In 1818 the government voted one million pounds for
the building of churches largely as a precaution against revolution. They were to build in the thickly populated
areas which had mushroomed with the Industrial Revolution and where few new
churches had been provided for ‘the lower classes’. It was argued that ‘the true Christian will
never be a leveller, will never listen to French politics or to French
philosophy.’ So there was a spate of
neo-Gothic church building as it was discovered that a large quantity of brick
could be concealed beneath the Gothic pillars and so made economic sense to
build in that style.
The established church promoted the idea that
poverty was in some way part of the plan of God as illustrated, some claimed,
by the words of the Bible to the effect that ‘the poor you will always have
with you.’ This view was immortalised by
Mrs Alexander in her well-known hymn ‘All things bright and beautiful’ in the
verse ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high
or lowly and ordained their estate.’ She
wrote those words in 1848. There were
two revolutions in France in that year.
The first arose in February from agitation by the middle classes for
parliamentary reform which led to the deposition of the Citizen King and the
birth of the Second Republic. This
struggle became violent and the uprising in the poorer districts of Paris
followed in June.
Watching these events in 1848 were Marx and Engels
who wrote the Communist Manifesto with its opening words: ‘A spectre is haunting
Europe – the spectre of Communism. All
the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
spectre.’ The Manifesto had little to
say about religion. It accused the
middle classes and merchants – the bourgeoisie – of turning the priests into
one of ‘its paid wage labourers’ and of having ‘drowned the most heavenly
ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm in the icy waters of
egotistical calculation.’
Before 1848 Marx had already written his famous
comment on religion and is not nearly as hostile as usually thought: ‘Religion
is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the
soul of soulless conditions. It is the
opium of the people. To call on them to
give up their illusions is to call them to give up a condition that requires
illusions. Criticism of religion is criticism of that vale of tears of which
religion is the halo.’
Marx, having moved from France to Germany in 1848,
came to England in 1849 where he lived until his death in 1883.
An English movement known as Christian Socialism
was established in 1848 seeking to promote Christian principles in
industry. Marx and Engels ridiculed
these efforts: ‘Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest
consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.’ Christian Socialism launches a magazine in
1848 called Politics and the people expressed some weird views. The Rev. Charles Kingsley (who later wrote
The Water Babies) suggested in this magazine that the gloom of the workmen of
England might be relieved if they paid a visit to the National Gallery:
‘Pictures raised blessed thought in me – why not in you, my brothers? Believe it, toil-worn worker, in spite of
your foul alley, your crowded lodging, your ill-fed children, your thin, pale
wife – believe it, you too and your dear ones will someday have your share of
beauty. God made you love beautiful
things only because He intends you hereafter to give you your fill of
them. That pictured face on the wall is
lovely but lovelier still may the wife of your bosom be when she meets you on
the Resurrection morn.’
Marx and his wife arrived in London and lived in
two rooms in the then squalid district of Soho.
Three of their children died there and on one occasion the couple could not
afford to pay for the coffin. Marx lived
only a few hundred yards from the British Museum. His researches resulted in the publication of
his major works – most notably Das Kapital which remained unfinished at his
death. The first volume was published in
Germany in 1867 and was called ‘The Bible of the Working Class’. It was almost as long – and more difficult to
read – than the Bible itself.
For most of his life Marx expected the revolution
to occur in an industrialised country – France or Germany but the first country
to adopt Communism was the most backward in Europe. The serfs of Russia had only been freed as
recently as 1861 but in the chaos of the Great War a handful of Bolshevik
revolutionaries were able to seize power in 1917. Russia was a country that was fervently
Christian and in which the Orthodox Church was closely identified with the
Emperor. One of their first acts was to
seize the Church’s extensive property as Henry VIII had done with the English
Monasteries. An orthodox priest in 1920
gives us an insight into their method.
Some hungry children in Georgia were told to ask God to give them their
daily bread. Three times they asked and
nothing came. They were then told to ask
Lenin and a truck full of goods came round the corner. It was Lenin who gave Marx’s ‘opium of the
people’ its sinister meaning: ‘Religion is the opium of the people. It is a kind of spiritual gin in which the
slaves of capital drown their human shape.
Every idea of God is unutterable vileness, vileness of the most
dangerous kind, contagion of the most abominable kind.’
