Читать книгу The Heart's Domain - Georges Duhamel - Страница 18

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The Christian doctrine, which has all the beauties, has all the audacities too. It has endeavored to make the sublime and daring notion prevail among the mass of men that salvation is reserved for the poor. What a magnificent thing! And if this religion of poverty has degenerated in the course of the centuries, with what consolation has it not bathed those thrice-happy souls whom an unbroken faith guides through misery and humiliation!

But there has never been a religion which has been able to found itself upon renunciation without compensation. Is he poor, this man who consents to go unclad, roofless, unfed, up to the day when there will be showered upon him all the riches of the kingdom of God? Has he no thought of a supreme gift, of a magnificent possession, the man to whom his master, in person, has given the command: “Lay up your treasures in heaven, where they will not be lost”?

He does not exist, the hopeless being who does not hunger for some treasure, even if it is an imaginary one, even an unreal one, even one that is lost in a bewildering future.

In what an abyss of poverty should we groan if our kingdom were not of this world and were nowhere outside the world, either?

And now a generation of men has come that no longer believes in the supernatural felicities of the future life and seems no longer to have anything to hope from a world consumed by hatred and given over inevitably, for long years, to confusion, destitution, egotistical passions.

In truth, the programmes of the social factions have no consolation for us, there is nothing in them that speaks of love and the true blessings; all these monuments of eloquence bring us back to hatred and anguish.

The most generous of them only give us glimpses of new struggles, new sheddings of blood, when our age is drunk with crime and fatigue. To whichever side the individual turns he finds himself crushed, scoffed at, sacrificed to insatiable, hostile gods.

A few years ago Maeterlinck wrote: “Up to the present men have left one religion to enter another; but when we abandon ours, it is not to go anywhere. That is a new phenomenon, with unknown consequences, in the midst of which we live.”

Having quoted these words, I hasten to add that the war is no particular consequence of this moral state of the world. The question of religion is not involved at all. The priests are quite ready to abuse these easy oppositions in order to obtain arguments in favor of their cause. But they know well enough, alas! that if the teaching of Christ stigmatizes wars, the religions have only contributed to multiply and aggravate them. They know very well that, in the conflict that now divides the earth, the religions have shown themselves enslaved to the states. No one has wished to take up the wallet and staff of the dead Tolstoy.

Humanity seems poorer and more truly disinherited than ever. Its kingdom is in itself and in everything that surrounds it; but it has sold it for a morsel of bread. And how can one reproach it for this? It is very hungry and its heart is not open to beauty.