Perhaps it is his knowledge of all this petty misery and sordid
unwholesomeness which makes him disposed at times, in spite of an almost
rollicking temperament, to take dismal and despairing views of the
religious future.
I have heard him say with some bitterness that people do not know what
Christianity is, that it has been so misrepresented to them, and so
mixed up with the quarrels of sectarianism, that the heart of it is
really non-existent for the multitude. He speaks with impatience of the
nonconformist churches and with contempt of the Anglican church. We are
all wrong together. Organised religion, he feels, is hanging over the
abyss of destruction, while the nation looks on with an indifference
which should complete its self-contempt.
His quarrel, however, is not only with the churches, but with the nation
as well. He regards the system under which we live as thoroughly
unchristian. It is the system of mammon--a system of frank, brutal, and
insolent materialism. Why do we put up with it?
His religious sense is so outraged by this system of economic
individualism that he bursts out with irritable impatience against those
who speak of infusing into it a more Christian spirit. For him the whole
body of our industrialism is rotten with selfishness and covetousness,
the high note of service entirely absent from it, the one energy which
informs it the energy of aggressive self-seeking.
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