The King's Writ
**rT>HE simple consolations needed by life in an J|_ under-civilized world . . . these Christianity could give. . . . | But in the cold light of today these consolations fade. In the cold, clear...
...But against the theory that anything deserving the name of anarchy would necessarily result, must be set the whole story of the world before Christ's coming...
...Spiritually considered, there is no doubt it would be a very terrible world...
...By contrast with this we find ourselves today in a society whose standards (as distinguished from the standards of individuals and groups within it) are purely pagan, and, as has recently been said 'more purely materialistic, more blatantly atheistical, than any mediaeval thinker would have conceived possible.' . . . You have a world today in which the King's writ does not run, Christendom is a world in which the King's writ does run...
...He knew that his loyalties might conflict and in that case his daty was to the Faith...
...Is it not strange" fantastic Marivaux once asked, "that a creature so limited as man should know no limit whatsoever to his distresses...
...What were those very different "consolations" which Mr...
...Increasingly it becomes evident, as the sheer joy of kicking over the traces moderates, that we live in an age whose liberation is more apparent than real...
...Wells perceives disappearing in "the cold clear light of our increasing knowledge...
...Outside the persuasion to which we have alluded, the stoutest perfectionist makes no attempt to deny it, no matter how confidently he looks forward to its abridgment by a wider diffusion of scientific knowledge and a wiser application of social laws...
...All that has altered is the ground of our conformity...
...Whether this impersonal will be regarded as the enactment of some power to which submission is due, or as the working of some chain of causation whose links were forged for us by generations that passed beyond the reach of praise or blame years, centuries and aeons ago, is not of literary interest...
...Sin, as Mr...
...Conformity remains and some means to insure it will always be found so long as society determines to function...
...To blend both into a grisaille of the subconscious, far less to erect the gratification of lust and hatred into a system of behavioristic philosophy, had not occurred to them...
...Lead me into the front of the battle," said the old blind king of Bohemia to the grooms at his stirrup...
...Sempack, the latest mouthpiece for his improvisations on that well-worn theme, the World saved by Science...
...Woe to the rich, for they have their consolation here...
...Doubtless it made them over-harsh to sin (we have not yet completely broken away from the mediaeval confusion between sin and crime...
...Thus Mr...
...Chesterton has pointed out more than once, was very black to them—virtue very white...
...But how their accumulated benefit is striking many men and women of good will in a country which is experiencing its full effect may be gathered from an introductory statement, issued by the Anglo-Catholic Summer School of Sociology, which concluded its third session at Keble College, Oxford, recently...
...On this score one need not even appeal to ancient history...
...Society was regarded not merely as a society of Christians, but as a Christian society...
...Displays of feeling not only permitted the men and women of the past but expected of them have gone the way of flounced clothing, extended holidays, carouses and the gout that attended them, punctilio of conduct and the long letters in which our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers took no shame in pouring out affections now taken for granted...
...The prince of this world cometh," our Saviour warned us two thousand years ago, "and in Me he hath no part...
...But it permitted them to believe that there was even here a frontier which mundane justice could only pass at its peril, and where God became the earthly as well as the heavenly Judge, so that the violation of any recognized right of sanctuary put the pursuer, whatever his status and justification, in worse outlawry than the pursued...
...The portent does not grow less strange as life itself becomes more complex, and as the necessity for grappling with its detail almost demands the state of mind that happiness insures and unhappiness destroys...
...The prime motive force in all great or good literature, as Croce has told us, is the conflict between personal and impersonal will...
...Godlessness has not waited for any general apostasy to prove its thorough competency to carry on the world to the world's own satisfaction...
...To draw up a relative table of'human felicity or infelicity in the past and contemporary worlds is a thankless task...
...But, to the least instructed, it must be evident that a large number of emotional releases permitted our forefathers by the comparative looseness of their organized life are denied a generation where the margin even of physical safety is becoming conditioned on emotional retrenchment...
...When we pass from corporate effectiveness to personal happiness, however, the case is different...
...Wells believes were needed (and by implication, one presumes, discovered) in the "under-civilized" world where major operations, poison gas, and bed-time stories by radio were unthinkable things...
...But their instinct for a certafn balance, reinforced as it was by belief in a day, unpleasantly close at hand, when the issues of time would have to be examined in the light of eternity, did not mislead them...
...Our forefathers in the age of faith sinned terribly...
...We cannot keep them if we would...
...Wells, on occasion, is quite ready to deny its existence...
...But they repented heartily...
...The subject of happiness, however, is one that comes too near the quick of human experience for any evidence to be discarded on the mere score of its illogicality...
...Its impact upon the individual has always been to quicken, together with his sense of infelicity, a sense also of his infinity...
...One of them, as we have already hinted, seems to have been a simpler outlook, a more childish outlook, if you will, upon life and its problems...
...Wells, it may be noted (and we are not the first to take note of it) rather fancies himself in the role of advocate for the race of Adam against the inscrutable decrees of some power none the less accessible to a sense of shame because Mr...
...The challenges, direct and oblique, that this popular and humane novelist has from time to time issued, inviting, challenging and persuading Providence to do something that will reestablish its shaken credit before he shatters it irremediably, would, of themselves, ma,ke a respectable volume...
...The cult of PoUyanna, the plea for "miles of smiles," the portentous growth of a patented religion which makes happiness the main article of its faith, even to the point of affirming pain an error, is no accident...
...It taught them to be just a little afraid of riches, even while they coveted them, to make vicarious atonement their own affair by rearing miracles in stone over shaven heads and coarse woolen habits, and to bridge the terrible abyss between wealth and destitution by holding up to public reverence those who had made poverty their bride...
...These are merely a few of the "consolations" as they will occur to the most casual reader of history, which Mr...
...However deep the failure of the middle-ages, the fact remains that you had a society in which the sovereignty of Christ was acknowledged, in which loyalty to Him and His Church was the supreme loyalty...
...Human bad luck is a constant...
...H. G. Wells, in Meanwhile, the most recent instalment of his secular wisdom, just hot from the press, and on the authority of one Mr...
...Some well-meaning persons, in their desire to see moral sanctions preserved, or shall we say restored, confuse the issue when they paint for us horrifying pictures of what a world might be from which religion, as a motive for decent conduct between man and man, had been obliterated...
...Those who perceive any subscription to godly, let alone Christian ideals, in the general conduct of international, political and social relations since the dark days of August, 1914, are either wilfully blind or very, very naiVe...
...The peasant in his rags knew that greater than nationality, greater than any obedience, was the obedience he owed to Christ...
...In the cold, clear light of our increasing knowledge...
...Even the Son of God Himself, in rebuking the rich, did not speak of positive happiness, but of alleviations...
...To count the blessings we have gained in their place would go far beyond the scope of the present brief and modest article...
...It convinced them, as Henry Adams has observed, that the ferocity of war might be hallowed if it were accompanied by a personal readiness to be the first in sacrifice...
Vol. 6 • August 1927 • No. 13
