time: the refreshing river 



The Development of Religious Feeling. 



More emphasis ought, indeed, in justice to traditional Christianity, 

 to be laid on the materialist elements in it;^ for example, the sacra- 

 mental principle. In the poetic symbolism of the sacrifice of the 

 Eucharist, we take clearly materialistic things, bread and wine, and 

 with them we offer and make, to a God anciently conceived of as 

 both immanent and transcendent, a holy and efficient sacrifice, remem- 

 bering that (in this language) material objects are necessary as carriers 

 of grace. Grace can have no existence in isolation. If we love not our 

 brother whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have 

 not seen.^ The material bread and wine of this sacrifice ought to teach 

 us that only by caring for the body and blood and secular spirit of 

 our comrade can we assist his soul, whatever that may be. The 

 material bread and wine ought to remind us that the most exalted 

 spiritual things are connected with, and have arisen in evolution out 

 of, the most primitive processes of living and dead matter. Christians 

 themselves rarely seem to understand this.^ 



No metaphysical commitments. Haldane's fundamental error of 

 identifying religion with metaphysical idealism made him blind to 

 one of the most impressive facts of our time, namely that everywhere 

 there is proceeding a persecution paralleled only by those of the 

 early Church, a persecution of materialists who hold this doctrine 

 of love of our comrade in a more thoroughgoing and enlightened 

 manner than it has evea been held before. Of course, I refer to the 

 communists, and those who sympathise with them, who in all 

 countries, Latin, Slavonic, Anglo-Saxon, are being imprisoned, 

 tortured, and murdered every day.^ Their doctrines might be de- 

 scribed, perhaps rather provocatively, as the highest form which 

 religion has yet taken, a form in which it negates itself, and must 

 necessarily be at war with all previous forms of itself. In my view, 

 the communist has, although in most cases he will never admit it, a 

 more highly developed sense of the holy than any of the adherents 

 of traditional religions, for he sees that the oppression of man by 

 man is unholy, and he is determined to banish it from the 



^ Cf. McTaggart, J., Some Dogmas of Religion (London, 1906), p. 250. 



2 But long after I had written this, I found that Archbishop Wm. Temple does. In 

 his Gifford lectures {Nature, Man and God, London, 1934), he says "Christianity is the 

 most avowedly materialist of all the great religions" (p. 478). And later he approximates 

 his own position to that of dialectical materialism (pp. 487 ff.)- 



^ Cf. A. D. Nock, Conversion (Oxford, 1933), p. 228, where the position of early 

 christians is likened to tliat of modern communists. 



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