6.  Religion as ethics

And while I am dealing with rationalists, let me note certain recent interesting utterances of Sir Harry Johnston’s.  You will note that while in this book we use the word “God” to indicate the God of the Heart, Sir Harry uses “God” for that idea of God-of-the-Universe, which we have spoken of as the Infinite Being.  This use of the word “God” is of late theological origin; the original identity of the words “good” and “god” and all the stories of the gods are against him.  But Sir Harry takes up God only to define him away into incomprehensible necessity.  Thus: 

“We know absolutely nothing concerning the Force we call God; and, assuming such an intelligent ruling force to be in existence, permeating this universe of millions of stars and (no doubt) tens of millions of planets, we do not know under what conditions and limitations It works.  We are quite entitled to assume that the end of such an influence is intended to be order out of chaos, happiness and perfection out of incompleteness and misery; and we are entitled to identify the reactionary forces of brute Nature with the anthropomorphic Devil of primitive religions, the power of darkness resisting the power of light.  But in these conjectures we must surely come to the conclusion that the theoretical potency we call ‘God’ makes endless experiments, and scrap-heaps the failures.  Think of the Dinosaurs and the expenditure of creative energy that went to their differentiation and their well-nigh incredible physical development. . . .

“To such a Divine Force as we postulate, the whole development and perfecting of life on this planet, the whole production of man, may seem little more than to any one of us would be the chipping out, the cutting, the carving, and the polishing of a gem; and we should feel as little remorse or pity for the scattered dust and fragments as must the Creative Force of the immeasurably vast universe feel for the DISJECTA MEMBRA of perfected life on this planet. . . .”

But thence he goes on to a curiously imperfect treatment of the God of man as if he consisted in nothing more than some vague sort of humanitarianism.  Sir Harry’s ideas are much less thoroughly thought out than those of any other of these sceptical writers I have quoted.  On that account they are perhaps more typical.  He speaks as though Christ were simply an eminent but ill-reported and abominably served teacher of ethics—­and yet of the only right ideal and ethics.  He speaks as though religions were nothing more than ethical movements, and as though Christianity were merely someone remarking with a bright impulsiveness that everything was simply horrid, and so, “Let us instal loving kindness as a cardinal axiom.”  He ignores altogether the fundamental essential of religion, which is the development and synthesis of the divergent and conflicting motives of the