ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

{The Wandering Jew 1893}

“Is Christianity Played Out?” - The Wandering Jew Controversy - 5

The Echo.
Monday, January 30, 1893.

Some Pistol Shots. In reply to those of Dr. Joseph Parker. By Robert Buchanan.

SOME PISTOL SHOTS.
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IN REPLY TO THOSE OF DR. JOSEPH PARKER.
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BY ROBERT BUCHANAN.

     I have the highest respect for Dr. Joseph Parker; only—I am always uncomfortable when I see a child of any age playing with firearms. True, the worthy Doctor’s weapon is more like a popgun than a pistol, and I know the owner would be wretched if it hurt anybody. Let him be comforted! His funny little pellets will injure no one. I only wish the missiles of the Church were always as harmless.

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     I like, moreover, to find jocularity in a clergyman. The Christian Religion, if we put aside the Miracles, is not rich in Humour; even the good old joke about Eternal Damnation is somewhat too grisly to be entertaining. It is pleasant, therefore, to find that Dr. Parker can jest about “the Divine initials,” the fourteen hundred million gods of Humanity and the Garden of Eden, according to the Bible pour Rire. Superstition has got no very tight hold on a man who can settle religious questions by “wheezes” worthy of a Lion Comique.

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     Still, I should like the worthy Doctor’s jokes much better if he did not, in his aberrations into argument muddle up his facts and his quotations. He says, for example, that I “admit my own baseness.” My words were, “If I admit my own baseness, I destroy all the godhead in the world.” Then he quotes with approval, as mine, some words which appear in an admirable article, “On the Open Road,” written by quite another writer, and printed immediately after my Interview! Is this more Christian “humour,” or does it only mean more Christian tampering with human documents?

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     In any case, I won’t have Dr. Parker giving Christianity away holus-bolus by saying that the fourteen hundred million “gods,” or human beings, are riotous, selfish, devouring, blood-thirsty gods, and that, personally, he “doesn’t care for them.” “They frighten me,” he says. “I cannot pray to them. I cannot trust them with money. I get out of the way of most of them when I can.” O, Doctor Parker! How many of these beings make up your own congregation? And do you fancy that you “get out of their way” by jumping into the pulpit and shouting at them? I know this is only your Christian humour, but to some who did not know you it would look curiously like a want of Christian charity.

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     But then, in another “Pistol Shot,” he says:—“I move that every man who is cruel to women and children be flogged on the naked back every Monday morning for the rest of his life”; because, he adds, “moral suasion is lost on   tigers.” Is that what you have learned from that most grimly facetious of all books, the Bible? If so, I’m not sorry to have said that I prefer the works of Herbert Spencer.

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     Mr. Le Gallienne will be greatly flattered by the good Doctor’s flattering references to himself. Just listen! “Mr. Buchanan has replied to Mr. Le Gallienne, but he has not answered him. Mr. Buchanan has not fairly and closely faced The Christ.” I am not here tampering with documents; I am quoting Dr. Parker word for word and sentence after sentence. After that, I think, there can be no difficulty about he “divine initials.” They are not “R. B.,” but “R. L. G.” “Ring out the Old; ring in the New!”

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     As I have said, I like this good Doctor. He is au fond a jolly fellow, and as clearly convinced as I am that popular religion, as preached and practised, is only one huge joke. He is very anxious to know what I “had to supper” that night when I tried, vainly, it appears, to resolve all godhead into human personality. “Welsh rabbits,” he suggests; “not,” he justly observes,” a good theological medium.” I did not on the occasion in question sup on Welsh rabbit, for I have always suspected that either toasted cheese or pickled salmon, or some such indigestible substance, must have been the supper of the pious gentleman who was first troubled with the nightmare of the Christian “Hell.”

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     “The word Love,” says Doctor Parker, “is quite as difficult to define as the word God.” I should fancy that it was to most clergymen much more difficult! Why try so hard to define either? We can get along very well without definitions. The thing, the essential fact, the living reality, is what we want; and it is here, in this world, or nowhere.

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     O, but Doctor Parker says, “there is no one world. The Secularist says he believes in agriculture, and does not concern himself with astronomy.” I never heard any Secularist say so, but let that pass! “He forgets,” our divine adds, “that without astronomy agriculture would be impossible.” This is a little far-fetched, but let it pass also. Does Dr. Parker seriously place Theology in the same classification as Astronomy? He has mistaken the word; he means Astrology. Theology bears the same relation to religion that Zadkiel’s Almanac does to Science, and Dr. Parker is a Christian astrologer, who tells fortunes by the heavenly bodies and has gone grievously wrong over a lunar calculation of Nativity!

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     I have not attempted to answer Dr. Parker seriously, for he has taken as little trouble to understand my meaning as he has to verify his quotations. I must refer to serious reader back to what I originally said, and what I still hold to be intellectually and metaphysically unanswerable. Nor will I reproach anyone who supplies the world with genuine amusement, with fine old pantomimic fun, because he says that the Heaven I believe in, containing all I love and reverence, must be “a very little Heaven.” Small as it is, it is all I care for, and all I hope for.

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     Finally, I still take leave to say that Christ, if he lived to-day, would be “disappointed.” Perhaps, however, he would not be disappointed in Dr. Parker. What Christianity has hitherto been deficient in is, as I have already suggested, a true sense of Humour. Even the fun of The Star Chamber and the Inquisition savoured too much of mere horse-play, and the burning of heretics because they did not believe the earth was flat was merely practical joking. Something more subtle and sociable is wanted now to relieve the fairy stories with which our clergymen still amuse their grown-up children, and to all who seek that something I cordially recommend the jests of Dr. Parker.

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The Daily Chronicle.
Tuesday, January 31, 1893.

1. J. Morrison Davidson’s fourth letter.
2. W. Bramwell Booth’s second letter.
3. Letter from Ignatius, O.S.B. [Order of St. Benedict]
4. Letter from James Hope Moulton.

Extracts from other letters.

Editor’s announcement, closing the discussion.

Editor’s summation of the controversy.

IS CHRISTIANITY PLAYED OUT?
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THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.

     SIR,—I had not intended to write a word more in this unexampled controversy but to leave it to my grand sabreur compatriot Mr. Buchanan to sum up the situation. Some friends, however, think that it would be well that I should say a few words in reply to Mr. G. W. Foote’s quasi-personal, “secularist”-papal rescript in Saturday’s issue, and with your permission I shall briefly do so.
     He does not like my reiteration of the fact that, so far at least as this world is concerned, communism pure and simple is the Christianity of Christ. He cannot deny it, but he holds up his hands in astonishment that I should claim as upholders of that “orb of rational polity” so much desiderated by Mr. Buchanan, St. Simon, Proudhon, Rodbertus, Lassalle, and Marx, of whom he ventures to say, “and there was not a Christian among them!”
     That was obviously not my point, which was that if Christ were not “intellectually” competent to think out an effective scheme for the emancipation of suffering humanity, neither were these acknowledged brain-giants who painfully expressed his all-embracing dicta in terms of modern industrialism.
     But to Mr. Foote it is given to know who are Christians and who are not; from me that knowledge is withheld. I am content to accept the authority that “those who, not having the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, are a law unto themselves.” Nay, I go to a yet higher authority, and say, “It is not they that call me Lord, Lord, that shall be saved, but those who do the will of my Father which is in heaven.” Indeed I should greatly hesitate to say that the president of the National Secular Society himself was not naturaliter Christianus.
     Mr. Foote is good enough to instruct me regarding the Essenes, who, he admonishes me, “were a numerous communistic society before the formation of any Christian Church; in fact, before the apostolate of Christ.” If Mr. Foote cares to turn to my little book, “The Old Order and the New,” he will find a pretty full account of the Essenes, but they were never, as he says, a “numerous society.” Philo reckons them at 4,000, and their ante-dating Christ’s apostolate, though it may be inferred, cannot be proved.
     Anyhow, so far as I am concerned, the point is of no consequence whatever, for my Christianity is at least as comprehensive as that of St. Augustine, who held that that which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist from the planting of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already subsisted, began to be called Christianity.
     On one point I am entirely at one with Mr. Foote—the utter futility of other-worldliness. We are as much in eternity now as we ever have been or ever shall be. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us here, and now or nowhere, and the “selfishness of salvation” in another world, apart from the most determined effort to abolish the environments which produces so much needless sorrow and suffering on earth, is to me anathema maranatha. My sole prayer in this momentous issue is that of the “Third Voice in the night” in Tennyson’s “Queen Mary.”
     “Third Voice: What am I? One who cries continually with sweat and tears to the Lord God that it would please him out of his infinite love to break down all kingship and queenship, all priesthood and prelacy; to cancel and abolish all bonds of human allegiance, all the magistracy, all the nobles, and all the wealthy, and to send us again, according to his promise, the one King, the Christ, and all things in common, as in the days of the first Church, when Christ Jesus was King.”—I am, &c.,

                                                                                                                   J. MORRISON DAVIDSON.
     Jan. 30.

     P.S.—One word regarding my alleged “anonymous defamation” of the late Mr. Charles Bradlaugh. I have never written a word anonymously for the last quarter of a century when I could avoid it, and I have never written a line during that long stretch of journalistic experience to which I would not willingly subscribe my name at this moment. All who know me are aware that this is so.—J. M. D.

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THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.

     SIR,—The comments and criticisms which have appeared in your columns in response to the brief protest I addressed to you on this subject, render it necessary that I should offer one or two further remarks. I do so with some reluctance, for in the nature of things it is impossible to deal satisfactorily within the limits of newspaper controversy with subjects which have exercised the greatest thinkers of all ages.
     I have to thank Mr. Buchanan for his appreciative recognition of the social work of the Salvation Army. That commendation is, I venture to believe, of a significance quite beyond his own perception. To W. K. F., of Merton College, Oxford, I desire to point out that he attributes to me words that I did not use, and that his argument is directed to the demolition of a proposition which I did not advance. To the writer of the letter signed “A Victim, Dover,” I would say that I am content with my Bible in my own tongue, and if he will read with a fearless desire to discover the truth he also will find it. I have no sympathy for any Scriptural teaching that depends upon what are called “original languages.” I have noticed that all sorts of schoolmen are open to the satire of one of the ancients, “Everything is Greek when it is inconvenient to know Latin.”
     The correspondence which you are about to close has shown once more the amazing mental, moral, and spiritual contradiction, confusion, and final vacancy into which modern unbelief inevitably leads. I say vacancy, for what do the scientists, the evolutionists, the philosophers, and all the mixed multitudes of critics offer us? Nothing—absolutely nothing. It is true that from time to time they set forth many extraordinary theories, which, like the good gentleman who periodically adjusts the date of the great Armageddon, they vary from year to year to suit more recently-observed phenomena. They supplement and correct and contradict one another; they correct and contradict themselves; they alternately say, “We know, we do not know, we cannot know.”
     “Whence come we?” asks Professor Tyndall (“Use of Imagination in Science”), “Whither go we? The question dies without an answer—without even an echo upon the infinite shores of the Unknown. . . . Having thus exhausted physics and reached its very rim, the real mystery still looms beyond us. We have, in fact, made no step towards its solution.” “Science takes for its province,” says Mr. Huxley (Nineteenth century, Dec. 1885), “only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension, and that outside the boundaries of that province they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance.” “Science,” writes Darwin (“Origin of Species,” 1882), “as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life.” “He” (the man of science), says Mr. Herbert Spencer (“First principles”), “more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate essence nothing can be known.” (!)
     What a spectacle these and a thousand other admissions and contradictions present! Men who arrogantly deny the teaching of Christ, compelled by Nemesis to confess what they know nothing of the great facts with which he deals; that their high-sounding postulates, their wordy reasonings, their “swiney” sneers are but the expressions of their own impotent ignorance. They offer us in the place of God and faith and love a portentous nothing, a monstrous abortion. Of a truth one may adopt the exclamation of Horace and inquire: “What will these boasters produce worthy of all this mouthing? The mountains are in labour; a contemptible mouse will be born.”
     Mr. Buchanan says that the question between Christianity and the world is this: “Is there or is there not another life beyond the life we now live?” But he must forgive me for saying this is not a complete statement of the case—it is what Bishop Butler would have described as “true, but not adequate.” Christianity offers much more than a cloudless immortality. It promises a holy and happy mortality. Christ is the Christ of to-day as well as the miracle-worker of ages past and the dispenser of everlasting joys in the ages to come. It is precisely at this point that the critics of his life and death and character all go wrong. They spend an infinitude of labour in microscopic dissections of facts which have been buried for centuries. They exhaust the all but limitless resources of learning and research in dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of ancient history. They construct from scientific accuracies and with faultless reasoning (if only the premisses were true!) theories which pronounce God and Eternity to be “unknown, unknowable, inconceivable.” The Christ of yesterday they say was a fraud, the Christ of to-morrow is a myth. But what, I ask them, of the Christ of to- day? Why do they not speak of him? Why do they not seek him? Why do they not make trial for themselves, and prove whether what he has affirmed himself able and willing to do in the present will not both account for all that he is said to have accomplished in the past, and illuminate all that he has promised to give in the future?
     What will he do? He will forgive sin; he will give power to resist evil; he will effect a permanent change in personal character, at least as difficult to influence as the shoal of fishes Mr. Buchanan cannot understand. It is futile to call sin “cant;” that is only admitting its existence by christening it afresh. Sin, selfishness, baseness, the opposite of love—call it what you like, it is a leading factor in the character and life of men. Jesus Christ declares that he has power to give release from its thraldom, to destroy the love of it, and to give as a sequence of that change eternal restoration to the likeness and conscious favour of the Eternal Father.
     The real practical question is, does he do this now? Multitudes of men, to whose witness I reverently add my humble testimony, have declared that he does. They cannot reasonably be held to be impostors, and the difference in the ipsissima verba of their evidence and of their creeds is a strong proof rather than otherwise that what they say is not irresponsible repetition, and that what they believe is not the “dreaming of a dream.” All the evidence that can be adduced against them is of the know-nothing description to which I have already referred. Such testimony has no place in the arbitraments of intelligent and honest men when associated with the affairs of daily life. Why should we regard it here? The witness of half a dozen credible men who have personal knowledge of some incident in question will obtain a verdict from any jury, if all that can be produced to rebut it is the testimony of those who have seen nothing, who have heard nothing, and who confessedly know nothing about it.
     May I add one word in conclusion to some who have written both to you and to me from amidst the stress and storm of stern conflict with honest doubt? To them I would say, be true—“to thine own self be true.” Sincerity is the life-preserver of the soul, and “have faith in God;” be that faith ever so small and weak, persevere. For even if there seems to be—

Nothing before, nothing behind
     The steps of Faith,
Fall on the seeming void, and find
     The Rock beneath.

With sincere apologies for the length of this letter,—I am, yours faithfully,

                                                                                                                       W. BRAMWELL BOOTH.
     International Headquarters of the Salvation Army, London, E.C., Jan. 30.

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     “Veritas” points out that “the mention in Matt. xxv. of an eternal (or age-log) fire does not necessitate belief in never- ending suffering. The literal Gehenna, or Valley of Hinnom, with its quenchless flames, was a receptacle just outside Jerusalem for what was utterly bad and worthless—rubbish and refuse being cast therein not for their own sake to be purified as gold is purified of its dross, but in order that by their complete destruction the city as a whole might be rendered clean and sweet. In like manner, it is natural to infer that all goodness and every remnant of a better nature having become extinct in the unbelievers of that last generation of the Jewish nation through their having utterly silenced within them the spirit of God, they became as the refuse and off-scouring of the world, and at this the first judgment were cast into the fire of the spiritual Gehenna, not for their own sakes nor that they might be perpetually tortured, but in order, without further prolonged delay, to rid the universe of their existence. The name “Valley of Slaughter” applied to the Valley of Hinnom, and the use throughout the New Testament of such phrases as ‘a consuming fire,’ ‘the lake of fire,’ ‘the second death,’ ‘perishing,’ ‘destruction,’ also point to the probability of fearful anguish, followed by extinction of being, as the doom which awaits all impenitent ones who sin against fulness of light and knowledge, and in spite of all that God can do for them in this or any world, choose evil and reject his infinite love, and thus prove themselves utterly, and therefore, irremediably bad.”
     “Comes”:—“I would take this opportunity of pointing out that the question that has been under discussion does not involve the truth of Christianity. Religion was played out in the days of Noah. The votaries of religion were reduced to a minority of eight. But what did the world gain by its repudiation of the religion of Enoch and Noah? A Christian may allow that Christianity is played out, but there will remain the question, “Will the world do better without Christianity?”
     “T. H.”:—“Taking Mr. Buchanan’s own definition of the question at issue ‘between Christ and the world,’ I maintain that Eastern psychology can alone substantiate his central teaching. Proof as we now know proof, was not needed in the early years of the Christian era; but as was said many years since by the great Brighton preacher, Mr. Robertson, ‘There is no revelation but the ever continuing,’ and I take it to be the duty of all who want to know to look for evidences where they can get them, instead of expecting to have these problems solved for them by some miracle. Mr. Buchanan prefers to label this doctrine of a conscious life after death ‘Christian.’ I see no objection so long as it is clearly admitted that it is a doctrine common to all the great world religions, Buddhism included.”
     G. W. Crutchley:—“As a reflection of the thoughts of all sorts and conditions of men upon one of the profoundest subjects that can occupy the mind, your controversy is a wonderful sign of the times. Twenty years ago no great London daily would have admitted such a correspondence, and in a religious newspaper it would have been too onesided to have been important. If you could see your way to reprinting the correspondence in book form, adding also the letters received but not printed, the book would be the most remarkable indication of the current of modern thought yet published.”
     Ethel Edwards:—“If by Christianity is meant that fearful and wonderful jumble of theological notions termed orthodoxy, which is taught in Sunday-schools, and believed by children and those who never use their reason, then to all earnest thinkers this Christianity has become as obsolete as the old Ptolemaic theory of the universe or the ancient mythologies of Greece and Egypt—so long as the theory and practice of Christianity differ so widely, it is no wonder that the people are somewhat sceptical concerning its value and regenerating power, and it is difficult to get the masses to believe otherwise than that, if Christianity ever exercised any beneficial influence upon the world, to all practical intents and purposes it is now played out.”
     “A Tiller of the Soil”:—“One of the most promising efforts for the upraising of the working classes is the co-operative movement, and when it has reached its logical conclusion and perfection it will be found Christianity in action, and men will see that the Christ was there, though they knew it not, like Jacob of old. And the Kingdom of God will have come when men are truly each for all and all for each.”
     “E. W. H. G.”:—“Is it not too painfully evident that mankind has rejected the humility of the Cross, and that so-called Christians have been seeking a system in which self and human interests may find a place? Protestantism, with all its boasted progress, its watchwords, and free thought, and an open Bible, has hindered the true spirit of Christianity, and has encouraged modes of free inquiry diametrically opposed to the teaching of Christ and his apostles.”
     An Edinburgh M. B. writes:—“The question is as easily and safely answered in the positive as in the negative; but, not being a Christian myself, I rather am inclined to hold that it is not played out. This may sound paradoxical, but what I mean is this—that while in my case Christianity would be an active depressant to both my intellectual and spiritual life, to others it may act in a manner entirely opposite. Because I am strong and healthy physically, it is not for me to say that medicine and surgery are played out. By Christianity I mean, of course, the system of morals founded by Jesus, and not the system as generally practised to-day, founded on fear and dogma, which stands in the same relation to true Christianity as charlatanism does to scientific medicine and surgery. And as far as I can understand Mr. Buchanan he agrees with me; and he would be the first to own that to some the beautiful example of Christ has been of more practical use in the battle of life than all the teachings of the moralists, from Marcus Aurelius to John Ruskin, put together.”
     Another Working Man:—“To me it seems as reasonable to ask, ‘Is water a failure?’ as to ask, ‘Is Christ a failure?’ We all admit the healing and cleaning properties of water, and yet I have known persons to whom water is a total failure for the simple reason that they fail to use it. Christ in like manner is a failure to many for the same reason—they do not accept him or his teaching.”
     John T. Markley:—“As one who for nearly thirty years has been in close contact with and an observant student of the various Churches, I don’t hesitate to pronounce professional Christianity a comparative failure, regarded from the standpoint of humanitarianism. Nonconformity, especially Baptists, Congregationalists, and fashionable Presbyterianism, are not in touch with the crying needs of unavoidable poverty or respectable distress. The working classes know they are not wanted at cushioned churches. No wonder the toiling democracy holds aloof from the ‘organised respectability’ of exclusive religions, and prefers the intellectual variety, humanity and contagious friendliness of the Sunday newspaper to the cold, well-paid, uninspired platitudes of the majority of the pulpits.”
     Miss Amrimi North:—“If a miracle were performed to-day for Robert Buchanan, a hundred years hence people would say, ‘We did not see it. Can we take a man’s word?’ Robert Buchanan would be deeply offended if he heard, yet he will not take God’s word.”
     Miss Louisa Samson:—“I submit that the question ‘Is Christianity Played Out?’ could hardly be seriously asked and eagerly discussed if there were not an uncomfortable kind of feeling that it might be answered in the affirmative . . . If Christianity cannot keep its own priests moral—and they are twelve times more criminal, on the average, than the rest of the community—what can be expected of it as a moral influence on the multitude?”
     Mr. F. C. Arnold-Jarvis:—“Christianity has a message for every age, and when that message has been apprehended it may itself, the agent, appear to be played out, just because it has really been played in, and has accomplished that whereunto it was sent, e.g. it casts its main attack, under the guidance of the spirit, in every age against the most uproaring of the powers of evil, and having combated that successfully (as in the case of slavery) it turns its attack to the next most pressing need. . . The temperance cause, social purity, and all philanthropic and humanitarian movements will never have their proper influence unless and only in so far as they ally themselves under the banner of Christ.”
     “Reformer”:—“My view of this question, arrived at after much study and observation, and confirmed by the correspondence in your paper, is that, while dogmatic Christianity—Paulism as Mill termed it—is certainly on the wane, ethical Christianity, the spirit of the Gospels, in other words, is no less surely on the ascendant. From the medley of conflicting theories which have found expression in your columns, one fact stands out clearly, that Christianity is regarded more and more as a religion for this life, and less and less as a scheme of insurance against endless torment in some  other.”
     Mr. W. H. Edwards:—“With me spiritualism has superseded Christianity, because it teaches there is a just God who wisely ordains all things and whose unalterable law is that of compensation, which entails the necessity of man working out his own redemption, either in this world or the next, irrespective of all creeds, and who creates his own heaven, by good deeds done on earth.”
     “A Mission Priest”:—“The faith of the picked troops of the army of Christ is not mere sentiment, their faith is not ‘nebulous’—they can give an answer to those who ask a reason for this belief, their aim is not ‘other worldliness,’ but ‘this worldliness.’ They are content to do their best to fight the evil in the world as well as they can, and to leave the future to God; content to go to hell if God’s purpose of saving the world be so served; and, strange to say, these draw their inspiration for action and for self-sacrifice not from secularism, but from the life and example of Jesus of Nazareth. It is with the Christianity of these, and they are more numerous than is thought, that Mr. Buchanan must deal before he is entitled to say that Christianity is played out, and Christianity will be played out when they and such as they are swept off the face of the earth.”
     “H. B. M. B.”:—“Much confusion of thought and hopeless misery would be saved us did we bear in mind the great principle of development. The only possible justification there can be for suffering is that it is the only instrument the supreme cause has at command to attain the ultimate more perfect becoming, that development read through the ages teaches us is nature’s great work to carry out.”

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     [As Parliament meets to-day, in order, we trust, to prove by wise and generous legislation that Christianity is not played out, and as we require all the space we can spare to reporting its proceedings, this correspondence must now close. The great interest the discussion has aroused is proved by the fact that nearly 2,000 correspondents have contributed to it. We deeply regret that it has not been possible for us to do justice to the many excellent letters which we have been compelled to reject for want of space.
                                                                                                                                               —ED. D. C.]

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     THE controversy on Christianity, which we bring to a conclusion to-day, is a sign of the times which it behoves everyone to note. Twenty years ago such a discussion in the columns of a daily newspaper would have been impossible. The influence of education and of the modern critical movement was not then sufficiently powerful to permit of any such phenomenon. And it may also fairly be argued that the old hidebound conception of a newspaper as merely a medium for the record of conventional party politics and of the regulation sporting, police, and general news, held the field. This era has completely passed away. Whatever may be its issue, it is certain that a deep movement of emotional thought, recasting the old political, social, literary and theological ideas, is beginning to powerfully affect humanity. Men are tired of mere make-believe, of surface-skimming. They need contact with vital facts, they desire to come to close quarters with reality. And it would be the merest affectation on the part of the Press to ignore this deep-seated sentiment. To “hold the mirror up to nature,” and to search into the “very form and body of the time,” we conceive to be a duty laid upon the conscientious journalist from which he cannot shrink. We are glad to be able to say that this controversy has been conducted fairly and without undue asperity. All the writers whose letters have appeared, as well as hundreds for whose contributions we could find no space, have written in real earnest, animated by a sincere desire to set forth or to arrive at some positive conviction. We have no doubt that every one of them remains of the same opinion still; but they have one and all contributed to an awakening of the general mind on the highest of all themes, on those deep fundamental ideas in which the life of men is ultimately rooted. Controversy, perhaps, seldom convinces a man of his error; but it has this enormous advantage, that it enables him to see another’s point of view, and so aids the growth of what may be called a common reason among men.
     Perhaps the most obvious criticism to be passed on nearly all our correspondents is that most of them have not clearly defined what they mean by Christianity. To one the doctrine of the Catholic Church, as expressed in her creeds and by her councils, and as symbolised by her great religious rites—that is Christianity. A secularist correspondent gives a definition of Christianity which would exclude from the Christian pale a CHANNING and a MARTINEAU. Another correspondent, Mr. MORRISON DAVIDSON, in a very powerful and interesting letter, appears to consider the abolition of property with a view to the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven to be the central thought of CHRIST’S teaching. Mr. LE GALLIENNE again presents us with his “essential Christianity,” and Mr. BUCHANAN, by a curious paradoxical argument, seems on the one hand to deeply sympathise with the ideas of CHRIST, but to believe, on the other, that they constitute a “counsel of perfection,” having no relation to the actual world in which we find ourselves here and now. We may well say something to each of these writers. To Mr. BUCHANAN we may at once say that the universe is one, and that all ideas which are true in any hypothetical future state are true now. “There is no other world,” said EMERSON—“the whole fact is here.” By this the brilliant essayist did not mean to deny life beyond the grave, which, indeed, he expressly affirms. He meant that the true eternal life has no reference to time or place, that it is a condition of the soul, a state of being in which the real inner man finds himself, and not something untrue to-day, but true in “another world.” If CHRIST’S ideas are true, they are true for man’s life now; and nothing can be more reactionary than to divide up life into fragments, to go back to a dualism which had a provisional value, but which man has now outgrown. To Mr. LE GALLIENNE we may, perhaps, say that he has scarcely given the majority of the readers of his very interesting letters a clear conception of what he means by “essential Christianity.” We cannot, however, blame him for this, for the word Christianity almost eludes all definition. WHITMAN says that a child asked him what is the grass, and he says he could not tell. The most common object in the world cannot be defined so as to give us an insight into its nature; it remains a mystery. So with Christianity; the great complexity of spiritual conceptions which finds its inner principle of life in the deep mystic faith of CHRIST. As to the question of property, undoubtedly CHRIST was averse to the rich class: no twisting of texts can alter that plain fact. Without question, the early Christians were communists; but it was a purely voluntary communism practised by men and women who had no conception of property owned and administered as it is to-day by the modern State. And, while CHRIST laid great stress on the danger of wealth and the anti-human influence of power and rank, it cannot be said that his gospel is to be summed up in the one idea of communism. Indeed JESUS CHRIST is not to be exploited for the benefit of any body of social reformers, however earnest, though his spirit permeates all true social reform. The truth is that the communism was very much more the result of spiritual conviction than the conviction was the outcome of communism. The secularist, too, cannot be permitted to lay down a set of dogmas as exactly coincident with Christianity. The Christian Church existed before the New Testament was written, much more before the creeds were constructed. The philosophic document drawn up at the Council of Nicæa would have been, we may feel pretty certain, quite unintelligible to a simple-hearted Galilean fisherman or to a slave at Corinth or Ephesus. Neither can the Catholic Church claim to decide that holy men and women outside its great communion, whose lives are devoted to the ideas of CHRIST, are not entitled to the Christian name.
     Now, in an attempt to answer the question which has been asked, let us at once say that the notion of Christianity, in any sense that any great body of men would accept to-day, being “played out” is manifestly absurd. The very controversy itself disproves such a theory. People do not passionately argue about something which has no existence. Whether churches or chapels are crowded with congregations is not eh question. Whether a different interpretation of Bible texts and Church formulas is not modifying our religious views is not the question. Leaving all these things on one side, the great fact remains that the revolution in our feeling about man and the world which was born with JESUS CHRIST is at work to-day perpetually recreating and renovating society. The ancient pre-Christian world, among other qualities, was remarkable for two things; it had no conception of human equality and solidarity, the basis of Democracy, and it had no conception of any progress towards an ideal which does not actually exist. Much mischief has been done by talk about Greek democracy. There was no democracy in Greece. There was merely a ruling caste, surrounded by slaves. In the prime of Athens when the city contained about half a million of people, there were less than thirty thousand free citizens, or only about one in twenty of the population. The slaves formed the great mass even in “constitutional” States of antiquity, and nearly all were slaves in the great Oriental monarchies. Democracy is a modern growth, the offshoot of equality, itself the political expression of the idea that GOD is incarnate in humanity, and that therefore all men partake of the divine nature. There are dim adumbrations of this idea in Greek poetry and philosophy; but it was never preached to the poor, to all, until it was preached by the Christian Church. Even such great thinkers as PLATO and ARISTOTLE had the utmost contempt for all non-Greek or “barbarous” peoples, much as the Southern planter had for his slaves. Nor had Paganism any conception of progress towards an ideal. Its ideal was realised. The Greek cared for no more than to be a perfect Greek citizen; he found the highest expression of his faith in the social life around him. But the modern man finds his ideal in “worlds not realised,” in “high instincts before which our mortal nature doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised.” The true city of our affections is not in the actual State around us, but in the “City of GOD” which is still to be. The revolutionary influence of this conception has been unparalleled in human history, and it is a conception which was foreign to Paganism, or only half-felt by writers like MARCUS AURELIUS, who lived actually in Christian times, and who were susceptible to the breath of the Zeitgeist. GOD working through man for the redemption of the world—that seems to us of the essence of the Christian idea. Now that idea is the moving thought of modern literature, of music, of art, of politics, and of the new and hopeful social movement. In that sense, then, Christianity is actually pulsing through the blood of man to-day; only instead of gathering men into the Church, it is working upon the whole world.
     We cannot close without a word to the religious bodies of our land. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” was CHRIST’S own standard and test of discipleship. And the more one inquires among our working population, the more one finds that they have been alienated by the separation of creed from deed. It may be, as BROWNING declares, “hard to be a Christian.” But it would assuredly make for honesty and truth if those who are contented with things as they are, and who live merely for money-getting and enjoyment, would formally renounce the Christian name. The hypocrisy of many modern Churches has equalled the hypocrisy of the Roman Empire when the old religion had died out, and the Augurs laughed in one another’s faces over the sacrifices. A professed creed of devotion to a great ideal of perfect love and goodness, and of untiring work for human redemption, goes ill with luxury, greed, conventional morality, bowing to the proprieties, and indifference to the claims of brotherhood which Christianity implies. If Mr. BUCHANAN and his opponents and critics have done nothing else, at least they have uttered in the ears of ecclesiastical convention a stern call to righteousness and to sacrifice.

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The Liverpool Mercury.
Tuesday, February 7, 1893.

     The Dissenting ministers of the metropolis have taken up Mr. Robert Buchanan’s query “Is Christianity played out?” with some zeal, and are discussing it in eloquent sermons Sunday after Sunday. It has been touched upon also by some of the leading Church clergy, but the latter have for the most part avoided the subject. The problem has given rise to much controversy, in which many foolish and irrelevant things have been uttered on both sides. It is a sign of the times, however, that such a controversy is possible. If everything has not been said for Christianity that could be said, its foundations have been somewhat cleaned by the discussion; but it may be assumed to be certain that the controversy has not altered the opinion of a single human being. Least of all has it affected Mr. Buchanan, who writes to a contemporary this morning that he not only disbelieves in Christianity, but believes that the Christian faith, as preached and practised, is the most powerful enemy of human progress, and that its failure is due to the fundamental errors of Christ himself. It is well to know exactly where Mr. Buchanan, poet, novelist, and playwright, stands.

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The St. James’s Gazette, London.
Saturday, March 11, 1893.

     Mr. Le Gallienne is not going to rest content with his controversy with Mr. Buchanan about Christianity in the Daily Chronicle. He is writing a small volume of essays to give us his gospel of “Essential Christianity.” What step will that pugnacious Mr. Buchanan take next? Add a new clause to his Commination Service for the Modern Young Man? Mr. Le Gallienne’s little book, we are assured by those in the secret, while altogether non-theological and unconventional, will approach the subject from a reverential standpoint. The book will be called “The Religion of a Literary Man” (after the “Religio Medici”?), and will issue from the Bodley Head (Messrs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane) some time during the spring season.

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The collection of cuttings from the Liverpool Record Office includes several other items related to the controversy but of more relevance to Richard Le Gallienne than Robert Buchanan. They are:

February 4, 1893: From The Speaker, London - ‘The Second Crucifixion’, a poem by Richard Le Gallienne.

February 12, 1893: Letter from Joseph Parker to Richard Le Gallienne thanking him for sending a copy of his poem.

March 11, 1893: From the Athenæum, London - announcement of Richard Le Gallienne’s book, ‘The Religion of a Literary Man’.

March 22, 1893: From the Liverpool Mercury - brief mention of Richard Le Gallienne’s book.

March 23, 1893: From The Daily Chronicle - report of a sermon by Rev. C. Lloyd Engström on the subject, “Is Christianity Played Out?”

April 17, 1893: From The Guardian, Manchester - report on a meeting of the Ancoats Brotherhood, addressed by Richard Le Gallienne.

April 29, 1893: From The Manchester City News - ‘The Religion of a Literary Man’ Part 1. Richard Le Gallienne’s address to the Ancoats Brotherhood.

May 6, 1893: From The Manchester City News - ‘The Religion of a Literary Man’ Part 2.

December 7, 1893: From The Independent and Nonconformist - ‘Is Christianity Played Out?’, a poem by James Bell.

March 23, 1910: From the Liverpool Echo - announcement of the death of Richard Le Gallienne’s mother.

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“Is Christianity Played Out?” - The Wandering Jew Controversy continued (Additional Material)

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