An Experiment In Social And Religious Education

( Originally Published 1909 )

W. R. HUGHES.

WE still use battlefield words to describe the joy of life which comes with personal strivings and advances. We only count to h ve known what living means in those fields of life where we have ourselves been in the charge and carried the sword unsheathed. The average man turns away from what he believes to be the socialist scheme of life because he sees in it a discharge from this war, which he believes must ever be fought for bread, as for any good thing. In the intellectual world we welcome the fight more eagerly still. There we have the children of our brains to de fend; every blow is for our own hearth-fire. And while in this battle we must cling to our own positions more closely than on any other field, we can see here more clearly that gain follows apparent disaster, and that it is by the sword strokes on both sides that the sparks of truth are struck out. We see, too, that here, in constrast to the industrial battlefield, the foe we smote down yesterday returns undismayed to the attack to-day.

Yet while we know that progress demands the clash of efforts and ideas, we know also that the joy of the fight is only one of the joys of life, and perhaps is the joy that is nearest to a pain. We live also by comradeships, sympathies, agreements, loves. So the varied question ever arises : Cannot we mark out our battlefields with plain-set boundaries, and outside those limits meet as friends and comrades? Rather, cannot we see today that though we still must fight, yet every honest warrior is on the same side? Or cannot we now at length cease to use our battle-field metaphors ? Cannot all our mappings and chartings of the fields of life find us some common and neutral ground, however scanty or empty it may seem at first, where we can rest together and be friends? Ideally the answer is simple. There are few who would not be ready to allow that men, even merely as similar creatures, apart from any theory of brotherhood or organic union, will in some things agree that they are going about the same business. Yet to many a man the fighting side seems to collect all the interest and tang of life. Or we may say that with such a one the strength of the current of his life seems conditioned by the narrowness of its channel. One dogma, perhaps, forms the right bank, and another the left, both too high to be overpeered; yet without them it seems as though the waters would be lost in the sands. A converse type seems to find truth almost too readily in apparently diverse directions, and tends to indirection through too great a readiness to find agreements with others.

We must recognize that each stream of individuality, though it come from the same source, must have its own definite channel, and that these channels will be infinitely diverse. Some will seem to us to wander in circles, and some to head away from the sea.. Yet in each may flow the same element, from the great deep to the great deep. Especially shall we find that full agreement cannot be hoped for when we come to the basal beliefs which a man holds about his own place and purpose in the scheme of things. Great men and movements for which the world is ripe, may seem for a time to carry all in their train. Societies and religions, national and continental, may arise and collect their millions of adherents. But, as formal systems, they carry the seeds of their own decay.

As the number of followers Increases so does that following tend to become more nominal, and so do divisions tend to arise. Or glance through the differences that mark the religious principles and guiding ideas of your own little circle of friends and see if you can combine them in one formulation, without destroying for each the warmth and reality that distinguishes his form from all others. On those fundamental principles, steeped in emotion and inexpressible in ally form of words, it is both impossible and undesirable to seek for any formal or detailed agreement. Yet we may still ask whether there is not room for an auxiliary machinery for bringing into contact with each other all those who recognize an agreement behind creeds and an essential similarity in experiences of widely differing form. How narrow or definite need an agreement be to bind in comradeship and common work? We know that great men leap over all the barriers, and take the world for their parish and all men as brothers, in fact as well as name. And among the rank and file also, in ever body and locality there are many who know well that They are ready to work and to commune with any honest man or woman, whether inside or outside the particular tabernacle to which chance or personal ties have bound them. And if inside churches and societies there are so many whose faith and sympathy are wider than their creed, so also there are many who have refused to join these churches or societies because they find no living power in the watchwords of the sect, and yet who are longing for definite work and comradeship.

Societies and communities aiming at some looser and yet deeper unions are constantly arising, usually on a small scale and in the train of some outstanding personality. Transcendentalists, universalists, mystics, unlabeled souls of insight and sympathy, are found in all quarters. It may be that the course of time is to bring some more permanent means of uniting, for effective common work and growth, all these and other floating units. If that is so, and the uniting principle is found expressible in terms, we must recognize that individual lives will still usually demand a plus of personal religion of private form. This will usually be connected with another personality, for a form of words will not take the place of a mother, nor a principle of a saviour. At the same time the uniting belief must be such as to be consistent with and included in each of the more definite formulations.

By some such line of thought we are constantly being led to inquire what is the most definite and at the same time widest statement of guiding belief which will bring together the largest number of real thinkers and workers in the world. Each of us will try to answer the question by analyzing first of all his own fundamental guiding principles and studying the growth of his life and personality; and next by comparing (probably with the aid of a framework provided by the reading of books on comparative religion or the varieties of religious experience) his own history and experiences with those of other men, so far as they can be understood by him.

The Alpha Union is a young society which tries to formulate an answer to the question, and has already set to work to test its solution. Before describing the history of the inception and aims of the Union, let me give at once the foundation of agreement on which it seeks to build. The Alpha Union is an educational union founded on the acceptance by its members of the belief that man is an essentially spiritual and progressive being, and aiming to make this the common and leading principle in working out, theoretically and practically, the development of the individual in the common life. The society is necessarily educational because of the nature of this fundamental agreement. It can also at once be labeled as a society of faith, optimism and anti-materialism. It is also at least capable of including in its ranks all those who have interpreted their own wider development as a growth into or a union with something beyond the material or limited individual man be that something beyond called God, or the Over-soul, or humanity.

The history of the origin of the Union is an interesting one. To begin at the beginning, we must go back to the year 1851, when there appeared a book by Edward N. Dennys called "The Alpha : or First Mental Principle and Truth Guide to General Well being and Progress a Revelation, but No Mystery." 1 This was evidently the work of a man of fine spirit who had set himself to think out from the beginning the problems of life and knowledge, and had succeeded in satisfying himself that he had arrived at simple and rational solutions. The book is cast in the form of a romance, out soon develops into an attempt to formulate the principles of true philosophy in a series of propositions based on the self-consistency of truth. Then follows a nun her of discussions on various points of metaphysics, religion and ethics which are often valuable, and always in advance of the common opinions of his day. The first suggestion of the Alpha Union occurs in this book in a passage where the author appeals for the formation of a holy league or brotherhood to give to the ignorant and friendless that education or religion which alone will show then' the way to rise from their degradation.

The character and teaching of Edward Dennys had a great influence on the late Antony S. Swinton, whose name is chiefly known as the founder (in 1881) and one of the chief supporters of the Land Nationalization Society. Mr. Swinton shared Dennys' view that no social reform was of any permanent value unless it was the out-come of a spiritual view of life. On his death, in 1905, it was found that he had left a sum of £3,000 to his executors "to be expended at their discretion in establishing an educational union on spiritual principles of life as, for example, shown in Dennys' 'Alpha.' " Mr. Swinton also expressed his wish that the chief direction of this work should be undertaken by one of the executors, J. Bruce Wallace, who for many years had been teaching on similar lines with much influence. This task Mr. Wallace undertook, and to him the Union largely owes its present form and tendencies, as well as a great amount of the good it has already accomplished.

The trustees who are administering the fund have al-ready inaugurated the Union, and have explained their ideas as to its scope and objects in an explanatory pamphlet.2 After an account of the origin of the trust, the pamphlet goes on to make clear that the union aims at spiritual catholicity. It is not a church or federation of churches, but wishes to be an influence which shall help to quicken with a common spirit of new life all churches and societies of which its members form part. In many different ways men and women are brought to the point at which they realize that they are children of an eternal spirit, and can only find life by working in harmony with the evolving process of that spirit; and in many different ways do they describe that consciousness of larger life. When such a faith or consciousness is reached communion and common work become both possible and necessary. The Alpha Union seeks to make channels and instruments for this common work and growth. For, combined with a deeper realization of what man is, comes the quest for a manner of arranging relationships of men on this planet more worthy of the dignity of his spiritual nature. The Union asks for no political uniformity from its members, but expects them to agree at the least that a social system so imperfect and unbrotherly as that of our western civilization must be replaced by one which looks upon the unfoldment of what is involved in every man as its one worthy aim. "In brief," to quote the pamphlet, "the Alpha Union will endeavor to help people to clearer thought on both spiritual and social questions. Its members will be banded together primarily for promoting their own and each other's education, and the education of as many as they can influence, in the true understanding of life and in the consequent power to draw upon the Infinite for a life of service worth living."

The first means used to tart the Union was the wide distribution of this pamphlet among those who were thought likely to be agreed on the spiritual basis. No attempt was made to collect a large membership in any wholesale way. The organization is not to be an aggressive one, but aims at providing a means of bringing into contact, or the chance of contact, as many as possible of the progressives of different places and environments, and allowing their grouping or common action to develop as time may suggest. This effort to enroll sympathetic and active members is stil going on, and a first list of members (for circulation among themselves only) has been issued. The number of members at present is between seven and eight hundred.

Three other educational instruments have also been brought into use. The Union has a periodical organ in Brotherhood, a monthly magazine which has been published regularly for the last twenty-one years by J. Bruce Wallace, in the interest of a peaceful social reconstruction. It has long been treasured by many for its lofty tone and its suggestiveness, and now finds fresh use as a medium for the suggestions and discussions of the members of the Union.

Then the Union has also made good use of the happy means of education known as the summer school. Three of these gatherings were held last summer and were very successful. Two of them (one at Montreux, Switzerland, and the other at Aberystwyth, Wales), were devoted largely to theological discussions and the social message of Christianity, and attracted a great many whose interest in such subjects had been made real by the influence of that tendency in modern Christianity which is typified by the Rev. R. J. Campbell's "New Theology." The other and longer school was held at the Garden City, Letchworth, and was devoted mainly to psychological and practical social discussions. At this first Garden City the Alpha Union has for the present fixed its headquarters. There it has had the use of Miss Lawrence's remarkable building known as "The Cloisters," an open-air school designed to provide a fitting home for students of the laws of rational life. Very marked has been the way in which the summer schools already held under the auspices of the Alpha Union have sent the members away full of enthusiasm and fresh ideas, which have been worked out in unexpected ways to fit the conditions of various localities.

Thirdly, the Union is collecting a library of books on all subjects which are deemed to be cognate to its aims. Already over a thousand books have been obtained on such subjects as religion, psychology, ethics, theosophy, mysticism, child-study, social reconstruction and so forth. Members or groups of members are thus put into communication not only with each other but with the seekers and teachers of all times. This library seems to be the only one in England of its kind, and the aim is to make it as inclusive as possible.

With regard to the future development of the Union, it will no doubt at first be largely along the lines already indicated, with perhaps the addition of a little more publishing activity. It is essentially an educational union. But education includes doing, experiment and failure, and experiment and success ; so it is expected that other work than that of the study already mentioned will naturally be undertaken by members of the Union, arising out of their common interests or sympathies. No attempt will be made to control any such activities by the central organs of the Union. The formation of groups, either local or for some common object, is encouraged, and several groups have already been formed. Any work they may wish to do must be done entirely on the responsibility of the group which, of course, may be increased to any extent front the general membership. In this way it is hoped that the dangers, such as the stifling of minorities, which accompany too detailed an organization, may be avoided.

The Alpha Union has al ready attracted to itself many (largely young people) who have found it difficult to get elsewhere spiritual comradeship and help, together with sufficient freedom of inquiry. These include some who have been attracted by the glamor of eastern thought; others who have found no help in circles of evangelical thought, which seem to ti em to belong to a past age; others again who have felt a salvation not out of personal sin, but rather into the earliest social life that is striving toward a new birth for society; there is again a large group of over seventy ministers and clerics (largely from "new theology" circles) whose progressive sympathies have drawn them into the Union. The colorless name which was only chosen for the society because no other that was not clumsy- suggested itself, is already taking on the color and warmth that dear associations bring. And if this article is the means of directing any new minds and energies into helpful opportunities of working and growing together, its aim will have been accomplished.

W. R. HUGHES. LONDON.