3.14. OF SECESSION.
The whole trend of my thought in matters of conduct is against whatever
accentuates one's individual separation from the collective
consciousness. It follows naturally from my fundamental creed that
avoidable silences and secrecy are sins, just as abstinences are in
themselves sins rather than virtues. And so I think that to leave any
organization or human association except for a wider and larger
association, to detach oneself in order to go alone, or to go apart
narrowly with just a few, is fragmentation and sin. Even if one
disagrees with the professions or formulae or usages of an association,
one should be sure that the disagreement is sufficiently profound to
justify one's secession, and in any case of doubt, one should remain. I
count schism a graver sin than heresy.
No profession of faith, no formula, no usage can be perfect. It is only
required that it should be possible. More particularly does this apply
to churches and religious organizations. There never was a creed nor a
religious declaration but admitted of a wide variety of interpretations
and implied both more and less than it expressed. The pedantically
conscientious man, in his search for an unblemished religious
brotherhood, has tended always to a solitude of universal dissent.
In the religious as in the economic sphere one must not look for perfect
conditions. Setting up for oneself in a new sect is like founding
Utopias in Paraguay, an evasion of the essential question; our real
business is to take what we have, live in and by it, use it and do our
best to better such faults as are manifest to us, in the direction of a
wider and nobler organization. If you do not agree with the church in
which you find yourself, your best course is to become a reformer IN
that church, to declare it a detached forgetful part of the greater
church that ought to be, just as your State is a detached unawakened
part of the World State. You take it at what it is and try and broaden
it towards reunion. It is only when secession is absolutely unavoidable
that it is right to secede.
This is particularly true of state churches such as is the Church of
England. These are bodies constituted by the national law and amenable
to the collective will. I do not think a man should consider himself
excluded from them because they have articles of religion to which he
cannot subscribe and creeds he will not say. A national state church has
no right to be thus limited and exclusive. Rather then let any man, just
to the very limit that is possible for his intellectual or moral
temperament, remain in his church to redress the balance and do his
utmost to change and broaden it.
But perhaps the Church will not endure a broad-minded man in its body,
speaking and reforming, and will expel him?
Be expelled--well and good! That is altogether different. Let them expel
you, struggling valiantly and resolved to return so soon as they release
you, to hammer at the door. But withdrawing--sulking--going off in a
serene huff to live by yourself spiritually and materially in your own
way--that is voluntary damnation, the denial of the Brotherhood of Man.
Be a rebel or a revolutionary to your heart's content, but a mere
seceder never.
For otherwise it is manifest that we shall have to pay for each step of
moral and intellectual progress with a fresh start, with a conflict
between the new organization and the old from which it sprang, a
perpetually-recurring parricide. There will be a series of religious
institutions in developing order, each containing the remnant too dull
or too hypocritical to secede at the time of stress that began the new
body. Something of the sort has indeed happened to both the Catholic and
the English Protestant churches. We have the intellectual and moral
guidance of the people falling more and more into the hands of an
informal Church of morally impassioned leaders, writers, speakers, and
the like, while the beautiful cathedrals in which their predecessors
sheltered fall more and more into the hands of an uninspiring,
retrogressive but conforming clergy.
Now this was all very well for the Individualist Liberal of the Early
Victorian period, but Individualist Liberalism was a mere destructive
phase in the process of renewing the old Catholic order, a clearing up
of the site. We Socialists want a Church through which we can feel and
think collectively, as much as we want a State that we can serve and be
served by. Whether as members or external critics we have to do our best
to get rid of obsolete doctrinal and ceremonial barriers, so that the
churches may merge again in a universal Church, and that Church
comprehend again the whole growing and amplifying spiritual life of the
race.
I do not know if I make my meaning perfectly clear here. By conformity I
do not mean silent conformity. It is a man's primary duty to convey his
individual difference to the minds of his fellow men. It is because I
want that difference to tell to the utmost that I suggest he should not
leave the assembly. But in particular instances he may find it more
striking and significant to stand out and speak as a man detached from
the general persuasion, just as obstructed and embarrassed ministers of
State can best serve their country at times by resigning office and
appealing to the public judgment by this striking and significant act.
