SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM 



The Position of the Scientific Worker. 



The position of the scientific worker in the world of to-day is 

 indeed a very difficult one. Owing to the gradual permeation of our 

 entire civilisation by the practical results of scientific thought and 

 invention, the scientific worker has in some measure succeeded to 

 the semi-oracular tripod previously occupied by the religious thinker, 

 whether enthusiastic saint or prudent ecclesiastic. That ancient 

 separation of life into secular and sacred, which arose out of the 

 acquiescence of the early christians in their failure to transform the 

 human society of their time into God's Kingdom on earth, still reigns 

 in our civilisation. Owing to the increasing intellectual difficulties 

 which the ordinary man of our time feels with respect to the theology 

 of the traditional form of western European religion, he turns more 

 and more to the scientific worker, expecting to hear from him a sound 

 doctrine about the beginning of the world, the dut}^ of man, and the 

 four last things. The scientific "ascetic" in the laboratory is the 

 monk of to-day, and is tacitly regarded as such by the ordinary man.^ 

 Conversely, the secular power, the medieval imperium^ has been 

 succeeded by the power of the owner — the owner of factories, the 

 owner of newspapers and propaganda agencies, the owner of land, 

 the owner of finance capital. 



In a new guise, then, the sacred and the secular are still at war. 

 We may study their antagonism best by observing the fate of the 

 concept of Regnum Dei^ the Kingdom of God — always the surest 

 indication of the relative power of priest and king. Roughly speaking, 

 there have been, in the history of the Christian Church, three separate 

 doctrines about the Kingdom of God, three separate interpretations 

 of the Kingdom-passages in the Gospels.^ First, there was the identifi- 

 cation of the Kingdom with a purely spiritual mystical realm of 

 beatitude, either to be reached after death by the faithful, or attainable 

 here and now through the methods of prayer and ascetic technique, 

 or existing in the future in Heaven after the last judgment. This has 

 been perhaps the commonest theory. It has flourished whenever the 

 secular was strong, since it discountenanced any attempt to improve 

 the conditions of life on earth. As an instance, one could mention 

 the mystical theology of lutheranism, whose founder held the world 



^ He may be called an "ascetic" in that he has often sacrificed for his intellectual 

 calling those material benefits which Lord Birkenhead referred to as the "glittering 

 prizes" of the capitalist system. 



* Cf. Bishop A. Robertson, Regnum Dei (London, 1901). We shall discuss this sub- 

 ject in more detail below, p. 50. 



43 



