(gl|g IWtlliam y>«H Hgtttata Religion As Reality, Life and Power 1919 The original of tliis bool< is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924082990288 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ail|P WiUtam l^snn gptlMrga Religion As Reality, Life and Power 1919 <^^ i 6n -I? WALTER H. JBNKIN3. PRINTER PHILADELPHIA l^rtfnt^ This is the fifth of the series of lectures known as the WILLIAM P^NN LEC- TURES. They are supported by the Young Friends' Movement of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which was organized on Fifth month thirteenth, 1916, at Race Street Meeting House in Philadelphia, for the purpose of closer fellow- ship; for the strengthening by such association and the interchange of experience, of loyalty to the ideals of the Society of Friends ; and for the preparation by such common ideals for more effective work thru the Society of Friends for the growth of the Kingdom of God on earth. The name of William Penn has been chosen because he was a Great Adventurer, who in fellowship with his friends started in his youth on the holy experiment of endeavoring "to live out the laws of Christ in every thought, and word, and deed," that these might become the laws and habits of the State. Dr. Rufus M. Jones, of Haverford College, delivered this fifth lecture on "Religion as Real- ity, Life and Power," at Race Street Meeting House on Fifth month tenth, 1919. Philadelphia, Pa., 1919. YOUNG friend of mine, Christopher Morley, has a passage in one of his recent essays which caught my eye in a newspaper and arrested my attention. It was as follows : "In every man's iieart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibration of beauty. I can imagine no more fascinating privilege than to be allowed to ransack the desk of a thousand American business men, men supposed to be hard-headed, absorbed in brisk commerce. Somewhere in each desk one would find some hidden betrayal of that man's private worship. It might be some old newspaper clipping, per- haps a poem that had once touched him, for even the humblest poets are stout partisans of Willican Penn Lecture reality. It might be a photograph of children playing in the surf, or a little box of fish-hooks, or a soiled old time-table of some queer back- woods railroad or primitive steamer service that had once carried him into his land of heart's desire." This is as good a preliminary definition of religion as we could wish. It is something that carries one into "the land of heart's desire." It is something which gives us a vision of what ought to be. This informal definition has the advantage of being in complete accord with one of the finest and most perfect descriptions of religion that has ever been written — ^the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where religion is treated as the capacity to see the invisible and to enable the possessor of it to live by his soul's vision of reality. The writer calls fciith the capacity to Page Six Religion as Reality, Life and Power seek successfully the true country of the heart's desire, "the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." "They seek a country of their own," he says, that is, a father- land of the heart's desire.* There are many pursuits and experiences which carry us toward this attainment, and in so far as they take us in that direction, — the direction of the soul's true country — ^they are either religious or at least in the fringe of religion. To speak a little more plainly, and less in the language of metaphor, I shall con- sider religion in this lecture as a way of realiz- ing and fulfilling life, a way of finding the whole of oneself. Life is a very sunbiguous word and may mean almost anything. It may mean hardly more than the ability to stay alive, to exhibit behavior, bare biological survival, successful correspondence with a physical en- *Heb. XI, 10-16. Page Seven William Penn Lecture vironment; or it may mean the discovery of infinite interior dimensions and possibilities, the finding of almost inexhaustible resources and supplies of power for the continual expan- sion of personal capacity and so the constant winning of unwon goals and the perennial acquisition of joy. The bare fact of going on, of keeping the procession moving, does not seem to a re- flective person such a very great achievement after all. If life were only a series of items one after the other, a succession of dots of experience, extended in a single dimension, it would soon grow very dreary and cme could hardly thrill much as he joined in singing the hymn: "When we've been there ten thousand years Bright shining as the sun, We've no less days to sing God's praise Than when we first begun." Page Eight Religion as Reality, Life and Power This sterile, static stagnant life is too insipid to make any effective appeal to our imagina- tion. The "Preacher," in Ecclesiastes, has this flat and fruitless kind of life in mind when he says: "Vanity of vanities All is vanity. What gain hath a man of his whole toil, Which under the sun he toils. * I|C * * * "The sun rises and the sun sets. Hasting back to the place where he rises. The wind goeth to the north And then tumeth back to the south. In circular process All the streams flow to the sea But the sea is not full. Unto the place whence the streams flow, There they flow again. All things are full of weariness Man cannot utter it. That which hath been is that which shall be There is no new thing under the sun!" Page Nine William Penn Lecture What we want is to discover a way to enrich and heighten the quality of life and not merely to add to the quantity of it. We are seeking for a dynamic force which will raise the intrinsic power and value of life. We can get out of that dreary row of dots, the seriatim way of living, only by finding something that or- ganizes life from above and makes it a cumu- lative affair, something that stores up the gains of it and forms them into a permanent and expanding whole. We tend to fall into the one-dimension track — often a rut or a groove, and we thus miss the wider, freer possibilities of the many dimensional life. We are very apt, furthermore, to get cut off, isolated and stranded, which means that we get separated from the completer wholes of being to which we properly belong. Most of the tragedies of human life are these tragedies of separation and Page Ten Religion as Reality, Life and Power' division. The divided self, sundered from its fellowship and companionship for vrhich it was made, is always a sick and feeble soul. The way of heedth and healing is a way of union and correspondence with those necessary reali- ties from which we have become isolated and we shall find that religion is one of the might- iest of all the constructive, unifying forces we know. As the word implies, religion binds back the soul into union with realities which refresh it, restore it, vivify it, and integrate it and complete it ; i. e., put it in possession of the whole of itself. Let us deal first with those agencies of life which are certainly in the fringe of religion, even if they do not quite go up to the apex and centre of its highest ranges. The passion for the pursuit of truth is one of these agencies of life which lies very close to the field of religion. Page Eleven William Penn Lecture It has its roots in deep lying instincts, like curi- osity, question asking, wonder; more than all, perhaps, in that fundamental feature of humsm personality — ^the tendency to look beyond and reach on ahead of everything given in expe- rience, the tendency which makes even the least imaginative of us ideal-forming beings. We cannot stop and rest satisfied with any bare fact. We look both before and after. We ask, and we cannot help asking, what caused the fact, what was its antecedent. We are, too, forced by an inevitable compulsion of our nature to anticipate, to forecast the significance of each fact and plot out its future results. We cannot take any fact in isolation and be con- tented to stand and stare at it and report it in its lonely nakedness. We are bound to link it up with more and to explain it and make it articulate. And in order to explain it we find Page Twelve Religion as Reality, Life and Power it necessary to go on and discover the larger whole to which it belongs, of which it is a part and in which its setting, and so its explanation, is revealed. The flower in the crannied wall, plucked out of the crannies, taken just by itself, apart from the environment in which it lives, cannot be understood or explained. In order to explain and understand it fully, "root and all and all in all," we should have to link it up with all the inter-related facts of the universe and we should need to know, to the fullest extent, "what God and man is" ! The rational pursuit of truth is thus the method of discover- ing the meaning of some fragment of expe- rience by setting it into its place in the larger whole which explains it. It involves the power to survey facts from above, as one views a landscape from a moimtain top, and to see things steadily and connectedly in relationship Page Thirteen WUliam Penn Lecture with the more to which they belong. There is obviously no place to stop in this process until one has arrived at that One Highest Nature of Things in which all things and we ourselves are — that true whole in which all finite bits and fragments have their meaning. We are "led as by the hand" up to the God who is the inclusive, living, organic whole, dimly implied and suggested at least in the finite parts, which we are trjdng to explain. Many, to be sure, who have the passion for truth do not go the whole way to the end of the trail. They draw a smaller curve and keep within the limits of finite explanations. They do not raise the question of what is ultimately involved in the meaning of their facts. But even so they find themselves steadily carried out to ever wider groups of facts and they see more or less clearly that all their explanations Page Fourteen Religion as Reality, Life and Power point to a more beyond, which must some time be included and that all stopping places short of a self-explanatory Reality are artificial. Science, with its excessive predilection for mathematics and its tendency to reduce the universe to realities which can be exactly de- scribed and charted, sometimes ends, though it does not need to do so, with a world stripped of spiritual values and rolling monotonously in space with no word of any source or goal other than that implied by the consolidating move- ment of atoms. That kind of a world, however, is so plainly a fragment, and an abstraction from a larger whole, that a seeker for truth, one who has a real passion for it, can hardly be long satisfied with such an inadequate substi- tute for the rich and concrete world which has values as well as mass movements. In any case, this agency of life is one which brings Page Fifteen William Penn Lecture very much enlargement and expansion to per- sonality. Every attainment of insight carries one on to a new problem and so widens out the field of interest and keeps the soul growing. Each discovery of truth brings a profound emotion of joy and so heightens the tone and capacity of the mind and qualifies it for its further tasks. It may be and sometimes is a feeling of egoistic satisfaction — "I discovered that." "I put in my thumb And pulled out that plum What a great man am I!" But more often the discovery of truth minis- ters to humility. The very search for it makes one aware of the littleness of his attainments, the immensity of the range and circle of his ignorance, and the small ratio of what is won compared with what is unwon. And finally he will be thrilled, if he is a good person, with the Page Sixteen Religion as Reality, Life and Power thought that this new insight, which he has just attained, will add to the total stock of human knowledge, will widen the area of light and will serve all men hereafter in their strug- gles and pursuits, and the emotion will thus in its altruistic color be close to real religious feeling and so will be an enlarging and a con- secrating agency. The appreciation of beauty, the enjoyment of "whatsoever things are lovely," is another agency of life which lies very close to religion and it is beyond question one of the great exalting and liberating influences. It both en- larges and consecrates man's life. Modem educators have discovered, or perhaps we ought to say rediscovered, the fact that love of beauty is a great ally to goodness. The cultiva- tion of appreciation for the beautiful in nature, in art, in literature, in music, is one of the Page Seventeen William Perm Lecture surest high roads to the formation of Rne ideals of character, which is the most triumphantly beautiful creation in the world. The child that has a passion for beauty is morally safer than is the child that has this side of his character starved. Joy in the contemplation of beauty expels low aims and carries one out of the circle of narrow, selfish interests. Words- worth's testimony to the way in which a sight of surpassing beauty affected his life is im- pressive on this point. "To the brim My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly A dedicated spirit."* It is not easy to define what constitutes the "secret" of beauty, nor to tell just what the essential mark of it really is. The authorities *Prelude. Book IV. Page Eighteen Religion as Reality, Life and Power disagree and most of us never raise the ques- tion. We feel the thrill at the right moment, and that is enough. The deeper question, how- ever, which I have raised is an important one and has real bearing on the problem of the nature of religion. One point seems certain. When we appreciate beauty we apprehend an object as an indivisible whole and not as some- thing made up of parts added together. We select out and seize all the aspects of the object which fit together to make one unified whole. What the mind gets in this experience is a harmonious unity in diversity, which makes a single impression upon us and which appears to us as something that is just as it ought to be. That means that there is nothing accidental or capricious about it. Nothing must be there which is brought in for its own sake. Every aspect must minister to produce, Page Nineteen William Perm Lecture and must be harmonious with, an integral whole. There must be nothing in the natural scene, nothing in the beautiful creation, which distracts, or which is superfluous, or which tends to break up the unified impression and attract attention to itself.'^ It is one striking effect of the perception, con- templation and appreciation of beauty that it brings for the moment at least all the powers of the soul into a harmony in which the dual- isms and contradictions of life are overcome and annulled. We suddenly become aware of free and spontaneous powers, of something im- fathomable within ourselves. Limits and boun- daries seem to drop away and disappear and an aspect of the infinite seems to come into play. *I have been iniiuenced in the formation of tay view by the lectures of tay {'Ormer teacher. Pro- fessor George Herbert Palmer. Page Twentv Religion as Reality, Life and Power The finite object which we are contemplating seems to be a window into an eternal world and we are carried beyond all our eyes see or our ears hear. "Suddenly, we know not how, a soimd Of living streams, an odor, a flower crowned With dew, a lark upspringing from the sod, And we awake. O joy and deep amaze, Beneath the everlasting hills we stand. We hear the voices of the morning seas, And earnest prophesyings in the land. While from the open heaven leans forth at gaze The encompassing great cloud of witnesses."* Such experiences expand and liberate the soul, they remove the narrow limits and the pressure of the finite, and they bring a sudden release of joy as though we had found that for which we were meant. But this experience of beauty may and often does stop short of the true end of life. Beaut}' *Edward Dowden's Sonnet, Awakening. Page Twenty-One William Penn Lecture often produces a kind of sudden spell and en- chantment without supplying discipline and control to the will, without training and or- ganizing the person to meet temptation and the stern choices of life. It does not of itself take the beholder beyond the stage of emotion to a real achievement of character. Lovers of beauty are not always morally robust. It is quite pos- sible, furthermore, to make beauty an end in itself, to treat it as though it were a world of its own and needed no Beyond to explain it and complete it, so that exalting and consecrating as it is, beauty does not necessarily carry its devotee all the way home to the real country and fatherland of the souL Another of the great agencies of life is the active spirit of service, the promotion of social causes, devoted struggle for the life of others. This aim at service is very close to religion Page Twenty-Two Religion as Reality, Life and Power and is always a feature of any great religion. It has its roots, as is the case with all these agencies of life, in native, fundamental instincts and emotions. It is as original a trait of per- sonality as is the self-seeking struggle for existence. The springs of egoism are no more primitive and no more built into the fibre of human nature than are the springs of altruism. Both are essential to personal life as we know it, and wherever life shapes itself towards the formation of personality, interest in others, "the other regarding" spirit, comes into play and is a momentous shaping factor. The ten- der emotions of pity, sympathy, affection, in- terest in others' welfare, look away from the focus of self and are as "disinterested" as is love of beauty. There is no way to reduce human life to the single strand of self-interest, any more than one can plane a board so thin Page Twenty-Three William Penn Lecture that it shall have only one side. A single, soli- tary, individual self apart from relationships with others has no more reality than a Jabber- wock. There isn't any such thing. Stripped of social affiliations, a person shrinks at once to ^ero. St. Paul's saying, "If I have not love, I am nothing," is absolutely sound psychology. We are joined in with the deeper life of hu- manity and we cannot cut ourselves asunder without at the same time annihilating our- selves. Consecration to ends beyond our own private interests is as rational an aim as is the pursuit of food. The team-spirit, which is joyous co-operation with others for the sake of common ends, is a widely prevalent spirit and it is a contagious attitude. My revered teacher, Josiah Royce, has nobly de^ribed this attitude of life in his book on Loyalty. By loyalty he meant willing and thorough-going devotion to Page Twenty-Four Religion as Reality, Life and Power a cause which unites many selves into one organic community-self. Wherever this team- spirit type of devotion possesses people, life seems to attain through it an unwonted bloom and glory. Enthusiasm, contagion of spirit, heightened power, self-forgetfulness, readiness to suffer, endure and even die for the common cause are the g^reat by-products of it. It is one of the most beautiful flowers that has grown on what our Norse ancestors used to call oiu: human "igdrasil tree." The highest form of it, its consummate stage, is love. Almost nothing else here in our world so dignifies and enlarges life as love does : "Not only to keep down the base in man But teach high thought, and amiable words And courtliness, and the desire of fame. And love of truth and all that makes a man." But love does more than expand and enlarge, it consecrates life to ends of unselfish good- Page Twenty-Five William Perm Lecture ness. We here pass by all aims and springs and desires to get, and we discover at length what it means to give and to share. We are ready now to be impoverished and stripped for the good of another. We no longer talk about "sacrifices." The word has no place in the vocabulary of love, for whatever is done or suffered, it is a joyous gift. The "me" and the "mine" are swallowed up in the "us" and "our." "Number there in love is slain." It is, however, no loss of self, no reduction and shrinkage, but a way of completion and fulfillment. As is true of all thes