“The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,In whatso we share with another’s need.”
“The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,In whatso we share with another’s need.”
“The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
In whatso we share with another’s need.”
This teaching is all summed up in the golden rule, “All things that ye would that men should do unto you do ye also unto them.” It is clear at once that to do this one must cultivate both his spirit of love and his power of imagination. It is never enough to want to help a person. We must put ourself in his place and be able to do what reallywill help him. It would appear, therefore, that the most difficult and at the same time the most heavenly attainment in the world is sympathy—the spirit of otherism.
We no longer expect a world of perfect conditions to appear by sudden intervention. We have explained so many things by the discovery of antecedent developmental processes that we have leaped to the working faith that all things come that way. We do, no doubt, find unbridged gaps in the enormous series of events that have culminated in our present world, and we must admit that nature seems sometimes to desert her usual placid way of process for what looks like a steeplechase of sudden “jumps,” but we feel pretty sure that even these “jumps” have been slowly prepared for and are themselves part of the process-method.
Then, too, we find it very difficult to conceive how a spiritual kingdom—a world which is built and held together by the inner gravitation of love—could come by a fiat, or a stroke, or a jet. The qualities which form and characterize thekingdom of God are all qualities that are born and cultivated within by personal choices, by the formation of rightly-fashioned wills, by the growth of love and sympathy in the heart, by the creation of pure and elevated desires. Those traits must be won and achieved. They cannot be shot into souls from without. If, therefore, we are to expect the crowning age that shall usher in a world in which wrath and hate no longer destroy, from which injustice is banished and the central law of which is love like that of Christ’s, then we must look for this age, it seems to me, to come by slow increments and gains of advancing personal and social goodness, and by divine and human processes already at work in some degree in the lives of men.
Christ often seems to teach this view. There is a strand in his sayings that certainly implies a kingdom coming by a long process of slow spiritual gains. There is first the seed, then the blade, then the ear and finally the full corn in the ear.The mustard seed, though so minute and tiny, is a type of the kingdom because it contains the potentiality of a vast growth and expansion. The yeast is likewise a figure of ever-growing, permeating, penetrating living force which in time leavens the whole mass. The kingdom is frequently described as an inner life, a victorious spirit. It “comes” when God’s will is done in a person as it is done in heaven, and, therefore, it is not a spectacle to be “observed,” like the passing of Cæsar’s legions, or the installation of a new ruler. But, on the other hand, there are plainly many sayings which point toward the expectation of a mighty suddenevent. We seem, again and again, to be hearing not of process, but of apocalypse, not of slow development, but of a mysterious leap. There can be no question that most devout Jews of the first century expected the world’s relief expedition to come by miracle, and it is evident that there was an intense hope in the minds of men that, in one way or another, God wouldintervene and put things right. Many think that Christ shared that hope and expectation. It is of course possible that in sharing, as He did, the actual life of man, He partook of the hopes and travails and expectations of His times. But, I think, we need to go very slowly and cautiously in this direction. To interpret Christ’s message mainly in terms of apocalypse and sudden interventions is surely to miss its naturalness, its spiritual vision, and its inward depth. We can well admit that nobody then had quite our modern conception of process or our present day dislike of breaks, interruptions, and interventions. There was no difficulty in thinking of a new age or dispensation miraculously inaugurated. Only it looks as though Christ had discovered an ethical and spiritual way which made it unnecessary to count on miracle. There was much refuse to be consumed, much corruption to be removed, before the new condition of life could be in full play, but He seems to have seen that the consuming fire and thecleansing work were an essential and inherent part of theprocessthat was bringing the kingdom.
When he was askedwheremen were to look for the kingdom, His answer was that they were to find a figure and parable of it in the normal process of nature’s scavengers. The carcass lies decaying in the sun, corrupting the air and tainting everything in its region. There can be no wholesome conditions of life in that spot until the corruption is removed. But nature has provided a way of cleansing the air. The scavenger comes and removes the refuse and corruption and turns it by a strange alchemy into living matter. Life feeds on the decaying refuse, raises it back into life, and cleanses the world by making even corruption minister to its own life processes. We could not live an hour in our world if it were not alive with a myriad variety of scavenging methods that burn up effete matter, transmute noxious forms into wholesome stuff, cleanse away the poisons, and transmute, not byan apocalypse, but by a process, death into life and corruption into sweetness. May not the vulture, like the tiny sparrow who cannot fall without divine regard, be a sign, a figure, a parable? When we look for the kingdom, in the light of this sign, we shall not search the clouds of heaven, we shall not consult “the number of the beast”—we shall look for it wherever we see life conquering death, wherever the white tents of love are pitched against the black tents of hate, wherever the living forces of goodness are battering down the strongholds of evil, wherever the sinner is being changed to a saint, wherever ancient survivals of instinct and custom are yielding to the sway of growing vision and insight and ideal. It is “slow and late” to come, this kingdom! So was life slow to come, while all that was to be
“Whirl’d for a million æons thro’ the vastWaste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light.”
“Whirl’d for a million æons thro’ the vastWaste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light.”
“Whirl’d for a million æons thro’ the vast
Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light.”
So was man slow to come, while fantastic creatures were “tearing each otherin the slime.” So was a spirit-governed Person slow to come, while men lived in lust and war and hate. But in God’s world at length the things that ought to come do come, and we may faintly guess by what we see that the kingdom, too, is coming. There is something like it now in some lives.
Among the parables of Christ there is a very impressive one on the shut door. It is a story of ten country maidens who were invited to a wedding. They were to meet the bridegroom coming from a distance, as soon as his arrival should be announced, and with their lighted lamps they were to guide him and his attendants through the darkness to the home of the bride, where the banquet and the festal dance were to be held.
For many days these simple maidens had been living in the thrilling expectation of the great event in which they were to take a leading part.
They had been busy with their preparations, drilling their rhythmic steps, and talking eagerly of the approaching night. But five of them foolishly neglected the critically important part of the preparation—they took no oil to supply their lamps and at the dramatic moment they found themselves compelled to withdraw from the joyous throng and to go in search of the necessary equipment. When at length they arrived with their oil, the illuminated procession was over and the door of the festal house was shut.
The simple maidens soon discovered that there was a stern finality to this shut door. Their blunder had irrevocable consequences. They may have had other interesting opportunities as life went on, but they forever missed this joyous procession and this wedding feast. “Too late, too late. Ye cannot enter now.”
Christ turns this common, trivial neighborhood incident into a parable of the Kingdom of God. Those who believe that He was looking, as so many in Histime were looking, for a sudden shift of dispensations and for a Kingdom to be ushered in by a stupendous apocalyptic event, find in this irrevocably shut door of the parable a figure of the doom of those who failed to prepare for the sudden coming of this crisis, decisive of the destiny of men.
But there is another, and, I think, a truer, way of interpreting this shut door. There is a stern finality to all opportunities that have been missed and to all high occasions that have been blundered and bungled. All decisions of the will, all choices of life have, in their very nature, apocalyptic finality. They suddenly reveal and unveil character and they are loaded with destiny which can be changed only by a change of character. Other opportunities may offer themselves and new chances may indeed come, but when any choice has been made or any opportunity has been missed that chance has gone by and that door is shut.
The football player who has had achance in the great game of the year to make a goal, and instead of doing it fumbled the ball and lost the opportunity to score, may just possibly have another chance sometime, but no apologies and no explanations can ever change the apocalyptic finality of that fumble.
Something like that is involved in all the spiritual issues of life, and our deeds and attitudes are all the time irrevocably opening or shutting doors, which prove to be doors to the Kingdom of God. Christ may possibly at times have looked for some sudden revelation of destiny, but surely for the most part He looked for the momentous issues of the Kingdomwithin the soul itselfrather than in a spectacular event in the outer world. This principle throws light on all Christ’s sayings about the future. The coming destiny is not in the stars, it is not in the sentence of a Great Assize, it is not in the sudden shift of “dispensations”; it is in the character and inner nature, as they have been formed within each soul. Thething to be concerned about is not so much a day of judgment or an apocalyptic moment, as the trend of the will, the attitude of the spirit, the formation of inner disposition and character. We are always facing issues of an eternal aspect, and every day is a day of judgment, revealing the line of march and the issues of destiny. Conversion crises are fortunately possible, when suddenly a new level of life may be reached and a fresh start may be made, and in this inner world of personality, there are always new possibilities occurring, but, as at oriental marriage feasts, neglected opportunities are irreversibly neglected, shut doors are irrevocably shut, and blunders that affect the issues of the soul have an apocalyptic finality about them. New dispensations may await us; the Kingdom may come in ways we never dreamed of; the beyond may be more momentous than we have ever expected, but always and everywhere “the within” determines “the beyond,” and character is destiny.
“Nowhere as yet has history spoken in favor of the ideal of a morality without religion. New active forces of will, so far as we can observe, have always arisen in conjunction with ideas about the unseen.” So wrote the great German historian and philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey. The greatest experts in the field both of ethics and of religion agree with this view. Henry Sidgwick and Leslie Stephen are experts in the field of ethics who cannot be suspected of holding a brief for religion, and yet Sidgwick says: “Ethics is an imperfect science alone. It must run up into religion to complete itself;” and Leslie Stephen says: “Morality and religion stand or fall together.” Spinoza, who was denounced during his lifetime as an atheist and a destroyer of the faith, nevertheless makes love of God the whole basis of genuine ethics, insisting that there is no morality conceivable without love ofGod. St. Augustine’s famous testimony may suffice as a religious expert’s view. He says, “Love God and then you may do what you please,” meaning, of course, that you cannot then approve a wrong course of action or of life.
Nowhere, certainly, are religion and ethics so wonderfully fused into one indissoluble whole as in the experience and teaching of Christ. This appears not only in His supreme rule for religion and for good conduct: “Thou shalt love God with all thy powers and thy neighbor as thyself,” but still more does it appear in the inner steps and processes which underlie and prepare the way for the decisions and acts of Christ’s own life. Here, unmistakably,all the active forces of will arose in conjunction with ideas about the unseen.
It is the modern custom to talk much about the ethics of Jesus and to see in the Sermon on the Mount an ideal of human personality and a program for an ideal social order. But a careful reader cannotfail to feel in Christ’s teaching the complete fusion of His ideal for the individual and for society with His consciousness of the world of unseen realities. The new person and the new society are possible in His thought, only through unbrokencorrespondencewith the world of higher forces and of perfect conditions. The only way to be perfect is to be on the way toward likeness to the heavenly Father, the only moral dynamic that will work is a love, like that of God’s love, which expels all selfishness and all tendency to stop at partial and inadequate goods. If any kingdom of heavenly conditions is ever to be expected on earth, if ever we may hope for a day to dawn when the divine will is to be exhibited among men and they are to live the love-way of goodness, it is because God is our Father and we have the possibilities of His nature.
The ethical ideals of the Kingdom are inherently attached to the prayer experience of Jesus. The kind of human world which His faith builds for men isforever linked to the kind of God to whom He prays. Cut the link and both worlds fall away. We cannot shuffle the cold, hard, loveless atoms of our social world into lovely forms of coöperative relationship. The atoms must be changed. In some way we must learn how to lift men into the faith which Christ had, that God is the Father who is seeking to draw us all into correspondence with His unseen world of Life and Love. “After this manner pray ye. Our heavenly Father of the holy name, thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The two faiths make one faith—the faith in a Father-God who cares, and the faith in the realization of an ideal society based on coöperative love.
“And as He was praying, the fashion of His countenance was altered and His raiment became white and dazzling.” This is a simple, synoptic account of an experience attaching to a supreme crisis of personal decision in the life of Jesus. His so-called ethics, as I have been insisting,is indivisibly bound up with His attitude toward the unseen, with His experience of a realm where what ought to be, really is. So, too, it is because He has found His inward relation with God that He makes His great decision to go forward toward Jerusalem, to meet the onset of opposition, to see His work frustrated by the rulers of the nation, to suffer and to die at the hands of His enemies. The Transfiguration has been treated as a myth and again as a misplaced resurrection story. But it is certainly best to treat it as a genuine psychological narrative which fits reality and life at every point. As the clouds darken and the danger threatens and the successful issue of His mission seems impossible, Jesus falls back upon God, brings His spirit into absolute parallelism with the heavenly will and accepts whatever may be involved in the pursuit of the course to which He is committed. When He pushes back into the inner experience of relation with His Father and the circuit of connectioncloses and living faith floods through Him and fixes His decision unalterably to go forward, His face and form are transfigured and illuminated through the experience of union. This prayer of illumination reported in the gospels, is not an isolated instance, a solitary experience. The altered face, the changed body, the glorified figure, the radiation of light, have marked many a subordinate saint, and may well have characterized the Master as He found the true attitude of soul toward the unseen and formed His momentous decision to be faithful unto death in His manifestation of love.
In Gethsemane, as the awful moment came nearer, once more we catch a glimpse of His attitude to the unseen. In place of illuminated form and shining garments, we hear now of a face covered with the sweat and blood of agony. Just in front are the shouting rabble, the cross and the nails, the defeat of lifelong hopes and the defection of the inner fellowship, butthe triumphant spirit within Him unites with the infinite will that is steering the world and piloting all lives, and calmly acquiesces with it. But to this suffering soul, battling in the dark night of agony, the infinite will is no abstract Power, no blind fate, to be dumbly yielded to. The great word which breaks out from these quivering lips is the dear word for “Father” that the little child’s lips have learned to say: “Abba.” The will above is His will now and He goes forward to the pain and death in the strength of communion and fellowship with His Abba-Father. There may have been a single moment of desolation in the agony of the next day when the cry escaped, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” but immediately the inner spirit recovers its connection and its confidence and the crucifixion ends, as it should, with the words of triumphant faith, “Father, into thy hands I intrust my spirit.”
The most important fact of this Life, which has ever since poured Alpine streamsof power into the life of the world, is its attitude toward the unseen. We miss the heart of things when we reduce the gospel to ethics or when we transform it into dry theology. Through all the story and behind all the teaching is the mighty inner fact of an intimate personalexperienceof God as Father. To live is to be about the “Father’s business.” In great moments of intercourse there comes to Him a flooding consciousness of sonship, joyous both to Father and Son: “In Him I am well pleased,” and in times of strain and tragedy the onward course is possible because the inner bond holds fast and the Abba-experience abides.
It is not strange that a synoptic writer reports the saying: “No man knoweth the Father but the Son.” The passage as it stands reported in Matthew may be colored by later theology, but there is a nucleus of absolute truth hidden in the saying. There is no other way to know God but this way of inner love-experience. Only a son can know a Father. Only onewho has trodden the wine-press in anguish and pain, and through it all has felt the enfolding love of an Abba-father reallyknows. Mysticism has its pitfalls and its limitations, but this much is sound and true, that the way to know God is to have inner heart’s experience of Him, like the experience of the Son.
Emerson’s friend, Margaret Fuller, coined the phrase, “standing the universe.” “I can stand the universe,” was her brave statement. But long before Concord was discovered or “the transcendental school” was dreamed of a school of Hebrew saints had learned how to stand the universe.
Canaan, with all its milk and honey, was never a land arranged by preëstablished harmony as a paradise for the idealist. It enjoyed no special millennium privileges. Whatever rainbow dreams may have filled the mind of optimistic prophets were always quickly put to flight by the iron facts of the rigid worldwhich ringed them round. The Philistines were pitiless neighbors. Like Gawain, they were spiritually too blind even to have desires tosee. Coats of mail, gigantic spear heads, iron chariots, and Goliath champions were their arguments. How could a nation like Israel be free to work out its spiritual career with these crude materialistic Philistines always hanging on its borders and always threatening its national existence? When the Philistines were temporarily quiet there were Moabites, or Edomites, or Syrians ready to take a turn at hampering the ideals of Israel. And worse still was ahead. From the time of the battle of Karkar (854B.C.) on, the armies of Assyria had to be reckoned with. Here was another pitiless foe; efficient, militant, inventive, with a culture and religion suited to its genius, but as ruthless as a wolf toward everything in its path. It smashed whatever it struck and in the course of events Jerusalem was ground in its irresistible mill.
When a “return” was granted under the Persians, and the national and religious life was restored in Jerusalem, new difficulties swarmed. During the long period of “restoration” the half-breed peoples in Palestine with their low ideals threatened to defeat the hopes of the returned exiles and made their feeble beginnings as difficult as possible. Then, again, the new nation was hardly firm in its re-found life when it had to meet the forces of Hellenism which rose out of the expansion policies of Alexander. A culture incompatible with the ideals and passions of the Hebrews broke in and surrounded them. It was a different enemy to any they had yet met but no less irreconcilable. Under the Hellenized kings of Antioch all the hopes and ideals of this long-suffering race were put in jeopardy, and the very existence of the chosen nation was in desperate peril in the period of the Maccabean struggle.
But through all these centuries of warfare with alien peoples, and during allthese hard periods of strain and anguish, there existed a school of saints who were learning how to stand the universe and who were teaching the world a way of victory even in the midst of outward defeat. Their “way” was the fortification of the soul, the construction of the interior life; and the literature which they produced has proved to be one of the most precious treasures of the race. The gold dust words of these saints are scattered through most of the early books of Israel, for in all periods the poets of this race were mainly busy with this central problem of life, the problem of standing the universe. But it is in the collection which we call thePsalmsthat we find the supreme literature of this inner way of fortification and victory.
“Thou restorest my soul,” is the joyous testimony of one of these saints, and this testimony of the best loved member of this school of saints is the key to the Psalmist’s way of triumph in general. In the confusion of events and the irrationalityof things—die Ohnmacht der Natur—he felt his way back, like a little child in the dark feeling for his mother, until he found God as the rock on which his feet could stand. The processes of reconstruction are never traced out. The logic of this way back to the fortification of the soul through the discovery of God is not given in detail. The moments when we shift the levels of life are never quite describable. But somehow when the way outside goes on into the valley of the shadow of death, and the table is set in the face of enemies, the soul falls back upon God and isrestored.
“I could not understand,” another Psalmist declares. Everything was baffling. The wicked seemed to prosper and the righteous to suffer. The world appeared out of joint and the whole web of life hopelessly tangled; “but,” he adds with no further explanation, “I came into the sanctuary of God and then I saw.” It is like the final solution in the greatinner drama of Job.God answersand Job’s problem is solved: “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee.” In the great phrase of the book, “Godturned the captivity of Job.”
These men who gave us our Psalms had learned how to bear adversity and affliction without being overwhelmed or defeated. “All thy waves and thy billows have gone over me,” one of them cries. He has lost his land and has only thememoryof Jordan and Hermon and Mizar. His adversaries are a constant “sword in his bones.” They jeer at him and ask, “Where now is thy God?” but his trust holds steadily on: “The Lord will command His loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me!” Even when the water-spouts of trouble break over him, when “the waters roar and are troubled,” when the “nations rage and kingdoms are moved,” when “desolations are abroad in the earth,” God abides for him “a verypresent help in time of trouble,” “a refuge and strength” for his soul. Dismay and trembling may be abroad; pain may come as on a woman in travail, yet this deep soul can calmly say, “God is our God forever; He will be our guide even unto death.”
This element oftrustandconfidencehas never anywhere had grander utterance. The Psalmist has got beyond reliance on “horses and chariots,” beyond trust in “riches,” “princes,” in “the bow or the sword,” or in “man, whose breath is in his nostrils.” He rests his case on God alone, and builds on naked faith in His goodness and care: “Thouhast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.” Puzzled he often is with the prosperity of the wicked, who “flourish like green bay-trees”; perplexed he sometimes is with God’s delay in coming to the help of the poor and needy and oppressed; but his faith holds on and he does not “slide.” It gives us almost a sense ofawe as we see a valiant soul, hard pressed, hemmed around, deep in affliction and sorrow, “standing the world” and saying in clear voice: “Oh, give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good; His loving-kindness endureth forever!”
We understand when we read such words why this collection of Psalms has held its place in the religious life of the world. It contains the living, throbbingexperienceof great souls, who cared absolutely for one thing—to find God and to enjoy Him, and who, having found their one precious jewel, could do without all else, and by this inner experience could stand the world.
The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews declares that Christ has introduced into the world “a new and living way” to God. The concrete problems confronting this writer to a Jewish circle of the first century were very different from our own problems to-day, but he so succeeded inseizing an eternal aspect of the issue that his word about the new and living way is as vital now as it was then.
His “new and living way,” as the tenth chapter shows, is the way of personal consecration as a substitute for the old way of sacrifice. The manner of his exposition may seem to us now a little artificial, but there can be no question of the religious significance of the conclusion. Following his usual line of interpretation, he begins by treating the great national system of sacrifices as a “shadow,”i.e.a parable, or a figure, or a symbol, of a true and higher reality. Then he goes on boldly to declare that “sacrifices” have become empty performances—it is impossible, he says, that the blood of bulls and goats works any real change in the nature or the attitude of the soul. Next he buttresses his radical conclusion with a citation of Scripture to the effect that God has never taken pleasure in burnt offerings and ritual sacrifices, and on this Scripture text fromthe Psalms he rises to his new insight, that Christ has come not to do the sacrificial work of a priest, not to satisfy God by a sacrifice, but to reveal the personal power of a life of consecration: “Then said I, lo, I come to do thy will, O God.” This way of dedication to the divine will, this complete consecration of self out of love for the will of God, the writer calls “the new and living way.”
Two very important conclusions are inherently bound up with this transition from a religion of sacrifices to a religion of dedication. First, if carries a wholly new conception of God and secondly, it involves a complete reinterpretation of human ministry. If God does not take any pleasure in sacrifice, then the whole idea that He is a Being to be appeased by gifts, by offerings, by incense, by blood, or by self-inflicted suffering of any sort, falls to the ground. These things are not shadows or symbols; they are blunders and mistakes. The God for whom they are intended needs and asksfor no such form of approach. That has always been the contention of the supreme prophets of the race, and Christ in His unveiling of God has made the fact sun-clear that God is not rightly conceived when He is thought of as needing any kind of sacrifice or any inducement to make Him forgiving or loving. Love is His nature. The new and living way leads first of all to this new revelation of God.
But no less certainly it leads to a new type of minister. The priest was conceived as an expert in ways ofsatisfyingGod and ofappeasingHim. He was supposed to know what God required and how to perform the things required. He was indispensable, because only an expert, duly ordained, could do the work that was necessary for bringing God and man into relation with each other. Under “the new and living way,” however, the priest has lost his occupation and the minister becomes an expert in ways of expanding human life and in bringingmen to a dedication of themselves to the will of God and to the spiritual tasks of the world. In accordance with this new insight, everything that concerns religion must in some way attach to life. It must promote, or advance life, increase life, add to its height and depth, or, in some manner, make life richer and more joyous. The minister of the new and living way may be called, as he no doubt will be called, to make many sacrifices of things that are precious, and surrenders of things as dear as life itself, but there will be no inherent magic in these sacrifices. They will not be efficacious as a satisfaction to God. They will be only means toward some larger end of life, as was the case with Christ’s surrenders and sacrifices. The ascetic temper will be left forever behind. Whatever is cut off, or plucked out, will be removed only for the sake of increasing the quality of life and the dynamic of it. The final test is always to be sought in the expansion of capacity, in the increase of talents, inthe formation of personality, in dedication to the task of widening the area of life.
The true minister will, like the great apostle, present his body, his entire being, in living dedication. He will be satisfied with nothing short of a holy and acceptable service—acceptable, because Christlike—he will endeavor to make all his service “reasonable service”; that is, intelligent service, and he will strive earnestly not to becomesetinto the mold of the world or into any deadening groove of habit, but to betransformedby a steady increase of life and a renewing of spiritual insight, so that he can prove what is the perfect will of God and so that he can minister to the growing life of the world.
It is always a foolish blunder to take half when it is just as easy to have a whole, but the tendency to dichotomize all realities into halves and to assumethat we are shut up to aneither-orselection, is an ancient tendency and one that very often keeps us from winning the full richness of the life that is possible for us. Human history is strewn with dualistic formulations which have sorted men intoeither-orgroups. Now it is “spirit” and “flesh” that are sharply antagonistic and men are called upon to settle which of these two halves of man’s life is to have their loyalty. Again, it is “this world” and “the next world”—the here and the yonder—that bid for our heart’s suffrage. “The Church” and “the world”; “faith” and “reason”; “the sacred” and “the secular” are other twin pairs that call for a sharp decision of allegiance. So, too, it has been customary to cut apart the outer life and the inner life and, with a sterneither-or, to put them into rivalry with one another. One camp insists that religion is to be sought in deeds and effects; the other camp asserts that religion is an inward condition of life—to beis more important thanto do. Butthis method of cutting is like that which the unnatural mother asked Solomon to perform upon the living child. It sunders what was alive and throbbing into two dead fragments, neither of which is a real half of the united living whole. In place of all theeither-orformulations that force a choice between the halves of great spiritual realities I should put the living and undivided whole. Instead of selectingeither-or, I prefer to takeboth. There is no line that splits the outer life and the inner life into two compartments. Nobody candowithoutbeingand nobody canbewithoutdoing. Personality is the most complete unity in the universe and it binds forever into an indissoluble and integral whole the outer and the inner, the spirit and the deed.
But at the same time it is interesting to see what a supremely great and many-sided soul like St. Paul has to say of the inwardness and interior depth of religion. That he was a man of action is plain enough to be seen and nobody can easilymiss his clarion call to armcap-a-piefor the positive, moral battles of life. He was ethical in the noblest sense of the word, but there was an inner core of religious experience in him which is as unique and wonderful as is his athletic ethical purpose or his imperial spirit of moral conquest.
There was for him no kind of “doing” which could ever be a substitute for the spiritual health of the soul. Nobody has ever lived who has been more deeply concerned than was St. Paul over the primary problem of life: How can my soul be saved? To be “saved” for him, however, does not mean to be rescued from dire torment or from the consequences which follow sin and dog the sinner. No transaction in another world can accomplish salvation for him; no mere change from debit to credit side in the heavenly ledgers can make him a saved man. To be saved for St. Paul is to become a new kind of person, with a new inner nature, a new dimension oflife, a new joy and triumph of soul. There is a certain innerfeelinghere which systematic theology can no more convey than a botanical description of a flower can convey what the poet feels in the presence of the flower itself. There is no lack of books and articles which spread before us St. Paul’s doctrines and which tell us his theory—hisgnosis—of the plan of salvation. The trouble with all these external accounts is that they clank like hollow armor. They are like sounding brass and clanging cymbals. We miss thereal thingthat matters—the inner throbbing heart of the living experience.
What he is always trying to tell us is that a new “nature” has been formed within him, a new spirit has come to birth in his inmost self. Once he was weak, now he is strong. Once he was permanently defeated, now he is “led in a continual triumph.” Once he was at the mercy of the forces of blind instinct and habit which dragged him whither he wouldnot, now he feels free from the dominion of sin and its inherent peril to the soul. Once, with all his pride of pharisaism, he was an alien to the commonwealth of God, now he is a fellow citizen with all the inward sense of loyalty that makes citizenship real.
He traces the immense transformation to his personal discovery of a mighty forgiving love, where he had least expected to find it, in the heart of God—“We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us;” “The life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.”Faith, wherever St. Paul uses it to express the central human fact of the religious life, is a word of tremendous inward depth. It is bathed and saturated with personal experience, and it proves to be a constructive life-principle of the first importance. Faithworks; it is something by which one lives: “The life I now live, I live by faith.”
But the full measure—the length andbreadth, depth and height—of his new inner world does not come full into view until one sees how through faith and love this man has come into conscious relation with the Spirit of God inwardly revealed to him, and operative as a resident presence in his own spirit. No forensic account of salvation can reach this central feature of real salvation, which now appears as new inward life and power. St. Paul takes religion out of the sphere of logic into the primary region of life. There are ways of living upon the Life of God as direct and verifiable as is the correspondence between the plant and its natural environment. Tolive, in the full spiritual meaning of this word as St. Paul uses it, is to be immersed in the living currents of the circulating Life of God, and to be fed from within by those sources of creative Life which feed the evolving world: “Beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, we are transformed into the same image by the Spirit of the Lord;” “He hath sentforth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying Abba;” “The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are sons of God.” With the progress of his experience and the maturing of his thought upon it, there came to St. Paul an extraordinary insight. He came to identify Christ with the Spirit: “The Lord is the Spirit.” He no longer thought of Him as merely the historical person of Galilee, but rather as the eternal revelation of God, first in a definite form as Jesus the Christ, and then, after the resurrection, as Christ the invisible Spirit, working within men, recreating and renewing their spiritual lives. The influence of Christ for salvation was, thus, with him far more than a moral influence. It was of the nature of a real energism—a spiritual power coöperating with the human will and remaking men by the formation of a new Christ-natured self within him. The process has no known or conceivable limits. Its goal is the formation of a man “after Christ”: “Till Christ be formed in you.” “Thatyou may grow up into Him in all things who is the Head;” “Till we all come to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” The “fruit” of the Spirit, matured in the inward realm of man’s central being and expressed in common acts of daily life, is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control—a nature in all things like that which was revealed in glory and fulness in the face of Jesus Christ.
In his fresh, impressive book,The Ephesian Gospel, Dr. Percy Gardner says that in the early period of Christianity no city, save only Jerusalem, was more influential for the development of Christian thought than was the city of Ephesus. It was here in Ephesus, scholars are convinced, some time about the end of the first century, that the life and message of Jesus received its most sublime and wonderful interpretation, and it was throughthis Ephesian interpretation that the gathered mysticism of Greece and the other ancient religions of the world was indissolubly fused with the great ethical teachings of the Galilean.
It will never be known, with absolute certainty, who was the profound genius that made this Ephesian interpretation, but it will always continue to be called the gospel “according to John.” There will never be any doubt, in the minds of those who read appreciatively, that, either inwardly or outwardly, the writer of it had “lain on Christ’s bosom”; that he had “received of His fulness,” and that he had “seen with his eyes, and heard with his ears and handled with his hands the Word of Life.” He was, we can almost certainly say, one of St. Paul’s men. He has fully grasped the central ideas of the apostle who first planted the truth in Ephesus, and he carries out in powerful fashion the Pauline discovery that Christ has become an invisible, eternal presence in the world. At the same timehe possesses, either at first or second hand, a large amount of narrative material for the expansion of the simple gospel story as it had come from the three synoptic writers. But from first to last everything in this gospel is told for a definite purpose and every incident is loaded with a spiritual, interpretative content and meaning. He does not undervalue history or the details of the Life lived in Judea and Galilee, but he is concerned at every point to raise men’s thoughts to the eternal meaning of Christ’s coming, to cultivate inward fellowship with Him, and to reveal the last greatbeatitude, that those who have not seen with outward eyes, but nevertheless havebelieved, are the truly blessed ones.
The earliest of our gospel documents—the document now called Q—centers upon the “message,” and gives us a collection of simple but bottomlessly profound sayings of Jesus. Another document—the gospel of Mark—hardly less primitive and no less wonderful, focusesupon the person of Jesus and His doings. Here we have in very narrow compass the earliest story of this Life, inexhaustible in its depth of love and grace, which has ever since woven itself into the very tissue of human life and thought. But now this final document, which we have been calling “the Ephesian Gospel,” makes a unique contribution and carries us up to a new level of life. It announces that Jesus who gave the message, the Jesus who lived this extraordinary personal life and did the deeds of love and sacrifice, has become an ever-living, environing, permeative Spirit, continuing His revelation, reliving His life, extending His sway in men of faith. He is no longer of one date and one locality, but is present to open, responsive human hearts everywhere as the atmosphere is present to breathing lungs, or the sea to swimming fish, or the sunlight to growing plants. We can no more lose this Christ of experience than we can lose the sky.
Christianity is in this interpretationvastly more than an historical religion, bound up forever with the incidents of its temporal origin. It is as much a present fact and a present power as electricity is. It is rooted in an inexhaustible source of Life. It is as dynamic as the central springs of the universe, and it is perpetually supplied from within by invisible fountains of living energy. But this triumphant and eternal principle of the spiritual life is, “according to John,” no vague, abstract principle of logic, but instead a warm, tender, intimate, concrete personification of Life, Light, and Love who has definitely incarnated the Truth and revealed the nature of God and the possible glory of man.
The great Ephesian makes no division between history and experience. The Christ of his faith and of his account is alike the Christ of history and of experience. He looks backward, and he looks inward, and the Christ of his story is the seamless and invisible product of this double process. This is wholly inthe manner of the great apostle who declared “if we have known Christ after the flesh we know Him so now no more,” and yet neither the Ephesian disciple nor the apostolic master discounted the importance of the facts of the Christ after the flesh. The transcendent truth for them both is the truth that the Church still has its Christ, who is leading it into all the truth and progressively revealing Himself with the expanding ages.
Every Christian mystic for nineteen hundred years has felt the influence of this great Ephesian prophet, and his message has become a part of the necessary air we breathe. His gospel and his brief epistle, loaded with its message of love, are, as Deissmann has well said, the greatest monument of the appreciation of the mystical teaching of St. Paul that has ever been reared in the world. The man who performed this immense literary task for us of the after ages now