Neither has the British State, though it does not say so. No
doubt there are many innocent people in England who take
Charlemagne's view, and would, as a matter of course, offer our
eighty-nine per cent of "pagans, I regret to say" the alternative
of death or Christianity but for a vague impression that these
lost ones are all being converted gradually by the missionaries.
But no statesman can entertain such ludicrously parochial
delusions. No English king or French president can possibly
govern on the assumption that the theology of Peter and Paul,
Luther and Calvin, has any objective validity, or that the Christ
is more than the Buddha, or Jehovah more than Krishna, or Jesus
more or less human than Mahomet or Zoroaster or Confucius. He is
actually compelled, in so far as he makes laws against blasphemy
at all, to treat all the religions, including Christianity, as
blasphemous, when paraded before people who are not accustomed to
them and do not want them. And even that is a concession to a
mischievous intolerance which an empire should use its control of
education to eradicate.

On the other hand, Governments cannot really divest themselves of
religion, or even of dogma. When Jesus said that people should
not only live but live more abundantly, he was dogmatizing; and
many Pessimist sages, including Shakespear, whose hero begged his
friend to refrain from suicide in the words "Absent thee from
felicity awhile," would say dogmatizing very perniciously. Indeed
many preachers and saints declare, some of them in the name of
Jesus himself, that this world is a vale of tears, and that our
lives had better be passed in sorrow and even in torment, as a
preparation for a better life to come. Make these sad people
comfortable; and they baffle you by putting on hair shirts.
None the less, governments must proceed on dogmatic assumptions,
whether they call them dogmas or not; and they must clearly be
assumptions common enough to stamp those who reject them as
eccentrics or lunatics. And the greater and more heterogeneous
the population the commoner the assumptions must be. A Trappist
monastery can be conducted on assumptions which would in
twenty-fours hours provoke the village at its gates to
insurrection. That is because the monastery selects its people;
and if a Trappist does not like it he can leave it. But a subject
of the British Empire or the French Republic is not selected; and
if he does not like it he must lump it; for emigration is
practicable only within narrow limits, and seldom provides an
effective remedy, all civilizations being now much alike.
To anyone capable of comprehending government at all it must be
evident without argument that the set of fundamental assumptions
drawn up in the thirty-nine articles or in the Westminster
Confession are wildly impossible as political constitutions for
modern empires. A personal profession of them by any person
disposed to take such professions seriously would practically
disqualify him for high imperial office. A Calvinist Viceroy of
India and a Particular Baptist Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs would wreck the empire. The Stuarts wrecked even the
tight little island which was the nucleus of the empire by their
Scottish logic and theological dogma; and it may be sustained
very plausibly that the alleged aptitude of the English for
self-government, which is contradicted by every chapter of their
history, is really only an incurable inaptitude for theology, and
indeed for co-ordinated thought in any direction, which makes
them equally impatient of systematic despotism and systematic
good government: their history being that of a badly governed and
accidentally free people (comparatively). Thus our success in
colonizing, as far as it has not been produced by exterminating
the natives, has been due to our indifference to the salvation of
our subjects. Ireland is the exception which proves the rule; for
Ireland, the standing instance of the inability of the English to
colonize without extermination of natives, is also the one
country under British rule in which the conquerors and colonizers
proceeded on the assumption that their business was to establish
Protestantism as well as to make money and thereby secure at
least the lives of the unfortunate inhabitants out of whose labor
it could be made. At this moment Ulster is refusing to accept
fellowcitizenship with the other Irish provinces because the
south believes in St. Peter and Bossuet, and the north in St.
Paul and Calvin. Imagine the effect of trying to govern India or
Egypt from Belfast or from the Vatican!

The position is perhaps graver for France than for England,
because the sixty-five per cent of French subjects who are
neither French nor Christian nor Modernist includes some thirty
millions of negroes who are susceptible, and indeed highly
susceptible, of conversion to those salvationist forms of
pseudo-Christianity which have produced all the persecutions and
religious wars of the last fifteen hundred years. When the late
explorer Sir Henry Stanley told me of the emotional grip which
Christianity had over the Baganda tribes, and read me their
letters, which were exactly like medieval letters in their
literal faith and everpresent piety, I said "Can these men handle
a rifle?" To which Stanley replied with some scorn "Of course
they can, as well as any white man." Now at this moment (1915) a
vast European war is being waged, in which the French are using
Senegalese soldiers. I ask the French Government, which, like our
own Government, is deliberately leaving the religious instruction
of these negroes in the hands of missions of Petrine Catholics
and Pauline Calvinists, whether they have considered the
possibility of a new series of crusades, by ardent African
Salvationists, to rescue Paris from the grip of the modern
scientific "infidel," and to raise the cry of "Back to the
Apostles: back to Charlemagne!"

We are more fortunate in that an overwhelming majority of our
subjects are Hindoos, Mahometans and Buddhists: that is, they
have, as a prophylactic against salvationist Christianity, highly
civilized religions of their own. Mahometanism, which Napoleon at
the end of his career classed as perhaps the best popular
religion for modern political use, might in some respects have
arisen as a reformed Christianity if Mahomet had had to deal with
a population of seventeenth-century Christians instead of Arabs
who worshipped stones. As it is, men do not reject Mahomet for
Calvin; and to offer a Hindoo so crude a theology as ours in
exchange for his own, or our Jewish canonical literature as an
improvement on Hindoo scripture, is to offer old lamps for older
ones in a market where the oldest lamps, like old furniture in
England, are the most highly valued.

Yet, I repeat, government is impossible without a religion: that
is, without a body of common assumptions. The open mind never
acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable
conclusion, we still, when we can reason and investigate no more,
must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act
dogmatically on our conclusions. The man who waits to make an
entirely reasonable will dies intestate. A man so reasonable as
to have an open mind about theft and murder, or about the need
for food and reproduction, might just as well be a fool and a
scoundrel for any use he could be as a legislator or a State
official. The modern pseudo-democratic statesman, who says that
he is only in power to carry out the will of the people, and
moves only as the cat jumps, is clearly a political and
intellectual brigand. The rule of the negative man who has no
convictions means in practice the rule of the positive mob.
Freedom of conscience as Cromwell used the phrase is an excellent
thing; nevertheless if any man had proposed to give effect to
freedom of conscience as to cannibalism in England, Cromwell
would have laid him by the heels almost as promptly as he would
have laid a Roman Catholic, though in Fiji at the same moment he
would have supported heartily the freedom of conscience of a
vegetarian who disparaged the sacred diet of Long Pig.

Here then come in the importance of the repudiation by Jesus of
proselytism. His rule "Don't pull up the tares: sow the wheat: if
you try to pull up the tares you will pull up the wheat with it"
is the only possible rule for a statesman governing a modern
empire, or a voter supporting such a statesman. There is nothing
in the teaching of Jesus that cannot be assented to by a Brahman,
a Mahometan, a Buddhist or a Jew, without any question of their
conversion to Christianity. In some ways it is easier to
reconcile a Mahometan to Jesus than a British parson, because the
idea of a professional priest is unfamiliar and even monstrous to
a Mahometan (the tourist who persists in asking who is the dean
of St. Sophia puzzles beyond words the sacristan who lends him a
huge pair of slippers); and Jesus never suggested that his
disciples should separate themselves from the laity: he picked
them up by the wayside, where any man or woman might follow him.
For priests he had not a civil word; and they showed their sense
of his hostility by getting him killed as soon as possible. He
was, in short, a thoroughgoing anti-Clerical. And though, as we
have seen, it is only by political means that his doctrine can be
put into practice, he not only never suggested a sectarian
theocracy as a form of Government, and would certainly have
prophesied the downfall of the late President Kruger if he had
survived to his time, but, when challenged, he refused to teach
his disciples not to pay tribute to Caesar, admitting that
Caesar, who presumably had the kingdom of heaven within him as
much as any disciple, had his place in the scheme of things.
Indeed the apostles made this an excuse for carrying subservience
to the State to a pitch of idolatry that ended in the theory of
the divine right of kings, and provoked men to cut kings' heads
off to restore some sense of proportion in the matter. Jesus
certainly did not consider the overthrow of the Roman empire or
the substitution of a new ecclesiastical organization for the
Jewish Church or for the priesthood of the Roman gods as part of
his program. He said that God was better than Mammon; but he
never said that Tweedledum was better than Tweedledee; and that
is why it is now possible for British citizens and statesmen to
follow Jesus, though they cannot possibly follow either
Tweedledum or Tweedledee without bringing the empire down with a
crash on their heads. And at that I must leave it.

LONDON, December 1915.