“Lies as he lay once, breast to breast with God,”
“Lies as he lay once, breast to breast with God,”
“Lies as he lay once, breast to breast with God,”
but hiswordis still quick and powerful and he has helped us more than any other writer has done to interpret our own experience, and more than any other prophet this Ephesian has inspired our faith in the real presence and has given us the assurance, inwardly verified, that we are not comfortless and alone, in a world of pain and loss and death, but are bound as living twigs in one sap-giving Vine of Life, participants of the vitalizing, refreshing, joy-bringing bread and water of Life, and with open access to the infinite healing and comfort and fortification of the Eternal Christ.
As worship, taken in its highest sense and widest scope, is man’s loftiest undertaking, we cannot too often return to the perennial questions: What is worship? Why do we worship? How do we best perform this supreme human function? Worship is too great an experience to be defined in any sharp or rigid or exclusive fashion. The history of religion through the ages reveals the fact that there have been multitudinous ways of worshiping God, all of them yielding real returns of life and joy and power to large groups of men. At its best and truest, however, worship seems to me to bedirect, vital, joyous, personalexperience and practice of the presence of God.
The very fact that such a mighty experience as this is possible means that there is some inner meeting place between the soul and God; in other words, that the divine and human, God and man, are not wholly sundered. In an earlier time God was conceived as remote and transcendent. He dwelt in the citadel of the sky, was worshiped with ascending incense and communicated His will to beings beneath through celestial messengers or by mysterious oracles. We have now more ground than ever before for conceiving God as transcendent; that is, as above and beyond any revelation of Himself, and as more than any finite experience can apprehend. But at the same time, our experience and our ever-growing knowledge of the outer and inner universe confirm our faith that God is also immanent, a real presence, a spiritual reality, immediately to be felt and known, a vital, life-giving environmentof the soul. He is a Being who can pour His life and energy into human souls, even as the sun can flood the world with light and resident forces, or as the sea can send its refreshing tides into all the bays and inlets of the coast, or as the atmosphere can pour its life-giving supplies into the fountains of the blood in the meeting place of the lungs; or, better still, as the mother fuses her spirit into the spirit of her responsive child, and lays her mind on him until he believes in her belief.
It will be impossible for some of us ever to lose our faith in, our certainty of, this vital presence which overarches our inner lives as surely as the sky does our outer lives. The more we know of the great unveiling of God in Christ, the more we see that He is a Being who can be thus revealed in a personal life that is parallel in will with Him and perfectly responsive in heart and mind to the spiritual presence. We can use as our own the inscription on the wall of theancient temple in Egypt. On one of the walls a priest of the old religion had written for his divinity: “I am He who was and is and ever shall be, and my veil hath no man lifted.” On the opposite wall, some one who had found his way into the later, richer faith, wrote this inscription: “Veil after veil have we lifted and ever the Face is more wonderful!”
It must be held, I think, as Emerson so well puts it, that there is “no bar or wall in the soul” separating God and man. We lie open on one side of our nature to God, who is the Oversoul of our souls, the Overmind of our minds, the Overperson of our personal selves. There are deeps in our consciousness which no private plumb line of our own can sound; there are heights in our moral conscience which no ladder of our human intelligence can scale; there are spiritual hungers, longings, yearnings, passions, which find no explanation in terms of our physical inheritance or of our outside world. Wetouch upon the coasts of a deeper universe, not yet explored or mapped, but no less real and certain than this one in which our mortal senses are at home. We cannot explain our normal selves or account for the best things we know—or even for our condemnation of our poorer, lower self—without an appeal to and acknowledgment of a divine Guest and Companion who is the real presence of our central being. How shall we best come into conscious fellowship with God and turn this environing presence into a positive source of inner power, and of energy for the practical tasks and duties of daily life?
It is never easy to tell in plain words what prepares the soul for intercourse with God; what it is that produces the consciousness of divine tides, the joyous certainty that our central life is being flooded and bathed by celestial currents. No person ever quite understands how his tongue utters its loftiest words, how his pen writes its noblest phrases, howhis clearest insights came to him, how his most heroic deeds got done, or how the finest strands of his character were woven. Here is a mystery which we never quite uncover—a background which we never wholly explore lies along the fringes of the most illumined part of our lives. This mystery surrounds all the supreme acts of religion. They cannot bereducedto a cold and naked rational analysis. The intellect possesses no master key which unlocks all the secrets of the soul.
We can say, however, that purity of heart is one of the most essential preconditions for this high-tide experience of worship. That means, of course, much more than absence of moral impurity, freedom from soilure and stain of willful sins. It means, besides, a cleansing away of prejudice and harsh judgment. It means sincerity of soul, a believing, trusting, loving spirit. It means intensity of desire for God, singleness of purpose, integrity of heart. The flabby nature, the duplex will, the judging spirit, willhardly succeed in worshiping God in any great or transforming way.
Silence is, again, a very important condition for the great inner action which we call worship. So long as we are content to speak our ownpatois, to live in the din of our narrow, private affairs, and to tune our minds to stock broker’s tickers, we shall not arrive at the lofty goal of the soul’s quest. We shall hear the noises of our outer universe and nothing more. When we learn how to center down into the stillness and quiet, to listen with our souls for the whisperings of Life and Truth, to bring all our inner powers into parallelism with the set of divine currents, we shall hear tidings from the inner world at the heart and center of which is God.
But by far the most influential condition for effective worship is group-silence—the waiting, seeking, expectant attitude permeating and penetrating a gathered company of persons. We hardly know in what the group-influence consists,or why the presence of others heightens the sensitive, responsive quality in each soul, but there can be no doubt of the fact. There is some subtle telepathy that comes into play in the living silence of a congregation which makes every earnest seeker more quick to feel the presence of God, more acute of inner ear, more tender of heart to feel the bubbling of the springs of life than any one of them would be in isolation. Somehow we are able to “lend our minds out,” as Browning puts it, or at least to contribute toward the formation of an atmosphere that favors communion and coöperation with God.
If this is so, if each assists all and all in turn assist each, our responsibilities in meetings for worship are very real and very great and we must try to realize that there is a form of ministry which is dynamic even when the lips are sealed.
There has surely been no lack of discussion on the Trinity during the centuries of Christian history! But in all the welter and turmoil of words there has been surprisingly little said about the Spirit. The nature of the Father and the Son has always been the central theme, and whatever is said of the Spirit is vague and brief. The Creeds are very precise in their accounts of God the Father and of Christ the Son, but of the Spirit, they merely say without explanation or expansion: “I believe in the Holy Spirit.”
The mystics and the heretics have generally had more to say of the Spirit. They have almost always claimed for themselves direct and inward guidance; they have insisted that God is near at hand, a presence to be felt, and they have endeavored to bring in a “dispensation” of the religion of the Spirit. But they,too, have contented themselves with vague and hazy accounts of the nature and operation of the Spirit. It has largely remained a subject of mystery, a kind of “fringe” with no definite idea corresponding to the word.
One reason for this haze and vagueness is due to the fact that the Spirit has generally been supposed to act suddenly, miraculously, and “as He lists,” so that no law or principle or method of His operation can be discovered. He has been conceived as working upon or through the individual in such a way that the individual is merely an “instrument,” receiving and transmitting what comes entirely from “beyond” himself. Consequently to be “in the Spirit” has meant to be “out of oneself,”i.e.to be a channel for something that has had no origin in, and no assistance from, our own personal consciousness. As Philo, the famous Alexandrian teacher of the first century, states this view: “Ideas in an invisible manner are suddenly showered upon meand implanted in me by an inspiration from on high.”
There is no doubt that in some cases in all ages men and women have had experiences like that of Philo’s. But they are by no means universal; they are extremely rare and unusual. God does sometimes “give to His beloved in sleep” and He does apparently sometimes open the windows of the soul by sudden inrushes of light and power. It is, however, a grave mistake to limit the sphere and operation of the divine Spirit to these sudden, unusual, miraculous incursions. It is precisely that mistake—made by so many spiritual persons—that has kept Christians in general from realizing the immense importance of the work of the Spirit in everyday religious life. The mistake is, of course, due to our persistent tendency to separate the divine from the human as two independent “realities,” and to treat the divine as something “away,” “above,” and “beyond.”
St. Paul, in spite of all his rabbinicaltraining and the dualisms of his age, is still the supreme exponent of the genuine, as opposed to the false, idea of the Spirit. Whether the sermon on the Areopagus as given in Acts is an exact report of an actual speech, or not, the words, “in Him we live and move and are,” express very well St. Paul’s mature conception of the all-pervasive immanence of God, though they by no means indicate the extraordinary richness and boldness of his thought. He identifies Christ and the Spirit—“the Lord is the Spirit.”[2]The resurrected and glorified Christ, he holds, relives, reincarnates Himself, in Christian believers. He becomes the spirit and life of their lives. He makes through them a new body for Himself, a new kind of revelation of Himself. They themselves are “letters of Jesus Christ,” written by the Spirit. He is no longer limited to one locality of the world or to one epoch of time. He is “present” wherever two or three believers meet inloyalty to Him. He is revealed wherever any of His faithful followers are working in love and devotion to extend the sway of His Kingdom. The Church, which for St. Paul means always the fellowship of believers, living in and through the Spirit, is “a growing habitation of God.”
The “sign” of the Spirit’s presence is, however, no sudden miraculous bestowal like an unknown tongue or an extraordinary gift of healing. It is just a normal thing like the manifestation of love. It is proved by the increase of fellowship, the growth of group-spirit, the spread of community-loyalty. When love has come, the Spirit is there, and when love comes, those who are in its spirit suffer long and are kind; they envy not; they are not provoked; they do not exalt mistakes; they bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. Love constructs, because it is the inherent evidence of the Spirit, living, working, operating in the persons who love. Through them the incarnation of God iscontinued in the world, the Spirit of Christ finds its organ of expression and life, and the Kingdom of God comes on earth as it is in heaven. This “body,” this Church, this community-group of loyal believers, is “the completion of Him who through all and in all is being fulfilled.”[3]
If this Pauline idea of the Spirit is the true idea—and I believe it is—then we are to look for the divine presence, the divine guidance, the divine inspiration, not so much in sudden extraordinary inrushes and miraculous bestowals, as in the processes which transform our stubborn nature, which make us loyal and loving, which bind us into fellowship with others, which form in us community-spirit and sympathetic coöperation, and which make us efficient organs of the Christ-life and of the growing Kingdom of God.
It seems to me very clear that there is a native, elemental homing instinct in our souls which turns us to God as naturally as the flower turns to the sun. Apparently everybody in intense moments of human need reaches out for some great source of life and help beyond himself. That is one reason why we can pray and do pray, however conditions alter. It is further clear that persons who pray in living faith, in some way unlock reservoirs of energy and release great sources of power within their interior depths. There is an experimental energy in prayer as certainly as there is a force of gravitation or of electricity. In a recent investigation of the value of prayer, nearly seventy per cent of the persons questioned declared that they felt the presence of a higher power while in the act of praying. As one of these personal testimonies puts it: prayer makes it possible to carryheavy burdens with serenity; it produces an atmosphere of spirit which triumphs over difficulties.
It certainly is true that a door opens into a larger life and a new dimension when the soul flings itself out in real prayer, and incomes of power are experienced which heighten all capacities and which enable the recipient to withstand temptation, endure trial, and conquer obstacles. But prayer has always meant vastly more than that to the saints of past ages. It was assuredly to them a homing instinct and it was the occasion of refreshed and quickened life, but, more than that, it meant to them a time of intimate personal intercourse and fellowship with a divine Companion. It was two-sided, and not a solitary and one-sided heightening of energy and of functions. Nor was that all. To the great host of spiritual and triumphant souls who are behind us prayer was aneffective and operative power. It accomplished results and wrought effects beyondthe range of the inner life of the person who was praying. It was a way of setting vast spiritual currents into circulation which worked mightily through the world and upon the lives of men. It was believed to be an operation of grace by which the fervent human will could influence the course of divine action in the secret channels of the universe.
Is this two-sided and objective view of prayer, as real intercourse and as effective power, still tenable? Can men who accept the conclusions of science still pray in living faith and with real expectation of results? I see no ground against an affirmative answer. Science has furnished no evidence which compels us to give up believing in the reality of a personal conscious self which has a certain area of power over its own acts and its own destiny, and which is capable of intercourse, fellowship, friendship, and love with other personal selves. Science has discovered no method of describing thisspiritual reality, which we call a self, nor can it explain what its ultimate nature is, or how it creatively acts and reacts in love and fellowship toward other beings like itself. This lies beyond the sphere and purview of science.
Science, again, has furnished no evidence whatever against the reality of a great spiritual universe, at the heart and center of which is a living, loving Person who is capable of intercourse and fellowship and friendship and love with finite spirits like us. That is also a field into which science has noentrée; it is a matter which none of her conclusions touch. Her business is to tell how natural phenomena act and what their unvarying laws are. She has nothing to say and can have nothing to say about the reality of a divine Person in a sphere within or above or beyond the phenomenal realm,i.e.the realm where things appear in the describable terms of space and time and causality.
Real and convincing intimations havebroken into our world that there actually is a spiritual universe and a divine Person at the heart and center of it who is in living and personal correspondence with us. This is the most solid substance, the very warp and woof, of Christ’s entire revelation. The universe is not a mere play of forces, nor limited to things we see and touch and measure. Above, beyond, within, or rather in a way transcending all words of space, there is a Father-God who is Love and Life and Light and Spirit, and who is as open of access to us as the lungs to the air. Nothing in our world of space disproves the truth of Christ’s report. Our hearts tell us that it might be true, that it ought to be true, that it is true. And if it is true, prayer, in all the senses in which I have used it, may still be real and still be operative.
There is no doubt a region where events occur under the play of describable forces, where consequent follows antecedents and where law and causality appear rigid and unvarying. In that narrow, limited realmof space particles we shall perhaps not expect interruptions or interferences. We shall rather learn how to adjust to what is there, and to respect it as the highest will of the deepest nature and wisdom of things. But in the realm of personal relationships, in all that touches the hidden springs of life, in the stress and strain of human strivings, in the interconnections of man with man, and group with group, in the vital matters by which we live or die, in the weaving of personal and national issues and destinies, we may well throw ourselves unperplexed on God, and believe implicitly that what we pray for affects the heart of God and influences the course and current of this Deeper Life that makes the world.
We generally use the word “mystery” to indicate the dark, baffling, and forbidding aspects of our life-experience. The things which spoil our peace and mar our harmoniesand break our unions are for us characteristicallymysteries. Pain, suffering, and death are the most ancient of mysteries, which philosophers and poets have always been striving to solve and unravel. Evil in all its complicated forms and sin in all its hideous varieties constitute another group of these dark and forbidding mysteries, about which the race has forever speculated. The problem of evil has been the prolific source both of mythological stories and of systems of philosophy.
Every war that has swept the world, from that of Chedorlaomer to that of Europe to-day, has driven this mystery of evil into the foreground of consciousness, wherever the dark trail of ruin and devastation and myriad woe has lain, or lies, across the lives and hearts of men. Now, as always, burning homes, ruined business, masses of slain, maimed bodies, the welter of animal instincts, the suffering of women and little children, and the hates enflamed between races form thegreatest summation of baffling evils that man has known.
But it is an interesting fact that the mysteries referred to by the greatest prophets of the soul are not of this dark and baffling type. They are mysteries of light rather than mysteries of darkness. Christ speaks of “the mystery of the Kingdom of God.” Saint Paul finds the central mystery to be an incarnational revelation of a suffering, loving God, who re-lives His life in us, and the author of the Epistle to Timothy announces “the great mystery ofgodliness.”[4]Love is put above all mysteries; the gospel of grace is more “unsearchable” than any suffering of this present time, and the real mystery is to be found rather in resurrection than in death: “Behold I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed and the dead shall be raised.”
Science has confirmed this emphasis of the spiritual prophets. We come back from the greatest books of the present time with the same conclusion as this of the New Testament that the prime mysteries of the world are mysteries of goodness and not of evil; of light and not of darkness. We can pretty easily understand how there should be “evil” in a world that has evolved under the two great biological conditions: (1) Every being that survives wins out because he is more physically fit than his neighbors in the struggle for existence, and (2) there is a tendency for all inherited traits to persist in offspring. In order to have “nature” at all, there must be a heavy tinge of redness in tooth and claw. The primitive passions must be strong in order to insure any beings that can survive. And if there is to be inheritance of parental traits, then the tendencies of bygone ages are bound to persist on, even into a world of more highly evolved beings, and there will be inherited “relics”of fears, of appetites, of impulses, of instincts, and of desires, as there are inherited “relics” in the physical structure, and men will continue to do things which would better suit the animal level. And, finally, if the world is to be made by evolving processes, there will of necessity be an overlapping of “high” and “low.” The world cannotgo onwithout carrying its past along with the advancing line, so that in the light of the new and better that comes, the old and out-passed seems “evil” and “bad.”
We can see plainly enough where the drive of selfishness came from, where the passionate fears and angers and hates that mar our world got into the system. What is not so clear and plain is how we came to be possessed of a driving hunger forgoodness, how we ever got a bent for self-sacrifice, how we derived our disposition for love, how we discovered that it is more blessed to give than to receive. The mystery after allisthe mystery of goodness. The gradualgrowth of a Kingdom of God, in which men live by love and brotherhood, in which they give without expecting returns, in which they decrease that others may increase, and in which their joy is fulfilled in thespreadingof joy—that is, after all, the mystery.
The coming, into this checkerboard world, of One who practiced love in all the varying issues of life,
“Who nailed all flesh to the crossTill self died out in the love of his kind,”
“Who nailed all flesh to the crossTill self died out in the love of his kind,”
“Who nailed all flesh to the cross
Till self died out in the love of his kind,”
and who Himself believed, and taught others to believe, that His Life was a genuine revelation of God and the spiritual realm of reality—there is a mystery.
That this Life which was in Him is an actual incursion from a higher, inexhaustible world of Spirit, that we all may partake of it, draw upon it, live in it, and have it live in us, so that in some sense it becomes true thatChrist lives in usand we are raised from the dead—that is the mystery.
This word “mystery” or “mysteries” did not, however, stand in the thought of the early Christians for something mysterious and inscrutable. It stood rather for some unspeakably precious reality which could be known only by initiation and to the initiate. The “mysteries” of Mithra were forever hidden to those on the outside; to those who formed the inner circle the secret of the real presence of the god was as open and clear as the sunlight under the sky. So, too, with the “mysteries” of the gospel. They could not be conveyed by word of wisdom or by proof of logic. Then, and always, the love of Christ “passes knowledge,” “the peace of God” overtops processes of thought. Love, Grace, Goodness, Godliness, Christlikeness breaking forth in men like us, remains a “mystery”—a thing not “explainable” in terms of empirical causation and not capable of being “known” except to those who see and taste and touch, because they have been “initiated into this Life.” We shallno doubt still puzzle over the dark enigmas of pain and death, of war and its train of woe, but we shall do well to remember that there is a greater mystery than any of these—the mystery of the suffering, yet ever-conquering love of God which no oneknowsexcept he who is immersed in it.
The word “authority” has shifted its meaning many times. We do not mean now by it what churchmen of former times meant when they used it. Even as late as the beginning of the twentieth century a great French scholar, Auguste Sabatier, wrote an influential book in which he contrasted “Religions of Authority” with “Religions of the Spirit.” By religions of authority he meant types of religion which rest on a dogmatic basis and on the super-ordinary power of ecclesiastical officials toguaranteethetruth. However authoritative a religion of that type may once have been, it is so no longer, at least with those who have caught the intellectual spirit of our age.
“Authority” is found now for most of us where the common people who listened to Jesus found it—in the convincing and verifying power of the message itself. We should not now think for a moment of taking our views on astronomy or geology or physiology—about the circulation of the blood, for instance—on the “authority” of a priest, assuming that his ordination supplied him with oracular knowledge on these subjects. We want to know rather what the facts in any one of these fields compel us to conclude, and we go for assistance to persons who have trained and disciplined their powers of observation and who can make us see what they see. Our “authority” in the last resort to-day is theevidenceof observable facts and legitimateinferencefrom these facts. A religion of authority, then, for our generation rests,not on the infallible guarantee of any ordained man, or of any miraculously equipped church, but on the spiritual nature of human life itself and on the verifiable relations of the soul with the unseen realities of the universe.
I need hardly say—it is so plain that the runner can see it—that the so-called Sermon on the Mount is one of the best illustrations available of this type of authoritative religion. Whatever is declared as truth in that discourse is true, not because a messenger from heaven brought it, not because a supernatural authority guaranteed it, butbecause it is inherently so, and if any statement here obviously conflicted with the facts of life and stood confuted by the testimony of the soul itself, it would in the end, in the long run as we say, have to go. The whole message, from the beatitude upon the poor-in-spirit to the judgment test of life in action, as revealed in the figure of the two houses, is a message which can be verified and tried out assearchingly as can the law of gravitation or the theory of luminiferous ether. All the results that are here announced are results which attach to the essential nature of the soul, and the conditions of blessedness are as much bound up with the nature of things as are the conditions of physical health for a man, or the conditions of literary success for an author.
Any one who has read William James’ chapter on “Habit” knows how it feels to be reading something which verifies itself and which convicts the judgment of the reader in almost every sentence. As one comes toward the end of the chapter he finds these words: “Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, ‘I won’t count this time!’ Well! he may not count it, and a kind heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among the nerve cells and fibersthe molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.” These words have the irresistible drive of observable facts behind them. We have come uponsomething which is so because it is so. It can no more be juggled with or dodged than can the fact of the precession of the equinoxes. The calm authority of that chapter might well be the envy of every preacher of the gospel and of every writer of articles on religion. If either the preacher or the religious writer expects to speak to the condition of his age, then he must acquire this authoritative way of dealing with the issues of life, for the other kind of “authority” has had its day.
It is interesting to discover that Tertullian and St. Augustine—two men who, almost beyond all others, helped to forge this waning type of “authority”—came very near risking the whole case of religion in their day on the primary authority of first-hand experience andthe testimony of the soul itself. “I call in,” Tertullian wrote, “a new testimony; yea, one that is better known than all literature, more discussed than all doctrine, more public than all publications, greater than the whole man—I mean all which is man’s. Stand forth, O soul, ... and give thy witness ... I want thy experience. I demand of thee the things thou bringest with thee into man, the things thou knowest either from thyself or from thy Author.... Whenever the soul comes to itself, as out of a surfeit or a sleep or a sickness and attains something of its natural soundness, it speaks of God.”
Nobody has ever shown more skill and subtlety in examining the actual processes of the inner life than has Augustine, nor has any one more powerfully revealed the native hunger of the soul for God, or the coöperative working of divine grace in the inner region where all the issues of life are settled. Take this vivid passage, picturing the hesitating will, zig-zaggingbetween the upward pull and the tug of the old self just before the last great act of decision which led to his conversion.
“Thus was I sick and suffering in mind, upbraiding myself more bitterly than ever before, twisting and turning in my chains in the hope that they would soon snap, for they had almost worn too thin to hold me. Yet they did still hold me. But Thou wast instant with me in the inner man, with merciful severity, redoubling the lashes of fear and shame, lest I should cease from struggling.... I kept saying within my heart, ‘Let it be now, now!’—and with the word I was on the point of going on to the resolve. I had almost done it, but I had not done it; and yet I did not slip back to where I was at first, but held my footing at a short remove and drew breath. And again I tried; I came a little nearer, and again a little nearer, and now—now—I was in act to grasp and hold it; but still I did not reach it, nor grasp it, norhold it, ... for the worse that I knew so well had more power over me than the better that I knew not, and the absolute point of time at which I was to change filled me with greater dread the more nearly I approached it.”
That is straight out of life. The thing which really matters there is not some fine-spun dogma or the power of some mitered priest, but the answer of the soul, the obedience of the will in the presence of what is unmistakably divine. “The whole work of this life,” he once said, “is to heal the eye of the heart by which we see God.” Both these men made great contributions to the imperial, authoritative church and they were foremost architects of the immense system of dogma under which men lived for long centuries, but the religion by which they themselves lived was born in their own experience, and back of all their secondary authority was this primary authority of the soul’s own testimony.
What our generation needs above everything,if I read its problems rightly, is a clearer interpretation of the spiritual capacities and the unseen compulsions of the ordinary human soul; that is to say, a more authoritative and so more compelling psychological account of the actual and potential nature of our own human self, with its amazing depths and its infinite relationships. We have had fifteen hundred years under the dogma of original sin and total depravity; now let us have a period of actually facing our own souls as they reveal themselves, not to the theologian, but to the expert in souls. We shall find them mysterious and bad enough no doubt, but we shall also find that they are strangely linked up with that unseen and yet absolutely real Heart of all things whom we call God. And our generation also needs a more authoritative account of Jesus Christ—more authoritative because more truly and more historically drawn. We have had centuries of the Christ of dogma and even to-day the Church is split and sundered by itsattempt to maintain dogmatic constructions about His Person. Was He monophysite? Was he diphysite? Those dead questions have divided the world in former ages and still rally oriental sects. Our problem is different. We want to see how He lived. We want to discover what He said. We want to feel the power of His attractive personality. We want to find out what His own experience was and what bearing it has on life to-day. We need to have Him reinterpreted to us in terms of life, so that once again He becomes for us as real and as dynamic as He was for Paul in Corinth or for John in Ephesus. The moment anybody succeeds in doingthat, He proves to be as much alive as ever, and religion becomes as authoritative as ever. Theology is not extinct, but it is becoming wholly transformed and the theology of the coming time will be a knowledge of God builded not on abstract logic, but on a penetrating psychology of man’s inner nature and a no less penetrating interpretation of historyand biography, especially at the points where the revelation of God has most evidently shone forth and broken in upon us.
The power “to see the invisible” is as essential in science, in philosophy, in art, and in common life as it is in religion. The world with which science deals is not made out of “things that do appear.” Every step in the advance of science has been made by the discovery of invisible things which explain the crude visible things of our uncritical experience. We seldom see any of the things the scientists talk about—atoms and molecules and cells, laws and causes and energies. These things have been found first, not with the eyes of sense, but with the vision of the mind.
Newton found the support that holds the earth to the sun and the moon to the earth, but there was no visible cable, nomighty grooves in which the poles of the earth’s axis spin. There was nothing to see, and yet his mind discovered an invisible link that fastens every particle of matter in the universe to every other particle, however remote. One fact after another has forced the scientist to-day to draw upon an invisible world of ether for his explanations of a vast number of the things that appear. Gravitation, electrical phenomena, light and color vision, and, perhaps, the very origin of matter, are due, his mind sees, to the presence of this extraordinary world within, or behind, the world we see.
One of the greatest advances that has ever been made in the progress of medicine was made through the discovery of invisible microbes as the cause of contagious and infectious diseases. The ancients had also believed the cause of many diseases to be the presence of invisible agents, which they called “demons,” but they could hit upon no way offindingthe “demons” or of banishing them. Thescientific physician “sees” the invisible microbe and he “sees” what will put this enemyhors de combat.
The study of philosophy is chiefly the cultivation of the power to see the invisible. Pythagoras is said to have required a period of a year of silence as an initiation into the business of philosophy—because there was nothing to talk about until the beginner had learned how to see the invisible! The great realities to which the philosopher is dedicated are not things to be found, even with microscopes or telescopes. Nobody is qualified to enter the philosophical race at all—even for the hundred-yard dash—unless in the temporal he can see the eternal, and in the visible the invisible, and in the material the spiritual. There can be no artistic creation until some one comes who has “the faculty divine” to see
“The gleam,The light that never was, on sea or land.”
“The gleam,The light that never was, on sea or land.”
“The gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land.”
Such artistic creations must not be unreal.On the contrary, they must be more real than the scenes we photograph or the factual events we describe. They must present to us something that is in all respectsas it ought to be. The artist, the poet, the musician succeed in making some object, or some character, or some series of events or sounds raise us above our usual restraints of space and time and imperfection and for a moment give us a glimpse of something eternal.
But we see the invisible in our common daily life much more than we realize. The simple cobbler of shoes stitches and pegs at his little shoe, and makes it as honestly as he can, for some child whom he has never seen and perhaps never will see. The merchant expands his business because he forecasts the expanding need for his articles in China, Africa, or South America. The statesman at every move is dealing as much with the country of his inner vision as with the country his eyes see. So, too, is the parent as he plans for the discipline and education ofhis child. No one can be a good person—however simple, or however great—without leaving the things that are behind,i.e.the things that are actual, and going on to realize what is not yet apprehended, what exists only in forecast and vision. Religion, then, is not alone in demanding the supreme faculty of seeing the invisible. We live on all life-levels by faith, by assent to realities which are not there for our eyes. Religion only demands of us that weseethe whole Reality which this visible fragment of nature implies, that weseethe larger spirit which our own human spirits call for, that weseethe eternal significance revealed in the life of Christ and in the conquests of His spirit through the ages.
The most important constructive work just now laid upon us is the serious task of helping to restore faith in the actual reality of God and in the fundamental spiritual nature of our world. There is no substitute for the transforming power and inward depth which an irresistible first-hand conviction of God gives a man. Carlyle, in his usual vivid fashion, says that one man with faith in God is “stronger, not than ten men that have it not, or than ten thousand, but thanallmen that have it not!” A man can face anything when he knows absolutely that at bottom the universe is not force nor mechanism but intelligent and loving purpose, and that through the seeming confusionand welter there is a loving, throbbing, personal Heart answering back to us. The cultivation of this experience is the greatest prophetic mission laid upon the spiritual leaders of any age. Isaiah is at his fullest stature when in a fearful crisis he calls his nation from a militaryalliancewith Egypt, whose people, he says, are “men and not God and whose horses are flesh and not spirit,” to arelianceon God and on eternal resources: “In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.” George Fox is most clearly a prophet when he reports his own experience of God: “I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but that an infinite ocean of light and love flowed over the ocean of darkness. InthatI saw the infinite love of God.”
If we are to assist in the creation of a higher civilization than that against which the hand on the wall is writing “mene,” we must speak of God in the present tense, we must live by truths and convictionsthat are grounded in our own experience, and we must endeavor to find a spiritual basis underlying all the processes of the world. Men have been living for a generation—or at least trying to live—on a naturalistic interpretation of the universe which chokes and stifles the higher spiritual life of man. We must help those who have been caught in this drift of materialism to find their way back to the spiritual meaning of the world.
We get a vivid impression of the stern and iron character of this materialistic universe from the writings of Bertrand Russell. Here are two extracts:
“Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of thesolar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”[5]“Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.”[6]
“Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of thesolar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”[5]
“Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.”[6]
Much of the present confusion has been due to a false interpretation of the doctrine of evolution. It has been assumed—not indeed by scientists of the first rank, but by a host of influential interpreters—that the basis of evolution, the law which runs the cosmic train, is competitive struggle for existence, that is to say the natural selection of the fittest to survive, and the fittest on this count are of course the physically fittest, the most efficient. This principle, used first to explain biological development, has been taken up and expanded and used to explain all ethical and social progress. Any nation that has won out and prevailed has done so, on this theory, because it made itself stronger than those nations with which it competed. This theory has contributed immensely toward bringing on the catastrophe in Europe. It is a breeder of racial rivalries, it is loaded with emotional stress, it cultivates fear, one of the main causes of war, and it runs on all fours with materialism.
But it does not fit the facts of life and it is as much a mental construction and as untrue to the complete nature of things as were the popular pre-evolution theories. Here, as everywhere else, the truth is the only adequate remedy, and the truth would set men free. Biologists of the most eminent rank have all along been insisting that life has not evolved through the operation of one single factor; for example, the law of competing struggle. Everywhere in the process, from lowest to highest, there has been present the operation of another force as primary as the egoistic factor, namely the operation of mutual aid, coöperation, struggle for the life of others, mother-traits and father-traits, sacrifice of self for the group, a love-factor implicit at the bottom but gloriously conscious and consecrated at the top. Nature has always been forerunning and crying in the wilderness that the way oflovewill work.
It is impossible to account for a continuously progressive evolution on anymechanical basis. As soon as life appeared there came into play some degree of spontaneity, something unpredictable; something which is not mechanism. The future in any life-series is never an equation with the past. What has been, does not quite determine what will be. Life carries in itself a creative tendency—a tendency to exhibit surprises, novelties, variations, mutations, unpredictable leaps. We can name this tendency, this upward-changing drive, “vital impulse,” but however we name it, we cannot explain it. The variation which raises the entire level of life is as mysterious as a virgin birth, or a resurrection from the dead. There is no help in the word “fortuitous,” or “accidental,” there is no answer when the appeal is made either to heredity or to physical environment. There is in favorable mutations a revelation of some kind of intelligent push, a power of life working toward an end. The end or goal of the process seems to be an operative factorinthe process. Evolution seems tobe due to a mighty living, conscious, spiritual driving force, that is pouring itself forth in ever-heightening ways of manifestation and that differentiates itself into myriad varieties of form and activity, each one with its own peculiar potency of advance. Consciousness, in Henri Bergson’s illuminating interpretation of evolution, is the original creative cosmic force. It is before matter, and its onward destiny is not bound up with matter. Wherever it appears there is vital impulse, upward-pointing mutations, free action, and potency. But no life is isolated or cut apart. Each particular manifestation of life is one of the rills into which the immense river of consciousness divides, and this irresistible river with its onward leaps seems able to beat down every resistance and clear away the most formidable obstacles—perhaps even death itself.
But it is not merely in the evolutionary process that we need to reinterpret the spiritual factor; it is urgently called for in our dealing with the whole of nature.We must learn how to interpret the fundamental spiritual implications involved in the nature of beauty, of moral goodness, of verifiable knowledge, and of personality itself.
In an impressive way Arthur Balfour in hisTheism and Humanismhas pointed out that it is impossible to find any adequate rational basis for our experience of beauty, or for our pursuit of moral ends of goodness, or for our confidence in the validity of knowledge or truth, unless we assume the reality of an underlying spiritual universe as the root and ground both of nature without us and of mind within us. “Æsthetic values,” Balfour says, “are in part dependent upon a spiritual conception of the world in which we live.”[7]“Ethics,” again he says, “must have its roots in the divine; and in the divine it must find its consummation”[8]and, finally, he says that if rational values are to remain undimmed and unimpaired,God must be treated as real—“He is Himself the condition of scientific knowledge.”[9]—“We must hold that reason and the works of reason have their source in God: that from Him they draw their inspiration, and that if they repudiate their origin, by this very act they proclaim their own insufficiency.”[10]
Personality carries in all its larger aspects inevitable implications of a spiritual universe. In the first place, it is forever utterly impossible to find a materialistic or naturalisticoriginfor personality. Whenever we deal with “matter” or with “nature,” consciousness is always presupposed, and the “matter” we talk about, or the “nature” we talk about, is “matter” or “nature” as existing for consciousness or as conceived by consciousness. It is impossible to get any world at all without a uniting, connecting principle of consciousness which binds fact to fact, item to item, event to event, into a whole which is known to us throughthe action of our organizing consciousness. Since it is through consciousness that a connected universe of experience is possible it seems absurd to suppose that consciousness is a product of matter or of any natural, mechanical process. Every effort to find a genesis of knowledge in any other source than spirit, derived in turn from self-existing Spirit, has always failed and from the logical nature of the case must fail. There is no answer to the question, how did we begin to be persons? which does not refer the genesis to an eternal spiritual Principle in the universe, transcending space and time, life and death, matter and motion, cause and effect—a Principle which itself is the condition of temporal beginnings and temporal changes or ends.
Normal human experience is, too, heavily loaded with further inevitable implications of an environing spiritual world. The consciousness of finiteness with which we are haunted presupposes something infinite already in consciousness, just as our knowledgeof “spaces” presupposesspace, of which definite spaces are determinate parts. That we are oppressed with our own littleness, that we revolt from our meannesses, that we “look before and after, and sigh for what is not,” that we are never satisfied with any achievement, that each attainment inaugurates a new drive, that we feel “the glory of the imperfect,” means that in some way we partake of an infinite revealed in us by an inherent necessity of self-consciousness. We are made for something which does not yet appear, we are inalienably kin to the perfect that always draws and attracts us. We are forever seeking God because, in some sense, however fragmentary, we have found Him.