Читать книгу A Rebel's Vision Splendid - James H. G. Chapple - Страница 4
ОглавлениеTHE VISION SPLENDID
Most of the intelligent beings on the earth at the present time are looking forward. They sense a crisis ahead, and are likewise concerned about the immediate results, well knowing that the ultimate results will be for the social benefit of the human race. The prophet ever did look ahead; it was this habit that made him hated; hated because he was thereby dangerous; to look ahead was to idealise, to visionise, and by doing that the present was made rather insecure. It was the priest that looked back; the priest is ever conservative, and usually he becomes fat and smug by so doing. In other words, “it pays.” The prophet is a lean, hungry man—a lonely and a thinking man. The priest thinks other people’s thoughts—thoughts of the traditional past; he is a backward-looker. The prophet has initiative, originality and daring, and is not a gramophone record; he has not a rubber-stamp message. God’s Spirit finds a channel for the forward-looking message in his (the prophet’s) dangerous personality. He is a lonely man—often as lonely as the man of Gethsemane. So it is an easily seen cleavage—the forward-lookers versus the backward-lookers. Yes, the past has lessons for us, for the past has made the present, and also we of the present are to make the future.
To-day we have reached the point of conscious evolution; evolution is no longer blind and groping, but has become conscious in thinking man. Man looks back, and the farther he looks back the slower he sees the evolutionary movement to have been. To-day he sees how rapid and almost revolutionary the evolutionary movement to-day may be, for conscious man may guide it and hurry it forward. The long slow stone age reached a crisis when the polished axe was made. The modern man reached a crisis when the steam engine was made. To-day we reach the greatest crisis of all in World-Brotherhood and the United States of Humanity! The farther we go, the greater the momentum. To-day the movement becomes faster, as we see more clearly the goal for humanity hardening up through the mists. Thinking people are gradually getting an enthusiastic love for the general good; they are beginning to curb the narrow national feeling, and also to doubt the morality of commercial rivalry. They see at last, that way lies war!
To be candid, what is needed is a Universal New Heart; and that is being born. This Divine ethic is evolving from the ranks of the industrial classes, where in the history of the world all Divine ethics do arise. Strange to say, it does not arise in the Church—the Church is too much concerned with a personal new heart, and the universal new heart seems of little consequence. The Church puts the query to the individual—are you saved? Also society puts the query to the individual—are you wealthy? Hence the Church can well support the nation in its trade rivalries, its commercial greed and its glorified John-Bullism. Of course, John Bull always quotes a text from his Bible, but his real inspiration comes not from there, but from trade and the cash register. Other nations in irony point to England and her oversea dominions, and say: “See the result of England’s three commodities—Beer, Bullets and Bibles!” This ever blessed trinity has caused her flag to fly over one fifth part of the globe. The danger is they fasten on the second element in the trinity—bullets, the logic of which is what the British Empire got by naval and military force, why may we not also get by the same force? This is the essence of imperialism everywhere. Until this is swept out of the way there can be no Universal New Heart.
What hinders, then, this aspect of The Vision Splendid? There is a double hindrance. It is to be found in the following two terms: Conservatism is Feudalism. Liberalism is Commercialism. It is tweedledum versus tweedledee. They both support imperialism, and are both supporters of a soulless commercial system. Also they both support militarism. In war time a Liberal is not distinguishable from a Conservative, for patriotism and profits kiss each other, and in times of peace the only difference is in their phraseology. The industrial world is quick to see it, and so they designate them both to one class, and the result is on the one side there is class ascendency and on the other side the increasing solidarity of the workers.
And in The Vision Splendid there is to be an ever-decreasing conservatism in the feminine mind. To many women still there is a great attraction in soldiering. Flags, buttons, uniforms, colors and khaki fascinate and hoodwink them. But the thinking mothers see the folly of this spirit of bloodshed; the reflective mothers are saying: “Shall we in the future sit silent and see piled up this mountain of corpses? Are we to sit silent and agonise over this—the result of the greed of a few individuals? Are we to be silent while the great god competition runs the earth? Are we women ever to be the victims of this vulgar, ill-bred wealth? We are beginning to see and learn that competitive trade is a continual warfare, and nationalism and imperialism use the naval and military castes to carry out their designs. Then when war is declared the patriotic stop is pulled out, while they fleece us of our sons and money.” So thinking women are reasoning, and it is a good omen, for class-rule and a fake old civilization must go. When the women take a hand its days are numbered.
So in The Vision Splendid we see the Universal New Heart is necessary. The rise of the industrial classes is the finest sign of the times. In the unity of workers all round the earth lies our hope. Not in any League of Nations, but in a League of Working Peoples. The former is based on force, and the latter is based on brotherhood. Therein lies a difference—and it is the real vital difference. Peoples don’t hate! Their interests are the same! The enemy of one people is the same enemy of all peoples—i.e., the exploiter! That is the only enemy the people of any country has. Every country is vulgarised by these champions of trade greed. It is they who whoop for war when they think the national totem or symbol is insulted. Totem is the correct word; it sounds aboriginal, and so it is, for the lower branches of the human family had as a totem an emu, kangaroo, buffalo or, maybe, a snake or lizard. Woe be to the neighbouring tribe who dared to insult the totem. But the so-called modern civilized nations have their totems too. It may be an eagle, a rising sun, a lion, a bull-dog, stars and stripes, or a Union Jack. Insult one of these, and war results. As with savages, so with moderns! There is no difference. If there be a difference, the savages have the advantage, for they cannot kill so splendidly; they have no bombs, mines, machine guns or poison-gas. Savagery is here more civilized! What irony!
The result of this Universal New Heart in The Vision Splendid will be some form of Communism. The real Communism of love and brotherhood, not of force and dictatorship. Communism is really inherent in the human race from the beginning, and the secret of life is in the spirit of it. We see to-day it begins to divide the world into two camps. The cleavage becomes wider—Communism or Capitalism? Love expresses itself in all things common! The great enemy is private property of those things God meant to be socialised—land, ships, railways, machines, and so on. It is not to be an equal dividing up of everything; only the vulgarisers of Communism talk that way; even as the vulgarisers of Evolution talk of monkeys and missing links. The possessive instinct in things essential has to go; it is the opposite of love and brotherhood, and love is evolving and is the strongest. When we come to think deeply, much of the lust for private property is really the illusion of dead matter. Let me ask—is it sanity to spend one’s life in collecting a heap of metal discs we call money, and then after a few years, when the heap is just about big enough, the hearse to be at the door? To spend our days gathering a heap of “matter” which a jackdaw or a magpie, or a raven, or a maori-hen does! What will God say to these mentally undeveloped individuals, who pull down their barns to build greater to pack their material wealth in? But great souls are indifferent to ownership. The possessive instinct arose in aboriginal malice, and the possessive instinct yet arouses malignant passions. The possessive instinct in centripetal—indrawing. The communal instinct is centrifugal—a scattering out. One is selfish and egoistic, the other is altruistic and serving. The Nazarene took a towel and served! They who knew his teaching and example best, they who dwelt upon his words, had all things common. The words common, communion, communism and common-union all come from the same root. Yet what a comedy the Communion service of the orthodox churches has become! What a burlesque is orthodox Christianity to-day!
The religion of Jesus should have softened the position caused by private property, should rather have revolutionised it. Our laws protect private property, our politics defend it, our morality perverts the conscience on private property, yet modern science increases it, while custom casts a spell on it and even art panders to it, in order to get bread and butter cheques. But the masses see the incongruity of it all, and begin to stir and to stretch out hands of amity across the seas. They begin to discover there is the same soul under the heart of all peoples. That the same private property curse is causing all peoples to suffer. Since the days of Marx they are learning that the surplus profits of the workers are really stolen to buy land, mines, stocks, shares, bonds, jewels, furs, flash gowns and expensive cars for parasites, who have the impudence to call the surplus profits of industry private property, and even to talk of the “Sacredness” of it. But great days are looming up; science will yet in greater quantities create life’s necessaries, and also see they are scientifically distributed. Science will yet give greater leisure to all. Science at present is a victim of the capitalist conditions; it is used to give to, and increase, the wealth of the few. It does not ease toil, nor does the machinery add to the people’s ease and plenty. Herbert Spencer defined progress as the release of humanity from toil, and to-day one train does the work of four hundred thousand men, yet how are the people bettered by it? Science talks of capturing tidal-power and sun-power, and the power is to be released from radium and the atom. Very good; but are the people to benefit? Or are these sources of power to be exploited by the money-makers?
Said one of the professors of science: “There will yet be little need to earn bread by sweat!” True; there is little need now for any person to work more than five hours per day, but the exploiters and parasites see to it that you do, and the law protects them in their exploitation. Civilization so far is a failure, and only protects the few, but in The Vision Splendid every child will have its opportunity, every mother will have her rights, every man will have his full reward for labour, every youth will be free from the body-snatching military curse. Tell your parson he is wrong—the Garden of Eden is not behind, the Garden of Eden is ahead and Divine man is the creator of it.
This is a day of optimism, not pessimism. The world of to-morrow is beyond all your dreams. Say with Browning: “The best is yet to be.” We march out of a past as black as night and we march to a future full of joy, full of light, full of sweetness. Give to your children The Vision Splendid; tell them they are creators and co-workers with God in shaping the new world. Tell them to vision the Kingdom of God and that the greatest dreamer of all was Jesus. Teach the children these lines:
Men counted him a dreamer! Dreams
Are but the light of clearer skies,
Too dazzling for our naked eyes,
And when we catch their flashing beams
We turn aside and call them dreams.
Believe me, every thought that yet
In greatness rose, in sadness set,
That time to ripening glory nursed
Was called an empty dream at first.
