Chapter IV: Part I (2)

This makes me as tired as it must make The Sphinx. Instincts, forsooth! An instinct is nothing but a name for a class of responses; it does not do anything nor explain anything. You can have as many or as few instincts as you like by choosing your method of classifying behavior. In fact, the whole notion that desires, instinctive or other, explain the occurrence of anything is simply a leftover from the belief in flitting ghosts who did things in the dark but never where you could see just what was happening. Bring the facts into the light, and what do you see (for I know nothing but what I see and touch)? You behold in our behavior nothing whatever but a few reflex movements modified in numerous ways by the conditions, purely physical, under which they occur. Behavior, which is change of place, has to be explained from within its own genus, which is, change of place. This is the last mountain height of psychology; climb up here, and you shall see that there are no desires, no wants. Men don’t want anything; a want is nothing but a bit of vocal or sub-vocal behavior.

The Sphinx:

Professor, you are a man after my own heart. You make things so simple. From what you say I get a hunch that maybe I have been foolish to be so inquisitive. For thousands of years I have believed that I was asking my big question about man because I wanted an answer. You make it clear that I didn’t ask because I desired an answer, or anything else, but only because I liked to ask questions. Come to think of it--it’s plain as a wart on a nose--I couldn’t ask a question _because_ of anything. In fact, it was not questions, but movements of my lips, that occurred. I’ve just been kidding myself, and I don’t need to worry any more about what goes on in this head of mine. I really don’t want an answer, and I don’t want to ask questions. Still, I should like to know what the rest of you fellows think about this.

A Gestalt-Psychologist:

The latest experiments upon both men and lower animals fail to justify any of the theories that man’s mind or his behavior is a composite of elements. The behavior of men, of chimpanzees, and even of domestic hens displays types of organization that cannot be explained as conditioned reflexes, or instinctive pushes, or associations of sense-elements. The organization is there when the response first occurs, not merely afterwards, and new organizations appear within new responses. The unit for psychology is the configuration, which is not a simple element. We are not composites of any kind of elements; we do not merely repeat and recombine old reactions; our behavior, through and through, looks forward to the organized world in which we live. I find the question of The Sphinx, therefore, not only rational, but inevitable. The supreme problem of psychology is: Whither? What are these already organized wholes that we recognize as mind? How and in what direction do they grow, and what are they going towards? Applied to man, the question is, What does this species really want?

A Self-Psychologist:

The circle is returning into itself! Psychology took its start--it always does so--from the experience of being a conscious self. This is the prime datum; it is the concrete actuality, from which all your alleged “elements,” sensory, affective, or instinctive, are derived by abstraction. Mind, as the Gestalt-Psychologist says, is a self-organizing object. Its activity, wherever you find it, is purposive striving. I should say that what ails the Sphinx’s head is simply the painful effort to become a complete self.

The Sphinx:

Thank you! You have saved my self-respect, and ...

A Psychoanalyst:

Pardon me, not too fast! Don’t respect yourself until you find out whether you are respectable, and above all, don’t rationalize. I am sure that you will welcome this interruption when I tell you that I am dealing daily with the dynamics of human conduct in its most intimate phases, so intimate that people cannot even recognize them as their own without my help. I walk among the mud-geysers and the volcanoes that show what’s really inside. What men think they want--in fact, most of what you psychologists think they want--isn’t what they really want, for the most part, but a lot of deceptive substitutes for what men really want and have failed to get. Dig down into the Unconscious, and you shall find libido, the simple spring that turns all the wheels of the machine. It is sex-desire broadly considered, though some would say desire to exalt the ego, or desire just to live (of which sex-desire is, of course, the chief constituent). Because these desires are repressed by social conventions, they seek outlets in strange and deceptive ways, and thus what we call our character becomes chiefly a mass of self-deluded virtues and self-deluded faults. Now, this restless longing of The Sphinx, which she thinks is a genuine desire to know what man is, conceals ...

Several Voices:

Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman, I ...

The Chairman:

Brethren, every member of this Sodality knows exactly what every other member is about to say. Would it not be well, instead of listening to ourselves, to hear the comments of our honored guest?

The Sphinx:

I won’t admit, no I won’t, that this discussion has given me a headache. I want you to think me more hard-headed than that, and moreover I might unwittingly reveal something in my insides that would shock the Psychoanalyst. All I can say, in view of your hospitality, is this: When you find out what you want, I hope you’ll one and all get what you want, provided you care to have that kind of want. As for me, the next steamer back to Egypt, where I shall brood over these things, perhaps, for a few more thousand years.[2]

* * * * *

To the question whether modern psychology has undermined our self-respect a partial reply would be, as we now see, Which modern psychology? One psychology is pitted against another whenever the nature of our motives is in question. Here science has problems rather than solutions, points of view rather than a point of view.

Only a small proportion of the populace, moreover, reads scientific psychology. Not by any logical use of established conclusions of research, then, has the present disillusionment reached its wide extent. We are dealing with a mood or sentiment and a habit into which men have slipped, not with insight that they have achieved by intellectual labor.[3]

Undoubtedly psychological rumors that have trickled into town have had an influence. Everybody who has an articulate desire to be modern is thinking about human nature in terms that he supposes to be those of the psychologist. In particular, three propositions have attained some vogue: That men are moved by the same instincts as the lower species; that instinctive conduct is mechanically determined; and that the reasons conventionally given for conduct are mostly sophistical “rationalizations” (that is, merely supposed reasons for that which in reality is determined by emotion rather than thought). These ideas give support to the current mood, but they cannot have had much to do with creating it. As here used, they are themselves “rationalizations.” The basis of the mood is some form of common or at least wide-spread experience. No great ground-swell of popular sentiment ever originated from anything else.

Indeed, can we reasonably assume that the wind blows in only one direction--from psychology to popular opinion, but not from the popular mood into the psychology laboratory? Surely psychologists are human, which is to say that we need a psychology of their psychologizing. Here is an item of it: (1) The area that one chooses for investigation; (2) The questions that one asks; (3) The facts that one notices or fails to notice; (4) The values that are noticed in the work of another; and (5) The apparent size of the sphere within which one acts--all these are influenced by some interest then and there present. Now, interest can be awakened in all sorts of ways. The spirit of the times can shunt research onto this track or that, and it can make this datum or that prominent in the mind of the researcher.

It is easy, in fact, to trace to their origin several of the dominant interests of psychology. Thus it struggled for scientific standing at a period when “science” connoted, most clearly of all, physical science; at a time when the biological concept of evolution filled the sky; at a time when it was necessary, in order to be let alone, to seem not to meddle with theological interests; and, above all, at a time when industrialism was rushing swiftly towards its present climax. We shall do no despite to science nor to any of its devotees if we say that there is a subtle connection between the dominance of machinery in our civilization, the prominence of a machine-like view of motivation in the many works on psychology, and the predilection of the popular mood for just this idea of human nature.

VII

ACCORDING TO INDUSTRIALISM, WHAT IS MAN?

An ancient poet celebrated the greatness of man in the following glowing words:

O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! Who
hast set thy glory above the heavens....
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and
the stars, which thou hast ordained,
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that
thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little lower than the gods, and hast
crowned him with glory and honor.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou
hast put all things under his feet:
All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;
The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea.

“Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands.” Simple-minded poet, son of herdsman, hunter, or fisherman, you think man is great because he domesticates sheep and oxen, and is successful in his hunting and fishing--so great that even the maker of the heavens regards him as important! What would you say if you could witness the conquests of nature that have followed upon modern science and invention? You might ride in a car that is propelled, heated, and lighted by a river a hundred miles away; you might speak in your natural voice at Jerusalem and be heard in Egypt; with a turn of a hand you could start moving a mass that a thousand of your Palestinian oxen could not budge.

How is it that this enormous increase in our dominion over nature adds so little to our appreciation of man? Nay, that it makes us less appreciative than this rustic?

The answer will be found in some phase of the process of securing this dominion, or in some use made of it. Outside of industrialism, in fact, the obvious trend of history is towards a higher and higher estimate of human nature. The growth of civil and political liberty; the spread of popular education; emancipation from many superstitious fears; the increase of humanitarianism--what a truly glorious period in human evolution do these witness. And yet, in spite of them all, a depressed view of ourselves hangs heavy in the atmosphere. We have canvassed all the more obvious partial causes of it, only to be pointed in every instance towards our everyday occupations as the more important source.

What is industrialism doing to us, then? Under this term may be included for convenience the entire system by which, in the period of steam and electric power--still a short one--goods are produced and distributed, and commerce and finance are carried on. This system, originating in the West but now spreading to the Orient, reorganizes human relationships in a manner that is almost revolutionary. It shifts populations from place to place; it dissolves old connections, and creates new ones, separating men who were together, and bringing together those who were strangers; it produces a large-scale consciousness of one another--ultimately, it seems, an almost feverish consciousness--but without ever making the reorganization of human relations any part of its main business. That is, the all-absorbing industrial system is not organized and run with reference to its main output, a changed humanity; we are not in business, as has been said, for our health; and this inversion of values, at first not clearly foreseen, or intended as a philosophy of life (but only practised), is now becoming a clearly conscious and, in the Western world, a generally accepted interpretation of our own worth. We are taking our occupations seriously.

It is hard for us who are most close to the facts to see them in perspective. We are rarely conscious of the human movement in the large because the whole immediate human environment moves with us. But Oriental observers like Tagore and Gandhi perceive that Western civilization is developing towards a world-tragedy--pigmy purposes wielding the power of giants. It may be that we shall be jarred into something wiser by the jolts that are occurring within the machine itself. For the human factor is increasingly the problem-setting item in the industrial system. All the other sources of difficulty--the weather, the changes of the seasons, the supply of raw materials, the chemistry of industrial processes, the control of elemental forces--all these taken together occasion less anxious thought than the question, What can we rely upon in the sphere of human conduct? The puzzle of organization is personnel; the nightmare of the employer is labor; the riddle of labor is organized capital and its instrument, the manager and the boss; at the spear-point of practically every enterprise appears the opposing spearhead of sharper and sharper competition. Experience of friction is leading to modifications of mechanical processes and some improvements in human relations. But meantime, there goes on, by virtue of the inner logic of the system as a whole, an increasing depression of spirit, an increasing skepticism of the worth of human motives in their totality.

Let not our question be confused with others. We are not asking whether the industrial system breeds injustice; not even what sorts of men it produces by this or that particular method of “handling” men. Our sole interest at this point is in the notions concerning the motives of men that spring up, or receive emphasis and currency, by virtue of the general characteristics of the system. Some wariness is advisable here, for the field is not entirely homogeneous, and (as we shall see more fully in a later section) motives are mixed and more or less misunderstood. That industrialism is producing, and, until it becomes greatly modified, must produce, a depressed view of man, however, is a safe proposition. For no one will question that there is in it a kind of gravitation towards the following specific judgments:

(_a_) That in the organization and the use of capital the dominant motive, almost invariably taken for granted, is not the glory of God (however this be understood), nor the improvement of human life (one’s own or others’), nor supplying the wants of men, but accumulation of profits and of power for the enjoyment of the possessor, or of the possessor and his family.

(_b_) That among the employed classes the dominant attitude with respect to the relations between employer and employe is to get the most possible for the least return; and that a corresponding attitude on the part of employers is taken as a matter of course.

(_c_) That, since conflict is of the essence of industrialism--competition of capitalist with capitalist, of laborer with laborer, and chronic strains between capital and labor--an essentially pugnacious self-interest is fundamental to human nature; consequently, that the natural, to-be-expected policy of all concerned is to obtain compulsory power over others.

(_d_) That insincerity permeates the whole--insincerity in that, though every one is for himself, everybody endeavors to make it appear that what he wants is for the good of the others. Thus, men actually ascribe virtue to themselves because their occupation supplies some human want, though these same men confess that their motive is profits, and that they ignore wants that it is less profitable to supply. “The public good” is known to be a continual excuse for economic partizanship in laws, administration, and politics generally. Under the guise of patriotism, self-interest pursues world-policies that make for economic imperialism, unfairness to weaker peoples, and war. Each struggling class, laborers and employers alike, conceals from the public the narrower, more partizan phases of its activities. It is not necessary to suppose that all this is entirely conscious, or that all men are equally paralysed in their moral nature by this poison. Let us give the benefit of the doubt wherever we can. But indubitably our industrial system creates a belief that our life is thus honeycombed with insincerity.

These, let it be repeated, are not a portrait, but only certain selected features; they do not fully describe any situation; they do not constitute an accusation of depravity. But no one who impartially surveys the human relationships that most characterize industrialism can deny that the impressions that have been described are being made by it, and are being believed with increasing generality.

If we ask how this factor in the present disillusionment compares with the others--the Great War, the belief in evolution, the literature of irrationality, general psychology, behaviorism, and psychoanalysis--we shall conclude that it is more influential than all of them put together. The reason is not merely that the War covered only a few short years, whereas experience with the industrial system is more than a century old; and not merely that science and literature reach only a portion of the population; there is a still deeper reason for the profound influence of industrialism upon our conception of ourselves. Wherever our voluntary activities, our efforts and struggles, are chiefly expended, there we get our deepest impressions as to the nature of reality. Men who through life spend from eight to ten of their freshest hours each day in the economic struggle tend to become conformed in their personal attitudes to the facts and forces with which and against which they work. They surely become conformed unless they take part in efforts to change the system. We do not understand even the pleasures of the people until we inspect their labor; the same is true of family life, and--more than we suspect--of religion.

Not only is industrialism the chief of several sources of our disillusionment; it is the background source that either produces or gives popular plausibility to the others. It produced the War; it aggravates all the general problems of the family and of sex-life; it intensifies everything that makes us distrust one another and everything that makes us content to be selfish. Industrial efficiency practically identifies itself with a mechanization of life that leaves the least possible scope for the exercise of thought, and choice, and personality. When release from work comes, the imprisoned vitality of the worker gushes into a kind of freedom that gives one an impression that the real basis of life is simply instinct. If, as some suppose, a flood of sexuality has descended upon us, the reason will be found, not chiefly in psychoanalysis, but in such conditions of modern life as the industrial city. Granted industrialism, ramifying into the home, the people’s recreations, politics and law; industrialism, growing more and more efficient according to its self-secreted standard of efficiency, what should one expect but disillusionment as to the worth of human motives? “Gentlemen,” said a college president to some students who were bibulously inclined, “there is one thing in this world that you can rely upon--the morning head!”

If one cares to listen for a coda to the harsh symphony of industrialism, one can discern it in many sorts of effort to reassure oneself of one’s goodness. Promoters of one of our enormous wastes, competitive advertising, will tell you that strict truth-telling is one of the standards of their profession; and one can see them measuring the moral worth of the profession by this one minor consideration. When big business is under fire because of its exploitation of both employe and consumer, we are told that business is growing more moral because competitors treat one another more honorably. We need not scent hypocrisy in the welfare work of great factories, but why should kindness to dependents be offered as an offset to objections to this very sort of dependence? Rotarians are helping their communities in various ways from unquestionably good motives; I should be sorry if any word of mine discounted their interest, say, in boys; but why should business men think that such extra-business activities reflect any credit upon the system or have any claim to soften the criticisms that are directed against it? What we perceive here is men who are better, and want to be counted as better, than the system that has caught them and victimized them.

But these “rationalizations,” if such they be, are less portentous than the infiltration of the principles of industrialism into the ethics that is generally recognized as obligatory. The major emphases in current practical ethics are the emphases that will not hurt the system. They center chiefly about two poles, property and contracts. It is well recognized that the American system of law is organized chiefly around property as the basic right, and at least one eminent public man has declared that unless we can somehow amend this foundation-principle it will get us into no end of trouble. Now, this assumption as to basic legal obligation has passed insensibly into an assumption as to moral obligation and moral character, with ironic results in our current moral judgments. Compare, for example, the intense reprobation of an embezzler with the entire respectability of a manufacturer who grows wealthy out of factory labor by children. He has not stolen property from children! Compare, again, our attitude toward dishonesty in making and fulfilling a contract with our attitude toward employers who have resisted with might and main every measure, whether proposed by a labor union or in a legislature, to safeguard the health of factory operatives. They are men of their word! Ask the next hundred men you meet what are the ethical obligations of business, or of employers, or of employees, or of buyers and sellers; you will not hear from five of them, probably not from one, a word about obligations other than the formal ones of honesty, respect for property, and fulfilment of contracts. The main issues--what property is for, what the main aim of production is, what constitutes success, the fundamental immorality of treating persons as mere means rather than ends--will not be mentioned. You may possibly receive from some church member a Scripture verse, “Love your neighbor as yourself”; but what do you think he will mean by it? Will he mean governing the main aims and processes of the economic life by this principle? Do you really think he will?

VIII

THE DILEMMA OF CHRISTIANITY

The relation of the dominant religion of the West--the garden-plot of industrialism--to these depressed views of the motives of men is as odd as it is complicated. The tradition of official Christianity has run to the effect that the heart of man is desperately wicked; that it is selfish, sensual, and self-deceived; and that it is incapable of improving itself until an infusion of divine power has made possible, first repentance, then a new life.

Like the melancholy tolling of a bell, our War experience, our popular psychologies, our popular literature, and our everyday economic occupations repeat after religion that, under the surface, we are a madhouse of clamant impulses, and that we have no power to become anything else. How, we may ask, does theology like this confirmation of itself?

Not too well! And for interesting reasons. Within the memory of men now living the evangelical churches were strenuously combating the notion that man is naturally good; today, when popular thought is inclined to classify human nature with that of the beasts, the same churches are exerting themselves to assert the natural nobility and dignity of the human race, and its unique significance in the order of nature. Just what has brought about this change of front? And how deep down does it go?

Secondary reasons for this change need not here be enumerated, as, for example, the modification of theological thought from within by its own re-examination of its historical bases. For a great about-face of popular religious consciousness never takes place at the command of historical scholarship but only at the command of a pervasive experience. In this instance, the pervasive experience that dominates religious thought lies precisely in the area that we already have had under consideration.

The doctrine that man’s nature is evil had as its counterpart and counterweight (partly relieving it of its gruesomeness) the dogma that divine grace, acting through the Scriptures and the church, is able (and some said, is ever ready,) to take away the evil desires and fill their place with good. Now, it would be intolerable to the churches to think so ill of man’s original nature unless the actuality of regeneration also could be believed in. But--here is the rub--living belief in regeneration could not be maintained upon biblical grounds or upon authority alone; it had to be made manifest in the common life to common men.

In order to retain the doctrine of depravity under such modern conditions as freedom of thought, popular education, and greatly widened acquaintance with humanity, a three-fold demonstration would have been necessary:

_First_, it would have been necessary to exhibit a great and
evident contrast between the daily lives of those who experienced
and those who did not experience the asserted special infusion of
divine power. If the doctrine was true, some experience here and
now, not merely in the hereafter, had to separate men into sheep
and goats.

_Second_, it would have been necessary to exhibit a regenerate
church as an organ of world-regeneration. Not necessarily an
infallible church; not necessarily an organization perfect in its
constitution and free from foibles in its administration, but at
least one clearly discriminable from all other social institutions
by the intensity, the continuity, and the independence of a
superior motive.

_Third_, it would have been necessary to demonstrate the reversal
of human nature’s evil traits socially as well as individually,
and outside the church as well as inside it. In particular, the
“new creature” would have had to appear within the structure of the
industrial order. Not that any sudden or complete conversion of the
industrial order is here implied, but at least some recognizable
beginning, some certain evidence that the process of industrial
regeneration is starting. Feeding those who are left hungry by the
economic machine, or binding up the wounds of those who have been
hurt by it, or soothing the asperities of the industrial warfare,
is not enough; the required demonstration had to reach and modify
the central motives that give to the system its specific character.
Unless objective evidence could be adduced that the kingdom of
property, profits, wealth, and wages can be transformed into a
Kingdom of God--not, of course, by charitable distribution of a
surplus, but by shifting the main direction--then nothing could
keep alive the doctrine of regeneration.

In not one of these directions have the churches made a convincing showing to the world at large or even to themselves. It is true that evangelism has turned many an individual permanently from evil ways--a fact that is today strangely understressed by the churches, and not sufficiently followed up in work with individuals. But evangelism at its best has always left us in a condition of strain, with evangelism’s own chosen problem not really solved. For the converted man turns out to be, like his unregenerate neighbor, a mixture of yeses and noes; and, with dismaying frequency--dismaying, that is, for the doctrine of depravity-removed-by-regeneration--the fruits of the Spirit have been abundant in the supposably unregenerate and scanty in the supposably regenerate. The point is not that conversion, if it is to back up the doctrine, must make a man perfect at a clip, but that it must make him sufficiently different to enable observers to identify him as actually different, in point of dominant motives, from men who have been trained otherwise than by the church.

In the current sense of evangelism, of conversion, of regeneration, or--most generally--of being a Christian, there is no generally recognized implication of incongruity with the accepted motivation of industrialism. I do not say that being a Christian even in the conventional sense does not somewhat moderate the selfishness of this motivation; sometimes a Christian industrialist is made superbly inconsistent by his religion. The point is that Christians, like anybody else, are expected to live out their workaday lives within industrialism upon its own terms. And industrialism is playing spiritual havoc!

A regenerate church, accordingly, is non-existent. This means, not that unregenerate individuals slip into membership; not that a united church is still merely hoped for; not that there is no insurance against corruption in any ecclesiastical body, local or general. It means, rather, that no church is definitely committed institutionally to the extirpation of the causes that degrade man in his own eyes. What is the motivation of the churches as such? What is the official motivation of the select number of their members to whom is committed the spiritual oversight of the flock? What does the word “ecclesiasticism” mean? When is a church successful, or healthily growing? In terms of motives operating from within the churches upon the causes of our disillusionment, what is the real meaning of church statistics? Compare what the churches do to able ministers who preach the Rotarian type of idealism with what they do to equally able or more able ministers who preach unequivocally that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. Ask leaders of industry who hold that its principles are inviolable whether the churches are allies of the system or makers of trouble for it. The answer that you will receive is that, though individual ministers are breeders of discontent, the churches as a whole are an asset to the system. No; there is no regenerate church.

We now have the groundwork for an explanation of the decay of belief in depravity even among those who have regarded themselves as faithful to the traditions of the elders. The doctrine, taken by itself, unrelieved by a counterbalancing doctrine of regeneration through the intervention of a merciful God, is too dreadful, too accusing of the Creator, to be endured. Therefore, when the doctrine of regeneration fails to be convincing in practice, the conviction grows that men are not so bad, after all. Natural amiability becomes more impressive, more suggestive of the hand of God in the creation of man, and natural unamiability actually gets overlooked or slurred over! The preaching of repentance loses its bite, too. An odd swing of the pendulum, this. For, whereas the thunders of the law broke forth against the natural depravity of man, which he couldn’t help, the bad conduct of naturally good men is not found particularly exciting!

Is it possible, then, that the churches are becoming a fellowship of natural amiability, and that, failing to regenerate the industrial system, they are being assimilated to it? This would involve topsy-turvydom with respect to ecclesiastical views of the motives of men, it is true. For it would mean, on the one hand, accommodation to industrialism’s assumptions regarding our innate selfishness and the conflicts by which it enforces itself, but, on the other hand, the giving up, or shoving into the background, of the one Christian doctrine, depravity, with which these assumptions at all harmonize. The practical outcome of this confused drifting would be either a sharing by the churches in the current disillusionment, or an evasion of it by fellowship in thinking about more pleasant things, and a fellowship in doing good things that do not bring the issue to the fore.

The anti-Christian movement in China bases itself to a considerable extent upon the proposition that the Christian churches of the Occident are in alliance, conscious or unconscious, with the industrialism that exploits weaker peoples and disrupts the world. What truth is there in this judgment? If we of the churches are acquiescing in the interpretation of human motives that is the spiritual essence of the present industrial order, then we cannot wholly escape the accusation, no matter how generally amiable and innocent-minded our piety is. And there is only one way to prove that we are not acquiescing, and that is to attack. We must attack either by making a demonstration of regeneration (industrialism’s low estimate of motives being accepted), or by exposing the falsity of this low estimate, in either case calling for repentance and for a reversal of the main direction of our organized conduct.

A significant body of historical study is bringing to light an amazing array of evidence that Christianity has, in fact, adopted the ethical fundamentals of the industrial consciousness. The anti-spiritual presuppositions of an acquisitive system have actually been baptized into the name of Christ, and taught as virtues. Even Catholicism, in spite of its reverence for tradition, shies at--more than shies, objurgates--social aspirations that reflect an early Christian attitude towards property and towards the organization of society. Moreover, the dominant Catholic conception of loyalty to the State obligates the laity to follow industrialism, whenever it so commands, onto the field of carnage. Rome has the grit to teach her children when to disobey the powers of this world, but she has not had the spiritual clarity to see that the kind of docility and contentedness that she inculcates plays into the hands of Mammon, the chief enemy of the Christ. Protestants often marvel at the adaptability that this ancient, stiffly authoritarian church has shown in its adjustments to the modern secular State and to popular government. What makes this adaptability possible is the restricted limits of the sphere within which Catholicism actually exercises authority. This sphere is not coextensive with the forces that make or mar personality, bestowing dignity or throwing contempt upon it. According to the decree of the Vatican Council, the Pope may speak with infallible authority upon any and all questions of both faith and morals; but he does not speak upon all of them. If he did speak, in specific and understandable terms, of the meaning of Jesus’ teachings as applied to present spiritual conditions, the position of Catholicism in industrial society would be far less comfortable than it now is.

The historical studies just referred to maintain that Protestantism, particularly Puritanism, has to a significant extent assimilated its conception of both the sphere and the method of the spiritual life to the economic process. That is, instead of insisting that this process be brought up to the standards implied in the teachings of Jesus, Protestantism has _first_, acquiesced in the doctrine that the economic order somehow secretes from within itself its own rules, standards of value, and grounds of self-justification; _second_, assumed that what the economic system counts as virtues really are virtues, and that here the spiritual life gets its discipline, and character its solidity; _finally_, persuaded itself that the function of the anti-Mammon teachings of Jesus is to prevent excesses such as sacrificing integrity to cupidity, taking undue advantage of the weak, pride of wealth, forgetting the poor, and losing the sense of dependence upon God. Nay, prosperity in the sense of mere accumulation (not in the sense of wants of personality actually met) becomes a sign of God’s kindness or even approval.

Hence austere industriousness (without regard to one’s place in the economic scale) has been valued above play; above the enjoyment of nature, literature, or the fine arts; above even the joys of human fellowship. The habit of saving so as to accumulate a surplus has been almost identified with strength of character. A serious life has been evidenced by intense devotion to business, and winning a competence by working the system hard has been one of the surest guarantees of general respect even within the religious circle. As to the relation of God to the system, consider the tone and contents of Thanksgiving Day proclamations and of prayers and sermons upon this festival day. For what do people give thanks? And does it not appear that God himself is contented with the system?

In short, here are clear tendencies towards making Christianity into a bourgeois religion--the sanctification of the struggles of the middle class within a _given_ industrial order. Such a religion has difficulty in understanding either the discontent of the laborer, or the necessarily disintegrating effect of private wealth upon personality (yes, the necessarily disintegrating effect, as Jesus unqualifiedly declared), or the spiritual significance of freedom in thinking and in the development of ethical principles.

This is not intended to be a statement of the whole situation in Protestantism, but of a drift within it. If a debit and credit judgment were in order, one would have to study carefully the upspringing within both Protestantism and Catholicism (and Judaism, too) of a social movement that to some extent opposes this drift. But our concern here is simply to discover the relation between Christianity and the disillusionment with respect to himself that is creeping upon twentieth-century man. This is what we find: Both Catholicism and Protestantism are entangled with industrialism, both its practice and its philosophy--entangled, that is to say, with the force that has most to do with lowering us in our own eyes. Christianity in the western world is therefore in a dilemma of the most vital kind. If it affirms the greatness and nobility of the human person (whether innate or achievable by a special infusion of divine grace), it must demand fundamental reconstruction of the industrial order because in theory this order denies and in practice it thwarts every such affirmation. On the other hand, if Christianity continues to compromise as it is now doing, it cannot maintain even such spiritual values as it now hugs to its breast. Its faith in God will decline--it is now declining--with its inability to see or produce the Christlike in the common man engaged in the common occupations of the day. Its continuity with Jesus will grow thinner and thinner because of growing inability to speak or understand the plainest of his language. The Protestant churches will more and more become clubs for the enjoyment of conventional and uncreative idealisms, and the Catholic church will protect itself from the advancing spiritual disintegration of Western society by immuring the sacramental life more and more in places of worship and in the esthetic appeal of symbolism. In both Protestantism and Catholicism, mystical experiences will have the character of a flight from life instead of being “the practice of the presence of God” not only in our kitchens but also in our factories, our department stores, and our offices of finance. Such a mystical flight has begun, in fact, not guessing its actual route, innocent of the possibility that it may even be another instrument whereby Mammon conceals the fact that it is--just Mammon.