SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM 



execution. If for seventeen centuries the Church has tended to put 

 allegorical constructions on the Gospels, we know that the christians 

 of the first two centuries did not do so. 



That religion has been, and largely is, "the opium of the people'* 

 is plainly undeniable. Proletarian misery in this world has been 

 constantly lightened by promises of comfort and blessedness in the 

 world beyond the grave, an exhortation which might come well 

 enough from some ecclesiastical ascetic v/ho did not spare himself, 

 but very ill indeed from the employer of labour or the representative 

 of the propertied classes. But the conclusion usually drawn, namely, 

 that religion could have no place in a socialist State, where no class- 

 distinctions existed, does not seem to follow. Because religion has 

 been often used as a social opiate in the past, there seems no reason 

 why this should be so in the future. "Religion would continue to 

 exist," writes A. L. Rowse,^ "in the socialist community, but on its 

 own strength. It would not have the bias of the State exerted in its 

 favour, as it has had so strongly in England up to the present, and in 

 greater or lesser degrees in all western countries." It may indeed be 

 said that religion is "the protest of the oppressed creature,"^ and that 

 therefore when social oppression, in the form of the class-stratified 

 society, is done away with, the private need for religion will vanish 

 as well as the class which profited by it. This, however, is to forget 

 what we could call "cosmic oppression," or creatureliness, the un- 

 escapable inclusion of man in space-time, subject to pain, sorrow, 

 sadness and death. Shall we substitute for the opium of religion an 

 opium of science.^ It has always been the tacit conviction of the 

 social reformer and the person occupied with the practical application 

 of scientific knowledge that by man's own efforts, not merely minor 

 evils, but the major evils of existence may be overcome. This is 

 expressed in that great sentence: "Philosophers have talked about the 

 universe enough; the time has come to change it."^ But the problem 

 of evil is not capable of so simple a resolution. So long as time con- 

 tinues, so long as change and decay are around us and in us, so long 

 will sorrow and tragedy be with us.* "Life is a sad composition," as 



^ Rowse, A. L., Politics and the Younger Generation (Faber, London, 193 1), p. 194- 



^ Marx, K., Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. 



^ And also in the great concluding paragraph of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (written 

 bet^'een 1854 and 1859). 



* Cf. Kierkegaard's distinction between "tribulations" (natural troubles which can 

 only be endured) and "temptations" (troubles due to,- and soluble by, acts of will), 

 discussed by Auden in New Year Letter^ 1941, p. 132. 



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