Preface to Androcles and the Lion | Page 8

is as good as another provided
they are used to it and can put up with its restrictions without
unhappiness; and in the maintenance of this morality they will fight and
punish and coerce without scruple. They may not be the salt of the
earth, these Philistines; but they are the substance of civilization; and
they save society from ruin by criminals and conquerors as well as by
Savonarolas and Knipperdollings. And as they know, very sensibly,
that a little religion is good for children and serves morality, keeping
the poor in good humor or in awe by promising rewards in heaven or
threatening torments in hell, they encourage the religious people up to a
certain point: for instance, if Savonarola only tells the ladies of
Florence that they ought to tear off their jewels and finery and sacrifice
them to God, they offer him a cardinal's hat, and praise him as a saint;

but if he induces them to actually do it, they burn him as a public
nuisance.
RELIGION OF THE MINORITY. SALVATIONISM.
The religion of the tolerated religious minority has always been
essentially the same religion: that is why its changes of name and form
have made so little difference. That is why, also, a nation so civilized as
the English can convert negroes to their faith with great ease, but
cannot convert Mahometans or Jews. The negro finds in civilized
Salvationism an unspeakably more comforting version of his crude
creed; but neither Saracen nor Jew sees any advantage in it over his
own version. The Crusader was surprised to find the Saracen quite as
religious and moral as himself, and rather more than less civilized. The
Latin Christian has nothing to offer the Greek Christian that Greek
Christianity has not already provided. They are all, at root,
Salvationists.
Let us trace this religion of Salvation from its beginnings. So many
things that man does not himself contrive or desire are always
happening: death, plagues, tempests, blights, floods, sunrise and sunset,
growths and harvests and decay, and Kant's two wonders of the starry
heavens above us and the moral law within us, that we conclude that
somebody must be doing it all, or that somebody is doing the good and
somebody else doing the evil, or that armies of invisible persons,
benefit-cut and malevolent, are doing it; hence you postulate gods and
devils, angels and demons. You propitiate these powers with presents,
called sacrifices, and flatteries, called praises. Then the Kantian moral
law within you makes you conceive your god as a judge; and
straightway you try to corrupt him, also with presents and flatteries.
This seems shocking to us; but our objection to it is quite a recent
development: no longer ago than Shakespear's time it was thought quite
natural that litigants should give presents to human judges; and the
buying off of divine wrath by actual money payments to priests, or, in
the reformed churches which discountenance this, by subscriptions to
charities and church building and the like, is still in full swing. Its
practical disadvantage is that though it makes matters very easy for the
rich, it cuts off the poor from all hope of divine favor. And this
quickens the moral criticism of the poor to such an extent, that they
soon find the moral law within them revolting against the idea of

buying off the deity with gold and gifts, though they are still quite
ready to buy him off with the paper money of praise and professions of
repentance. Accordingly, you will find that though a religion may last
unchanged for many centuries in primitive communities where the
conditions of life leave no room for poverty and riches, and the process
of propitiating the supernatural powers is as well within the means of
the least of the members as within those of the headman, yet when
commercial civilization arrives, and capitalism divides the people into a
few rich and a great many so poor that they can barely live, a
movement for religious reform will arise among the poor, and will be
essentially a movement for cheap or entirely gratuitous salvation. To
understand what the poor mean by propitiation, we must examine for a
moment what they mean by justice.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ATONEMENT AND
PUNISHMENT
The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly
expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that
two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it
should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine
majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be
inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other
would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will show that this
utilitarian application