The second thing to get clear is that Christianity has
not, and does not profess to have, a detailed political programme for applying "Do as you would
be done by" to a particular society at a particular moment. It could not
have. It is meant for all men at all times and the particular programme which suited
one place or time would not suit another. And, anyhow, that is not how
Christianity works.
When it tells you to feed the hungry it does not give
you lessons in cookery. When it tells you to read the Scriptures it does not
give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or even in English grammar. It was never
intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is
rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of
energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at
its disposal.
People say, "The Church ought to give us a
lead." That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they
mean it in the wrong way. By the Church they ought to mean the whole body of practising Christians. And when they say that the
Church should give us a lead, they ought to mean that some Christians— those
who happen to have the right talents—should be economists and statesmen, and
that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole
efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting "Do as you
would be done by" into action. If that happened, and if we others were
really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own
social problems pretty quickly. But, of course, when they ask for a lead from
the Church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political programme.
That is silly. The clergy are those particular people
within the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look
after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live for ever: and we are
asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not been trained. The
job is really on us, on the laymen. The application of Christian principles,
say, to trade unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists
and Christian schoolmasters: just as Christian literature comes from Christian
novelists and dramatists —not from the bench of bishops getting together and
trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.
All the same, the New Testament, without going into
details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would
be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are
to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat.
Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is
to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and
then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be
no "swank" or "side," no putting on airs.
To that extent a Christian society would be what we
now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience—obedience
(and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed
magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be
very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful
society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as
wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates
what it calls "busybodies."
If there were such a society in existence and you or I
visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should
feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, "advanced,"
but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned—perhaps
even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I
am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what one
would expect if Christianity is the total plan for the human machine.
We have all departed from that total plan in different
ways, and each of us wants to make out that his own modification of the
original plan is the plan itself. You will find this again and again about anything
that is really Christian: every one is attracted by bits of it and wants to
pick out those bits and leave the rest. That is why we do not get much further:
and that is why people who are fighting for quite opposite things can both say
they are fighting for Christianity.
No comments:
Post a Comment