§ 2
But the cosmological and historical part of the old Bible was merely the opening, the groundwork upon which the rest was built. Let us now consider what else the Bible gave a man and a community, and what would be the modern form of the things it gave.
The next thing in order that the Bible gave a man and the community to which he belonged was the Law. Rules of Life. Rules of Health. Prescriptions—often very detailed and intimate—of permissible and unpermissible conduct. This also the modern citizen needs and should have: he and she need a book of personal wisdom.
First as to Health. One of the first duties of a citizen is to keep himself in mental and bodily health in order to be fit for the rest of his duties. Now the real Bible, our model, is extremely explicit upon a number of points, upon what constitutes cleanness or uncleanness, upon ablutions, upon what a man or woman may eat and what may not be eaten, upon a number of such points. It was for its times and circumstances a directory of healthy practice. Well, I do not see why the Bible of a Modern Civilization should not contain a book of similarly clear injunctions and warnings—why we should not tell every one of our people what is to be known about self-care.
And closely connected with the care of one’s mental and bodily health is sexual morality, upon which again Deuteronomy and Leviticus are most explicit, leaving very little to the imagination. I am all for imitating the wholesome frankness of the ancient book. Where there are no dark corners there is very little fermentation, there is very little foulness or infection. But in nearly every detail and in method and manner, the Bible of our Civilization needs to be fuller and different from its prototype upon these matters. The real Bible dealt with an oriental population living under much cruder conditions than our own, engaged mainly in agriculture, and with a far less various dietary than ours. They had fermented but not distilled liquors; they had no preserved nor refrigerated foods; they married at adolescence; many grave diseases that prevail to-day were unknown to them, and their sanitary problems were entirely different. Generally our New Leviticus will have to be much fuller. It must deal with exercise—which came naturally to those Hebrew shepherds. It must deal with the preservation of energy under conditions of enervation of which the prophets knew nothing. On the other hand our New Leviticus can afford to give much less attention to leprosy—which almost dominates the health instructions of the ancient law-giver.
I do not know anything very much about the movements in America that aim at the improvement of the public health and at the removal of public ignorance upon vital things. In Britain we have a number of powerful organizations active in disseminating knowledge to counteract the spread of this or that infectious or contagious disease. The War has made us in Europe much more outspoken and fearless in dealing with lurking hideous evils. We believe much more than we did in the curative value of light and knowledge. And we have a very considerable literature of books on—what shall I call it? on Sex Wisdom, which aim to prevent some of that great volume of misery, deprivation and nervous disease due to the prevailing ignorance and secrecy in these matters. For in these matters great multitudes of modern people still live in an ignorance that would have been inconceivable to an ancient Hebrew. In England now the books of such a writer as Dr. Marie Stopes are enormously read, and—though they are by no means perfect works—do much to mitigate the hidden disappointments, discontents, stresses and cruelties of married life. Now I believe that it would be possible to compile a modern Leviticus and Deuteronomy to tell our whole modern community decently and plainly—just as plainly as the old Hebrew Bible instructed its Hebrew population—what was to be known and what had to be done, and what had not to be done in these intimate matters.
But Health and Sex do not exhaust the problems of conduct. There are also the problems of Property and Trade and Labour. Upon these also the old Bible did not hesitate to be explicit. For example, it insisted meticulously upon the right of labour to glean and upon the seller giving a “full measure brimming over,” and it prohibited usury. But here again the Bible is extraordinarily unhelpful when we come to modern issues, because its rules and regulations were framed for a community and for an economic system altogether cruder, more limited and less complicated than our own. Much of the Old Testament we have to remember was already in existence before the free use of coined metal. The vast credit system of our days, joint-stock company enterprise and the like, were beyond the imagination of that time. So too was any anticipation of modern industrialism. And accordingly we live to-day in a world in which neither property nor employment have ever been properly moralized. The bulk of our present social and economic troubles is due very largely to that.
In no matter is this muddled civilization of ours more hopelessly at sixes and sevens than in this matter of the rights and duties of property. Manifestly property is a trust for the community varying in its responsibilities with the nature of the property. The property one has in one’s toothbrush is different from the property one has in ten thousand acres of land; the property one has in a photograph of a friend is different from the property one has in some irreplaceable masterpiece of portraiture. The former one may destroy with a good conscience, but not the latter. At least so it seems to me.
But opinions vary enormously on these matters because we have never really worked them out. On the one hand, in this matter of property, we have the extreme individualist who declares that a man has an unlimited right to do what he likes with his own—so that a man who owns a coal mine may just burn it out to please himself or spite the world, or raise the price of coal generally—and on the other hand we have the extreme communist who denies all property and in practice—so far as I can understand his practice—goes on the principle that everything belongs to somebody else or that one is entitled to exercise proprietary rights over everything that does not belong to oneself. (I confess that communistic practice is a little difficult to formulate.) Between these extremists you can find every variety of idea about what one may do and about what one may not do with money and credit and property generally. Is it an offence to gamble? Is it an offence to speculate? Is it an offence to hold fertile fields and not cultivate them? Is it an offence to hold fertile fields and undercultivate them? Is it an offence to use your invested money merely to live pleasantly without working? Is it an offence to spend your money on yourself and refuse your wife more than bare necessities? Is it an offence to spend exorbitant sums that might otherwise go in reproductive investments, to gratify the whims and vanities of your wife? You will find different people answering any of these questions with Yes or No. But it cannot be both Yes and No. There must be a definable Right or Wrong upon all these issues.
Almost all the labour trouble in the world springs directly from our lack of an effective detailed moral code about property. The freedom that is claimed for all sorts of property and exercised by all sorts of property to waste or withhold is the clue to that savage resentment which flares out nowadays in every great labour conflict. Labour is a rebel because property is a libertine.
Now this untilled field of conduct, this moral wilderness of the rights and duties and limitations of property, the Books of the Law in a modern Bible could clear up in the most lucid and satisfying way. I want to get those parts of Deuteronomy and Leviticus written again, more urgently than any other part of the modern Bible. I want to see it at work in the schools and in the law-courts. I admit that it would be a most difficult book to write and that we should raise controversial storms over every verse. But what an excellent thing to have it out, once for all, with some of these rankling problems! What an excellent thing if we could get together a choice group of representative men—strictly rationed as to paper—and get them to set down clearly and exactly just what classes of property they recognized and what limitations the community was entitled to impose upon each sort.
Every country in the world does impose limitations. In Italy you may not export an ancient work of art, although it is your own. In England you may not maltreat your own dog or cat. In the United States, I am told, you may not use your dollars to buy alcohol. Why should we not make all this classification of property and the restraints upon each class of property, systematic and world-wide? If we could so moralize the use of property, if we could arrive at a clear idea of just what use an owner could make of his machinery, or a financier could make of his credit, would there be much left of the incessant labour conflicts of the present time? For if you will look into it, you will find there is hardly ever a labour conflict into which some unsettled question of principle, some unsettled question of the permissible use of property, does not enter as the final and essential dispute.