PERSONAL RELIGION AND PUBLIC MORALSBYROBERT BRUCE TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D.
BY
ROBERT BRUCE TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D.
The last quarter of a century has seen a vast change in the general attitude toward organized religion. To some extent that change has had its points of pause and punctuation; we could tell where one paragraph ended and another began. In thought, a Robertson Smith or a Briggs case marked a period. The real range of a theological debate can never be measured by the resolution of an ecclesiastical assembly. Its main repercussion is upon the crowd, which becomes gradually conscious of the significance of the issue. The great change has come, however, almost without observation, and it may be said to have affected religion rather than theology. It has shown itself in lessened church attendance, and in the challenging of the right of the church to assume the monopoly of religious interest. The reduction in the number of men seeking to find their life-work in the Christian ministry is a grave feature; for the temper of the martyr and the soldier is not dead among us and the call for sacrifice has always in it a peculiar ring and compulsion. The Christian ministry is a great and noble calling, in which a man, if he is to have any happiness in his work, must deliberately put the world behind his back. But that particular form of sacrifice is losing its urgency. The war revealed, to those who were actively engaged in it, not so much a changed conditionas unpleasant actualities in the old condition. It became wofully apparent that religious instruction had not penetrated as deeply as the religious organizations had imagined. One never knew whether to wonder most at men’s ignorance of what the Christian Church should have been teaching them, or at their indifference to some matters which the peace standard of domestic ethics regarded as vital, or at their continual and magnificent gaiety of spirit, their glorious comradeship, their mastery of fear. The war showed how little conventional religion stood for. It also made it plain that the great words of the Gospel—joy, peace, love, righteousness, sacrifice—were of the very heart of high conduct as men understood high conduct, face to face with death, in those most desperate conditions.
If one asks oneself what it is that has been going on beneath the surface to bring about so profound a change in religious outlook, one may say that it has been the challenging of the seat of authority in religion. In organized religion there have been two main conceptions of the seat of authority.
The Romanist and high-church view is that authority lies in the Church, in its continuity of tradition and in its possession of sacramental power. If men are to be left to their own devices there will be anarchy in religion. But if they will but look back to the very foundations of Christianity, they will find a body of truth steadily handed down, and an efficacy communicated by the laying on of episcopal hands, transmitted from one generation to another. They will find adivinely guided history of councils and creeds through which the deposit of truth has been safeguarded; and the doubter may commit himself with certainty to this system, which is the embodiment not only of divine truth but of human wisdom and practical knowledge. A Scottish Presbyterian is not predisposed to favor such a conception, but one has to admit its power. The majority of mankind are neither able nor willing to examine a long course of church history for themselves, and a strong, dogmatic assertion and a definite historical position have a vast power with a certain conservative and clinging and devotional type of mind. There are many people who have not sufficient intellectual daring to wrestle constantly with things for themselves. They want certainty. And so Newman and Adelaide Procter and many other equally pure souls have found rest in this obedience to authority. There is, however, particularly in this new land, a different temper springing up. The community spirit seeks inclusion rather than exclusion. It tries to use different gifts without judging between them. It will not nullify categories; it will simplify them. The question of apostolic succession, except where men are still held to belief in it by ecclesiastical authority, is ceasing to be an issue, just because this practically minded world does not see any such monopoly of spiritual power in one particular church. And, with regard to the permanence of any creed, we are in an atmosphere which tends more and more to utter its faith in the language of the day. A man may be very near to his Lord andyet unable to discern his Lord in the Athanasian Creed. The process is too long which requires that the believer search back through all those centuries of tangled historical stuff before he finds his Master. He does not need to be either a prophet or the son of a prophet who declares confidently that the sacramentarian, historically exclusive, miraculous, sanction of religion is likely to become less and less powerful.
Is, then, the seat of authority for religion in the claims of Holy Scripture? This has been the appeal of the Reformed churches. At the Reformation, when the assertion was again made of the rights of the human spirit to come directly into fellowship with Christ, Scripture of necessity took a place of new importance. It was the road of direct access to God. One can understand how, after being bound in the chains of the Roman Catholic Church, men and women found in Scripture the glorious liberty of the children of God. Is it any wonder that they brooded over it until even the translations themselves seemed to be the very breath of the Almighty? But the earliest and greatest of the reformers had no such cast-iron view of verbal inspiration as afterward came to prevail, in its turn to become a tyranny just as exacting as the old. Both Luther and Calvin knew far too much of religious history and of the Bible to be led into any such unbending position. Luther, for instance, had his pronounced views upon the Epistle of James, which he would have excluded from the Canon. He was well aware of the doubt which had prevailed as to the canonicityof the splendid Epistle to the Hebrews. The preacher of to-day is not wise who neglects Calvin on the Psalms and Calvin on Isaiah; but Calvin saw clearly that there were Aramaic elements in the 139th Psalm, and that the ascription of it to David was impossible. Gradually, however, what was really the record of a revelation came to be regarded as the revelation itself. It is not the New Testament which reveals God. It is Christ who reveals God, and it is the New Testament which gives the story of the incarnation of the Most High. In the post-Reformation days, however, when the Reformation, as a mighty revival of personal religion, was giving place to the time when men were trying to state in logical and philosophical form those wonderful experiences which they had lived through of the power of the Holy Spirit, the Bible came to be used as though it were a collection of proof-texts. A creed is obviously the product of the time when the first overwhelming flood of enthusiasm has passed, and men have begun to reason about the experiences through which they have lived. Thus, in the seventeenth century the doctrinaire view of Scripture stiffened. There was no attempt to understand the history underlying this great library of sacred writings. So truculent a book as Esther was believed to be, every word of it, the breathing of the Almighty, because it found itself within the sacred boards, while so glorious a record as First Maccabees was ranked with any other piece of secular history because its date precluded its inclusion within the Canon. There was noknowledge of the fact that the early narratives of Genesis had a relationship to the Babylonian cosmogony; that, the Septuagint being witness, there had been widely varying texts of the Book of Jeremiah; that the Hebrew text of Hosea was in places in such confusion that anything more than a conjectural translation was impossible. The general and well-founded belief that Scripture was the Word of God was stretched until it became a new legalism, until it covered every word of the Authorized Version, and, in the minds of many, every comma of the splendid translation. That was an inflexible, an uncritical, an unscholarly position that was perilous. In the minds of multitudes it linked the truth in Jesus with some conundrum about Cain’s wife. It put the great causes of religion at the mercy of the negative and unbelieving critic. Many of us remember still the shock it was to our faith when we found that Scripture was being examined by the ordinary methods of critical and linguistic analysis; and yet we now realize that it is through this liberty that our faith has been re-established and set foursquare to all the winds that blow.
The present condition of things is that, while scholars have made the adjustment in their own minds, the great majority of believing people have not. That distinction between the revelation and the record of it is a delicate and subtle thing compared with the direct and unsophisticated view that every word within the boards that contain Holy Scripture is absolutely inerrant, in the most literal sense of the term. Pietyand intellectual acumen do not always go together. Those who know out of a long experience what Scripture has been to them, in strengthening and comfort, are jealous with a godly zeal when they think they see heedless hands laid upon the ark. And so some good people have tried to beat back the tide by accusing scholars of unbelief, and again and again the attempt has been made to control the teaching in theological colleges in the interest of a particular theory of inspiration. The result is that the teaching of the pulpits has often become suspect by men poles apart in their general view. Some, clinging to the old ways, have been looking for heresy; others, feeling the new breath, have been wondering whether the preacher was frank. There has thus been unsettlement of a most profound character, and it is unsettlement upon a really first-class issue. The Protestant world as a whole has yet to be brought to understand that the believer’s faith in his Lord is something that will be affected in no way by a discussion of the question whether the sun did actually stand still upon Gibeon. Such a faith rests on something much more precious than the authority even of the written Word; it rests on the witness of the spirit of the believer to the revelation of God as he finds it in Christ.
If, on the one hand, this unsettlement has caused pessimism and distress on the part of those who cannot see that a living faith is bound to be a growing thing, an organism and not a crystal, it has brought about a very different attitude on the part of many others,who feel that certain obvious religious duties are incumbent upon them, even if they may never be able to solve for themselves such questions as modern scholarship has raised. The social and business life of to-day has one fine feature, unfortunately quite dissociated from the Christian Church, although created largely by Christian people. Men, immersed in business and professional life, have yet religion in their hearts; they know the need, for their own spiritual health as well as for the good of the community, of guarding against the tendency to selfishness and absorption in gain. And so we have springing up everywhere Rotarian Clubs and Kiwanian Clubs and many other organizations of similar kind, which foster a genial and kindly rivalry in well-doing. Once a week men gather and refuse to admit that they are growing old. They laugh and are happy. They are looking around for some good thing to do. Is it an industrial training home for boys, away among the mountains, in the best of surroundings, far from the city streets; is it the installation of a new hot-water apparatus in their city hospital—to take two instances known to me of the activities of a Rotarian and a Kiwanian Club—they throw themselves into the effort with zeal, and get, as surely they should do, joy for themselves in the securing of joy for others. Behind it there lies the feeling that whatever the uncertainties of faith may be, there are certain duties incumbent upon all who love their kind. It is better to be unselfish than selfish, better to be glad than frowning, better to come out of yourisolation and know your neighbor and competitor than to retire into your shell and imagine all kinds of evil about his persistent activities. Such a movement, spreading with somewhat of the fire of a crusade, is just another evidence of the working of the Holy Spirit, another proof that religion is the most pronounced and permanent bent of the human mind. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, and the Spirit will always manifest himself in varying modes.
What we are faced with to-day is not the destruction of religion but the change in its form and outlook. The permanent thing in the Christian religion, the unique thing, is that it has been the attempt to set forth Jesus of Nazareth. Everything else has been temporal, but that has been permanent. As men look back over history they see that many expressions of that loyalty have become antiquated, and have, without any active hostility on the part of reformers, simply ceased to be. The human mind has no longer regarded them as adequate. The study of a doctrine such as the Atonement is the best of all evidence for the fact. On so great a truth the greatest thinkers of all times have exercised themselves, and the statements made of the doctrine have been made in terms intelligible to the men of the age in which they were made. Books which deal with the subject of the Atonement are invariably stronger on their historical and critical than on their constructive sides. It is easy to understand now the defects of so great and permanent a book as Anselm’sCur Deus Homo, or, leaping over many hundreds of years, to question the adequacy of the statements of Robertson of Brighton, or of MacLeod Campbell. Even the greatest writers, when they deal with eternal truth, the Apostle Paul himself being witness, write in the language of their time for the men of their time, and are influenced in their statements by the ideas that are in the air in their time. The truth itself is a matter of Christian experience, whether it be taught by the old women of Bedford to John Bunyan, or by the thoroughly equipped scholar of to-day to a student who has all his senses exercised to receive the truth. But, while mediæval thought has few greater names than that of Anselm,Cur Deus Homois now studied exactly like Faraday’sResearches, only as a matter of history. Human thought has left Anselm behind.
To the trained thinker, of course, this position is the merest commonplace. The wine of divine truth is ever new, and it has to be put into new bottles. He does an infinite disservice to faith who strives to tie it indefinitely to particular statements. The heresy of yesterday may be the orthodoxy of to-day, and the orthodoxy of to-day the exhausted formula of to-morrow. The men of this generation read with amazement the attacks of the sixties on Darwin, attacks so full of acerbity, so reckless in their bandying of evil charges and in their ascription of anti-religious motives. And to-day, while the biologist may still debate the particular issue, we know that the conception of continuity and development has been of enormousservice in every range of thought. The first debates on theOrigin of Specieshave given place to a general conception. Einstein, in the same way, may influence profoundly not only physical but theological and ethical problems.
And so those who to-day have faith in a living and personal Christ must not lose courage, even if they do find the envelope in which that faith was wrapped being torn asunder. This particular envelope may have served its turn. We have this treasure in earthen vessels. We may ask as a matter of intellectual curiosity as to the form in which men expressed their belief some centuries ago, but the vital thing for us is that to-day we shall have such a form as shall be intelligible and arresting for us and our contemporaries. Wherever the Spirit of Christ is quick there will always be the double process in action, the challenging of old forms and the creation of new. The speech in the process may vary from generation to generation, but the process itself is a symptom of life. The desire for change is no evidence of impiety; it may be the setting forth of the prophet. The ages which are the ages of godlessness are those in which there has been no challenging of the accepted thing. In social as in religious life there are always multitudes whose motto is “Leave well alone.” The position is a complete begging of the question. Is the situation really “well”? Many to-day in the Old Country sigh for the industrial conditions of forty years ago, when labor was subservient and cheap, and when taxation was low. At that timeit never seemed to occur to any one that there was something wrong with a system in which one-third of the population of a great city like Glasgow lived in houses of one room, where women went barefoot throughout the winter months, where the question of the next meal was an insistent one with tens of thousands. Because the system had existed so long, the sufferers under it did not challenge it, while those who profited by it had no sense of the anomaly of a situation which worked comfortably for them. It was not that men were heartless or unbelieving. They were tender in their affections and quick with their charities. But the existence of this condition of great wealth alongside of abject poverty and degradation was regarded with the inevitableness of fate. It existed and therefore it was accepted. It had the sanction of age and was not to be challenged. The public conscience was not awake. There was no vision and the people perished. The last seven years have wrought a mighty change. Apart from any immediate economic issue there has been an alteration in the general attitude toward the question of wages. A community is not stable in its ordering nor is it genuinely prosperous if one main element in its financing is the maintenance of vast industries by labor so cheap as to be always upon the verge of destitution. The economic considerations are not the only ones, nor indeed are they the primary ones. A healthy and contented population is real wealth. A generation ago our cities emptied their filth into the rivers and lakes at their doors, and thenused dredges to remove the sludge. Now, under new methods, unclean products are purified by chemical or bacteriological processes; the effluent is clean and innocuous, and there is no need for dredging. A great deal of the social rescue work and philanthropy of past years has been a beginning at the wrong end. Drunkenness and an iron social system manufactured the criminal, the wastrel, the lunatic, and we dealt with the waste product. Now we are trying to keep our rivers clean.
A change of similar character, but even more rapid in its operation, is taking place in our thoughts of religion. It is coming about rather by the opening of the eyes than by any special process of reasoning or by any definite challenging of old methods. We are becoming not a little wearied of the tyranny of organization. We are afflicted by “drives” of all sorts; by vast conceptions of “the world for Christ in this generation,” while the streams of Christian thought are all the while running shallower and more shallow, with less and less power to drive anything. In the States, as in Canada, there have been great campaigns for funds which also tried to be campaigns for spiritual results. It has been discovered to be an easier thing to raise money than to quicken the spirit. Life remains as materialistic and as worldly as before, and the temperature is dropping as with the coming of an east wind on the Maine coast. Theologically in both countries we are still inclined to fight for a former condition of things which, as a matter of fact, has ceasedto have power. It is our burden, as it is our glory, to stand in difficult days. We shall all the sooner come to grips with the real issue if we understand that it is our business to set forth the undying Christ as we know him, and not to resuscitate, if that were possible, the forms and phrases and intellectualisms of an age that is gone. Back to Christ is the necessity—not the Christ of the Creeds compounded with the technical terms of Greek philosophy or the juristic outlook of Roman law, but the Christ of the Gospels. Any religious awakening which is going to move the common weal will begin in a revival of personal religion. Public morals are what personal religion makes them. The power-house is more vital than the transmission-plant. Wherever one looks it is to find that great public movements have had their origin in the hearts of consecrated men and women. Religion does not suffer by changing its form; it will founder if it be not ever related afresh to Jesus.
It may be taken for granted that an inquiring age like this will never submit itself to an intellectual position which presents itself merely on the ground of authority. The Reformation won the right to think, and in this we shall not be less than our fathers. Whatever we believe must be in harmony with our reason and our experience. This does not mean that those who exercise this right to think are become rationalists. We know ourselves everywhere to be surrounded by the evidences of a divine purpose: for us the things which are not seen are eternal. We find in the historyof to-day—in the history of those past seven tangled and tragic years—clear manifestations of the hand of God. But we believe that in the interpretation of Jesus personal experience must always have a major part. Our faith must be something not merely personal to ourselves but of which we can give some sort of account to others. Christ spoke no more incisive word than this: “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?”
There can be no question as to the dire need there is of such an awakening by which men and women may once again be turned to spiritual things. War is, under all conditions, and even when waged for the purest of motives, an unmitigated evil. The saddest things in war are not the deaths in action. Abnormal conditions, which bring together millions of men in a cause in which the sense of personal responsibility is merged in the sacrifice for a general purpose, produce abnormal results. The old moorings are lifted. The old restraints, so largely the result of environment and of local opinion and knowledge, cease to operate. The sense of “mine” and “thine” is loosened. Continence ceases to be a primal virtue. The idle become yet more idle and the reckless yet more reckless. And if the results upon the men who have seen service have been thus evil, the effects on the stay-at-home community have been even more evil because less gross. Money has been made in great quantity by those who have no sense of the stewardship of wealth, and has been displayed with an aggressiveness that only embittersthe way of simple and modest people. If the morals of men have deteriorated, women may well consider whether their fashions of dress have not contributed largely to the general demoralization. There were periods when lewdness advertised itself by its garb and indecency wore a uniform. It is not possible now to draw any large generalizations. The pungent definition of the modern novel as the kind of book that no nice girl would allow her mother to read may or may not be justified, but a glance through the pages of the cheap American story magazine will leave no one in uncertainty as to the kind of thing that is apparently most marketable. Any one to-day who takes a grave view of moral and religious conditions need not be afraid of being counted a misanthrope. Public life will always reflect not inaccurately private conditions. If ever there was a time when those who name the name of Christ required to reflect the character of Christ it is now.
Suppose, then, we come to Jesus and ask ourselves what were the characteristics of the life he lived and the faith he taught, should we not set down some broad and simple issues which current religious life might well be reminded of?
1. The Joy That He Brought.
When our Lord came it was to a world which was shrouded with the idea of demons and vindictive spiritual powers. That dark time between the close of the Old Testament period and the beginning of the New had been a forcing ground for all such thoughts. Thepowers of evil were serried ranks over against the power of God, and in the hands of those powers of evil Pilate and Herod were mere puppets. St. Paul, for instance, speaks of the wisdom of God, and then he adds: “Which none of the princes of this world knew, for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory” (1 Cor. 2:8). “It was not of Pontius Pilate and of Herod that Paul was speaking, but of things far more awful and far more powerful—thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers—as he calls them elsewhere the world rulers of this darkness, and at their head is the prince of the power of the air” (Glover,Jesus in Experience, page 1).
Not only on the side of the Jews was this terror of hidden and revengeful and incalculable powers felt. The Greek-speaking world had become permeated by Mithraism with its hierarchies of evil potentates, and as a result men lived in gloom and in a temper which made the propitiation of the unseen a main element in their religion. This was swept away not so much by what Jesus said as by what he was, and the New Testament, as the result, is the most joyous of books. Our Lord revealed the Father; there was none between the Father and himself. He was the Door; not only were there no other doors, but there was no necessity for other doors. He came to give life and more abundant life. He linked himself deliberately with those Old Testament Messianic passages which declared that there was liberty for those who were in bondage. He overstepped the inhibitions and prohibitions of ecclesiasticism.He took the Jewish law, and, reaching through the letter to the spirit, he tore off the accretions which had overlain the original purifying and liberating purpose. He declared the spiritual manhood of believers and invited those who cast in their lot with him to take up their great inheritance.
It is in the setting forth of Christ that the New Testament is self-evidencing. No theory as to its origin and descent is needed to guarantee its inspiration. The evidence of experience goes to show that the New Testament has power within itself. It is the word of God because it effectively conveys the message of God. Its glow, its simplicity, is due to this, that it was written by men who had just come through an overwhelming religious experience, an experience differing in kind but related in each case to the same supreme Source. In the case of a great work of art we are able to trace an origin and an evolution. The development may be rapid but there is demonstrable sequence between the Byzantine art and Giotto, between Giotto and the great Umbrians. In pure literature the master does not arise like some volcano from the midst of a plain. He has his predecessors in form, and his rivals differ only in degree. But in the case of a religious movement, the first burst is the most powerful, the first vision the most clear. Every effect must have an adequate cause. What Cause was it which made of these plain disciples literary and religious figures of incomparable power and dignity? Who of mortals can have taught the writer of the Fourth Gospel the interpretationthat he has to hand on to us? The power of the written Gospel is due to the unique power that was at work in these men’s hearts. After they were gone other Christian writers arose, better equipped in scholarship, and men of true piety as well, but they have left nothing that can be mentioned in the same breath with those narratives of the life of Christ, with the torrent of the Apostle Paul. Those who were nearest the source received most of the light. No naturalistic explanation has ever done anything to solve the riddle of those New Testament writings. An exercised Christian experience carries the truth. Almost all of those to whom we owe the New Testament died violent deaths, but their hearts were filled with singing, and their tribulations were matters only of joy. Base the inspiration of the Scriptures on their universal and ever youthful experience, and nothing can move the authority of the Gospels. Rest it on some theory of verbal inerrancy, and it is shaken by every negative critic. The vital question with regard to the New Testament is whether it does or does not reveal Jesus as God in the flesh. If it does this, then every other question as to the mere harmony of this account and that becomes almost irrelevant. We can admit and must admit the human element. God works through personalities, not through colorless nonentities. Every experienced Christian is a separate instrument, giving forth a separate tone. And men rejoice in the New Testament because other men two thousand years ago rejoiced, and their gladness and release still sound true.
Those who grasp this thought enter into the glorious liberty of the children of God. To-day all kinds of demons, even though they may not call themselves such, are supposed to be holding the ground between the truth-seeker and Jesus. It may be the general dread of life which always sees the possibilities of doom in to-morrow; it may be some carrying over into the spiritual sphere of an analogy from the physical law of causation; it may be some visualizing of the past, which makes reparation appear to be a prerequisite of any approach to a new life. Alas, reparation is no longer possible for most of the moral and spiritual failures, and in any case the kind of man we have become is a much more important matter than the mistakes which may come back to us on the selective wings of memory. And then there are other fears which deal not so much with spiritual things as with material and personal conditions. Not a few are haunted by their own suspicious natures. No man is to them wholly spontaneous or open-handed. The motive behind the generous or the brotherly thing must be sought, and that motive is invariably found to be something mean or selfish. How can there be any joy in the heart when there is this suspicion of one’s fellow? And others are dogged by their anxieties about their own ill health. One’s memories of the Riviera are sufficient to induce one to view Christian Science with a kindly eye. Those who have had the easiest of lives and endless leisure in which to indulge their whims cannot use the gifts they have by reasonof the overstrain they would incur! As if life were worth having on the terms of a constant hypochondria. And others again are haunted by their fear for their own reputation. They have to dress in a certain way, walk with a certain gait, live in a certain type of house, spend money at a certain rate, choose their friends among those who will be useful to them, speak the safe and colorless theory when epigram is on their tongue and provocativeness in their heart—all because they have to maintain a reputation. Yet,Hemade himself of no reputation, and because He sought only to live in dependence on his Father He had no fear, no divided mind, no anxiety, only joy and peace in believing.
Is not the recovery of that joy something that the Christian Church and the Christians within the church are crying out for. It is so evidently one of the first-fruits of fellowship with Christ, and how really rare a gift it is! St. Francis had it because, like the birds he loved, he leaned only upon God. Some men in war, having given themselves wholly to a cause that they believed to be of God, learned the quiet of having the world behind them. We who are burdened about so many things, so anxious to assume the right attitude, to maintain the conventional opinion, to insure against every conceivable misfortune of worldly estate, how can we know the joy of living free, the release of casting the burden upon the great Burden-bearer? The stoic taught the Roman to endure by denying the presence of pain. His strength was in his passive receptivity. But Christ Himself felt pain, dreaded pain,was distressed by pain in the house of His friends; and, moved thus by the sombre and unkind things in life, He yet had an undisturbed peace. If the church is to regain its hold upon men, it must be composed of joyous Christians. Only then will there be removed those misapprehensions which have made for such multitudes the thought of religion the thought of gloom. Only thus shall we be conquerors through Christ who loved us.
2. The Faith Which He Possessed.
Although it is two years since its publication, Mr. Lytton Strachey’sEminent Victoriansstill leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Mr. Strachey made it his business to destroy the halo around some well-known and long-venerated heads. He spoke what he believed to be the truth, not always in love, about Thomas Arnold and Florence Nightingale and General Gordon and others. He suggested that Gordon had been intemperate, and that some of his daring had been due to this fact. To read the insinuation was to remember the day, nearly forty years ago, when Gordon, at a few hours’ notice, stepped out of London and took his road for Khartoum and death and an immortal name. The magic of the story is felt beyond the bounds of the British Empire. A real hero is the possession of all mankind, and the thought of this one solitary and God-possessed soldier setting out alone by sheer personality to quench the rebellion that had spread over half a continent will always make the blood of the lethargic and the stay-at-home run a littlefaster. But that temper, if we could only grasp it, is essentially the temper of religion, and it means the possession of peace. The materialism of our day has overshot all our conceptions of peace, and we identify peace with comfort and a substantial bank balance and a fortification against the vicissitudes of chance. No wonder that the venture and the happiness have gone out of faith, which is the trust in the centuries as against the years, in the unseen instead of in the seen. There is little to be gained by society congratulating itself in its victory over alcohol if all the time it judges all success by outward and obvious standards. As things are, it is regarded almost as a crime not to have made money, and the doom of the “unsuccessful” is not pity but reprobation. How is it that, in a universe in which we believe that the fundamental factors are spiritual, such a conception should have come to rule! Simply because we have forgotten the rock from which we have been hewn, and have made a God after our own image. “He granted their request but sent leanness into their souls” (Ps. 106:15). We have had our reward. Is it any wonder that church life is stagnant? Why should it be otherwise if such conceptions virtually rule? Faith is become a comfortable dogma instead of a living conviction. The popular conception of faith implies no sacrifice. The faithful do not live in any way which marks them off from the faithless. Generally speaking, they pursue the same interests, follow out the same policy of insuring against most of the inevitable risks of life. Godly and ungodlyalike, they meet the demand of charity, and are not wholly unmindful of their duty to their neighbors. But that the Christian Church should be composed of people who truly are casting their burden upon the Lord is an unknown conception. Nor can they ever think of themselves launching off like Gordon on a quest that was inspired simply by belief in a command of God, as the realization of a need, by faith in an ideal.
If the church of to-day is uninteresting and without appeal to youth, the reason may very well be found in the lack of any thought of a living faith. Our Lord depended absolutely upon the Father. The Father’s will was his will, and as the result quiet dwelt with Christ. But his was no prudential service. Peace had its willing price. “Peace be unto you ... and when he had thus spoken he showed them his hands and his side” (John 20:19, 20).
Public life will rise no higher than its source in personal religion. A quick sense of the brotherhood of man led to the antislavery movement. The removal of the merely penal idea in punishment has led to the new treatment of criminals. Every religious revival may be traced by changes in public administration. A new grasp of the meaning of faith, as the leading by God out into the wilderness, will draw out of their pessimism and social ineptitude men and women who loathe the publicity and mud-slinging of public life and have hitherto stood apart from it. If, however, they come to it out of an awakened conscience,they will step forth, not as unwilling recruits, obeying the uninspiring call of mere duty, but as crusaders to strive for the kingdom of God upon earth.
The great aim of this and of every day is definite and in itself simple—to make spiritual things real. Each man has to understand his dependence upon a world which he cannot control, which was before he was and will endure when he has gone, a world in which right rules inevitably and finally, where the secrets of all hearts are known. And then, having recognized with all its implications his place in this kingdom of the spirit, he has to play his part through the institutions of civilized life, the church, the state, the municipality, in making this unseen life an actuality in the region of things mundane. But first things come first. The social interest does not create the clean heart. The power of Christ alone can do that. The Salvation Army is a mighty factor in moral uplift but it had its origin in Methodism and in the Christian experiences of a godly man and of a still more God-inspired woman. Those churches are not wrong or out of date which lay stress on the relationship of the believer to his Lord. That, after all, is the fundamental thing, the source out of which all wider and more impersonal movements flow. Evangelical faith is not outgrown. It never can be outgrown. It needs, it is true, constant restatement. The living phrases of one generation become almost certainly the catchwords of the next. It is not only the rightbut the duty of each generation of exercised Christians to state its belief in its own way; and those who are older must have faith in those who are young and allow them to tell their story in their own words. It was a great friendship which existed between D. L. Moody and Henry Drummond. The older man was self-educated, brought up to a religious belief that was under attack by scholars and scientists. The younger man was both a scholar and a scientist, a setter forth of new views of things. But it was Drummond who was chosen by Moody to follow up his work, to gather together the results of the missions. For Moody, “the greatest of living humans,” as Drummond called him, saw that they were both striving for the same thing, actually saying it in different words. They both have had their reward in the affection of countless men and women who think of them as messengers of the new life. But an awakened soul is the beginning of things. He who has been truly aroused to the life of God will not be slack in the life of man.
RELIGION AND SOCIAL DISCONTENTBYPAUL ELMER MORE, LITT.D., LL.D.
BY
PAUL ELMER MORE, LITT.D., LL.D.
A couple of years ago one of the most distinguished of our social philosophers, Professor John Dewey, of Columbia University, was invited to lecture at the Imperial University of Japan, and, having delivered his message in Tokyo, proceeded to China, where he was welcomed eagerly by the younger malcontents as an exponent zof Western ideas. The character of these ideas which our collegiate missioner carried across the Pacific Ocean may be learned from the little book since published by him under the title ofReconstruction in Philosophy. His thesis, indeed, is simple almost to naïveté. Hitherto, he avers, philosophy and religion have been nothing but an attempt to “identify truth with authoritative dogma.” And this attempt has a double aspect, theoretical and practical. On the one hand, mankind is prone to forget the evils of yesterday and to gloat in memory over the good, so that by the combined force of memory and imagination the past remains with us as a kind of idealized dream, a lovely, impalpable curtain hanging between our vision and the hard realities of the present. From such an iridescent dream has grown the philosophical and religious belief in an immaterial world of ideas, a glamorous make-believe under whose sway “we squirm,” as Mr. Dewey says in his pragmatic style, “dodge, evade, disguise, cover up, find excuses and palliations—anythingto render the mental scene less uncongenial,” and so to escape the actualities that confront us. Buddha, Plato, Jesus, and the other great masters and doctors of the life unseen were merely juggling with words and leading us nowhere; the discipline of character proposed by them and their offers of supernatural peace were a fraudulent perversion of the facts of human experience. The only true knowledge is that which comes to the farmer toiling at his crops, and to the carpenter laboring with his tools; the real facts of life are those that we can see and smell and taste and handle, and, so far as I can understand Mr. Dewey, such things alone.
That is the theoretical aspect of the reconstruction of philosophy proposed by our tender-hearted materialist; and the practical aspect is like unto it. Existing forms of government, established order, property, the church, institutions generally, draw their support from the idealizing illusions of memory and imagination; they are in truth the dead hand of the past clutching the throat of the living present. Throughout all the ages preceding the advent of Mr. Dewey, or by a gracious inclusion anterior to Francis Bacon, it has been the task of philosophers and religious leaders to find reasons for the existence of such institutions on ideal grounds, and to justify those who profit from them at the expense of the masses. Religion and philosophy have been simply the servile allies of the predatory classes of society. The hope of the world is in the new gospel of pragmatic materialism.
I trust I have not misrepresented Mr. Dewey’s teaching. Indeed, with an individual teacher I should have no quarrel, were he not in a position of authority; but it is another matter when such doctrines are spreading out from a lecture-room all over the country, and, as I hear from Chinese friends, are persuading the young reformers of the Far East that the only salvation for their people lies in adopting the crudest materialism of Western civilization, and in emancipating themselves from all that philosophy and religion hitherto have meant to the Occident as well as to the Orient. At least here is a matter to consider.
Now in one sense Mr. Dewey’s theory of religion—I use this word preferably, since the classical forms of philosophy which he would reconstruct belonged essentially to the field of religion—in one sense this theory is so far from being revolutionary that it has been current almost from the inception of human thought. Plato knew that the religious temper was naturally reverential of the past and conservative in its influence. It was, indeed, for this reason that he gave to religion and to a philosophy of the unseen world so thorough a control over the polity of his state. Polybius, the Greek historian of Rome, not only recognized this function of religion, but went so far as to maintain that even the palpable fictions of superstition should be upheld as a safeguard against political anarchy. “Since the multitude,” he argues, “is ever fickle and capricious, full of lawless passions, and irrational and violent resentments, there is no way left to keep themin order but the terrors of future punishment, and all the pompous circumstance that attends such kinds of fictions. On which account the ancients acted, in my opinion, with great judgment and penetration, when they contrived to bring in these notions of the gods and of a future state into the popular belief.” And on this basis Polybius goes on to show how the power and permanence of Rome were connected with a national morality grounded in irrational beliefs, whereas the inquisitive rationalism of Greece was the cause of her ethical and political decline. Livy’s annals of Rome are inspired throughout by the same idea, though without the tincture of scepticism that pervades the philosophy of the Greek historian. The city on the Tiber, Livy thought, grew mighty and conquered the world because of her faith in the gods and in that mystical Fatum which presided over her destiny, and kept her, through all the formal changes of her government, true to her originalêthos. “You will find,” he writes, “all things have prospered for those who follow the gods, while adversity dogs those who spurn them—invenietis omnia prospera evenisse sequentibus deos, adversa spernentibus.” So, for Tacitus, religion was, as he expresses it in his epigrammatic way,instrumentum regni. Christianity, though it altered much, maintained this same view. The greatest preacher of the ancient church, Chrysostom, was fond of pointing to the connection of religious humility, mother of all the virtues, with the principle of orderly subordination, on which, as on the golden chain ofdivine law, depended the stability of society and the happiness of the people.
But I must not fatigue you with examples. Passing on to the eighteenth century, one finds the politico-religious thought of England and France dominated by the Polybian notion that religion was imposed more or less deliberately on the people by their masters as an instrument of government, only with this important difference, that in England the imposition was commonly regarded even by the more radical deists and freethinkers as a salutary and necessary fraud, whereas across the channel a more logical and less prudential habit of speech led the bolder spirits at least to spurn the whole fabric of traditional religion as an impediment to liberty and progress. It was characteristic of the British mind, then as it has always been, to stop short of final conclusions and to be tolerant of a certain penumbra of illusion about the ultimate principles of life, a trait which has resulted on the one hand in the national willingness “to muddle through,” and, on the other hand, in a deeper sense of spiritual mysteries. Bolingbroke, atheist or deist, as you choose to call him, would take the position frankly that the truths of scepticism are for the enlightened few who, as Aristotle said, have learned from philosophy to do voluntarily what other men do under compulsion. Religion, to Bolingbroke and his class, was simply an integral part of that marvellous fiction, the British Constitution. “To make a government effectual to all the good purposes of it,” he says, “there must be a religion;this religion must be national, and this national religion must be maintained in reputation and reverence.” And a little later in the century one of the correspondents of that admirable and very British gentleman, Sir William Pepys, condemns Gibbon for divulging to the public the sort of scepticism which he might have enjoyed lawfully in his closet. “I agree,” avows our correspondent, “that no man should ‘take the bridle out of the mouth of that wild Beast Man’ (as Bolingbroke writes to Swift).... Tho’ a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, he shall not be permitted to vend them as cordials.” (Which, so far as I know, is the first attempt recorded in history to evade, prophetically, the Eighteenth Amendment of our own Constitution.) Nothing is more characteristic of the ruling temper of England than the fact that this same Gibbon, he who had expended his wit and his vast erudition in “sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer,” in his old age should have confessed admiration for Burke’s chivalry, even for his “superstition,” and should have planned a dialogue of the dead, wherein Lucian and Erasmus and Voltaire were to be heard discussing the danger of shaking the ancient faith of the people in religious institutions.
But the French mind could not rest in this severance of logic and practice. To their more incisive and less humble way of thinking, true was true and false was false, and to confound the boundaries of truth and falsehood was only to pay homage to canting hypocrisy.There was no distinction for them between an illusion and a plain lie, nor would they rest satisfied with a suppression of truth as known to individual reason, in order to leave room for a practical faith as taught by public experience. So it happened that thephilosophesas a body were not theoretical sceptics merely but militant atheists. If, as La Mettrie believed, “the soul is an empty word of which no one has any idea,” if men are no more than blind “moles creeping in the field of nature,” then, o’ God’s name, out with the truth of it; society can only profit from universal knowledge of the facts. In like manner a Holbach will take up the old theory of Polybius, but without the Polybian and the British “reserve.” “Experience,” he says, “teaches us that sacred opinions were the real source of the evils of human beings. Ignorance of natural causes created gods for them. Imposture made these gods terrible. This idea hindered the progress of reason.” And again: “An atheist ... is a man who destroys chimeras harmful to the human race, in order to lead men back to nature, to experience, and to reason, which has no need of recourse to ideal powers to explain the operations of nature.”
And the French view has prevailed, or threatens to prevail, as courageous views inevitably tend to supplant timid views, however true it may be that courage in such matters may sometimes be another name for insensibility, not to say conceit. So Leslie Stephen, writing of the eighteenth century in England, with asneer that contrives to combine the French boldness with the British reserve, declares that “the church, in short, was excellent as a national refrigerating machine; but no cultivated person could believe in its doctrines.” And at last Mr. Dewey, perhaps the most influential teacher to-day in America, is renewing the old cry and persuading our young men that religion is a fallacy of the reason devised to maintain the more fortunate classes in their iniquitous claims, and that progress and democracy are bound up with the materialistic pragmatism that emanates from his own chair of reconstructed philosophy.
Now, it will be clear from these illustrations, which might be multiplied indefinitely, that the classic philosophy, the philosophy of idealism properly so called, which underlies all religion, whether Platonic or Christian, has been regarded by most thinking men from ancient times to the present day as a conservative, or at least as a regulative, force in society. But thinking men have differed profoundly in their valuation of such a force. Those who hold this philosophy to be true are naturally undivided in their opinion that its social function is beneficial; but those sceptically and materialistically inclined, to whom the spiritual world of Plato and St. Augustine is merely an insubstantial fabric wrought out of the discontent of mankind with the actualities of life, have been divided in their attitude. By some this dream of the unseen, though a deception, has been accepted as necessary for the ordered welfare of society; the enlightened few might indulge theirsuperiority of doubt, but without the restraining content born of superstition the turbulent desires of the masses would throw the world into anarchy and barbarism and universal misery. That was the prevalent attitude of ancient rationalism; and it is still common enough to-day among those who have a condescending respect for the church as a useful ally of the police court. To others, a rapidly growing number, it seems that the spirit of content engendered by religion, if based on a falsehood, must be detrimental to the progress of mankind. Or perhaps their position might be expressed more accurately by reversing the terms. They would not say that religious content is false and therefore must be detrimental; but, rather, religious content is inimical to progress and therefore must be false.
I am not here before you to-day to determine the truth or falsehood of the ideal philosophy which supports religious institutions; that is a question which for the present we may waive. We will not discriminate between those who hold this philosophy to be true and those who regard it as an illusion, but an illusion necessary for the preservation of society. The line for us is drawn between those who, for whatever reason, cling to a religious philosophy of the unseen and those who denounce such a philosophy as a check to the progress and prosperity of the race. And you will see at once that the issue between these two classes has been sharpened for us of the present day by the intrusion into sociology of a new theory of existence—newat least in its scope and claims. I mean the great and all-devouring doctrine of evolution.
Now the evolutionary philosophy, by which we have become accustomed, rather prematurely perhaps, to test all problems of truth and utility, has many aspects and follows various lines of argument. What it means to the working scientist is one thing, and what it means to the metaphysician may be quite another thing; but when it intrudes into the field of sociology, and more specifically when it lays its grasping hand upon that part of sociology which attempts to weigh the value of religious belief, you will find it almost inevitably taking the note so clearly defined in pages of Mr. Dewey’s typical book. Evolution is identified with progress, progress is measured by increased power to satisfy physical wants, and the effort to increase this power is conditioned on dissatisfaction with material conditions. Oh, I know that many evolutionary sociologists will demur against the reduction of their theories to a crudely materialistic formula; but many of them will not, and I am sure the formula does not misrepresent the real conclusions of their doctrine. It comes down to this: Physical progress has its source in physical discontent, and, by an extension of terms, social progress has its source in social discontent; and any doctrine which dulls the edge of this discontent is thereby an obstacle in the path of individual and racial welfare. Discontent is motion and the striving for better things, it is life; content is just stagnation and death. And here lies the charge against religion. By drawing offthe mind to the contemplation of those so-called eternal things that are not visible to the bodily eyes or palpable to these fleshly hands, by injecting spiritual values into this present life and raising hopes of other-worldly happiness, religion, together with the whole range of illusory philosophy on which it is nurtured, throws the feelings of physical discomfort out of the centre into the further margin of the field of vision, into the penumbra, so to speak, of insignificance, while it imposes a stillness of content upon the naturally restless soul of man. In such a mood the past, out of which the oracles of faith seem to sound by some miracle of memory, acquires a tender sanctity, and the institutions of tradition are often invested with a reverence and awe which easily flow into vested rights. If the religious mood were really to prevail, they say, then society would sink into the slothful decay described by old Mandeville in his “Fable of the Bees,” that terrible poem which the modern humanitarian would abhor as a black parody of his doctrine, but which in good sooth told the facts of a materialistic sociology once for all: