The King of Italy has met Mr.Lubin's idea with open hands.(It was because of this profoundly interesting experiment that in a not very widely known book of mine, /The World Set Free/(May, 1914), in which I represented a world state as arising out of Armageddon, I made the first world conference meet at Brissago in Italian Switzerland under the presidency of the King of Italy.) So that when I found I could meet Mr.Lubin I did so very gladly.We lunched together in a pretty little room high over Knightsbridge, and talked through an afternoon.
He is a man rather after the type of Gladstone; he could be made to look like Gladstone in a caricature, and he has that compelling quality of intense intellectual excitement which was one of the great factors in the personal effectiveness of Gladstone.He is a Jew, but until I had talked to him for some time that fact did not occur to me.He is in very ill health, he has some weakness of the heart that grips him and holds him at times white and silent.
At first we talked of his Institute and its work.Then we came to shipping and transport.Whenever one talks now of human affairs one comes presently to shipping and transport generally.
In Paris, in Italy, when I returned to England, everywhere Ifound "cost of carriage" was being discovered to be a question of fundamental importance.Yet transport, railroads and shipping, these vitally important services in the world's affairs, are nearly everywhere in private hands and run for profit.In the case of shipping they are run for profit on such antiquated lines that freights vary from day to day and from hour to hour.It makes the business of food supply a gamble.And it need not be a gamble.
But that is by the way in the present discussion.As we talked, the prospect broadened out from a prospect of the growing and distribution of food to a general view of the world becoming one economic community.
I talked of various people I had been meeting in the previous few weeks."So many of us," I said, "seem to be drifting away from the ideas of nationalism and faction and policy, towards something else which is larger.It is an idea of a right way of doing things for human purposes, independently of these limited and localised references.Take such things as international hygiene for example, take /this/ movement.We are feeling our way towards a bigger rule.""The rule of Righteousness," said Mr.Lubin.
I told him that I had been coming more and more to the idea--not as a sentimentality or a metaphor, but as the ruling and directing idea, the structural idea, of all one's political and social activities--of the whole world as one state and community and of God as the King of that state.
"But /I/ say that," cried Mr.Lubin, "I have put my name to that.And--it is /here!/"He struggled up, seized an Old Testament that lay upon a side table.He stood over it and rapped its cover."It is /here/," he said, looking more like Gladstone than ever, "in the Prophets."4
That is all I mean to tell at present of that conversation.
We talked of religion for two hours.Mr.Lubin sees things in terms of Israel and I do not.For all that we see things very much after the same fashion.That talk was only one of a number of talks about religion that I have had with hard and practical men who want to get the world straighter than it is, and who perceive that they must have a leadership and reference outside themselves.That is why I assert so confidently that there is a real deep religious movement afoot in the world.But not one of those conversations could have gone on, it would have ceased instantly, if anyone bearing the uniform and brand of any organised religious body, any clergyman, priest, mollah, of suchlike advocate of the ten thousand patented religions in the world, had come in.He would have brought in his sectarian spites, his propaganda of church-going, his persecution of the heretic and the illegitimate, his ecclesiastical politics, his taboos, and his doctrinal touchiness....That is why, though Iperceive there is a great wave of religious revival in the world to-day, I doubt whether it bodes well for the professional religions....
The other day I was talking to an eminent Anglican among various other people and someone with an eye to him propounded this remarkable view.
"There are four stages between belief and utter unbelief.There are those who believe in God, those who doubt like Huxley the Agnostic, those who deny him like the Atheists but who do at least keep his place vacant, and lastly those who have set up a Church in his place.That is the last outrage of unbelief."
