capitalist, and, like Frankenstein, they are afraid of their own creations, now that the working man has become the dispenser of Parliamentary power. It is vital to their interests that he should be diverted from further attacks upon capital, and encouraged to believe that it is the priest who is his true foe. “Le cléricalisme voilà l’ennemi” is a convenient cry. A vague Deism is not dangerous to wealthy manufacturers; but if the clergy are going to take up Christian Socialism it is time to be up and doing. So every weapon against the creed of Christendom is being taken down and examined, and many an old fallacy is refurbished and employed once more. Celsus is disinterred from the tomb in which Origen had buried him, and his filthy slander of the Blessed Virgin is printed as though it were a new discovery of historical research. Collins is called into court again as though Bentley had never exposed his ignorance, and Hume’s a priori method is revived as though it had never been discredited; whilst Strauss and Renan are quoted as authorities, as if Westcott and Lightfoot had never been known. Shunt the working classes on a new line of rails. Set them shrieking against sacramentalists, and swearing at sacerdotalists, and we may quietly arrange our commercial combinations and protect our manufacturing interests!

I want to see the seats under the dome of St. Paul’s filled not by only the middle-aged middle classes, who for the most part are Christian in creed, but by the young artisans and craftsmen, and the strong politicians who fill the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, and crowd the great Assembly Rooms of Birmingham and Liverpool when an election is drawing near. The timid members of the Episcopate who may be reminded that “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap,” are not our only Bishops. Occasionally a Prime Minister offers for election and consecration a man who can reach the minds and consciences of men. Is it too great an ambition for a storyteller to try to arouse in people’s minds a suspicion that after all something may be said for the Catholic Faith, and so to bring them to listen to those who know and can teach it? Each man must do his work with such tools as have come in his way. The Mission preacher will use his magnetic power, the artist whose skill it is to build or to paint, will make his appeal to the love of order and beauty, the musicians will meet the heart through the ear. May not the writer of fiction use his psychological training and his knowledge of many sides of human life to create a story which shall set men thinking about the old doctrines which he believes to have lost none of their regenerating power?

There is danger lest men with good intentions should go blindly to work to redress and diminish social grievances. Individualism with its hateful cry, “Each man for himself and the devil take the hindmost,” is now at a discount, but it may be replaced by a despotism of State regulation which will destroy the family and the home. There is, I believe, only one creed which can make the capitalist unselfish and the sons of labour satisfied, which will tell men that wealth means responsibility and that there is dignity in toil, which will teach the rich man to order himself lowly and reverently to those who are his betters and to hurt nobody by word or deed, which will teach the labourer that his chief need is not other men’s wealth, but the “carrière ouverte aux talents” and the determination to do his duty in that state of life, whatever it may be, unto which God shall call him.

It is the Holy Catholic Faith which makes equality of opportunity for all men its earthly ambition, and offers refreshment and hope to those who are not strong enough to strive with the rest. The old men saw visions and we have found that they were prophecies, a young man may dream dreams. My dream is that the men who are doing the work of the world to-day may be taught that Christ is their best teacher and the Incarnate God their refuge and strength.

There is a tale of an acrobat and juggler who knew well that his tricks were the outcome of years of concentrated effort and constant exercise, and being moved by the Grace of God, he desired to offer the best thing he had to give to the Lord of Life. His best was his skill. He lived by it. Shown in the streets and the play places, it won for him his daily bread. His work was to give men amusement in their hours of recreation by an exhibition of his feats of strength and nimbleness. Could this, his one talent, be consecrated and devoted to God? So he considered, and humbly sought the sanctuary, and there before the Presence he performed his fantastic tricks which had cost him years of endeavour. The story is a parable which men have not been slow to read, and it has become the theme of the musician and artist.

Shall I offend my fellow-writers if I repeat it here in this connection?

II

THE FIRES OF MOLOCH

“There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets.”

Every three months with unfailing regularity small paragraphs appear in the daily papers headed “RECORD LOW BIRTH-RATE.” Some figures follow, and then occurs the sentence – unhappily a stereotyped one in our day – “This is the lowest rate recorded in any quarter since civil registration began.”

Now and again a blue-book upon the subject of the birth-rate is dissected by a journalist and the result appears in his newspaper as a series of startling figures. The story of England’s decadence is set out in the plainest language for every one to read.

At rarer intervals still, some prominent clergyman or sociologist writes or lectures in order to call attention to what is going on, and thus to bring home the spiritual and economic dangers of our racial suicide.

A few people read or listen and are convinced. A good many other people are too utterly ignorant of either the Philosophy of Christianity or the Science of Sociology to understand in the least what the point of view of the protesters is. According to their temperament, they smile quietly and dismiss the subject, or bellow their disgust at such a subject being mentioned at all.

“He who far off beholds another dancing,And all the timeHears not the music that he dances to,Thinks him a madman.”

A party which has the fools at its back is always in the majority, and discussion is stifled, alarm is lulled by the anodyne of indifference and the great number of honest folk who call themselves both Patriots and Christians have no time to spare from fighting and squabbling for money – in order that the dishonest men may not get it all.

Half-a-dozen problems of extreme national importance confront every thinking English man and woman in 1907. The air is thick with their stir and movement, and so great is the noise and reverberation of them that true “royalty” of “inward happiness” seems a thing impossible and past by in these troubled times. Be that as it may, it is quite certain that one of the most real and pressing of these problems is that summed up in the stock phrase “Record Low Birth-rate.”

We hear a great deal about the doings of a class of people who are referred to as “The Smart Set,” and it is actually said that its influence is having a serious effect upon the national character. I do not believe it for a moment. It seems a folly to suppose that a handful of champagne corks floating on a cess-pool has any far-reaching influence upon the English home. I mention that small section of society constituted by the idle and luxurious rich, because, whatever their vices are, they are being used as whipping-boy for enormous numbers of people whose lives are equally guilty with theirs in at least one regard – in the matter of which I am writing now.

I propose in this essay to discuss the question of the decline in the birth-rate from the Christian and Catholic standpoint. There is only one perfect philosophy, and all other half-true philosophies in the light of which we might consider such a momentous matter as this, lead only to the conclusion that expediency is the highest good. Without the incentive of the Christian Faith and without the light of the Incarnation one may sit in a corner and think till “all’s blue in cloud cuckoo land.” Christianity can alone be reconciled with Economics, theory and practice celebrating always the marriage of the King’s son, the wedding of Heaven and Earth, the spiritual and the material. Plato knew that it was impossible to raise the Greek state to the level of his philosophic principles, and Aristotle frankly abandons the attempt to connect ethics and politics with the highest conclusions of his creed. We are in the same position to-day if we ignore the supreme truth which is our possession and which was not vouchsafed to the great Greek thinkers.

There is one cause and one cause only of the decline in the birth-rate and the beginning of the country’s spiritual and material suicide.

The way of Nature is for every species to increase nearly to its possible maximum of numbers. This is a proved law, and nothing but the limitation of families by artificial means, or infanticide, can check its operation.

The truth is exactly as Dr. Barry put it nearly two years ago, “It stands confessed that the great, proud, English race, famous as a people for manly virtues, once the very Stoics of Christian Europe decline more and more to be fathers and mothers, will not be worried with children, and – cannot be spoken of in decent language.”

It is a truth of history that when a nation begins to refuse the responsibility of providing for posterity it begins to decline.

The doctrines of Malthus in his great Essay on the Principles of Population, are no longer believed in by the Christian philosopher. Malthus was perfectly sound upon the ethical problem, and the “Neo-Malthusians,” of whom I shall presently speak, have no right whatever to use his name upon their banners. Malthus, so the modern socialistic thinker, such as Mr. H. G. Wells avers, “demonstrated for all time that a State whose population continues to increase in obedience to unchecked instinct can progress only from bad to worse. From the point of view of human comfort and happiness the increase of population that occurs at each advance in human security is the greatest evil of life.”

Malthus, however, never once suggested or advocated the limitation of population by mechanical means. He believed that it was a patriotic duty of men and women to abstain from producing more children than the State could bear, and it is as well to remove at once a popular misconception which stains the name of a good man and a powerful though mistaken thinker.

Otter says of him in a memoir, “His life was more than any other we have ever witnessed, a perpetual flow of enlightened benevolence, contentment and peace; it was the best and purest philosophy, brightened by Christian views and softened by Christian charity.”

It is economically and from the sociological point of view that the modern student condemns the theories of Malthus and those who follow him.

Socialist thinkers disregard the entity of nations, and treat of the world and its population as a whole. The Christian Patriot loves his own country, believes in its destiny no less than he reveres its past, and knows that if our English nation is going to live, it must go on reproducing itself.

The “no room to live” theory is preposterous upon the face of it. In 1879, Lord Derby asked a somewhat obvious question. “Surely,” he said, “it is better to have thirty-five millions of human beings leading useful and intelligent lives, rather than forty millions struggling painfully for a bare subsistence.”

This has been made into a watchword by those who advocate the limitation of population.

It can be answered by a simple statement of fact – in our colonies there are places for a hundred million wives.

While I have not lost sight of the main object of this paper – to summarize the weight of Catholic Christian feeling upon the mechanical limitation of population, and to tell how this is being accomplished – I find that there is yet some ground to be cleared before coming to the main issue.

I have said that there is only one material cause of our decadence, but there are many reasons.

More than a year ago in one or two newspapers, particularly the Daily Chronicle, various sociologists gave the results of their thought upon the matter. I print a few extracts here.

The outspoken Dr. Barry wrote: —

…”‘As for religion, Christian or any other, when its dogmas are no longer believed, its ethics pass away,’ and he draws a picture of the rotten state of society in our Western world, which he attributes directly to the growth of agnosticism. The fact that the birth-rate in England has been declining for twenty-five years, and was lowest in 1904, seems to Dr. Barry to be due to several causes – ’poverty and luxury, pleasure-seeking and disbelief in the Bible,’ and he adds, ‘The spirit of anarchic individualism that cries, “No God, no Master!” is needed to tell us why Englishmen and their wives, once dedicated to a blameless and lasting union, have fallen into the pit which Malthus or his followers digged for them.’ England alone is not at fault. ‘Wherever unbelief has taken hold, or doubt saps the ancient creeds, there Malthus reigns instead of Christ.’”

A “well-known public man” wrote: —

…“It is within my knowledge that certain flats in Mayfair and elsewhere for the married servant and artisan class are let on the express or implied condition that not only no children shall be brought into the tenements, but that none shall be born there. The direct consequence of this embargo on natural increase is terribly disastrous. Many footmen and coachmen in Mayfair could tell a tragical story of the results of compulsory sterility.

“A Japanese friend was telling me the other day that after an absence from England of a dozen years he is startled at the visible deterioration of the race and the great increase of penniless British weaklings, who add strength to no nation. ‘You English are losing both patriotism and religion, and consequently you are not only decadent but doomed, unless you mend your ways in the treatment of women and children.’”

I take the following from a leading article in the Church Times: —

…“After making all allowances for minor contributory causes, the fact remains and may be proved by a little inquiry, that married people have come to regard a large family as a curse instead of a Divine blessing. The birth-rates in London are instructive. Residential districts, with fewest poor, show the lowest rates. Hampstead 16·6 and Fulham 32·3 may be taken as typical districts at each end of the scale. Stepney with its Jewish population has a rate of 37. If the Aliens Bill is to be effective it will need a clause compelling Jews to limit their families, just as their Christian (!) neighbours do. The misery of it all is that we find the practice of child murder, for such it is in plain English, defended by men of education; lawyers, medical men, and even priests make no secret of their approval of it, if no more. And as working men become aware of what their ‘betters’ are saying and doing – and they are not slow to follow a similar course – the evil spreads. Our proper leaders, the Bishops, ought long ago to have dealt with this subject resolutely and firmly. But apparently a grain of incense is a more terrible thing to them than the murder of an existing if unborn personality. We can only judge by their public utterances, but we have yet to learn that as a body their lordships have spent a thousandth part of the time over this supreme question of national morality that they have devoted to the suppression of things disapproved of by Lady Wimborne and her league. The spectacle of disproportionate interest and action is melancholy, and indicative of incapacity to observe the real dangers to be faced.”

Again —

“The personal causes of this mischief are fear of pain (i. e. failure to see in pain the discipline of God which elevates human nature), hatred of duty, shirking of responsibility, love of pleasure, the substitution of hedonism for the religion of Jesus Christ the Lord, and ignorance of the Holy Spirit as Lord of all life. How far religious teachers are accountable for this we leave to their own consciences to say. The same causes are at work in the high mortality of infants. The honour of doing her best for her child is cast aside by many a mother because it involves a certain amount of self-restraint and some seclusion from the gaieties of the hour; and recourse is had to all sorts of patent nostrums and infants’ ‘food’ (often the cause of rickets) until the hospitals are over full of young children, whose sufferings are the result (God grant that they may be the atonement also) of their mothers’ negligences and ignorances. Where there is not deliberate and wilful avoidance of maternal duty, there is neglect through awful ignorance.”

In the Daily Mail Mr. H. G. Wells writes: —

…“On the other hand think of the discouragements. While the mother toils in a restricted anxious home amid her children, she sees through her imperfectly cleaned window (one can’t do everything) the childless wives having a glorious time, going a-bicycling with their husbands, dressed gaudily with all his superfluous income, talking about their ‘Rights.’ As her children grow up to an age when they might help drudge with her or drudge for her, the State, without a word of thanks to her, takes them away to teach them and make good citizens of them. If the husband presently becomes bored by his restricted prolific household and its incessant demands, and absconds, or if he is simply unlucky and gets out of work, the State deals with her in a spirit of austere ingratitude. She is subjected to ‘charity’ and every conceivable indignity; she undergoes profounder humiliations than fall to the lot of the most dissolute women. If a husband ‘goes wrong’ and a woman has kept childless, she can get employment, she can shift for herself and be well quit of him, but a family disaster for a mother is catastrophe.

“I submit the situation is preposterous. I do not believe that with increasing intelligence and refinement women will go on marrying and bearing children under such conditions. I gather that the statistics of marriage-rates and birth-rates bear me out in this.”

And in the Daily Chronicle the Rev. Cartmel-Robinson: —

…“This phenomenon of the falling birth-rate is of course not confined to England; it is to be met with, you might say generally, in all Christian countries. It would be far more marked but for the tremendous decline in the death-rate, especially among infants. We ourselves should be vitally bankrupt but for this factor, and in France, as you know, the population is slowly dropping. That is an old story, but it is startling to learn, as President Roosevelt tells us, that the native-born American population is actually declining.

“One of the main causes, no doubt, is the determined pursuit of pleasure by all classes. The man will not take the burden of providing for a family, or, at any rate, a large family, upon himself, because that would mean a curtailment of his luxuries, perhaps even his necessities, while the woman refuses to spend all the prime of her life in child-bearing and child-rearing. She also wants to enjoy herself, and the pure, simple joys of maternity, which we used to think ought to be sufficient for a woman, have in many cases become irksome.

“For my part I do not think that you will ever rouse England to this question of home and children by an appeal to patriotism. The Englishman has become too cosmopolitan for that, and I am afraid the feeling is growing.

“The reason for the decline in America is said to be that women are becoming neurotic, and will not face the dangers and responsibilities of motherhood. No doubt that is true to a certain extent here also, and it is quite certain that among intellectual and highly-educated women, such as are trained at our universities in increasing numbers, the maternal instinct, the capacity for love, if you like to put it in that way, is apt to be destroyed.

“Then, among the middle classes thousands of young women, who not many years ago would have looked to marriage as their natural career, are earning their own livings, and are less eager to rush into matrimony.”

I have taken these extracts from the words of a few people crying in the wilderness. All of the dicta are at least eighteen months old. I am writing now, in November 1906, and three days ago the apparently inevitable paragraph again made its appearance: —