這個工作應該是由我們這些平信徒來承擔。把基督教信仰的原則應用到工會制度或教育上的，必須是基督徒的工會會員和基督徒的校長；正如基督教文學，是出於基督徒的小說家和劇作家——而不是由那一排板凳上的主教們，搞在一起，要利用他們的閒暇時間來寫小說和戲劇。
The first
thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this
department Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden
Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what
everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right. Really great moral teachers
never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr.
Johnson said, "People need to be reminded more often than they need to be
instructed." The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us
back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious
not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to
jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants
to shirk.
The second
thing to get clear is that Christianity has not, and does not profess to have,
a detailed political program 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 program 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 practicing 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 program. 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.
Now another
point. There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks,
and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of
the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All
these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at
interest-what we call investment-is the basis of our whole system. Now it may
not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and
Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or
"usury" as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock
company, and were only dunking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore,
we need not bother about what they said. That is a question I cannot decide on.
I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is
responsible for the state we are in or not This is where we want the Christian
economist But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three
great civilizations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning
the very thing on which we have based our whole life.
One more
point and I am done. In the passage where the New Testament says that every one
must work, it gives as a reason "in order that he may have something to
give to those in need." Charity-giving to the poor-is an essential part of
Christian morality: in the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats it
seems to be the point on which everything turns. Some people nowadays say that
charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought
to be producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be
quite right in saying that we ought to produce that kind of society. But if
anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the meantime, then
he has parted company with all Christian morality. I do not believe one can
settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give
more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts,
luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the
same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our
charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small
There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our
charitable expenditure excludes them. I am speaking now of
"charities" in the common way. Particular cases of distress among
your own relatives, friends, neighbors or employees, which God, as it were,
forces upon your notice, may demand much more: even to the crippling and
endangering of your own position. For many of us the great obstacle to charity
lies not in our luxurious living or desire for more money, but in our fear-fear
of insecurity. This must often be recognized as a temptation. Sometimes our
pride also hinders our charity; we are tempted to spend more than we ought on
the showy forms of generosity (tipping, hospitality) and less than we ought on
those who really need our help.
And now,
before I end, I am going to venture on a guess as to how this section has
affected any who have read it. My guess is that there are some Leftist people
among them who are very angry that it has not gone further in that direction,
and some people of an opposite sort who are angry because they think it has
gone much too far. If so, that brings us right up against the real snag in all
this drawing up of blueprints for a Christian society. Most of us are not
really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says: we
are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the
views of our own party. We are looking for an ally where we are offered either
a Master or—a Judge. I am
just the same. There are bits in this section that I wanted to leave out. And
that is why nothing whatever is going to come of such talks unless we go a much
longer way round. A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us
really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully
Christian. I may repeat "Do as you would be done by" till I am black
in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as
myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love
God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him. And so, as
I warned you, we are driven on to something more inward -driven on from social
matters to religious matters. For the longest way round is the shortest way
home.
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