If we consider carefully any such faithful lives as I have just exemplified, we see that, however simple-minded and unreflective some of the people may be who learn to live in this way, the motives that guide them are such as will bear a great deal of thoughtful reflection.
The people whom I have in mind, and of whom such instances teach us something, are, in the first place, individuals of considerable wealth and strength of personal character. They certainly are resolute. They have a will of their own. They make choices. And so the contribution of their individual experience to their moral purpose is large. It would be wrong to say, as some do, that they are characterised by mere "altruism," by utter "self-forgetfulness," by "living solely for others." If you were on a wreck in a storm, and the lighthouse keeper were coming out to save you, you would take little comfort in the belief, if you had such a belief, that, since he was a man who had always "lived for others," he had never allowed himself the selfish delight of being fond of handling a boat with skill or of swimming for the mere love of the water. No, on the contrary, you would rejoice to believe, if you{198}could, that he had always delighted in boating and in swimming, and was justly vain of his prowess on the water. The more of a self he had delightedly or with a just pride trained on the water, the more of a self he might have to save you with. When we are in desperate need, we never wish beings who, as some say, "have no thought of self" to help us in our plight. We want robust helpers who have been trained through their personal fondness for the skill and the prowess that they can now show in helping us. So individual self-development belongs of necessity to the people whose faithfulness we are to prize in an emergency. And if people resolve to become effectively faithful in some practical service, their principle of action includes individual self-development.
In the second place, people of the type whom I here have in mind have strong social motives. Their faithfulness is a recognition of the significance, in their eyes, of some socially important call. And this, of course, is too obvious a fact to need further mention.
But in the third place, these people are guided by a motive which distinguishes their type of social consciousness from the chance and fickle interests in this or that form of personal and social success which I exemplified a short time since. A peculiar grace has been indeed granted to them--a free gift, but one which they can only accept by being ready to earn it--a precious treasure that they cannot{199}possess without loving and serving the life that has thus endowed them--a talent which they cannot hide, but must employ to earn new usury--a talent which seems to them not to belong to themselves, but to their master, who will require it of them, increased. This grace, this gift, is what may be called their Cause. Sometimes it appears to them in winning guise, seen in the depths of the eyes of a beloved one, or symbolised by a flag, or expressed through a song. Sometimes they think of it more austerely, and name it "science," or "the service," or "the truth." Sometimes they conceive it expressly as a religious object, and call it, not unwisely, "God's will." But however they conceive it, or whatever name they give to it, it has certain features by which you may easily know it.
The Cause, for people of this spirit, is never one individual person alone, even if, as in the lover's case, the devoted person centres it about the self of one beloved. For even the lovers know that they transfigure the beloved being, and speak of their love in terms that could not be true, unless that which they really serve were much more than any one individual. The Cause for any such devoted servant of a cause as we have been describingis some conceived, and yet also real, spiritual unity which links many individual lives in one, and which is therefore essentially superhuman, in exactly the sense in which we found the realities of the world of the reason to be superhuman.Yet the cause is not, on that{200}account, any mere abstraction. It is a live something: "My home," "my family," "my country," "my service," "mankind," "the church," "my art," "my Science," "the cause of humanity," or, once more, "God's will,"--such are names for the cause. One thinks of all these objects as living expressions of what perfectly concrete and needy people want and require. But one also thinks of the cause as unifying many individuals in its service, and as graciously furnishing to them what they need, namely, the opportunity to be one in spirit. The cause, then, is something based upon human needs, and inclusive of human efforts, and alive with all the warmth of human consciousness and of human love and desire and effort. One also thinks of the cause assuperhuman in the scope, the wealth, the unity, and the reasonableness of its purposes and of its accomplishments.
Such is the cause. That the individual loves it is, in any one case, due to the chances of his temperament and of his development. That it can be conceived and served is a matter of social experience. That it is more worthy to be served than are any passing whims, individual or social, is the insight which the individual gets whenever he surveys his life in its wider unities. That to serve it requires creative effort; that it cannot be served except by positive deeds is the result of all one's knowledge of it. That in such service one finds self-expression even in and through self-surrender, and is more of a self even because one gives one's{201}self, is the daily experience of all who have found such a cause. That such service enables one to face fortune with a new courage, because, whatever happens to the servant of the cause, he is seeking not his own fortune, but that of the cause, and has therefore discounted his own personal defeats, is the result of the whole spirit here in question.
For such a practical attitude toward such a cause I know no better name than the good old word Loyalty. And hereupon we are ready for a statement of the principle which dominates loyal lives. All the foregoing cases were cases of loyalty. In each some one had found a cause, a live spiritual unity, above his own individual level. This cause is no mere heap or collection of other human beings; it is a life of many brethren in unity. The simplest statement of the principle of the loyal person was the maxim:"Be loyal to your cause."Somewhat more fully stated this principle would read:"Devote your whole self to your cause."Such a principle does not mean "Lose yourself," or "Abolish yourself," or even simply "Sacrifice yourself." It means: "Be as rich and full and strong a self as you can, and then, with all your heart and your soul and your mind and your strength, devote yourself to this your cause, to this spiritual unity in which individuals may be, and (when they are loyal) actually are, united in a life whose meaning is above the separate meanings of any or of all natural human beings."
{202}
Yet even thus the principle which actually inspires every thoroughly loyal action has not been fully stated. For, as we have seen, the warriors, despite the fact that their duty requires them to compass if they can the defeat of their foes, best show their loyal spirit if they prize the loyalty of their foes and honour loyalty wherever they find it. We call such a spirit that honours loyalty in the foe a spirit of chivalry. You and I may remember that Lee was the foe of that Union in whose triumph we now rejoice. Yet we may and should look upon him as, in his own personal intent, a model of the spirit of true loyalty; for he gave all that he had and was to what he found to be his cause. Such an insight into the meaning of the loyalty of the foe, chivalry requires. Therefore, the true spirit of loyalty, including, as is reasonable, this spirit of chivalry, also requires us to state the principle of loyalty in a still deeper and more universal form. The true principle of loyalty is, in fact, an union of two principles. The first is:Be loyal.The second is:So be loyal, that is, so seek, so accept, so serve your cause that thereby the loyalty of all your brethren throughout all the world, through your example, through your influence, through your own love of loyalty wherever you find it, as well as through the sort of loyalty which you exemplify in your deeds, shall be aided, furthered, increased so far as in you lies.
Can this principle be acted out? Can it direct life? Is it a barren abstraction? Let the life and{203}the deed of the lonely lighthouse keeper give the reply. Who, amongst us, whatever his own cause, is not instructed and aided in his loyalty by the faithful deed of such a devoted soul? Such people are then, in truth, not loyalmerelyto their own private cause.They are loyal to the cause of all loyal people.For, to any enlightened survey of life, all the loyal, even when chance and human blindness force them at any moment to war with one another, are, in fact, spiritual brethren. They have a common cause--the cause of furthering universal loyalty through their own choice and their own service. The spirit of chivalry simply brings this fact to mind. The loyal are inspired by the loyal, are sustained by them. Every one of them finds in the loyal his kindred, his fellow-servants. Whoever is concretely loyal, that is, whoever wholly gives himself to some cause that binds many human souls in one superhuman unity, is just in so far serving the cause not only of all mankind, but of all the rational spiritual world. I repeat then: The true principle of all the loyal is:So be loyal to your own cause as thereby to serve the advancement of the cause of universal loyalty.
Now of the principle thus formulated I assert that it is a principle fit to be made the basis of an universal moral code. There is no duty, there is no virtue whose warrant and whose value you cannot deduce from this one principle. Charity, justice, fidelity, decisiveness, strenuousness, truthfulness,{204}efficiency, wise self-assertion, watchful self-restraint, patience, defiance of fortune, resignation in defeat, your daily social duties, your individual self-development, your personal rights and dignity, your obedience to the calls of duty, your justified self-sacrifices, your rational pride in the unique moral office to which you have individually been called--all these, I assert, can be rightly defined, defended, estimated, and put into practice through an accurate understanding and development of the principle of loyalty just laid down.
Since I am, indeed, speaking of sources of insight, and am not portraying at any length their results, you will not expect of me a deduction of such a moral code here. But this assertion of mine is no mere boast. I have repeatedly endeavoured, elsewhere, to portray loyalty and to apply its principles to life. For the moment it suffices to ask you to consider the lives of the loyal, in such examples as I have suggested to you, and to try for yourselves to see what they teach. To help you in such a consideration, I may here simply remind you that when one is not only loyal but enlightened, one cannot finally approve or accept any cause or any mode of living that, while seeming in itself to be a cause or a mode of living such as embodies the spirit of loyalty, still depends upon or involves contempt for the loyalty of other men, or a disposition to prey upon their loyalty and to deprive them of any cause to which they can be loyal. No loyalty that lives by{205}destroying the loyalty of your neighbour is just to its own true intent. And that is why charity and justice are fruits of the loyal spirit. And that is why, if your cause and your loyal action are rightly accepted and carried out, the common interests of all rational beings are served by your loyalty precisely in so far as your powers permit. Whatever your special cause (and your special personal cause--your love, your home, or your calling--you must have),your true cause is the spiritual unity of all the world of reasonable beings.This cause you further, so far as in you lies, by your every deed.
And that also is why the principle of loyalty, once rightly defined and served by you--served with the whole energy and power of your personal self--is a principle that, upon any enlightened survey of your life you can never regret having served. This, then, is what we were seeking--an absolute moral principle, a guide for all action.
But even this is not the whole meaning of what the spirit of loyalty has to teach you. Your cause, thus concretely and yet universally defined, is something of which you can always, and now truthfully and without any pathetic fallacy, say, what Browning's lover said in the lyric that I quoted in our second lecture:
"World, how it walled aboutLife with disgrace,Till God's own smile came outThat was thy face."
{206}For your cause can only be revealed to you through some presence that first teaches you to love this unity of the spiritual life. This presence will come to you in a beloved form, as something human, dear, vitally fascinating. It may be a person--a face--or a living community of human beings that first reveals it to you. You can, indeed, choose it as your cause. Your will is needed. Loyalty is no mere sentiment. It is the willing and practical and thorough-going devotion of a self to a cause. But you can never choose your cause until you have first found it. And you must find it in human shape. And you must love it before you can choose its service.
Therefore, however far you go in loyalty, you will never regard your loyalty as a mere morality. It will also be in essence a religion.It will always be to you a finding of an object that comes to you from without and above, as divine grace has always been said to come. Hence loyalty is a source not only of moral but of religious insight. The spirit of true loyalty is of its very essence a complete synthesis of the moral and of the religious interests. The cause is a religious object. It finds you in your need. It points out to you the way of salvation. Its presence in your world is to you a free gift from the realm of the spirit--a gift that you have not of yourself, but through the willingness of the world to manifest to you the way of salvation. This free gift first compels your love. Then you freely give yourself in return.
{207}
Therefore, the spirit of loyalty completely reconciles those bitter and tragic wrangles between the mere moralists and the partisans of divine grace. It supplies in its unity also the way to define, in harmonious fashion, the ideal of what your individual experience seeks in its need, of what your social world, groaning and travailing in pain together, longs for as our common salvation, of what the reason conceives as the divine unity of the world's meaning, of what the rational will requires you to serve as God's will. Through loyalty, then, not only the absolute moral insight, but the absolute religious insight, as you grow in grace and persist in service, may be and will be gradually and truthfully revealed to you.
For loyalty, though justifying no "moral holidays," shows you the will of the spiritual world, the divine will, and so gives you rest in toil, peace in the midst of care. And loyalty also, though leaving you in no mystic trance, displays to you the law that holds the whole rational world together; though showing you the divine grace, calls upon you for the strenuous giving of your whole self to action; though requiring of you no philosophical training, tells you what the highest reason can but justify; and, though concerned with no mere signs and wonders, shows you the gracious and eternal miracle of a spiritual realm where, whatever fortunes and miracles and divine beings there may be, you, in so far as you are loyal, are and are to be always at home.
{208}
And all this is true because the spirit of loyalty at once expresses your own personal need and reason, and defines for you the only purpose that could be justified from the point of view of one who surveyed all voluntary and rational life. This is the purpose to further the unity of whatever spiritual life you can influence, and to do this by your every rational deed, precisely in so far as your powers permit. This is a law for all rational beings. No angels could do more than this.
There is a famous word that Chaucer put into the mouth of his Griselda at the moment when her husband tried her patience with his last and utmost cruelty. That word, uttered by a woman to a mere individual human creature who happened to be her husband, seems helplessly pathetic and slavish enough. Yet Chaucer himself warns us that the old tale, truly interpreted, should be viewed as an allegory of the deeper relations between the soul and God. Even so, to many of our leading modern minds the allegory, when interpreted in this way, may seem harsh enough. Mere moralists may make light of it, because it seems opposed to the dignity of the moral spirit of individual self-respect. Only the partisans of a divine grace, administered through inscrutable divine decrees, would, you might suppose, still see any worth in so cruel an allegory. Nevertheless, this judgment of the allegory is false. Let a truly loyal being--our lighthouse keeper, for instance--our patriot or martyr, let Lee or Newton,{209}let whoever is filled with the right spirit of loyalty--whoever, through the light that he trims, intends to lighten and to unify so much of the spiritual world as he can ever reach by his deed--letsucha loyal being utter Griselda's word. Let him utter it as in the presence of the master of life, who offers to all the loyal the divine grace of finding themselves through their devotion to their cause. Let him address this word
"As unto one that hearsA cry above the conquered years."
Let him utter this word as the summary and confession of his whole life of loyalty. And then Griselda's word is no longer slavish. It is full of the resolute courage, of the splendid contempt for mere fortune, of the unconquerable spiritual self-assertion, yes, it is full of the deathless will, which are of the very essence of loyalty, and which, indeed, must overcome and, in the eternal realm, do overcome the world.
Griselda's word was this:
"But certes, Lord, for none adversitie,To dien in this case it shall not beThat I in herte and minde should aye repente,That I you gave my soul with whole intente."
Whoever thus addresses his word, not to a human individual, but as unto the master of life, and then.{210}sincerely and persistently and lovingly, lives that word out in his life, has solved the religious paradox. From out the lonely and darkened depths of his personal finitude, from out the chaos of his social promptings and of his worldly ambitions, amid all the storms of fortune, "midst of hell's laughter and noises appalling," he has heard the voice of the Spirit. He has heard, and--however unlearned--he has understood. His own lamp is burning, and through his deed the eternal light shines in the darkness of this world.
{211}
{212}
{213}
It very often happens to us that to reach any notable result, either in life or in insight, is even thereby to introduce ourselves to a new problem. In the present state of the undertaking of these lectures such is our experience. The religious insight whose source is the loyal spirit was our topic in the foregoing lecture. If my own view is correct, this source is by far the most important that we have yet considered. It unites the spirit and the meaning of all the foregoing sources. Rightly interpreted, it points the way to a true salvation.
Yet the very last words of our sketch of the fruits of loyalty were of necessity grave words. Intending to show through what spirit man escapes from total failure, we were brought face to face with the tragedies which still beset the higher life. "Adversity"--poor Griselda faced it in the tale. We left the loyal spirit appearing to us--as it does appear in its strongest representatives, able, somehow, in the power that is due to its insight, to triumph over fortune. But side by side with this suggestion{214}of the nature of that which overcomes the world stood the inevitable reminder of the word: "In this world ye shall have tribulation."
How is tribulation related to religious insight? That is our present problem. It has been forced upon our attention by the study of the place and the meaning of loyalty. Some understanding of this problem is necessary to any further comprehension of the lessons of all the foregoing sources of insight, and is of peculiar significance for any definition of the office of religion.
To nearly all of us, at some time in our lives, and to many of us at all times, the tragic aspect of human life seems to be a profound hindrance to religious insight of any stable sort. I must here first bring more fully to your minds why this is so--why the existence of tragedy in human existence appears to many moods, and to many people, destructive of faith in any religious truth and a barrier against rational assurance regarding the ultimate triumph of anything good. Then I want to devote the rest of this lecture to showing how sorrow, how the whole burden of human tribulation, has been, and reasonably may be, not merely a barrier in the way of insight, but also a source of religious insight. And this is the explanation of the title of the present lecture.
{215}
We approach our problem fully mindful of the limitations to which the purpose of these lectures confines us. The problem of evil has many metaphysical, theological, moral, and common-sense aspects upon which I can say nothing whatever in the present context. Human sorrow appears in our pathway in these lectures as a topic for us to consider, first, because whatever source of religious insight we have thus far consulted has shown us man struggling with some sort of ill, and, secondly, because there are aspects of this very struggle which will provide us with a new source of religious insight, and which will thus tend to throw new light upon the meaning of all the other sources. A thorough-going study of the problem of evil would require of us a complete philosophy not only of religion but of reality. But we are limiting ourselves, in these discussions, to a survey of certain sources.
The reasons why the existence and the prominence of evil in human life seem to all of us at some times, and to many of us at all times, a hindrance to the acceptance of any religious solution of the problems of life are familiar. I need then only to remind you what they are.
Without going into any subtleties regarding the definition of evil, it is obvious that our first characteristic reaction when we meet with what we take{216}to be an evil is an effort to get rid of it, to shun its presence, or to remove it from existence. Pain, cold, burning heat, disease, starvation, death, our enemies, our dangers, these are facts that, precisely so far as we find them evil, we face with the determination to annul altogether their evil aspect.
A characteristic result of this tendency appears in the fact that man, who of all animals is most clearly aware of the presence of evil in his world, is for that very reason not only an ingenious deviser of new inventions for getting good things and for supplying his needs, but is also the most destructive of animals. He wars with his natural surroundings, and still more with his fellow-men, in ways that show how the instinctive aversions upon which his estimates of evil are founded are reinforced by the habits which he forms in his contests with ill fortune. Man the destroyer of evil thus appears, in much of his life, as a destroyer who is also largely moved by a love of destruction for its own sake. This love plays a great part in the formation of even very high levels of our social and moral consciousness. The heroes of song and story, and often of history as well, are fascinating partly, or chiefly, because they could kill and did so. We love victory over ill. Killing seems to involve such a victory. So we love killing, at least in the hero tales. The result is often a certain inconsistency. The gods offered Achilles the choice between a short life full of the glorious slaying of enemies and a long life of{217}harmless obscurity. He chose the short life; and therefore he is to be remembered forever. For even when he would not fight, his "destructive wrath sent the souls of many valiant heroes to Hades, and left themselves a prey to the dogs and birds of the air." And when he returned to battle, what became of Hector? The song of the Nibelungs opens by assuring us that the old stories tell of many wonders, and of heroes worthy of praise(von Helden lobebaeren), and of great labours(von grosser Arebeit). These "great labours" consisted mainly in the slaying of other men. And this slaying was obviously "worthy of praise"; for it gave us a model for all our own struggle with evil. As for the heroes of history, of course, we love to dwell upon their constructive labours. But, after all, what sort of comparison is there in what the plain man, apart from a higher enlightenment, usually calls glory, between Washington and Napoleon? No doubt there will always be admirers of Napoleon who will think of him as a misunderstood reformer labouring for the building up of an ideal Europe. But even such admirers will join with the plain man in dwelling, with especial fascination, upon the Napoleon of Austerlitz. And they will not forget even Borodino. No doubt the lovers of Washington find him glorious. But where, in his career, belongs the glory of having put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, or of having destroyed the polity of the Europe of the old maps?
{218}
Man the destroyer thus glories in his prowess, and adores the heroes who were the ministers of death. And since, of course, his warfare is always directed against something that he takes to be an evil, the principle which directs his glorious conflicts seems to be one easy of general statement, inconsistent as some of the reasonings founded upon it seem to be. This principle is: "All evil ought to be destroyed. There ought to be none. It should be swept out of existence."
Of course, when the principle of the warfare with evil is thus abstractly stated, it does not tell us what we are to regard as an evil. It leaves the wise estimate of good and evil to be learned through a closer study of the facts of life. No doubt, then, Achilles, and the other heroes of song and story, may have become as glorious as they are by reason of our excessive love of destruction due to some imperfect estimate of the true values of life. And therefore the mere statement of the principle leaves open a very wide range for difference of opinion and for inconsistency of view as to what it is that ought to be destroyed. The natural estimate of the plain man, when he loves the heroes of old, seems to imply that one of the chief ills that man ought to destroy usually takes the form of some other man. And this way of estimating men in terms of their success in killing other men has its obvious inconsistencies. But, after all, as one may insist, much is gained when we have made up our minds as to what{219}ought to be done with evil, whether evil is incorporated in our enemies, in our pains, or in our sins. We may leave to advancing civilisation, or perhaps to some triumph of religion, the correction of our excessive fondness for the destruction of human life. What is essentially important is that it is part of man's mission to destroy evil. And about this general teaching the saints and the warriors, so it seems, may well agree.
Religion, it may be said, can have nothing to urge against this fundamental axiom. So far all appears clear. Evil ought to be driven out of the world. Common-sense says this. Every struggle with climate or with disease or with our foes is carried on in this spirit. The search for salvation is itself--so one may insist--simply another instance of this destructive conflict with impending ills. All that is most elemental in our hatreds thus agrees with whatever is loftiest in our souls, in facing evils with our "everlasting No." All the differences of moral opinion are mere differences as to what to destroy. Man is always the destroyer of ill.
But if you grant the general principle thus stated, the presence of evil in this world, in the forms that we all recognise, and in the degree of importance that it attains in all our lives, seems, indeed, a very serious hindrance in the way of religious insight.{220}And the reason is plain. Religion, as we have said, in seeking salvation, seeks some form of communion with the master of life. That is, it seeks to come into touch with a power, a principle, or a mind, or a heart, that, on the one hand, possesses, or, with approval, surveys or controls the real nature of things, and that, on the other hand, welcomes us in our conflicts with evil, supports our efforts, and secures our success. I have made no effort, in these lectures, to define a theological creed. Such a creed forms a topic in which I take great interest but which lies beyond the limitations of this discourse. Yet our study of the historical relations between religion and morality, our earlier analysis of the religious need, have shown us that unless you are able to make some sort of effective appeal to principles that link you with the whole nature of things, your religious need must remain unsatisfied, and your last word will have to take, at best, the form of a moral, not a religious doctrine. Religion does not require us to solve all mysteries; but it does require for its stability some assurance that, so far as concerns our need of salvation, and despite the dangers that imperil our salvation, those that are with us, when we are rightly enlightened, are more than those that are against us.
In order to make this fact yet clearer, let us suppose that all such assurance is taken away from us. Review the result. Let it be supposed that we need salvation. Let it be granted that, as we naturally{221}are, in our blindness and narrowness, and in the caprices of our passions, we cannot find the way out unless we can get into touch with some spiritual unity and reasonable life such as the loyal man's cause seems to reveal to him. Let it be further supposed, however, that all human causes are, in their way and time, as much subject to chance and to the capricious blows of fortune as we ourselves individually are. Let it be imagined that the cause of causes, the unity of the whole spiritual world, is, in fact, a mere dream. Let the insight of the reason and of the will, which, when taken in their unity, have been said by me to reveal to us that the universe is in its essence Spirit, and that the cause of the loyal is not only a reality, butthereality--let this insight, I say, be regarded as an illusion. Let no other spiritual view of reality prove probable. Then, indeed, we shall be left merely with ideals of life in our hands, but with no assurance that real life, in its wholeness, approves or furthers these ideals. Our need of salvation will then, to be sure, still remain. Our definition of what salvation would be if it should become ours will be unchanged. But, having thus abandoned as illusory or as uncertain all the sources of insight which I have so far been defending, we shall have upon our hands only the moral struggle for the good as our best resource. We shall then hope for no assurance of salvation. We shall abandon religion to the realm of mythical consolations, and shall face a grim world with only{222}such moral courage as we can muster for the uncertain conflict. Our loyalty itself will lose its religious aspect. For the objective goodness of our cause--the divine grace which its presence seems to offer to our life--will no longer mean anything but a faint and uncertain hope, which we shall keep or not according to the caprices of our personal resolutions. Such, I say, would be the outcome of rejecting all sources of religious insight into the real nature of things.
The result, in the case now supposed, will be one which any honest man will indeed accept if he must, but which no one can regard as including any satisfactory religious insight whatever. I certainly do not here present these considerations as in themselves any arguments for religion, or as in themselves furnishing support for our previous arguments regarding the nature and the merits of the sources of insight which we have been reviewing. The case for which I have argued in the foregoing lectures must indeed stand or fall solely upon its own merits. And if the reason and the will, as the spirit of loyalty interprets and unifies their teachings, donotreally show us any truth about the whole nature of things, I would not for a moment ask to have their teachings tolerated merely because, without such teachings, we should lose our grounds for holding to a religious interpretation of life. If wemustfall back upon mere moral resoluteness, and abandon any assurance as to the religious objects, and as to{223}the way and the attainment of salvation, I, for one, am quite ready to accept the call of life, and to fight on for a good end so long as I can, without seeking for religious consolations that have once been shown to be mythical. But I have indicated to you, in general, my grounds for holding that our previous sources actually do give us an insight which is not only moral but religious, and do throw light upon our relations to a reason which moves in all things, to a divine will which expresses itself in all the universe, and to a genuine revelation of its purposes which this makes of itself when it inspires our loyalty. My present purpose is, not to reinforce these grounds by the mere threat that their rejection would involve an abandonment of any well-grounded religious assurance, but to present to you the fact that religion is, indeed, a search for a really divine foundation for the saving process.
Religion differs from morality in looking beyond our own active resoluteness for something--not ourselves--that gives a warrant, founded in the whole nature of things--a warrant for holding that this resoluteness will succeed and will bring us into union with that which saves.
Hence it is, indeed, true that if there isnomaster of life with whom we can come into touch,notriumph of the good in the universe,noreal source of salvation--religion must result in disappointment. And then our only recourse must, indeed, be the moral will. This recourse is one that, as we have seen,{224}many in our time are quite ready to accept. And such, in my own opinion, are for reasons that they do not themselves admit actually well on their way toward real salvation. Only it is useless to attribute to them, in their present stage of conviction, any conscious and assured possession of religious insight. To sum up, then, religion demands the presence of the master of life as a real being, and depends upon holding that the good triumphs.
But if we attempt to combine the two assertions, "All evil ought to be destroyed" and "In the universe as a whole the good triumphs," and hereupon to face the facts of human life as religion finds them, we are at once involved in familiar perplexities. With many of these perplexities the limitations of the present discussion, as already explained, forbid us to deal. I am merely trying to show, for the moment, why the presence of evil in our lives seems to be a hindrance in the way of religious insight. And it is enough if I emphasise at this point what must readily come to the consciousness of all of you when you consider the situation in which our whole argument seems now to have placed us.
The very existence of the religious need itself presupposes not only the presence, but the usual prevalence of very great evils in human life. For unless man is in great danger of missing the pearl of great price, he stands in no need of a saving process. A religious man may come to possess an acquired optimism--the hard-won result of the religious{225}process which seems to him to have pointed out the way of salvation. But a man who begins with the assurance that all is ordinarily well with human nature is precluded from religion, in our sense of the word religion, by his very type of optimism. Such an optimist of the "first intention," such a believer that in the main it is well with human nature, can be, as we have seen, a moralist, although he is usually a very simple-minded moralist, as unaware of the graver moral problems as he is cheerfully indifferent to the hard case in which most of his brethren live. But whoever sees the deep need of human salvation, as the various cynics and rebels and sages and prophets whom we cited in our first lecture have seen it, has begun by recognising the bitterness of human loss and defeat--the gravity of the evil case of the natural man. Were not the world as it now is very evil, what, then, were the call for religion? Religion takes its origin in our sense of deep need--in other words, in our recognition that evil has a very real place in life."Tempora pessima"--"The times are very evil"--is thus no phrase of a merely mediaeval type of world-hatred. The woes of man are the presupposed basis of fact upon which the search for salvation rests.
And the further one goes in the pursuit of the sources of religious insight, the more, as we have ourselves found, does one's original recognition of the ill of the human world become both deepened and varied. From the solitude of one's individual{226}sorrows one goes out to seek for religious relief in the social world, only to find how much more manifold the chaos of ordinary social life is than is the conflict of one's private passions. If one asks guidance from reason, reason appears at first as a sort of spirit brooding upon the face of the depths of unreason. When loyalty itself is created, it finds itself beset by adversities. If evil drives us to seek relief in religion, religion thus teaches us to know, better and better, the tragedy of life. Its first word is, thus, about evil and about the escape from evil. But its later words appear to have been a persistent discourse upon our tribulations.
But how can religion, thus presupposing the presence of evil in our life, and illustrating this presence anew at every step, undertake to lead us to any assurance of the triumph of a good principle in the real world, in case, as seems so far obvious, such a triumph of a good principle would mean that all evil is to be simply destroyed and wiped out of existence?
Briefly restating the situation, it is this: If the evils of human life are indeed but transient and superficial incidents, or if--to use a well-known extreme form of statement--evil is an "unreality" altogether--then religion is superfluous. For there is no need of salvation unless man's ordinary case is, indeed, very really a hard case, that is, unless evil is a reality, and a deep-rooted one. But, on the other hand, if evil is thus deep-rooted in the very{227}conditions of human life as they are, and if it persists upon higher levels even of the religious life, religion seems in danger of total failure. For unless goodness is somehow at the real heart of things--is, so to speak, the core of reality--the hope of salvation is a dream, and religion deceives us. But goodness, by the hypothesis that we are just now considering, requires that evil should be wholly abolished. How can that which should not exist at all, namely, evil, be in such wise the expression of the real nature of things that on the one hand religion is needed to save us from evil, and yet is able to do so only by bringing us to know that the real nature of things is good? Here is our problem. And it is a hard one.
In brief, as you may say, religion must take its choice. Either the evil in the world is of no great importance, and then religion is useless; or the need of salvation is great, and the way is straight and narrow; and then evil is deeply rooted in the very nature of reality, and religion seems a failure.
I believe that there is some advantage in stating in this somewhat crabbed and dialectical fashion, a problem which most of us usually approach through much more direct and pathetic experience. One advantage in crabbedness and in fondness for dialectic is that it sometimes tends to clear away the clouds{228}with which emotion from moment to moment surrounds certain great problems of life. As I said earlier, in speaking of the office of the reason, abstract ideas are but means to an end. Their end is to help us to a clear and rational survey of the connections of things. When you are to examine the landscape from a height, in order to obtain a wide prospect, you may have to use a glass, or a compass, or some other instrument of abstraction, in order to define what the distance tends to render obscure, or what the manifoldness of the scenery surveyed makes it hard rightly to view in its true relations. And, in such cases, the glass or the compass is but an auxiliary, intended to help in the end your whole outlook. Now the world of good and evil is a world of wide prospects, of vast distances, of manifold features. A bit of dialectics, using abstract and one-sided considerations in succession, may prepare the way for seeing the whole better.
The plain man well knows the problem that I have just been characterising. He knows how it may enter his religious life. Only he does not usually think of it abstractly. It pierces his heart. Stunned by a grief, he may say: "I have trusted God, and now he forsakes me. How can a good God permit this horror in my life?" Yet the plain man, if religiously minded, also knows what is meant by saying, "Out of the depths have I cried." And he knows, too, that part of the preciousness of his{229}very idea of God depends upon the fact that there are depths, and that out of them one can cry, and that God is precisely a being who somehow hears the cry from the depths. God, "pragmatically viewed," as some of our recent teachers express the matter, is thus often defined for the plain man's religious experience as a helper in trouble. Were there no trouble, there would be, then, it would seem, no cry of the soul for such a being, and very possibly no such being conceived by the soul that now cries. Yet this very God--one cries to him because he is supposed to be all-powerful, and to do all things well, and therefore to be a very present help in time of trouble. All this seems clear enough at the time when one is on the way up, out of the depths, or when one begins to praise God in the Psalmist's words, because, as one now says: "He hath planted my feet upon a rock, and hath established my goings." But how does all this seem at the moment when one suddenly falls into the pit of sorrow, and when one's eyes are turned downward; when he who doeth all things well permits the utmost treachery of fortune, and when the one who can hear every cry seems deaf to one's most heartrending pleadings? The familiar explanation that all this is a penalty for one's sins may awaken an echo of Job's protest in the mind of the man who knows not how he has deserved this woe, or may arouse the deeper and now consciously dialectical comments on the mystery involved in the fact that God{230}permits sin. "Why was I made thus blind and sinful?" one may cry. And hereupon religious insight becomes, indeed, confused enough, and may turn for relief to that well-known type of defiance which, if not religious, is at least moral; for it is a protest against evil. If at such moments God is, indeed, to our darkened vision, and, for us, who wait for his blessing, as if he were sleeping or on a journey, one can at least, as moral agent, utter this protest against ill, and wonder why his omnipotence does not make it effective. One thus begins, as it were, to try heroically to do the absent God's work for him.
All these are familiar experiences. They find us, too often, unprepared. They find us when emotion tends to cloud every insight. They illustrate a certain dialectical process which belongs to all human life and which plays its part in the whole history of religion. Perhaps it is well to state an aspect of this dialectical process abstractly, crabbedly, and unemotionally, as we have just done, in order that we may make ourselves the more ready to face the issue when life exemplifies it with crushing suddenness, and when
"The painful ploughshare of passionGrinds down to our uttermost rock."
The problem, as just abstractly stated, is this. Religion seems to face this dilemma: Either there are no great and essential ills about human life;{231}and then there is no great danger of perdition, and no great need of salvation, and religion has no notable office; or there are great and essential ills, and man's life is in bitter need of salvation; but in that case evil is deeply rooted in the very nature of the reality from which we have sprung; and therefore religion has no right to assure us of communion with a real master of life who is able to do with evil what not only ought to be done with it, but ought always to have been done with it by any being able to offer man any genuine salvation. For (as we are assuming) what ought to be done, yes, what ought to have been done with evil from the beginning, is and was this: To banish it altogether from existence.
This, I say, is, when abstractly stated, the dilemma in which religion seems to be placed. Of this dilemma the countless struggles of the human soul when, in the spirit of some practical religion, it seeks for salvation and faces its woes are examples. These struggles are infinitely pathetic and in life are often confusing to insight. Is there any value in considering this abstract statement of the principles upon which this dilemma seems to be founded? Possibly there is, if we can hereby be led also to consider--not indeed, in this place, the problems of theology, or the metaphysics of evil, but a new source of insight.