Читать книгу The Divine Need of the Rebel - James H. G. Chapple - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Cicero: “Strict law is often grave injustice.”

Ray Lankester: “Man is Nature’s insurgent son—Nature’s rebel. Where Nature says, ‘Die’! Man says, ‘I will live!’ ”

Oscar Wilde: “Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent. That is the reason why agitators are absolutely necessary—without them there would be no advance.”

The essay on “Self Reliance,” written by a great scholar and thinker—Emerson—is also one of the most revolutionary pieces of writing in literature. It is not generally looked upon as such. For years it has been my habit to recommend privately and publicly every young person to read it. If you have read it, then take down Emerson’s Essays again, sit in your easy chair, read it through, and then, so to speak, allow yourself to enter the room and interview you. There is only one YOU and there can be no other—no repetition. All the unions, matings, and marriages during ages have produced YOU, and YOU cannot be duplicated or produced again. It will be a wonderful world when everybody feels this—the sacred Divinity of the ego. But it is only under some form of Socialism it can eventuate. To feel as Emerson felt, “God incarnates Himself in man and goes forth to possess the world,” is splendid, and also “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.” Again, “I am Divine! through me God acts; through me speaks.” Once a devoted soul with high moral purpose allows himself to be charged with such Divine electricity he will soon rebel against social injustices, and the world will be the better for his passage through it. Bacon, long before Emerson, finely said: “Men seem neither to understand their riches nor their strength.” True; but a few here and there throughout the world are discovering their riches and also their strength. A few who will not conform to anything but reason. Russia has produced a few such as Lenin; Germany has produced a few such as Liebknecht—men who refuse to be footballs or the sport of circumstances. Men who feared not to utter their latest conviction, knowing it would eventually become the universal sense, even though they died in uttering it. They have fulfilled the dictum of Channing: “No man should part with his individuality,” and Lessing: “Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.” To do this is to become a rebel, without knowing it or intending it. The prophets were rebels! Men who detected and watched that gleam of light which passed across the mind—and spoke the rude truth. Men who knew an ounce of powder in the barrel of the mental gun was better than a pound outside the rifle. The world is hungry for such men and women now. Men who toss all fears and timidities overboard and act and speak.

The evolution of a higher ethical conscience is producing rebels in every land. It is a result of the war—a good result—and the end is not yet. We are only at the beginning. So many are learning the laws of society are higher than the laws of the State. So many are learning there comes a choice between morality and the State and they are morally bound to refuse State orders. What an impasse! If a finer ethical culture finds a State clashing with its morality, what then? Allow the rebels to settle it—the Divine prophets. They will soon point out that the State with its authority must rest on ethical foundations.

This brings us to the question of the State and its evolution. The word State, unfortunately, means that which is fixed in law and government; but would any man to-day ascribe fixity to the conception of the State? Is the State dynamic or static? Allow the world of Conservatism and the world of Labour both to answer, and the answers would be as wide apart as the poles, but Labour would be true, for it well knows the present Constitution was framed during the centuries by the privileged classes, and the State to-day works against the natural laws of progress. Hence, in order to obey the Divine laws of evolution, Labour supplies many so-called sedition-mongers, who as individuals find themselves bound to rebel and disobey the State. So the poor old world is slowly learning that the law-breaker so often ranks ethically higher than the law-maker. It is a hard lesson to learn, my masters! Our proudest and best traditions prove it. The history of the prophets settles it.

People are asking questions. The Nonconformists rebelled against the State Church. Were they wicked? The conscience of millions rebelled against uniformity of worship. Were they wicked? The early Christians refused to worship the Emperor. What of them? What of France when she deported the Huguenots; was she right? If so, was England right by opening her doors to the rebels? Were the people in America right who in a rebellious mood refused to recognise the fugitive slave laws? Answer this. What of the man who rebels and refuses to enlist for war, refuses even to dig a trench—in fact, would rather be shot than shoot?

There is a Divine necessity for the rebel! Any good citizen has the Divine right to rebel against authority. What of Garibaldi, Kossuth, Mazzini, Franklin and Washington? Were they right or wrong? Were they for God or against Him? The conscientious objectors are in mind. The Creator and the mother are one in this:—

The Mother’s Viewpoint

Lay all your thoughts of mother love aside;

Put all your sentimental dreams away,

And answer me, whose wayward son has died

Upon the law’s grim gibbet; Did it pay?

My son embodied all I had to give

The State, the Nation and Humanity.

I bore the pangs of death that he might live;

And did it pay to kill him? Answer me!

Hear me, in truth! I do not say because

He was my son the State should not exact

A penalty to satisfy its laws,

Or should not make him suffer for his act;

But you, in killing him, have done the thing

For which you killed him—so at least it seems

To me, a mother, who was born to bring

New life to vivify God’s Scheme of Schemes.

The years I spent to give the world a man—

Are they as naught? We mothers have a task

That’s measured by a lifetime’s fullest span;

You snuff it in one breath; and why, I ask?

Whether for gallows’ flesh or rifle food,

In the dark cell or in the hellish fray—

Tell me, as in this darkest hour I brood,

You who destroyed our offspring: DOES IT PAY?

If Spinoza was right in asserting “The aim of the State is liberty,” then a good many people are wrong. The State is not a magnified drill-sergeant! The State must not rule by precepts handed down from Cæsar. The fanatics of force have a lot to learn!

One of the greatest lessons to be learnt is from Nature; i.e. all progress in plants, animals and men really depends upon the rebellious outgrowths commonly known as variations from types. We see now what Oscar Wilde meant in speaking so highly of agitators. He was right! The most dangerous class in any community is not the agitating class, but that class who supports a hide-bound conservatism. The great indictment is not against the rebels but against the conservatives who create the rebels. The history of reform and progress is more or less the history of rebels and prophets. An ocean without agitating tides and rebellious winds would become stagnant, so would society become as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean and as stagnant, were it not for the agitating and rebellious spirits of Divinity. But the State and the law is ever in conflict with the prophets and rebels! It is so; but, alas for the State and the law, for they side against God! The rebel ever has a little more grey matter in the brain and an extra spark of Divinity in the soul.

In Nature the new varieties are really rebel-plants, refusing to conform to type and striving to advance. Read Bergson’s Creative Evolution also De Vrie’s Mutations.

Man himself was a variable rebel from the anthropoids. Man to-day struggles to understand Nature and control it. The grey matter in the brain of rebel man increased, and he discovered fire and invented clothes, then gradually went into cold latitudes and did wonders. Men crossed rivers and seas and said: “I will not starve.” Nature produces weeds and berries to a certain point of development; then rebel man interferes, and the Divinity within guides him in producing Burbank plums and all the rest. The Divine Spirit incarnated in man becomes insurgent and captures Nature. In proportion as he has the Divine spirit of rebellion so he becomes great. What a field here for the eugenists! Not to investigate heredity, to crush the spirit of rebellion; but to study Nature and nurture in order to cultivate the rebel, for he is a Divine necessity. So far he has always been crushed—from Jesus to Rosa Luxembourg. The future will see him bred and cultivated. Oh, shades of Francis Galton! we now understand what you meant by desiring a religion of eugenics! But a new conception of the State will have to precede it. The world will yet have but a handful of contented conservatives, and millions of rebels! What a world that will be! What desperate conditions will not be altered then! What will be the outcome of that Divine creative rebellious will when it has not any State or law to hinder or persecute it?

Rebels ARISE! There is a world to shape and conquer! Think of your future work in rebelling against slums, poverty, unemployment, war, and capitalism. In these matters it is your absolute Divine duty to rebel and help man fulfil his God-like destiny.

Man must interfere in all directions and go on—otherwise sink into the slough of conservatism and perish. Rebel and control the rapacity of capitalism; rebel and capture the political machine; rebel and throttle a greedy imperialism; rebel and destroy a predatory militarism; rebel and allow theocracy to replace king-rule.

At the present time we allow sweaters and exploiters to exist, and then denounce prostitution. We make it difficult for young couples to marry and stand aghast at sexual results. We submit to Puritan hypocrisy while seventy-five per cent. suffer from venereal disease. We decry free thought while a dead theology proclaims miracles, atonements, devils and hells. We starve the inventor and germ-finder and decorate the military fratricides. We pick out the “VIR,” the best, for the sacrifice to the war Moloch, and leave the “HOMO” to breed, and then blink stupidly at decadence. We throw beneath the wheels of the military juggernaut our virile blood, in order that a few may get titles, medals, ribbons, pensions and other gewgaws. Oh, Divine rebels! Where are you? Shades of Moses, Hypatia, John Ball, Wat Tyler, Luther, Galileo and Bruno! Jesus, thou rebel against Mammon and a stagnant orthodoxy, canst thou still inspire rebellion against social injustices? Is there not another chapter yet to be added to Christianity?

Is it treason to be loyal to the Nazarene? The words “Treason” and “Reason” seem so alike. Strike the “t” out and “reason” remains. For following Divine reason men have died for treason. To be reasonable to-day we are looked askance at for being treasonable! Was France well rid of the treasonable Huguenots? Was England well rid of the treasonable Pilgrim Fathers? Was it treason here in New Zealand to cry out against a hundred millions extra war debt and the sacrifice of fifty thousand lives, killed and broken, in order that another hundred millions extra war profits could be made by those who were already rich before the war? These profiteers could not hear the groans of the parents bereaved. No; they could not hear. Their ears were plugged with wool, meat, butter and cheese—plugged tight.

Is it treason to be done with the old world hates? Is it treason to object to New Zealand being a kind of suburb to England? Is it treason to hunger for a pacific republic?

The greatest treason of all is treason against God! The greatest treason of all is to sacrifice the international ideal of brotherhood for national vanity. The finest reason is to rebel, and resist the standards, stiff with blood, hanging over pulpits, to condemn the ground muddy and red with the life of men. If war be right, then the Carpenter was wrong. Our choice is between treason to the State or treason to God and the people. Man is Nature’s insurgent son, Nature’s rebel—Arise! Thou wilt win, but not by material force. Rather wilt thou win by the force of ideas. Says Edwin Markham:

“They drew a circle that shut me out,

A heretic rebel, a thing to flout;

But love and I had the wit to win,

We drew a circle that took them in!”