“Men look to their tools; a painter will wash his pencils; a smith will look to his hammer, anvil, andforge; a husbandman will mend his plow-irons and grind his hatchet, if it be dull; a musician will string and unstring his lute; only scholars neglect that instrument, their brains and spirits I mean, which they daily use.”
“Men look to their tools; a painter will wash his pencils; a smith will look to his hammer, anvil, andforge; a husbandman will mend his plow-irons and grind his hatchet, if it be dull; a musician will string and unstring his lute; only scholars neglect that instrument, their brains and spirits I mean, which they daily use.”
Not scholars only, but all classes and conditions of men are guilty of this strange insanity. If the Duke of Westminster should offer to transfer to us his estates, we would rush with all conceivable speed to acquire our new potential possessions. We would go as with wings of an aeroplane to get the transaction accomplished before anything could occur to keep us from entering into our fortune. But here we are already within reach of a vastly better possession, of which we are strangely negligent. If it came to a choice between himself and his outward possessions, this duke who owns so much would not hesitate a minute which to prefer. If in a crisis of illness he could save himself by surrender of his goods, they would instantly go. “Give me health and a day,” Emerson said, “and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”
What we would do in a crisis we often fail to do when no crisis confronts us, and it is a fact that too often we miss and even squander that better possession, ourselves. The best way to win it and enjoy it is to cultivate those inner experiencesand endowments which make us independent of external fortune. All Christ’s beatitudes attach to some inherent quality of life itself. The meek, the merciful, the pure, are “happy,” not because the external world conforms to their wishes, but because they have resources of life within themselves and have entered upon a way of life which continually opens out into more life and richer life. They have found a kind of Canaan that “comes” in continuous instalments.
One of the simplest ways to heighten the total value of life is to form a habit of appreciating the world we have here and now. It presents occasional inconveniences, no doubt, but think of the amazing donations which come to us: the tilting of the earth’s axis twenty-three and a half degrees to the ecliptic by which contrivance we have our seasons; the fact that the proportion of earth and water is just right to give us a fine balance of rain and sunshine; the extraordinary way in which the entire universe submits to our mathematics so that every movement of matter and every vibration of ether conforms to laws which we formulate; the accumulation and storage of fuel and motor power, with the prospect of even greater resources of energy to be had from the unoccupied space surrounding the earth. Then, again,it cannot be a matter of unconcern that there is such a wealth of beauty lavished upon us everywhere, waiting for us to enjoy it. There is here a strange fit between the outer and the inner. The more one draws upon the beauty of the world and enjoys it, so much the more does he increase his capacity to discover and enjoy beauty. Coal and oil may become exhausted, but beauty is inexhaustible. The only trouble is that we are so limited in our range of appreciation of it. We turn to cheaper values and miss so much of this free gift of loveliness.
Greater still should be our resources of love and friendship. Nothing could be stranger or more wonderful than that in a world where struggle for existence is the law this other trait should have emerged. It is easy to explain selfishness; love is the mystery. Love forgets itself; it scorns double-entry bookkeeping; it gives, it bestows, it shares, it sacrifices without asking whether anything is coming back. And it turns out to be a fact that nothing else so enhances and increases the value of this “better possession which is ourselves.”
Even more wonderful, if that is possible, is the way we are formed and contrived to have intercourse with the Eternal. With all our materialfurnishings we strangely open out into the infinite and partake of a spiritual nature. God has set eternity in our hearts. We cannot win this better possession nor hold it permanently unless we exercise these spiritual capacities, which expand our being and add the richest qualities of life. “Thou hast made us for thyself,” Augustine acknowledged in his great prayer at the opening of theConfessionsand “we are restless until we find thee as our true rest.” It is as true now as in the fourth century. Barns and houses, lands and stocks, mortgages and bonds, do not constitute life unless one learns how to win and possess his soul and to keep that best of all possessions—himself.
“After experience had taught me that all things which are encountered in human life are vain and futile.... I at length determined to inquire if there was anything which was a true good.” Those are the words of a great philosopher who says that he found himself “led by the hand up to the highest blessedness.”
Not everybody finds the choice of ends so easy as Spinoza did; not all of us are carried along into sustained and unmistakable blessedness. Life is full of rivalries which tend to divide our interest and to dissipate our attention. We wake up, perhaps, with surprise to discover that we are being carried, by the hand or by the hair, straight away from “the highest blessedness.” Not seldom the sternest tragedies of human life are occasioned by success. Failure overtaking one in his aim will often shake him awake and make him see that he was pursuing an end in sharp rivalry with his highest good. But success often dulls the vision for other issues and gives one the specious confidence that he is on the right track and “all’s well.”
Christ has a vivid parable which touches upon the rivalries of life. It is the story of a great feast to which many guests are invited. When the critical moment for the dinner comes the other rivalries begin to operate. One man, attracted by his possessions, “begs off,” to use the graphic phrase of the original. Another, occupied with the complex interests of business and busy with the affairs of trade, prays to be excused. A third is immersed in the joys and responsibilities of married life and he abruptly dispatches his “regrets.”It was not that they were unconcerned about the sumptuous feast, but that they were carried along by rival interests.
The feast in this parable plainly stands for the “true good,” the “highest blessedness” of life. It symbolizes the goal and crown of life, the full realization of our best human possibilities, the attainment of that for which we were made aspiring beings. The invitation is a mark of amazing grace and the recipient of it has the clearest evidence that the feast would satisfy him. But there are the other things with their rival attractions! Possessions and business and domestic life pull us in a contrary direction. We send our cards of regret and beg off from the great feast.
The real mistake lies in treating these things as rivals. If we only knew it, an affirmative response to the great invitation of life would prepare us for all the other things and would heighten the value of all we own, of all we do, and of all we love. Salvation is not some remote and ghostly thing that has to do with another world. It is the infusion of new life and power into all the concerns and affairs of this present world where we are. It means, as Christ said, receiving “a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, andlands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.”
Nothing could be a more mistaken way than to regard human love as a rival to the highest of all relations, the love of the soul for God. One of the medieval saints said: “God brooks no rival”; but that phrase shows that the saint was caught napping, and in any case did not quite understand what love is. The way up to the highest love is not to be found by turning away from those experiences which give us training and preparation for the highest; but rather it is found in and through the experience of loving some person who, however imperfectly, is a revelation of the beauty and divineness of love. Not by some sheer leap from the earth does the soul arrive at its height of blessedness, but by steps and stages, by processes which bring illumination and richness of life. The man who has married a wife will do well to say when he answers the great invitation: “I have just married a wife and therefore I am peculiarly glad to come to thy feast, since fellowship with thee will make my love more real and true as that in turn will enable me to rise to a more genuine appreciation of thy love.”
The same is true of houses and lands, of business and trade. There is no necessary rivalryhere. Religion does not rob us of earthly interests, it does not strip us of the good things of this world. It only corrects our perspective and enables us to see the true scale of values. The trivial and fragmentary things of the world no longer absorb us. We refuse now to allow them to own us and drive us, or drag us. We see things steadily and we see them whole. We discover through our higher contacts and inspirations how to flood light back upon our occupations and upon the things we own, and how to make these subordinate things minister to the higher functions and attitudes of life. We get not some other world, but this world here and now transmuted and raised a little nearer to the ideal and perfect world of our hopes and dreams. We get it back item for item increased a hundredfold, raised to a higher spiritual level. The wise owner of property and the intelligent man of affairs will not beg off when the great invitation comes to him. He will say: “I have just come into possession of a piece of land, I have bought five yoke of oxen, and therefore I want to come to thy divine feast so that I may learn how to turn all I possess into the channels of real service and to make these things which thou hast given me help me find the way to the highest joy and blessedness of life.”
We have all been asking, “What is the matter with the Church? Why is it so weak and ineffective? Why does it exercise such a feeble influence in the world to-day? Why do men care so little for its message and its mission?” There are no doubt many answers to these questions, but one answer concerns us here. It is this: We who compose the Church do not sufficiently realize that God is a living God and that the Church is intended to be the living body through which he works in the world and through which he reveals himself. We think of him as far away in space and remote in time, a God who created once and who worked wonders in ancient times long past, but we do not, as we should, vividly think of him as a living reality, as near to us as the air is to the flying bird or the water to the swimming fish.We suppose that the Church is made up of just people, and is a human convenience for getting things done in the world. We do not see as we should that it is meant to be both divine and human and that it never is properly a Church unless God lives in it, reveals himself by means of it and works his spiritual work in the world through it.
This truth of the real Presence breaks through many of Christ’s great sayings and was one of the most evident features of the experience of the early Church. “Wherever in all the world two or three shall gather in my name there am I in the midst of them.” “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” “Wherever there is one alone,” according to the newly found “saying” of Jesus, “I am with him. Raise the stone and there thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and there am I.”
Not once alone was the early Church invaded by a life and power from beyond itself as at Pentecost. The consciousness which characterized this “upper room” experience was repeated in some degree wherever a Church of the living God came into existence, as “a tiny island in a sea of surrounding paganism.” To belong to the Church meant to St. Paul to be “joined to the Lord in one spirit,” while the Church itself in hisgreat phrase is the body of Christ and each individual a member in particular of that body.
What a difference it would make if we could rise to the height of St. Paul’s expectation and be actually “builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit!” We try plenty of other expedients. We popularize our message; we take up fads; we adjust as far as we can to the tendencies of the time; but only one thing really works after all and that is having the Church become the organ of the living God, and having it “charged” with what Paul so often calls the power of God—“the power that worketh in us.”
I saw a car wheel recently that had been running many miles with the brake clamped tight against it. It was white hot and it glowed with heat and light until it seemed almost transparent in its extraordinary luminosity. Those Christians in the upper room at Pentecost were baptized with fire so that the whole personality of each of them was glowing with heat and light, for the fire had gone all through them. They suddenly became conscious that their divine Leader who was no longer visible with them had become an invisible presence and a living power working through them. It is no wonder that all Jerusalemand its multitudinous sojourners were at once awakened to the fact that something novel had happened.
Our controversies which have divided us have been controversies about things out at the periphery, not about realities at the heart and center. We disagree about baptism, and we are at variance over problems of organization, ministry, and ordination, but the thing that really matters is the depth of conviction, consciousness of God, certainty of communion and fellowship with the Spirit. These experiences unite and never divide.
There is after all, in spite of all our gaps and chasms, only one Church. It is the Church of the living God. We are named with many names. We bear the sign of a particular denomination, but if we belong truly to the Church, then we belong to the great Church of the living God. It is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the building, fitly framed together, grows into an holy temple in the Lord. This is “the blessed community,” the living, expanding fellowship of vital faith, and it has the promise of the future, whether conferences on “faith and order” succeed or not, because it is the Church of the living God.
We are coming more and more to realize that religion attaches to the simple, elemental aspects of our human life. We shall not look for it in a few rare, exalted, and so-called “sacred” aspects of life, separated off from the rest of life and raised to a place apart. Religion to be real and vital must be rooted in life itself and it must express itself through the whole life. It should begin, where all effective education must begin, in the home, which should be the nursery of spiritual life.
The Christian home is the highest product of civilization; in fact there is nothing that can be called civilization where the home is absent. The savage is on his way out of savagery as soon as he can create a home and make family life at all sacred. The real horror of the “slums” in our great cities is that there are no homes there, but human beings crowded indiscriminately into one room. It is the real trouble with the “poor whites” whether in the South or in the North that they have failed to preserve the home as a sacred center of life.
One of the first services of the foreign missionary is to help to establish homes among the people whom he hopes to Christianize. In short, the home is the true unit of society. It determines what the individual shall be; it shapes the social life; it makes the Church possible; it is the basis of the state and nation. A society of mere individual units is inconceivable. Men and women, each for self, and with no holy center for family life, could never compose either a Church or a State.
Christianity has created the home as we know it, and that is its highest service to the world, for the kingdom of heaven would be realized if the Christian home were universal. The mother’s knee is still the holiest place in the world; and the home life determines more than all influences combined what the destiny of the boy or girl shall be. The formation of disposition and early habits of thought and manner as well as the fundamental emotions and sentiments do more to shape and fix the permanent character than do any other forces in the world.
We may well rejoice in the power of the Sunday school, the Christian ministry, the secular school, the college, the university; but all together they do not measure up to the power of the homeswhich are silently, gradually determining the future lives of those who will compose the Sunday school, the Church, the school, and the college.
The woman who is successful in making a true home, where peace and love dwell, in which the children whom God gives her feel the sacredness and holy meaning of life, where her husband renews his strength for the struggles and activities of his life, and in which all unite to promote the happiness and highest welfare of each other—that woman has won the best crown there is in this life, and she has served the world in a very high degree. The union of man and woman for the creation of a home breathing an atmosphere of love is Christ’s best parable of the highest possible spiritual union where the soul is the bride and he is the Eternal Bridegroom, and they are one.
It seems strange that these vital matters are so little emphasized or regarded. Few things in fact are more ominous than the signs of the disintegration of the home as a nursery of spiritual life. We can, perhaps, weather catastrophes which may break down many of our ancient customs and even obliterate some of the institutions which now seem essential to civilization; but the home is a fundamental necessity for true spiritual nurtureand culture, and if it does not perform its function the world will drift on toward unspeakable moral disasters.
Democracy was in an earlier period only a political aim; it has now become a deep religious issue. It must be discussed not only in caucuses and conventions, but in churches as well. For a century and a quarter “democracy” has been a great human battle word, and battle words never have very exact definitions. It has all the time been charged with explosive forces, and it has produced a kind of magic spell on men’s minds during this long transitional period. But the word democracy has, throughout this time, remained fluid and ill-defined—sometimes expressing the loftiest aspirations and sometimes serving the coarse demagogue in his pursuit of selfish ends.
The goal or aim of the early struggle after democracy was the overthrow of human inequalities. Men were thought of in terms of individual units, and the units were declared to be intrinsicallyequal. The contention was made that they all had, or ought to have, the same rights and privileges. This equality-note has, too, dominated the social and economic struggles of the last seventy-five years. The focus has been centered upon rights and privileges. Men have been thought of, all along, as individual units, and the goal has been conceived in political and economic terms. Democracy is still supposed, in many quarters, to be an organization of society in which the units have equal political rights. Much of the talk concerning democracy is still in terms of privileges. It is a striving to secure opportunities and chances. The aim is the attainment of a social order in which guarantee is given to every individual that he shall have his full economic and political rights.
I would not, in the least, belittle the importance of these claims, or underestimate the human gains which have been made thus far in the direction of greater equality and larger freedom. But these achievements, however valuable, are not enough. They can only form the base from which to start the drive for a more genuine and adequate type of democracy. At its best this scheme of “equality” is abstract and superficial. Nobody will ever be satisfied with an achievement of flatequality. Persons can never be reduced to homogeneous units. There are individual differences woven into the very fiber of human life, and no type of democracy can ever satisfy men like us until it gets beyond this artificial scheme and learns to deal with the problem in more adequate fashion.
A genuinely Christian democracy such as the religious soul is after can not be conceived in economic terms, nor can it be content with social units of equality or sameness. We want a democracy that is vitally and spiritually conceived, which recognizes and safeguards the irreducible uniqueness of every member of the social whole. This means that we can not deal with personal life in terms of external behavior. We can not think of society as an aggregation of units possessing individual rights and privileges. We shall no longer be satisfied to regard persons as beings possessing utilitarian value or made for economic uses. We shall forever transcend the instrumental idea. We shall begin rather with the inalienable fact of spiritual worth as the central feature of the personal life. This would mean that every person, however humble or limited in scope or range, has divine possibilities to be realized; is not a “thing” to be used and exploited,but a spiritual creation to be expanded until its true nature is revealed. The democracy I want will treat every human person as a unique, sacred, and indispensable member of a spiritual whole, a whole which remains imperfect if even one of its “little ones” is missing; and its fundamental axiom will be the liberation and realization of the inner life which is potential in every member of the human race.
On the economic and equality level we never reach the true conception of personal life. Men are thought of as units having desires, needs, and wants to be satisfied. We are, on this basis, aiming to achieve a condition in which the desires, wants, and needs are well met, in which each individual contributes his share of supplies to the common stock of economic values, and receives in turn his equitable amount. I am dealing, on the other hand, with a way of life which begins and ends, not with a material value-concept at all, but rather with a central faith in the intrinsic worth and infinite spiritual possibilities of every person in the social organism—a democracy of spiritual agents.
It is true, no doubt, as Shylock said, that we all have “eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions,” are “subject to diseases,”and “warmed and cooled by summer and winter.” “If you prick us we bleed, if you tickle us we laugh, if you poison us we die,” and so on. We do surely have wants and needs. We must consider values. We must have food and clothes and houses. We must have some fair share of the earth and its privileges. But that is only the basement and foundation of real living, and we want a democracy that is supremely concerned with the development of personality and with the spiritual organization of society. We shall not make our estimates of persons on a basis of their uses, or on the ground of their behavior as animal beings; we shall live and work, if we are Christ’s disciples, in the faith that man is essentially a spiritual being, in a world which is essentially spiritual, and that we are committed to the task of awakening a like faith in others and of helping realize an organic solidarity of persons who practice this faith. Our rule of life would be something like the following: to act everywhere and always as though we knew that we are members of a spiritual community, each one possessed of infinite worth, of irreducible uniqueness, and indispensable to the spiritual unity of the whole—a community that is being continually enlarged by the faith and action of those who now composeit, and so in some measure being formed by our human effort to achieve a divine ideal.
The most important service we can render our fellow men is to awaken in them a real faith in their own spiritual nature and in their own potential energies, and to set them to the task of building the ideal democracy in which personality is treated as sacred and held safe from violation, infringement, or exploitation, and, more than that, in which we altogether respect the worth and the divine hopes inherent in our being as men.
There are few questions more difficult to answer than the question, What is Christianity? Every attempt to answer it reveals the peculiar focus of interest in the mind of the writer, but it leaves the main question still asking for a new answer.
“Always it asketh, asketh,” and each answer, to say the least, is inadequate. Harnack, Loisy, and Tolstoy have given three characteristic answers to the great question. Their books are touched with genius and will long continue to beread, but, like the other books, they, too, reveal the writers rather than solve the central problem.
One of the greatest difficulties about the whole matter is the difficulty of deciding where to look for the essential traits of Christianity. Are they to be found in the teaching of Jesus? Are they revealed in the message of St. Paul? Are they embodied in the Messianic hope? Are they exhibited in the primitive apostolic Church? Are they set forth in the great creeds of orthodoxy? Are they expressed in the imperial authoritative Church? Are they to be discovered in the Protestantism of the modern world? This catalogue of preliminary questions shows how complicated the subject really is. To start in on any one of these lines would be of necessity to arrive at a partial and one-sided answer.
Nowhere can we find pure and unalloyed Christianity; always we have it mixed and combined with something else, more or less foreign to it. The creeds contain a larger element of Greek philosophy than of the pure original gospel. The Messianic hope is far more Jewish than it is “Christian.” The imperial authoritative Church is Christianity interpreted through the Roman genius for organization and merged and fused with the age-long faiths and customs of paganpeoples. Protestantism is an amazingly complex blend of ideas and ideals and everywhere interwoven with the long processes of history. Even this did not drop from the sky ready-made! Nor did St. Paul’s message flash in upon him with the Damascus vision, as a pure heaven-presented truth. It proves to be a very difficult task to find one’s way back to the pure, unalloyed teaching of Jesus, and, strangely enough, the moment one endeavors to constitute this by itself “Christianity,” and undertakes to turn it into a set of commands and to make it a “new law,” he ends with a dry legalism and not a vital, universal Christianity.
What, then, is Christianity? In answering this question we can not confine ourselves to the teaching and the work of Jesus. Important as it is to go “back to Jesus” that is not enough. We can not fully comprehend the meaning of Christianity until we take into account the fact that the invisible, resurrected Christ is the continuation through the ages of the same revelation begun in the life and teaching of Jesus. Galilee and Judea mark only one stage of the gospel, which is, in its fullness, an eternal gospel. The Christian revelation which came to light first in one Life—its master interpretation and incarnation—has since been going forward in a continuous and unbrokenmanifestation of Christ through many lives and through many groups and through the spiritual achievements of all those who have lived by him. Christianity is, thus, the revelation of God through personal life—God humanly revealed. St. Paul and the writer of the Fourth Gospel were the first to reach this profound insight into its fuller meaning, though it is plainly suggested in some of the sayings of Jesus and in the pentecostal experiences of the first Christians. It is the very heart of the Pauline and the Johannine Christianity. Important as is the backward look to Jesus in both these writers, the central emphasis is unmistakably upon the inward experience of the invisible, spiritual Christ. This is the expectation in the Fourth Gospel: Greater things than these shall ye do when the Spirit comes upon you. This is the mystery, the secret of the gospel, St. Paul says, Christ in you.
If this is the right clew, Christianity is not a new law, nor an institution, nor a creed, nor a body of doctrine, nor a millennial hope. It is a type of life, it is a way of living. The most essential thing about it is the fact of the incursion of God into human life, the revelation of the eternal in the midst of time, the new discovery which it brought of God’s nature and character.We nowhere else come so close to the essential truth of Christianity as we do in the life and experience of Jesus. The life at every point floods over and transcends the teaching. He is the most complete and adequate exhibition of what I have called the incursion of God into human life, but even so he is the beginning, not the end, of the revelation of God through humanity—the Christ-revelation of God—and this Christ-revelation of GodisGod, so far as he is at all adequately known.
Some persons talk as though God were a kind of composite Being, got by adding up the God of the natural order, the God of the Old Testament, and the God as Father about whom Jesus taught. He is, according to this scheme, in some way a compound aggregate of infinite power, irresistible justice, and eternal love. Sometimes one “attribute” is predominant, and sometimes another, while in some mysterious way all the dissonant attributes get “reconciled.” This is surely boggy ground to build upon.
Christianity is essentially, I should say, a unique revelation of God. Here for the first time the race discovers that God identifies himself with humanity, is in the stream of it, is suffering with us, is in moral conflict with sin andevil, is conquering through the travail and tragedy of finite persons, and is eternally, in mind and heart and will, a God of triumphing Love. No texts adequately “prove” this mighty truth. We cannot tie it down to “sayings,” though there are “sayings” which declare it. The life of Jesus, the supreme decisions through which he expresses his purpose, the spirit which dominates him and guides his decisive actions, make the truth plain that God meantthatto him and that his way of life revealed that kind of God.
Through all the fusions and confusions of history and through all the vagaries of man’s tortuous course since the Church began to be built, Christ as eternal Spirit has gone on revealing this truth about God and demonstrating the victorious power of this way of life. The making of a kingdom of God in the world, the spread of the brother-spirit, the expansion of the love-method, the increase of coöperation, sympathy, and service, the continued incursion of the divine into the life of the human, these are the things now and always which indicate the vitality and progress of Christianity, and the uninterrupted revelation of God.
Always, in every period of history, the essential truth of Christianity must be revealed andexpressed in and through a medium not altogether adapted to it. It is always living and working in a world more or less alien to it. It has at any stage only partially realized its ideal, and only achieved in a fragmentary way the goal toward which it is moving. It means endless conquest and ever fresh winning of unwon victories. It must be for us all a vision and a venture, it must be a thing of faith and forecast. At the same time it is, in a very real sense, experience and achievement. Godhasentered into humanity. Love has revealed its redeeming power. Grace is as much a reality as mountains are. The kingdom of God though not all in sight yet is, I believe, as sure as gravitation. The invisible, eternal Christ, living in the soul of man, revealing his will in moral and spiritual victories in personal lives, is, I am convinced, as genuine a fact as electricity is. But we shall seeallthat Christianity means only when the living totality of the revelation of God through humanity is complete.
Anaxagoras said twenty-five hundred years ago that men are always cutting the world in two with a hatchet. William James, in one of his living phrases, says with the same import that everybody dichotomizes the cosmos. It is so. We all incline to bisect life into alternative possibilities. We split realities into opposing halves. We show a kind of fascination for an “either-or” selection. We are prone to use the principle of parsimony, and to be content with one side of a dilemma. History presents a multitude of dualistic pairs from which one was supposed to make his individual selection. There was the choice between this world and the next world; the here and the yonder; the flesh and the spirit; faith and reason; the sacred and the secular; the outward and the inward, and manymore similar alternatives. This “either-or” method always leaves its trail of leanness behind. It makes life thin and narrow where it might be rich and broad, for in almost every case it is just as possible to have a whole as to have a half, to take both as to select an alternative. St. Paul found his Corinthians bisecting their spiritual lives and narrowing their interests to one or two possibilities. One of them would choose Paul as his representative of the truth and then see no value in the interpretation which Apollos had to give. Another attached himself to Apollos and missed all the rich contributions of Paul. Some of the “saints” of the Church selected Cephas as the only oracle, and they lost all the breadth which would have come to them had they been able to make a synthesis of the opposing aspects. St. Paul called them from their divided half to a completed whole. He told them that instead of “either-or” they could have both. “All things are yours; whether Paul or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present or things to come, all are yours; and ye are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.” This is the method of synthesis. This is the substitution of wholes for halves, the proffer of both for an “either-or” alternative.
That last pair of alternatives is an interesting one, and many persons make their bisecting choice of life there. One well-known type of person focuses on the near, the here and now, the things present. Those who belong to this class propose to make hay while the sun shines. They glory in being practical. They have what doctors call myopia. They see only the near. Their lenses will not adjust for the remote. They believe in quick returns and bank upon practical results. Those of the other type have presbyopia, or far-sightedness. They are dedicated to the far-away, the remote, the yonder. They are pursuing rainbows and distant ideals. They are so eager for the millennium that they forget the problem of their street and of the present day. Browning has given us a picture of both these types:
“That low man seeks a little thing to do,Sees it and does it:This high man, with a great thing to pursue,Dies ere he knows it.That low man goes on adding one to one,His hundred’s soon hit:This high man, aiming at a million,Misses an unit.”
“That low man seeks a little thing to do,Sees it and does it:This high man, with a great thing to pursue,Dies ere he knows it.That low man goes on adding one to one,His hundred’s soon hit:This high man, aiming at a million,Misses an unit.”
“That low man seeks a little thing to do,Sees it and does it:This high man, with a great thing to pursue,Dies ere he knows it.
“That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,His hundred’s soon hit:This high man, aiming at a million,Misses an unit.”
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred’s soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.”
Browning’s sympathies are plainly with the “high man” who misses the unit, but it is one more case of unnecessary dichotomy. What we want is the discovery of a way to unite into one synthesis things present and things to come. We need to learn how to seize this narrow isthmus of a present and to enrich it with the momentous significance of past and future. Henry Bergson has been telling us that all rich moments of life are rich just because they roll up and accumulate the meaning of the past and because they are crowded with anticipations of the future. They are fused with memory and expectation, and one of these two factors is as important as the other. If either dies away the present becomes a useless half, like the divided parts of the child which Solomon proposed to bisect for the two contending mothers.
We are at one of those momentous ridges of time at the present moment. Some are so busy with the near and immediately practical that they cannot see the far vision of the world that is to be built. Others are so impressed with past issues that have become paramount, with the glorious memories of the blessed Monroe Doctrine, for instance, that they have no expectant eyes for the creation of an interrelated and unifiedworld. Another group is so concerned with the social millennium that they discount the lessons of the past, the message of history, the wisdom of experience, and fly to the useless task of constructing abstract human paradises and dreams of a world-kingdom which could exist only in a realm where men had ceased to be men.
What we want is a synthesis of things present and things to come, a union of the practical, tested experience of life and the inspired vision of the prophet who sees unfolding the possibilities of human life raised to its fuller glory in Christ, the incarnation of the way of love, which always has worked, is working now, and always will work.
Most people like to be told what they already think. They enjoy hearing their own opinions and ideas promulgated, and no amens are so hearty as the ones which greet the reannouncement of views we have already held.
The natural result is that speakers are apt to give their hearers what they want. They takethe line of least resistance and say what will arouse the enthusiasm of the people before them, and they get their quick reward. They are popular at once. There is a high tide of emotion as they proceed to tell what everybody present already thinks, and they soon find themselves in great demand.
The main trouble with such an easy ministry is that it isn’t worth doing. It accomplishes next to nothing. It merely arouses a pleasurable emotion and leaves lives where they were before. And yet not quite where they were either, for the constant repetition of things we already believe dulls the mind and deadens the will and weakens rather than strengthens the power of life. It is an easy ministry both for speakers and hearers, but it is ominous for them both.
The prophet has a very different task. He cannot give people what they want. He is under an unescapable compulsion to give them what his soul believes to be true. He cannot take lines of least resistance; he must work straight up against the current. He cannot work for quick effects; he must slowly educate his people and compel them to see what they have not seen before. The amens are very slow to come to his words, and he cannot look for emotional thrills.He must risk all that is dear to himself, except the truth, as he sets himself to his task, and he is bound to tread lonely wine-presses before he can see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied.
Every age has these two types of ministry. They are both ancient and familiar. There are always persons who are satisfied to give what is wanted, who are glad to cater to popular taste, who like the quick returns. But there are, too, always a few souls to be found who volunteer for the harder task. They forego the amens and patiently teach men to see farther than they have seen before. Their first question is not, What do people want me to say? but, What is God’s truth which to-day ought to be heard through me? and knowing that, they speak. They do not move their hearers as the other type does; they do not reach so many, and they miss the popular rewards—but they are compassed about by a great cloud of witnesses as they fight their battles for the truth, and they have their joy.
But this is not quite all there is to say. It is not possible to teach the new effectively without linking it up with the old. The wholly new is generally not true. New, fresh truth emerges out of ancient experience; it does not drop like ashooting star from the distant skies. The great prophets in all ages have lived close to the people. They have not had their “ear to the ground,” to use a political phrase, but they have understood the human heart. They have lived in the great currents of life. They have heard the going in the mulberry trees, and have felt the breaking forth of the dawning light just because of their double union with men and God.
All sound pedagogy recognizes this principle. The good teacher knits the new material which he wishes learned on to the old and familiar. He takes his student forward by gradual stages, not by leaps and bounds, and he binds the known and unknown together by rational synthesis, not by some strange, foreign, magical glue. The more we wish to belong to the prophet-class and to raise our hearers to new and greater levels of truth and insight, the more we shall strive to understand the truth that has already been revealed, to saturate ourselves with it, to fuse and kindle our lives with those immense realities by which men in past ages have lived and conquered. So, and only so, can we go forward and take others forward with us to new experiences and to new discoveries of the light that never was on sea or land.
Every time the Christmas anniversary returns, the heart renews its youthful joy in the thrilling stories of the nativity. We cannot be too thankful for the inspiration and poetry and imagination which touch and glorify every aspect of our religious faith. Some dull and leaden-minded pedants appear to think that the “real” Christ is the person we get when we take, for the construction of our figure, only those facts about him which can be rationalistically, historically, and critically verified. We are thus reduced to a few religious ideas, a little group of “sayings,” a tiny body of events, which explain none of the immense results that followed. The real Christ, on the contrary, is this rich, wonderful, mysterious, baffling person whose life was vastly greater even than his deeds or his words, who aroused the wonder and imagination of all who came in contact with him, who touched everything with emotion, and fused religion forever with poetry and feeling. He, in a very true sense,