HELD IN COMMITTEE ROOM B, CENTRAL HALL, A. T. SCHOFIELD, ESQ., M.D., IN THE CHAIR. The Minutes of the previous Meeting were read, confirmed and signed, and the HON. SECRETARY announced the following elections: Member: James Steel, Esq. Life Associate: The Rev. Dr. E. D. Lucas, Principal of Forman Associate: Mrs. Frederick Henlé. The HON. SECRETARY read a letter from Lady Halsbury apologizing for the inability of Lord Halsbury to take the Chair as promised owing to illness. In the regretted absence of Lord Halsbury through illness, Dr. Schofield took the chair, and introduced the Very Rev. Dean of St. Paul's. FREEDOM AND DISCIPLINE. By the Very Rev. W. R. INGE, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's. HE Germans said that the late war was a trial of strength Tbetween Discipline and Liberalism. This is perhaps the truest statement of the issue that has yet been made. Our opponents prided themselves on having evolved, for the first time in history, a scientific State-a polity in which all the forces of the community are or can be mobilized for a common end, so that there is no waste, no confusion, no hesitation, and no division. The management was in the hands of experts, who can act without talking. They are not obliged to persuade anybody; they demand and receive implicit obedience. Under such a system the whole nation submits for the most part willingly to an invisible drill-sergeant. There is no right of private judgment; right and wrong have lost their usual meanings. Right for the individual means doing what he is told; for the State it is the interest of the political aggregate. We do not need to be convinced of the terrible efficiency of a nation so organized; we know it to our cost. It is less obvious, though probably true, that such a polity can only be developed as a military empire, in which the effective force is not in the hands of a mass of voters, nor of class-organizations such as trade unions, but of the army and its chiefs. Further, it is unlikely that a nation will long submit to military rule unless the people can be induced to believe that they are threatened by other nations, and unless the army is periodically used for conquest and plunder. Thus the whole system hangs together, and the chief danger which menaces it lies in the probability of provoking a powerful coalition. We, on the contrary, represent the democratic principle in its strength and weakness. Our organization is loose and slovenly; we can only mobilize our resources slowly and at enormous cost; our policy is vacillating and inconsistent, and constantly interfered with by the necessity of considering public opinion, and buying off recalcitrant sectional interests. On the other hand, we are perhaps less likely to commit great national crimes; and our neighbours know that they have nothing to fear from us. The more we reflect on this tremendous struggle, between the ideals of Discipline and Liberty, the more convinced we shall be that it is only one phase of a universal conflict, which in myriad shapes pervades all human relations. It is the issue at stake between Patriotism and Humanitarianism; between Socialism and Syndicalism; between Catholicism and Protestantism-the religion of authority and the religion of personal inspiration (we ought not to be surprised that the Vatican was backing Germany all over the world); between faith in average human nature and the aristocratic ideal. It is one of the fundamental antinomies of life, a part of the Yes and No in which, as Jacob Böhme says, all things consist. There are some who would state this otherwise. It is, they would say, part of the eternal struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness, between grace and law, between spiritual freedom and bondage. Such is not my position in this paper. I must confess, indeed, that in my own mind the balance inclines less decidedly on the side of liberty than it would have done had I written this paper a few years ago. I have not lost my faith in religious liberty, or my horror of priestly domination, the worst of all forms of tyranny. But I have been disillusioned by recent developments of democracy in England, France, and America. I am no more a pro-German than Plato was a pro-Spartan; but I sympathise with his distaste for Athenian democracy as he knew it, and with bis dream of a highly organized State in which those should rule who have learned to rule, and in which each citizen shall have his work assigned to him. Order is not better than freedom; but anarchy may destroy freedom more effectually than a habit of obedience. So perhaps my prejudice in favour of discipline in political and social life may counterbalance my prejudice in favour of liberty in the world of thought. But I want to speak without prejudice, as one ought to try to do in dealing with a great and serious problem. And I know, in spite of what I have just said, that the difficulty cannot be solved by leaving thought free and subjecting all the outward life to authority. For all discipline requires some kind of intellectual and moral sanction; and no repressive government has been able to enforce itself without curtailing free thought and free speech. In Germany a pastor who ventured to say that God is not the special God of the German nation was likely to be deprived of his cure of souls. The case for Discipline and Authority against Liberty rests partly on the continuity and value of racial experience, and partly on the natural inequality of human beings. There is a strong presumption that any custom, whether of acting or thinking, which has survived for a long period, meets some actual human need, and tends to promote the survival or the happiness of the species. The gains of knowledge and experience which have lifted human societies out of savagery are mainly empirical, sometimes almost accidental; and they are precarious. They may be and sometimes are lost. Hence arises the necessity of placing them under the protection of consecrated authority, which it is impious to defy or even to criticize. Almost all barbarous societies are held together in this way. The whole system of tabu has no other foundation. Some of its prohibitions are or once have been useful, the majority palpably absurd. There is no possibility of separating the wheat from the chaff, because criticism is strictly forbidden. The more we know of primitive societies, the more astonished we shall be at the mass of vexatious and ridiculous rules which a savage has to obey. If an inventive barbarian makes the door of his hut a little wider than is customary, he does so at his peril. More things are verboten to the savage than to the Prussian. And yet a strong case may be made out for keeping society under this kind of discipline. The most stable and indestructible polities have been held in chains by tradition. And those nations which have shown unusual intellectual courage and readiness to try new experiments of all kinds, such as the City States of ancient Greece and medieval Italy, have had a short life and a merry one. A thoughtful writer, H. R. Marshall, argues that Reason, the experimental, innovating spirit, is the social form of the tendency to variation, instinct, the conservative, disciplined spirit, of the tendency to persistence. Most variations fail to establish themselves, and therefore it is safer to follow instinct. "Common practice and normal beliefs," he says, "are closely related to instinctive capacities, and to some extent represent the effective experience of the race. If, then, we displace them, we should use the greatest care not to displace their resultants in the life of action." History seems to show-and this is to me a very interesting fact that the evil consequences of rash liberty are exhibited neither in the routine of ordinary life, which has become so deeply rooted in habit as to be almost a matter of instinct, and is therefore to a large extent immune to the innovating temper, nor in the highest spiritual life, which is so recent and insecure an acquisition that its tender growth is stifled by repression and requires freedom for its development, but in the intermediate field of morality, where the protection of consecrated custom seems to be almost necessary. The moral consciousness has not had a long enough racial history to act automatically; it has to struggle against various impulses and instincts which are older than itself. It is based largely on racial experience of comparatively recent date, and the independent judgment of the individual can by no means always be trusted to coincide with the stored experience of society at large. Therefore adventurous, free-thinking societies, which have rejected the trammels of authority, generally come to grief because their intellectual development far outstrips their moral practice. The Romans knew that they were intellectually inferior to the Greeks; but they also perceived that the Greeks were "too clever by half" even for their own interests, and they despised them for their untrustworthiness and moral levity. Quite rightly they recognized the greater survival-value of their own reverence for custom : Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque. Even more startling than the obliquities of Hellenic morality are the viciousness and criminality of the Italian republics of the Renaissance, during the period of their most brilliant achievements in art and literature. The same tendency to moral shipwreck is sometimes seen in the boldest and freest individual characters; though many courageous navigators in strange seas of thought instinctively feel the danger of making experiments in conduct, and choose deliberately to live quite conventionally on this side. This is especially the case in our own country, where the fear of logic is almost instinctive. Some of our most emancipated free-thinkers have been, to their own great advantage, almost philistines in their acceptance of traditional ideas in morality. Experience certainly seems to indicate that in morals authority is indispensable. The individual is not only an incompetent judge in some matters of right and wrong, but his judgment is likely to be warped by his temperament precisely in those questions where he is in most need of sound guidance. Now it is obvious that authority is much more efficacious in overcoming temptation when it is regarded as absolute. This is why religion has so much more potent an influence upon conduct than mere ethics. For religious authority is always a guidance which is conceived of as external to ourselves, and infallible. To accept authority means to submit voluntarily and without question to the dictation of a will or wisdom which is not our own. It is necessary to insist on this, because some writers, like Mr. Balfour, have lumped together all non-rational processes by which men come to assent to propositions, and have called them authority. This would even cover the "will to believe" of the experimental pragmatist. But the essence of authority as a source of belief and a guide to conduct is that it issues absolute commands which must not be questioned, and which are supposed to emanate from some power, not ourselves, who has the right to issue them. It is the negation of private judgment. Belief in such an absolute authority has a great influence upon external conduct, and there is no doubt that the form of moral habits modifies the character itself. Advocates of strong Discipline may also appeal to the diversities of human endowments. Men are born unequal. Democracy rests on a pure superstition-viz., that a large number of admittedly foolish persons, voting together, will somehow evolve political wisdom. We may say that it is a belief in the plenary inspiration of the odd man. But in reality the majority of human beings recognize their incompetence either to govern other people or to devise a religion and a philosophy for themselves. So much is this the case that the path to freedom is barred far more by the many who wish to obey than by the few who wish to rule. And there are many persons who will develop |