THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH.

First and Last Things by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH.

THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH.

Now all this leads very directly to a discussion of the relations of a person of my way of thinking to the Church and religious institutions generally. I have already discussed my relation to commonly accepted beliefs, but the question of institutions is, it seems to me, a different one altogether. Not to realize that, to confuse a church with its creed, is to prepare the ground for a mass of disastrous and life-wasting errors.

Now my rules of conduct are based on the supposition that moral decisions are to be determined by the belief that the individual life guided by its perception of beauty is incidental, experimental, and contributory to the undying life of the blood and race. I have decided for myself that the general business of life is the development of a collective consciousness and will and purpose out of a chaos of individual consciousnesses and wills and purposes, and that the way to that is through the development of the Socialist State, through the socialization of existing State organizations and their merger of pacific association in a World State. But so far I have not taken up the collateral aspect of the synthesis of human consciousness, the development of collective feeling and willing and expression in the form, among others, of religious institutions.

Religious institutions are things to be legitimately distinguished from the creeds and cosmogonies with which one finds them associated. Customs are far more enduring things than ideas,—witness the mistletoe at Christmas, or the old lady turning her money in her pocket at the sight of the new moon. And the exact origin of a religious institution is of much less significance to us than its present effect. The theory of a religion may propose the attainment of Nirvana or the propitiation of an irascible Deity or a dozen other things as its end and aim; the practical fact is that it draws together great multitudes of diverse individualized people in a common solemnity and self-subordination however vague, and is so far, like the State, and in a manner far more intimate and emotional and fundamental than the State, a synthetic power. And in particular, the idea of the Catholic Church is charged with synthetic suggestion; it is in many ways an idea broader and finer than the constructive idea of any existing State. And just as the Beliefs I have adopted lead me to regard myself as in and of the existing State, such as it is, and working for its rectification and development, so I think there is a reasonable case for considering oneself in and of the Catholic Church and bound to work for its rectification and development; and this in spite of the fact that one may not feel justified in calling oneself a Christian in any sense of the term.

It may be maintained very plausibly that the Catholic Church is something greater than Christianity, however much the Christians may have contributed to its making. From the historical point of view it is a religious and social method that developed with the later development of the world empire of Rome and as the expression of its moral and spiritual side. Its head was, and so far as its main body is concerned still is, the pontifex maximus of the Roman world empire, an official who was performing sacrifices centuries before Christ was born. It is easy to assert that the Empire was converted to Christianity and submitted to its terrestrial leader, the bishop of Rome; it is quite equally plausible to say that the religious organization of the Empire adopted Christianity and so made Rome, which had hitherto had no priority over Jerusalem or Antioch in the Christian Church, the headquarters of the adopted cult. And if the Christian movement could take over and assimilate the prestige, the world predominance and sacrificial conception of the pontifex maximus and go on with that as part at any rate of the basis of a universal Church, it is manifest that now in the fulness of time this great organization, after its accumulation of Christian tradition, may conceivably go on still further to alter and broaden its teaching and observances and formulae.

In a sense no doubt all we moderns are bound to consider ourselves children of the Catholic Church, albeit critical and innovating children with a tendency to hark back to our Greek grandparents; we cannot detach ourselves absolutely from the Church without at the same time detaching ourselves from the main process of spiritual synthesis that has made us what we are. And there is a strong case for supposing that not only is this reasonable for us who live in the tradition of Western Europe, but that we are legitimately entitled to call upon extra European peoples to join with us in that attitude of filiation to the Catholic Church since, outside it, there is no organization whatever aiming at a religious catholicity and professing or attempting to formulate a collective religious consciousness in the world. So far as they come to a conception of a human synthesis they come to it by coming into our tradition.

I write here of the Catholic Church as an idea. To come from that idea to the world of present realities is to come to a tangle of difficulties. Is the Catholic Church merely the Roman communion or does it include the Greek and Protestant Churches? Some of these bodies are declaredly dissentient, some claim to be integral portions of the Catholic Church which have protested against and abandoned certain errors of the central organization. I admit it becomes a very confusing riddle in such a country as England to determine which is the Catholic Church; whether it is the body which possesses and administers Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, or the bodies claiming to represent purer and finer or more authentic and authoritative forms of Catholic teaching which have erected that new Byzantine-looking cathedral in Westminster, or Whitfield’s Tabernacle in the Tottenham Court Road, or a hundred or so other organized and independent bodies. It is still more perplexing to settle upon the Catholic Church in America among an immense confusion of sectarian fragments.

Many people, I know, take refuge from the struggle with this tangle of controversies by refusing to recognize any institutions whatever as representing the Church. They assume a mystical Church made up of all true believers, of all men and women of good intent, whatever their formulae or connexion. Wherever there is worship, there, they say, is a fragment of the Church. All and none of these bodies are the true Church.

This is no doubt profoundly true. It gives something like a working assumption for the needs of the present time. People can get along upon that. But it does not exhaust the question. We seek a real and understanding synthesis. We want a real collectivism, not a poetical idea; a means whereby men and women of all sorts, all kinds of humanity, may pray together, sing together, stand side by side, feel the same wave of emotion, develop a collective being. Doubtless right-spirited men are praying now at a thousand discrepant altars. But for the most part those who pray imagine those others who do not pray beside them are in error, they do not know their common brotherhood and salvation. Their brotherhood is masked by unanalyzable differences; theirs is a dispersed collectivism; their churches are only a little more extensive than their individualities and intenser in their collective separations.

The true Church towards which my own thoughts tend will be the conscious illuminated expression of Catholic brotherhood. It must, I think, develop out of the existing medley of Church fragments and out of all that is worthy in our poetry and literature, just as the worldwide Socialist State at which I aim must develop out of such state and casual economic organizations and constructive movements as exist to-day. There is no “beginning again” in these things. In neither case will going apart out of existing organizations secure our ends. Out of what is, we have to develop what has to be. To work for the Reformation of the Catholic Church is an integral part of the duty of a believer.

It is curious how misleading a word can be. We speak of a certain phase in the history of Christianity as the Reformation, and that word effectually conceals from most people the simple indisputable fact that there has been no Reformation. There was an attempt at a Reformation in the Catholic Church, and through a variety of causes it failed. It detached great masses from the Catholic Church and left that organization impoverished intellectually and spiritually, but it achieved no reconstruction at all. It achieved no reconstruction because the movement as a whole lacked an adequate grasp of one fundamentally necessary idea, the idea of Catholicity. It fell into particularism and failed. It set up a vast process of fragmentation among Christian associations. It drove huge fissures through the once common platform. In innumerable cases they were fissures of organization and prejudice rather than real differences in belief and mental habit. Sometimes it was manifestly conflicting material interests that made the split. People are now divided by forgotten points of difference, by sides taken by their predecessors in the disputes of the sixteenth century, by mere sectarian names and the walls of separate meeting places. In the present time, as a result of the dissenting method, there are multitudes of believing men scattered quite solitarily through the world.

The Reformation, the Reconstruction of the Catholic Church lies still before us. It is a necessary work. It is a work strictly parallel to the reformation and expansion of the organized State. Together, these processes constitute the general duty before mankind.

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This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2009). First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4225/4225-h/4225-h.htm

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