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 WALTER RUSSELL “BOWIE 
 
 RECTOR OF GRACE CHURCH IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK, AND FORMERLY 
 RECTOR OF ST. PAUL’S CHURCH, RICHMOND, VA. 
 AUTHOR OF ‘‘THE MASTER OF THE HILL,” ‘‘ THE CHILDREN’S YEAR,” 
 ‘*SUNNY WINDOWS,” ‘!THE ARMOR OF YOUTH,” ETC. 
 
 6eé 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
 
 1924 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 
 
TO 
 8 od eg 6 
 
 This book is yours,—yet not for aught it gives, 
 Yours rather for the gain it takes from you, 
 
 Since what you are commends what it would say, 
 And in your eyes is that which makes it true: 
 
 For through the morn, or through gray mists of tears, 
 Where courage led, your steady feet have trod; 
 
 And those who watch that far look on your face, 
 Know you have found the open ways to God. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https J/archive.org/details/someopenwaystogo00bow' 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I should like to believe that this book might 
 justify its name. For I think as I write it of that 
 multitude of men and women in our world to-day 
 who are wistful for God, yet do not know how to 
 find Him. Many of them imagine, in these times 
 of much religious controversy, that old roads to 
 Him have been destroyed, and they are fearful 
 of any new ones. And some, especially of the 
 younger generation, wonder whether there genu- 
 inely is any reality of God at all at the end of the 
 questionings men follow. ‘To both these groups 
 equally—to the traditional believers distrustful 
 of changing ideas, and to the restless questioners 
 who are doubtful of even the most vital facts 
 which religious tradition tells of—I would try to 
 bring what seems to me the message of the truth. 
 The pages that follow deal sometimes with mat- 
 ters which have been much in controversy; but 
 they are written never for a controversial, but 
 always for a religious, end. They are meant to 
 show that the ground of those modern concep- 
 tions of science, of life, and of religion, over which 
 alone our twentieth-century minds can easily 
 move, do give firm footing for the advance of 
 faith, and that the ways of our truest and most 
 unfettered thinking are open ways which lead to 
 God through Jesus Christ. W.R.B 
 
 Grace Cuurcu REcTOoRY 
 October, 1924. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 I. THE NEED OF RELIGIOUS CONVICTION. . I 
 
 The popular distaste for religious formulations. 
 The necessity for creedal certainties, nevertheless, and 
 the value of religious convictions to-day, for: 
 The preservation of moral integrity. 
 The revelation of the spiritual beauty which is the 
 spring of hope. 
 The gift of courage. 
 
 Il. THE REALITY OF GOD FOR PERSONAL EXPERI- 
 FONTS eth ench & a 
 
 I. Some reasons why, fon many Benples ie conscious- 
 ness of God is dim: 
 
 The child’s thought of God fades, and no ma- 
 ture conception is equally vivid to take its 
 place. 
 
 The intricate self-sufficiency of our material 
 civilization seems to make God unnecessary. 
 
 The contradiction of evil to belief in a holy and 
 loving God. 
 
 II. How the difficulties already considered may be 
 transcended: 
 The reinterpretation of God into terms of our 
 mature experience. 
 The discovery of God as the spirit in the 
 wheels. 
 The answer of the Divine to the challenge of 
 evil. 
 
 III. The possession of God for the life of to-day: 
 The power of faith in the living fact. 
 God seen in the beauty of the world. 
 God found in the common task. 
 Human souls as the gateways of God. 
 
 Tig ole. CHRIS DAs hari si geuive dling ah eu ait nt Gm 
 
 I. The twofold aspect of tesa 
 
 The intimate humanness of the disciples’ first 
 knowledge of Him. 
 
 The growing awareness of that in Jesus which 
 no human measures could contain. 
 
 II. The problem of the miraculous: 
 
 The distinction between the event and the 
 descriptions of it. 
 
 The value of a reverently suspended judgment. 
 
 ix 
 
sf CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III. How shall we interpret to-day these two supreme 
 beliefs concerning Jesus: 
 The Resurrection. 
 The Virgin Birth. 
 
 IV. The immediate. religious significance of certain 
 great Christian doctrines: 
 The Incarnation. 
 Salvation through the cross. 
 The power of the risen life. 
 The second coming of Christ. 
 
 IV. THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 I. The vital religious consequences of he! coming ret 
 the Holy Spirit: 
 The experience of the disciples. 
 Attempts to explain the experience. 
 
 II." What the Holy Spirit may mean for life to-day: 
 
 The inspiration of goodness: In work, in service 
 for others, in courage beneath calamity. 
 
 The Spirit of Truth, creating: Open-mindedness 
 to appraise the unexpected, adaptableness to 
 a changing intellectual challenge. 
 
 The genius for constructive interpretation of 
 the enlarging facts of life. 
 
 The spirit of power. 
 
 V. WHY BELONG TO THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH? 
 
 I. The true simplicity of the church: 
 In its origin. 
 In its essential and continuing character. 
 II. Some familiar indictments of the actual church 
 and the answers to them: 
 The “unattractiveness”’ of church people. 
 The charge of hypocrisy and the honorableness 
 of being a ‘‘ hypocrite.” 
 The objection that ‘‘the church does not do 
 anything.” 
 III. The positive contributions of the church to the re- 
 deeming forces of our civilization and life: 
 The nurture of the ideal. 
 The strength of the confidence which comes 
 from Christian history. 
 A gradual unifying of spiritual forces. 
 The church as the body of Christ. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 140 
 
 184 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
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CHAPTER I 
 | 
 THE NEED OF RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 
 
 IN various Christian communions of late 
 there has been an extraordinary ferment of dis- 
 cussion concerning what men ought to believe. 
 
 It had been generally assumed that the mark of 
 Christianity in this age was a comparative indif- 
 ference to theology and a thorough preoccupation 
 with practical service. Yet here of a sudden is 
 an explosion of interest not only in theology, but 
 in the categorical forms in which it is represented 
 that theology must properly be cast. 
 
 Nor is this discussion a matter of merely super- 
 ficial emotion. Loyalties of the deepest and most 
 passionate kind surge up into its expression. An 
 extraordinary preacher stands in the pulpit of 
 the old First Presbyterian Church in New York. 
 Multitudes flock to hear him and find in his gos- 
 pel a message that satisfies their souls. Yet a 
 host of conscientious ministers and laymen in the 
 Presbyterian Church are convinced that all the 
 seeming work of righteousness which his preach- 
 ing produces is blighted by a bad theology, and 
 that the preacher himself ought to be silenced 
 because of his unorthodox beliefs. The General 
 Assembly of the Church has had as its most in- 
 
 I 
 
SOME OPEN W-AYS' 10) GO 
 
 tense concern the question as to whether Dr. Fos- 
 dick shall continue to mount his pulpit stairs or 
 be turned out of his Church doors. Nor is it 
 among the Presbyterians only that division 1s 
 sharp. In the Episcopal Church a Bishop puts 
 forth a little book outlining the change and ex- 
 pansion of his theology in a ministry of fifty years. 
 The House of Bishops holds a meeting and pro- 
 ceeds to set forth in emphatic fashion the strict 
 idea of the majority of its members as to the 
 limits within which theology must properly move. 
 In other communions the so-called Fundamentalists 
 have established their shibboleths, and in deadly 
 earnest they would decapitate as ecclesiastical 
 heathen all those who cannot pronounce their 
 formulas. ‘The temper of this widespread theo- 
 logical discussion is not always the same. Some- 
 times it is as vehement and excited as though into 
 the religious life of our own time had come a 
 recrudescence of passions like those which made 
 the Inquisition. Sometimes it is the deep intensity 
 of a quiet and disciplined conviction. But back of 
 all the discussion, there is a profound reality of 
 concern. Thousands of Christian men and women 
 see in the terms of the theological discussion—in 
 the Virgin Birth, in the deity of Christ, in the lan- 
 guage of the historic creeds—the symbols of their 
 deepest faiths. Confusedly, but very genuinely, 
 they are afraid that something which has been 
 2 
 
REL CGO Ss. 6 ONVLe LOIN 
 
 very precious to them is imperilled in a great up- 
 heaval. 
 
 Yet the curious fact is that, at the very moment 
 when so many people within the Churches are 
 engaged in theological discussions, the crowd with- 
 out is plainly sceptical as to any worth which these 
 discussions may have. It is true, of course, that 
 the man in the street is interested for the moment 
 in what the churchmen argue about. He likes to 
 read the flamboyant headlines that tell of some 
 interesting collision between ecclesiastical person- 
 ages. Among other exciting features of the morn- 
 ing news, he will accept with satisfaction the re- 
 port of theological controversy. But his interest 
 arises, not from the fact that it is theological, but 
 from the fact that it is controversy. After a 
 while, men outside the Church grow confused in 
 the general tangle of arguments and the dust of 
 dificult language which hides the real contention. 
 So it results that at the very moment when many 
 religious folk are deeply and earnestly engaged 
 in trying to vindicate those forms of faith which 
 seem to them of extreme importance, a great many 
 of the people at large, instead of feeling that they 
 ought to shape their religious creeds more posi- 
 tively, are feeling rather that, in the midst of so 
 much which seems to them confusion, it is im- 
 possible for the average man to find out anything 
 
 3 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS POVGOD 
 
 definite, and that there is no particular necessity 
 for him to try. 
 
 If we should try to analyze more particularly 
 this reaction which is so often characteristic of the 
 crowd outside the Churches, we should find that 
 in their mind there are two considerations at least. 
 
 In the first place, people are thinking that the 
 discussion about creeds simply distracts by all sorts 
 of needless questionings the attention which had 
 better be fixed on the plain business of respectable 
 living, which goes along better without too much 
 theological dissection. They remember the whim- 
 sical verse 
 
 “The centipede was happy quite 
 Until the frog in fun 
 Said, Pray which leg comes after which? 
 Which raised his mind to such a pitch 
 He lay distracted in the ditch 
 Considering how to run.” 
 
 “What difference does it make,” says someone, 
 ‘what a man says that he believes so long as he 
 goes ahead doing the best he knows how?” “Ex- 
 actly what I say,” replies his neighbor, “if a man 
 is conscientious and does his duty, beliefs don’t 
 matter much, one way or the other. If he stops 
 bothering about the things he does not understand 
 
 4 
 
RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 
 
 and simply tries to go straight, he will probably 
 land where he ought to be.” 
 
 That is one reason for scepticism as to the im- 
 portance of religious formulations. Also there is 
 another and deeper reason which lies back of the 
 first. 
 
 Not only are many people impatient of any 
 attempt at trying to understand what religious 
 dogmas mean; but they are doubtful about the 
 value of those dogmas, even if they did fully un- 
 derstand them. They know that men have always 
 believed in God; but with the world as it is, does 
 belief in God make any very great difference in 
 a man’s way of living and in the results which 
 his life achieves? They know that for many 
 centuries millions of people have worshipped in 
 the name of Jesus Christ. But has Jesus Christ 
 a message which is practicable in the twentieth 
 century? Arguments about the Virgin Birth or 
 some other article of the Apostles’ or the Nicene 
 Creed seem to large numbers of people nowadays 
 to be mere gesticulations not very relevant to the 
 more essential matter. It is not a question now 
 of whether they are right or wrong, but of the 
 fact of what they think; and it is a fact that thou- 
 sands of men and women are indifferent to creedal 
 affirmations, not because they question this or that 
 detail, but because they are dubious as to any 
 
 5 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS) GOMGI 
 
 actual dynamic value in the most fundamental con- 
 victions which the creeds express. 
 
 Notwithstanding, with full recognition of these 
 facts, I stake the message of this book upon the 
 affirmation that it does make a tremendous dif- 
 ference what a man believes, and that it does 
 make an equally tremendous difference that he 
 should come to believe those great proclama- 
 tions of religious faith which Christianity has 
 always taught to be essential to his soul’s health. 
 There are some Christian convictions which would 
 be argued about the less as they are understood 
 the more; and what I want to do is to lift some 
 things up out of the dust and confusion of con- 
 troversy, to set certain facts in the light of today’s 
 sunshine, and to show why the Christian faith 
 must be laid hold of and how it may be conceived, 
 in order that it may be the power of life in this our 
 present time. 
 
 To begin with, then, about that centipede. It 
 sounds plausible to say that the trouble with us 
 is that we are getting our minds into a whirl with 
 various speculations, when what we had better 
 do is to go and take the next step without bother- 
 ing our brains as to ultimate principles and under- 
 lying explanations. Many of us say things like 
 that very glibly. We play with the phrases which 
 happen to be popular in our generation. We blow 
 them out like feathers down the wind; but if we 
 
 6 
 
RELLGIGUS: CONMIG DION 
 
 really dare rest any weight upon them, they come 
 down promptly enough to the ground, and we with 
 them. We may not have to be considering at 
 every moment which leg comes after which; but 
 if we do have to get anywhere, we have to stop 
 and consider where both legs are going to. How- 
 ever it be with a centipede, it is certainly true with 
 a man that he will stay in the ditch permanently, 
 so far as his life’s achievements are concerned, un- 
 less he determines what his life’s movement is 
 about and what direction he intends to move in. 
 From the very start—if there is to be any start— 
 he has got to believe in something. He must be- 
 lieve, for example, that effort is better than stag- 
 nation. He must believe that it is better to try 
 than not to try. He must believe that one thing is 
 better to try for than another thing. So little by 
 little his life builds itself up out of creeds,—that is 
 to say, out of the definite and practical beliefs 
 which become the mainspring of his daily choice 
 and action. 
 
 Plainly, also, it will make a difference to a man’s 
 neighbor to know what that man believes, and 
 what are the general lines along which he may 
 be trusted to move. Here he is today. But what 
 are the general principles which govern him, by 
 which his neighbors may know where they will 
 find him tomorrow? For even the most practical 
 purposes of mutual relationships, it may be far 
 
 7 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 more important for a man’s neighbors to know 
 what he thinks and what he believes in than to 
 know what he possesses. It is more important for 
 the landlady to know that her lodger has a belief 
 in honesty than it is for her to know that he has 
 money in his pocket. If he has money but no 
 creed of honesty, his money will do her no good: 
 But if he has no money and does have the fixed 
 belief that honesty is right and that honesty is 
 authoritative, he will somehow get the money, and 
 she will get it too. 
 
 Let us be candid with ourselves, then, and admit 
 that there is a great deal of loose talk about the 
 uselessness of religious belief which is talk and 
 nothing else. We do need creeds, and none of us 
 could get along without them. Without creeds 
 our own individual lives would be like so many 
 tumble-bugs and beetles, buzzing and turning and 
 getting nowhere; and without those great central 
 convictions and governing principles which men 
 mutually acknowledge, society, which has been 
 built up by the growth of just such creeds, would 
 disintegrate into chaos. 
 
 At this point, I know very well that someone 
 will rise up to reply. He will declare, “"What you 
 have said is all very well, and all very obvious too. 
 Nobody objects to that. Everybody admits that 
 there are certain necessary principles of morality 
 and decent living, of straight purpose and clear 
 
RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 
 
 choice, which men must follow. If you choose 
 to call these things creeds, then it is plain enough 
 that to this extent creeds are necessary; but it is 
 a mere paper argument which identifies principles 
 such as these with the kind of dogmas theologians 
 talk about. Of course people have got to have 
 some kind of belief in something. But what has 
 this to do with the question as to whether there 
 is vital importance in those particular beliefs 
 which Christian teachers insist upon?” 
 
 That is a fair question, and it is not to be evaded. 
 Because a man believes something, you cannot by 
 that fact alone persuade him that he is bound to 
 believe something else. He may be convinced 
 that he must be better than a beast or a bug; but 
 he may not thereby be convinced of the nearness 
 and sufficiency of God, who will help him to be 
 something very different from the common run 
 of men. To face this further question and present 
 a Christian faith for today in the light of it, is 
 exactly the purpose of what I am writing. Only 
 an answer cannot be given in a paragraph. It 
 must be given in everything that follows. Not 
 long ago, when I was preaching the same message 
 which is written in this book, I had a letter from a 
 man who asked me please to answer for him “in 
 two or three lines, how to attain everlasting life.” 
 I had to reply that it would take a lifetime of 
 obedience to find that out, and that to tell about 
 
 9 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 ‘t in two or three lines was beyond me; but that, 
 if he kept on following in the way of Jesus, think- 
 ing, desiring, living, according to His leadership, 
 he would learn. That is what I also believe about 
 the general question of our religious doctrines. 
 It is true that men’s lives, in order to reach their 
 best, need not only the obvious everyday convic- 
 tions which most moral people recognize, but need 
 also those more radiant and abundant beliefs 
 which come only from the wider horizons of the 
 thought of God. What may we believe about 
 God? What may we believe about Jesus Christ? 
 About God’s Spirit within us? About the Church? 
 These are the definite questions we are to con- 
 sider in the next chapters. But first in this chap- 
 ter we must entrench more firmly the fundamental 
 realization that, in addition to the everyday ideas 
 of workable behavior which common sense might 
 arrive at, we do need the convictions which are 
 confessedly religious. We must learn that, for 
 gallant and effective living, there is need of a kind 
 of inspiration which cannot come to us until our 
 sense of reality reaches on to include the fulness 
 of God. 
 
 Specifically then, let us consider some of the 
 reasons for which it may be fairly claimed that to 
 carry on creditably this plainest business of living, 
 we need no less a creed than that which presently 
 
 10 
 
RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 
 
 shall reveal at the heart of it the meaning of God 
 in Christ. 
 
 To begin with, there is the fact, rather stagger- 
 ing to our complacency, that our everyday integ- 
 rity requires a richer creed than some of us have 
 imagined we could get along with. There are 
 sions that even our common decencies will disin- 
 tegrate if men imagine they can build on principles 
 which have no underlying religious sanction. 
 
 A short while ago, the front pages of the metro- 
 politan newspapers were filled day by day with the 
 reports of the Congressional investigation into the 
 oil concessions. That absorbing interest has 
 drifted now off the front page into the background; 
 but it cannot have faded out of the recollection 
 of our American people,—and if it should fade 
 out, that fading would be a deeper indictment of 
 our general moral status than was the original 
 wrong. Here has been a deep and disgusting 
 scandal with its ugly ramifications reaching out 
 in many directions to touch this public man and 
 that with discredit and to strike the nation with 
 a sense of humiliated disillusionment as to the char- 
 acter of American public men. In an issue of 
 Life, there recently appeared a sardonic car- 
 toon, showing the scrapping of Washington. The 
 
 II 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 capitol was being hauled off on trucks in one direc- 
 tion, the Washington monument hoisted into an- 
 other, and the White House, sold to the highest 
 bidder, carted away in a third. In a field there 
 was set up a huge advertising bill-board, reading 
 as follows: ‘‘For Sale——a lot of junk. Ideals of 
 moral responsibility, public stewardship, and other 
 old stuff, going cheap.” 
 
 Why were these things going cheap? Wood- 
 row Wilson expressed it in a sentence from the 
 last message which he wrote for publication in his 
 lifetime: ‘The sum of the whole matter is this, 
 that our civilization cannot survive materially un- 
 less it be redeemed spiritually.” The trouble with 
 us is, as the whole scandal in Washington has 
 made dismayingly evident, that too many men have 
 no firm convictions of anything. They have no 
 principles on which they can stand unshaken, when’ 
 the thrust of temptation suddenly imperils the 
 respectability which had been built on sand. 
 When men follow expediency, and, having lost the 
 eternal sanctions for right and wrong, make their 
 ideas of conduct the mere by-product of materialis- 
 tic shrewdness, then firmness and stability have 
 gone out of them. As Franklin K. Lane wrote to 
 a friend in Europe in that year of weariness and 
 spiritual depression which followed the end of the 
 war: 
 
 I2 
 
RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 
 
 “This whole damned world is damned because 
 it is standing in a bog. There is no sure ground 
 under anyone’s feet. We are the grossest mate- 
 rialists because we only know our bellies and our 
 backs. We worship the great god Comfort. We 
 don’t think; we get sensations. The thrill is the 
 thing. All the newspapers, theatres, prove it. 
 We resign ourselves to a life that knows no part 
 of man but his nerves. We study reactions in 
 human beings and in chemistry—recognizing no 
 difference between the two—and to my great 
 amazement, the war has made the whole thing 
 worse than ever. If you have a religion that can 
 get hold of people, grip them and lift them—for 
 God’s sake come over and help us.” And to an- 
 other friend he wrote, again of the need of re- 
 ligion: “If we can get that sense we can have a 
 new world. I do not believe we will change this 
 world much for the good out of any materialistic 
 philosophy or by an shifting of economic affairs. 
 We need a revival—a belief in something bigger 
 than ourselves, and more lasting than the world.” 
 
 The revival which Franklin K. Lane wrote of 
 must begin with the individual. We shall not have 
 a finer standard of honor and service in our pub- 
 lic life or in private business either until individual 
 men are mastered by those fine motives which 
 through all the centuries it has been abundantly 
 evident that Christianity can repeatedly furnish. 
 Certain it is that religion has been able, and still 
 is able, to remould and transform the inner char- 
 acter of men, giving soundness where there has 
 
 13 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 been unsoundness, strength where there had been 
 weakness, unfailing honor and faith where there 
 had been cowardice and evasion. We need that 
 remaking of individuals now. As C. E. Mon- 
 tague has written in a striking volume of Essays 
 entitled ‘“‘Disenchantment”’: 
 
 “You remember the little French towns which 
 the pestle and mortar of war had so ground into 
 dust, red and white, that each separate brick went 
 back at last, dust to dust, to mix with the earth 
 from which it had come. The very clay of them 
 has to be put into moulds and fired again. To some 
 such remaking of bricks, some shaping and hard- 
 ening anew of the most elementary, plainest units 
 of rightness in action, we have to get back. Hum- 
 drum decencies, patiently practised through mil- 
 lions of undistinguished lives, were the myriad 
 bricks out of which all the advanced architecture 
 of conduct was built—the solemn temples of 
 creeds, gorgeous palaces of romantic heroism, 
 cloud-capped towers of patriotic exaltation. And 
 now, just when there seems to be such a babble 
 as never before about these grandiose structures, 
 bricks have run short.” 
 
 Of course, it is open for any man to say that 
 these “humdrum decencies” of which Montague 
 speaks can be built without any divine influence of 
 religion. They can be built, one may think, by the 
 united pressure of a general moral expectation, 
 whether or not the community have God in its 
 
 14 
 
REE GLOUS ;C ON VIC TEOWN 
 
 mind. Yet there is abundant evidence, both in 
 our own time and in all the far record of history, 
 that this is not true. You cannot make bricks by 
 pressing together cold clay. They must be fired 
 and hardened by heat. Similarly, there is a hard- 
 ening of character that does not come until men’s 
 spirits have been brought under that influence 
 which comes from the flaming thought of God. 
 Oliver Cromwell, disgusted with the kind of 
 drafts which were first furnished him for his 
 army, determined to enlist a different sort. So 
 he said, ‘I chose me men who had the fear of 
 God before their eyes and made some conscience 
 of what they did. After that, they were never 
 beaten, but they beat continually.’ The long 
 testimony of human experience has not lost its 
 weight. In every enterprise, and not least in those 
 battles which men must fight against the undra- 
 matic but most vital temptations of everyday 
 business and politics, there is need of men who 
 have the fear of God before their eyes, and who 
 make some conscience of what they do. The kind 
 of morality which is a mere reflection of the crowd 
 opinion disintegrates under pressure. The in- 
 tegrity which does not disintegrate must find its 
 strength in that reverence for something bigger 
 than oneself and more lasting than the world, 
 which is the fear of God,—and in that growing 
 
 i) 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 devotion to the beauty of holiness, through which 
 the fear of God is lifted into the love of Him. 
 
 IJ 
 
 ‘As we need a creed to preserve integrity, so also 
 we need it to preserve our hopefulness. In order 
 to keep life on any happy level, we must learn to 
 see the world as at least potentially beautiful; 
 and that means that all through its often sordid 
 and discouraging facts we must have the ability 
 to perceive the gleam of something which redeems 
 the present facts through the possibilities of the 
 divine. 
 
 There are many influences in our day which 
 make for cynicism. It is significant that the pres- 
 ence of cynicism and the absence of religion go 
 together. There is a class of writers who make 
 ‘t a cult of modern smartness to destroy the finer 
 optimism everywhere. They talk in magisterial 
 fashion of “getting under the surface of things.”’ 
 They must not let anybody be content with what 
 they call the sentimental appearances; and pretty 
 much everything is sentimental appearance to 
 them which does not lead back to dust and mud. 
 As Ian Hay has whimsically said in one of his 
 lectures: If this mordant school of interpreters 
 had their way, they would make short work of all 
 our fairy-tales. ‘Cinderella, for example,” they 
 
 16 
 
RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 
 
 would say. ‘Who in common sense could read 
 such stuff as that? Look beneath the surface and 
 take her measure. She was a wretched little hus- 
 band-hunter—that is what she was. Her sisters 
 were two old maids with an inferiority complex, 
 and the prince was nothing but an empty-minded 
 bounder, who probably made his wife miserable 
 all the rest of her days.” ‘That is what becomes 
 of Cinderella, and that is what becomes of most 
 of the rest of us at the hands of those critics of 
 life who see no poetry in it because they translate 
 everything into their own sour prose. They are 
 forever burrowing down into the poor origins 
 which life grows from instead of seeing it in the 
 higher beauty of that which it is growing to. 
 They see the garden as the worm sees it, crawling 
 through his dark channels in the sunless earth and 
 imagining a flower is nothing but the white, ghost- 
 ly roots that strike down into the blackness. But 
 the garden as it really is above its surface, the 
 only garden that counts for the fully appraising 
 spirit, the garden as the girl sees it who walks 
 among its flowers, the burrowing critic does not 
 Stele 
 
 Yet why burrow? It is true that we may ac- 
 count the garden of life in terms of its creeping 
 roots, but we may also account it in terms of its 
 aspiring flowers. We may judge it with the 
 worm’s judgment, but also—instead—with the 
 
 17 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS DLORGiOm 
 
 judgment of one who helps its roses grow. And 
 the determination as to the way we shall thus 
 judge it depends chiefly upon whether or not we 
 have any belief in those diviner forces that for- 
 ever are making growing things climb above the 
 surface into a fragrance and beauty which they 
 are destined to attain. 
 
 One of the chief troubles with our world today 
 -s that it has lost that sense of hopefulness which 
 comes from the conviction that life ought to be 
 and can be made beautiful. A materialistic 
 philosophy has twisted our heads backward and 
 told us to look at the origins of life, as though 
 these contained within themselves the only ex- 
 planation of reality. ‘Look at what man came 
 from,” says this philosophy. ‘He came out of 
 beastliness and savagery. Human nature 1s 
 nothing but a little more presentable variety of 
 the nature of the brute. It is full of hate and 
 ferocity and instinctive selfishness. That is what 
 it has been, and that is what it is going to be, and 
 so the practical man had better shape his calcu- 
 lations accordingly.” But to try to negotiate life 
 under the dominion of any such idea as that, as 
 Studdert-Kennedy wittily has put it, “is like going 
 out for a walk, looking back to the place you 
 started from. If you do that, you will break 
 your neck.’ You need to look to the place you are 
 going to, and there is nothing that our world 
 
 18 
 
Heol GLoOUss CONV b@ RIO N 
 
 needs more than a hopeful confidence that there is 
 something fine we are going to,—some far-off 
 divine event to which the whole creation moves, 
 and also some true measure of progress toward 
 that far-off hope which faithfulness and goodness 
 can attain today. 
 
 At a large assembly of the League for Indus- 
 trial Democracy not long ago, when the needs of 
 our civilization were being discussed before a 
 group of men and women accustomed to think 
 of its economic and social problems, Glenn Frank, 
 the editor of the Century, concluded an analysis 
 of the perils of our present social order by say- 
 ing that what we need is more religion. And 
 David Friday, the economist and statistician, said 
 that what we most need to recapture in order to 
 correct our materialistic drift, is a larger influence 
 of religion and of art. It was not accidental that 
 these two things were put together. Art helps 
 men to reflect the beauty of their world, that, 
 looking up to it, they themselves may be refined, 
 and that the multitude, looking up to the ideal 
 which the artist has embodied, may be refined by 
 that contemplation; but the beauty which is 
 wrought into canvas or marble, is only a frag- 
 mentary part of that influence which men need to 
 make them feel that the world is a fair place. 
 There must be the spirit which can touch the com- 
 
 we, 
 
SOME OPEN ways TO GOD 
 
 mon surroundings and the ordinary duties of 
 every day with the light of a suggested beauty, 
 so that existence, which otherwise might be a 
 plodding and a discouraging thing, may have the 
 morning sunlight breaking across its fields and the 
 song of larks within its sky. In the long run, that 
 ‘nvincible sense of a beauty even among common 
 things is not possible without the religious spirit. 
 It requires the ‘award conviction which cries to 
 itself, ‘“O worship the Lord in the beauty of holli- 
 ness. O come, let us sing unto the Lord.” If we 
 want to see in one vivid realization how different 
 the world looks to the spirit which is filled with the 
 sense of God, we need only look to the life of 
 Jesus. He opened the doors into the undreamt-of 
 universe that lies around our life. To ordinary 
 men their world was largely made up of eating 
 and drinking, of toil and uninspired drudgery, of 
 the routine of common days with no glory break- 
 ing through. But when He came, it was as 
 though one said, “There is another universe which 
 environs us as the ocean environs the little island 
 in its bosom. Come out from under the covert 
 of your trees that you may sce and hear it. All 
 along the shore of life is its eternal music. Every- 
 thing that lives and blooms is fed by the moistures 
 that come from its far sweep. Out to its infinite 
 horizons of adventure, it can lead your spirit 
 20 
 
RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 
 
 on. Round your littleness is the largeness of 
 God.” It needed no change of place or circum- 
 stance for Jesus to feel and make His disciples 
 feel this divineness in which, if we choose, we may 
 live and move and have our being. He went 
 along the common ways of Galilee. Men looked 
 and said, There is nothing in the field except the 
 insignificant lilies which are too familiar to be 
 noticed. Jesus said, The field is full of the grace 
 and glory of God. The disciples looked into the 
 market-place and said, There is nothing here but 
 a group of noisy children playing. Jesus said, 
 The market-place is full of the innocence, the lift 
 of the spirit, the blessed youthfulness out of which 
 alone can be builded the Kingdom of God. A 
 woman stooped to give a child a cup of water. 
 The disciples passed on unnoting; but Jesus said, 
 Here is the compassion out of which the redemp- 
 tion of God is made. A woman of the streets 
 came into the house of Simon the Pharisee and 
 bowed at His feet. She is a sinful woman, said 
 Simon. She is the open gateway for the incoming 
 saintliness of God, said Jesus. In the last night 
 in the upper room, He took water and a basin 
 and girded Himself with a towel, that He might 
 wash the disciples’ feet. It is the deed of a ser- 
 vant, thought the disciples as they shrank away. It 
 is the self-expression of the holy love wherein God 
 oy 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 is most revealed, said the one disciple who in after 
 years could see into his Master’s heart. The lily 
 in the field, the water in the cup, bread and wine 
 on the table, the towel of the servant—these be- 
 came sacramental things, pathways of star-dust for 
 angelic entrances, golden gateways for the coming 
 in of God Himself. 
 
 It is only as men and women become able to 
 think of their world in some such way as that 
 today that we shall be able to make it over. We 
 do not lack the materials for noble civilization. 
 In spite of the awful wastage of the war, the vast 
 resources of the earth, and the accumulated power 
 of human knowledge, are sufficient to build again 
 a social and economic order in which all men 
 might have room to live and grow. What we lack 
 most of all is a genuine confidence in the worth- 
 whileness of effort. The war has left many people 
 wondering whether there is anything real in life 
 except cruelty and selfishness. ‘They have seen 
 the wretched confusion into which secret diplomacy 
 and business rivalries and jealous antagonisms of 
 national interests have led us. Is there some- 
 thing better ahead to strive for? If there is not, 
 we shall slip back into the kind of disgust and 
 cynicism which are the paralysis of effort. If we 
 are to go forward to optimistic living for the in- 
 dividual and to confident reconstruction of our 
 society, it will only be because men are lifted up 
 
 22 
 
RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 
 
 in spirit to see that possible beauty which falls 
 upon their world of striving from the light of 
 their faith in God. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In the third place, we need religious conviction 
 in order that men may bear themselves courage- 
 ously even in those hours when all the beauty 
 seems to have vanished from their world. For 
 those hours of gloom do surely come. For every 
 life there are times when there is a drab monotony 
 about the things it must try to do, when there is 
 no color of flags to float above its obscure moral 
 struggles, and when duty must be followed with- 
 out the drum-beat. But no principle of living is 
 worth much unless it does provide driving force 
 for these otherwise uninspired flats of existence. 
 Vagrant emotions of many kinds may lift us to 
 some fine thought or generous deed for an instant; 
 but without the kind of continuing power which 
 religion furnishes, these things are apt to evapor- 
 ate in empty sentiment. Dwight L. Moody, with, 
 his penetrating common sense, had the truth in 
 mind in the reply he made to Wilfred Grenfell 
 when Grenfell, then a young medical student in 
 London, heard Moody preach in an evangelistic 
 service and was moved to a new religious convic- 
 
 tion. Months after that, he met Mr. Moody and 
 23 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 told him how he had been stirred. This is what 
 Moody said, ‘What have you been doing since ?”’ 
 That is the question which comes to every man. 
 If you have thought that life ought to be a fine 
 thing, what have you been doing about it since? 
 And can you do it without religion, which is the 
 steadying touch of the hands of God? In his 
 heroic service along the grim coasts of Labrador, 
 of which all the world knows, Dr. Grenfell has 
 exhibited in our modern time the power of religion 
 to help men live gallantly and work unflaggingly. 
 In his autobiography, he has written, “Whether 
 we, our neighbor, or God is the judge, absolutely 
 the only value of our religious life, to ourselves or 
 to anyone, is what it fits us for and enables us to 
 do. God’s ‘Well done’ is only spoken to the man 
 who wills to do His will.’ And he wrote again, 
 “Feeble and divergent as my own footsteps have 
 been since my decision to follow Jesus Christ, I 
 believe more than ever that this is the only real 
 adventure of life. No step in life do 1 even com- 
 pare with that one in permanent satisfaction. I 
 deeply regret that I did not take it sooner. The 
 decision and endeavor to follow Christ does for 
 man what nothing else on earth can.” 
 
 The power of belief in God is needed to keep 
 men faithful to duty even when their attempted 
 faithfulness seems for the time to end in nothing 
 but disaster. As long as the skies are fair, any 
 
 2.4 
 
RELLGiIOUS) CONVICTION 
 
 man with a sturdy moral purpose can go ahead 
 with honor, but it requires an ultimate religious 
 passion of conviction, whether through fair 
 weather or foul, whether through success or long 
 postponement and humiliation, to cleave to the 
 brave attempt when every evidence of the world 
 points derisively against it. ‘The confused and 
 sometimes sordid facts of our actual world may 
 shatter the expectations which the good man 
 would seem to have a right to. Those who ought 
 to be friends are indifferent and selfish, and false- 
 hood finds its sinister ways to combat the noble 
 thing it fears. Love may stand helpless before 
 stubborn ingratitude and the locked doors of a 
 wilfull heart; truth may knock in vain at the gates 
 of sullen error; courage and generous service may 
 find themselves assailed by treacherous foes; the 
 cause which ought to have succeeded languishes; 
 the crusade that lifted its lances into the sunlight 
 of the morning rides down into the vale of some 
 disastrous overthrow. Then comes the tempta- 
 tion to believe that effort has gone for naught. 
 All things continue as they were from the begin- 
 ning. What has been the use of inspiration and 
 of effort? The brief day of the best that one 
 could do draws to its end, and little is there to 
 show for what has been attempted. What is there 
 but futility in the best that one has tried to be 
 and do? 
 
 25 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 Then back of that sense of immediate failure 
 there can rise the consciousness of the background 
 of God. What He can do, what He will do, is 
 not measured by the apparent result of the 1so- 
 lated human effort. What any life has tried must 
 be set in relation to the far sweep of His thought 
 and plan. Grandly and unperturbed His purposes 
 move on to their fulfillment. He is not troubled 
 nor in haste, nor need men be. The tides may ebb 
 and flow, but the strength of God which works 
 through all faithful living is like the upheaval 
 of the continents which slowly through the ages, 
 yet with infinite certitude, lifts the firm land above 
 the sea and widens the margin of safety on which 
 the feet of the coming years may go. 
 
 If we should seek an illustration of this faith 
 in the vindication of God which rises superior to 
 all temporary disaster, we could hardly find a- 
 better one than in that life, which, next to the life 
 of Jesus Himself, has been the greatest force in 
 making Christianity what it is. Paul, the apostle, 
 who originally had been one of the powerful 
 leaders in the official ranks of Judaism and then 
 had become a missionary of the Gospel of Christ, 
 went out to execution from a prison at Rome. 
 There were those who would hear the news about 
 him with contemptuous satisfaction. He was the 
 man who would turn the world upside down. 
 Well, the world was not ready to be turned up- 
 
 26 
 
RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 
 
 ~ side down, and so to their minds his life had the 
 usual climax which the enthusiast may look for- 
 ward to. He lived to be discredited and to die 
 in obscurity. Doubtless the elders in the city of 
 Tarsus from which Paul had come, shook their 
 heads with sage regret. It was too bad that Paul, 
 with all his possibilities, could not have had a little 
 more sound sense. If he had not chased dreams, 
 he might have succeeded, instead of coming to 
 nothing, as very obviously he had. 
 
 The news filtered through also to the little con- 
 gregations of men and women to whom Paul had 
 preached in many cities of the great Roman civili- 
 zation of that day. They met together in Corinth, 
 in Thessalonica, in Athens, in the towns of Gala- 
 tia, and heard the tidings with a hush. It did not 
 seem possible that he could really be dead, he who 
 had once been so full of flaming life. ‘They re- 
 membered when he first came to them, ardent with 
 his message. He preached to them of hope. Lis- 
 tening to him, they forgot their poverty and their 
 need. They forgot the oppression of that hard 
 Roman world in which they dwelt, with all its 
 weight of suffering, and its old legacy of war. 
 They saw the vision grow of a better kingdom of 
 mankind made into a brotherhood, where there 
 should be justice and peace in the love of Christ. 
 Paul had meant all these things to them, and Paul 
 was dead. Now that he was gone, was the dream 
 
 27 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS) GOWG Gap 
 
 gone too? Would there be any real betterment 
 for their world, after all? 
 
 But in contrast with all these groups who 
 thought of him with contempt, or with regret, or 
 with wistfulness, study Paul himself. Death 
 opened those prison doors and looked in to find 
 no broken figure, but to find instead a soul with 
 all its high confidence gathered into triumphant 
 strength. He had not been thinking of defeat, 
 but of victory. He had not been thinking of 
 failure, but of achievement,—and this in spite of 
 the fact that the ordinary reckoning saw little 
 sign of anything that he had achieved. He did 
 not leave anything behind him. There was an old 
 cloak, it is true, which he mentions in his letter 
 to Timothy, some books, and a few parchments. 
 Beyond these things, heirs had no concern about 
 his possessions. His concern was in another realm 
 of realities altogether. He had given his life to 
 a cause which was mightier than any visible ex- 
 pression of it. He had laid hold of an eternal 
 thing, and therefore neither it nor he could fail. 
 And the history of his influence for these nine- 
 teen hundred years is the witness that he was not 
 mistaken. 
 
 As we remember the words which Paul wrote 
 we can understand why it was that he knew he 
 could not fail. I have fought the good fight, he 
 
 28 
 
RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 
 
 said. I have finished my course. I have kept the 
 faith. 
 Kipling in one of his ballads says: 
 
 The race is run by one and one 
 And never by two and two. 
 
 But life’s race, as a matter of fact, is run by one 
 and one and also by two and two. There can be 
 no fine achievement for any individuals, nor for 
 families, nor for nations, except in so far as the 
 single lives, each in its own lap of the relay, do 
 give the utmost ounce of effort required of them 
 to carry the torch of truth and honor and service 
 forward in the progress of their time. Yet with 
 this goes the correlative truth that with no indi- 
 vidual are the ends of the whole race exhausted. 
 If one has done his best, he is not defeated though 
 he fall. If only he has finished his course, he has 
 thereby launched on its way the life that waits on 
 his for inspiration. He may not be there to see 
 when and how the race is won. His eyes may 
 not reach forward to the finish line. When the 
 long progress of the soul of man comes to its 
 climax, and the flags of God are hoisted to hail 
 the triumph of the victors, it will not greatly mat- 
 ter though he have fallen spent at the end of his 
 partial course. He too is part of the ultimate 
 victory, and in the great spiritual awareness of 
 
 29 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 the ultimate things he already knows it. That 
 was why Paul in the prison knew that his race was 
 not in vain. Other hands should take the torch 
 which he passed on. Other feet should set forth 
 on the track of the purposes of God because the 
 contagion of his heroic beginning was passed on 
 to them. There are those in high place who start 
 for some great goal that waits within the gift of 
 God for the achievement of our human race. 
 They may fall; but before they fall, they have 
 touched their comrade in the coming relay, and 
 they have not failed. They are spent, but the race 
 is sped. And less dramatic lives there are of 
 whom the same is true. When men are discour- 
 aged because they know that some true thing they 
 set out to obtain will never be reached within 
 their own experience, when they are conscious that 
 the best things they have striven for are still far 
 beyond their reach, and that their strength wanes 
 and the time is short,—still may they take heart 
 again and keep on in faithfulness on all the way 
 which God has marked for them; for there at the 
 end of it wait the runners who shall take up the 
 brave incentive which their lives pass on. There 
 are the dreamers of another generation waiting 
 to be set free. There are the high hopes of to- 
 morrow reaching out for the touch of their faith- 
 fulness today. 
 
 So the heart of courage which religion gives 
 
 30 
 
REE BO LOS AC GENIE EC Ou 
 
 may still beat invincibly in the midst of weariness 
 and seeming defeat. That was true of the great 
 apostle to the Gentiles. It was true in so vivid 
 a measure that it needs no pointing out in the 
 case of the life of Jesus. It can be true with all 
 lives. The prophet Isaiah rightly shaped his 
 words to their climax when he wrote of those 
 who, being touched by the spirit of God, “shall 
 mount up with wings as eagles, shall run and not 
 be weary, shall walk and not faint.” It is the 
 long, hard pull that counts, the steady pressing on 
 when life is too bruised to fly, too weary to run, 
 and can only take one painful determined step at 
 atime. Then in the midst of discouragement the 
 man who looks to God is still undaunted. 
 
 “It fortifies my soul to know 
 That, though I perish, Truth 1s so: 
 That, howsoe’er I stray and range, 
 What’er I do, Thou dost not change. 
 I steadier step when I recall 
 
 That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall.” 
 
 31 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE REALITY OF GOD FOR PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 
 
 Nor long ago-.a caravan started across the 
 Sahara Desert to find the oases of Kufara, to 
 which very few Europeans had ever penetrated. 
 It was a hazardous adventure, and one which must 
 end disastrously unless across the desert the right 
 track were followed which would lead without 
 unnecessary delay to the oases. Day by day the 
 caravan went on over the blistering white sand 
 of the desert. The water which they had brought 
 with them failed. They began to suffer the in- 
 creasing agonies of thirst. At length, some of the 
 caravan, their throats on fire, their tongues 
 swollen, half delirious and wholly spent, staggered 
 and fell in the sand. It seemed to them useless 
 to keep up the agony of effort. The desert ap- 
 peared to stretch with mocking emphasis on every 
 side. They never could reach the oases. Perhaps, 
 after all, there were none to reach. But one man, 
 the guide, hardened himself against despair. The 
 oases did exist, he said. They must be near. So 
 he pressed on over a swell of the desert sand, and 
 as he surmounted it, there before him lay the 
 green paradise of the wells of Kufara. Because 
 he believed, in the face of contrary appearance, 
 ‘n the face of doubt and seeming disaster, he 
 
 32 
 
Per EO AST Y- )O:-Be, GOD 
 
 achieved for himself and for others the life-saving 
 Pact, 
 
 When Columbus set out in his tiny vessels from 
 the port of Spain to find a new way to the Indies, 
 he unfurled the flags of his adventure in the face 
 of a world that mostly viewed his whole imagining 
 with a scornful disbelief. Out’ into the trackless 
 ocean, never dared before, he pointed his prows. 
 Doubtless the men who went with him, drawn from 
 the daredeviltry of Spanish seamanship, were not 
 lacking in courage and resolution; but as the days 
 went on, and the awful loneliness of the empty 
 horizon still stretched before them, they grew 
 mutinous. They thought that they were sailing 
 with a mad adventurer on to death. Columbus 
 himself had no proof that he could give them 
 which had been drawn from any other man’s ex- 
 perience. No living soul had ever crossed those 
 waters before. Upon nothing but his own intre- 
 pid conviction could he stand. Nevertheless he 
 clung so unflinchingly to his belief that these west- 
 ern paths, if followed to the end, would lead to 
 the reality which his imagaination had told him 
 must be true, that he held to his course and com- 
 pelled his crew to follow. Because he did so, the 
 gates were opened to the mighty continent which 
 had lain undiscovered till he showed the way to 
 find it. The whole earth was suddenly enlarged 
 because this man followed his dream. The mighty 
 
 35 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 spaces of the western world, which before that 
 time had lain as though non-existent, out of the 
 ken of civilization, suddenly became the heritage 
 for the expanding life of man. 
 
 Which things, as the New Testament might say, 
 are an allegory. Here are illustrations of the 
 fact that a deliberate conviction in that which is 
 still unseen and unproven and a resulting shaping 
 of the will in terms of that conviction may make 
 the difference between success and failure and be- 
 tween life and death. Follow that illustration into 
 the realm of religion, and we understand the cru- 
 cial value of that instinctive sense of a reality as 
 yet unseen which leads on to the discovery of God. 
 Without God, our spirits may be like vessels on an 
 empty sea or like the caravan bewildered in the 
 desert. To the mind unlighted by religious faith, 
 there may be no reality beyond that which the im- 
 mediate experiences suggest; but if God does exist 
 as a fact beyond the borders of the uninspired 
 consciousness, then it is infinitely tmmportant to 
 know it, for the discovery of Him may be like the 
 discovery of a new continent in which the life of 
 man finds the splendor of its more spacious oppor- 
 tunity, or like the discovery, in the midst of what 
 otherwise would be the desert, of the great oasis 
 with its wells of life. 
 
 Most people will admit the importance of God 
 and the need of God. Blatant and deliberate 
 
 Ass 
 
ila Beek A WV Y, 2OVR GOD 
 
 atheism is rare. Men are willing to acknowledge 
 possibilities beyond what they or their neighbors 
 may have laid hold of, and will say like Hamlet, 
 “There are more things in heaven and earth, 
 Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 
 But though thus men do not deny that God may 
 be, the trouble with our time is that many con- 
 fessedly have not found Him. They are conscious 
 that He might be a fact of immeasurable signifi- 
 cance for their living if once they became aware 
 of Him; but they are not aware of Him. Many 
 Christians acknowledge this inwardly to them- 
 selves, even when they stand in Church and say the 
 mighty words, “I believe in God.” 
 
 I 
 
 Why is this? That is what we want to try to 
 answer. If we can discover some of the reasons 
 why the apprehension of God is difficult for many 
 people today, we can more intelligently see our 
 way to overpass the difficulties which block the 
 road to faith. 
 
 1. The first difficulty is the fact that most of us 
 have grown up out of the child’s naive conception 
 of what God is, and we have never attained any 
 other, equally vivid, to take its place. Thought is 
 bewildered; for it knows it cannot conceive God 
 according to the child’s imagery, and, having lost 
 
 35 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 that, it has lost all definiteness of conception what- 
 ever and gropes as ina fog. With the passing of 
 the years, we grow out of the old thoughts of God, 
 but do not grow into new ones, and land in empti- 
 ness. Sometimes for men and women God has 
 dropped as completely into the realm of the out- 
 grown imaginations as has the old belief in Santa 
 Claus. One day, shortly after Christmas, I met 
 two little boys whom I knew, one of them about 
 eleven and his small brother about five. I said to 
 the older one, “I hope you had a fine Christmas.” 
 “Well,” he said, “I did; but it was a lot nicer 
 when I was young.” Already he had begun to 
 grow out of the happy illusions which made the 
 keenest thrill and wonderment of Christmas for 
 him. Already the vision splendid had begun to 
 fade into the light of common day. And this is 
 true with the thoughts that have to do with God. 
 For them, too, there is a time of youth, bright 
 with the childish confidence, filled with all sweet, 
 instinctive expectation; and then, it is as though 
 the dream world were shattered before the hard 
 thrust of maturer facts. A little girl of six and 
 her tiny brother of three were heard conversing 
 one day—and this also was at the Christmas sea- 
 son—to this effect. Said the little boy: “Elisa- 
 beth, wouldn’t you like to die?’ ‘To which she, 
 being a matter-of-fact small person, replied en- 
 phatically: “No. Why should I want to die 2’ 
 36 
 
er Be Roe Ae al Ye Ose) GOD 
 
 “Well,” he persisted, ‘‘wouldn’t you like to die and 
 go to heaven?” ‘‘What do you want to go to 
 heaven for?” said she. “Well, wouldn’t you like 
 ‘to go to heaven and play around with God and the 
 angels and the little Christ-child?” he persisted. 
 “Oh! He’s grown up long ago,” she answered. 
 At which the little boy was much cast down. 
 
 For heaven in his imagination was quite as vivid 
 and real a place as his nursery filled with toys, 
 and God and the little Christ-child quite as under- 
 standable as his own father and as any little boy. 
 ‘To play around with God and the angels and the 
 Christ-child,” seemed a very desirable way of 
 spending the time, and quite as real and possible 
 as anything else that might happen in his wonder- 
 crowded world. 
 
 But what have we grown-up people achieved by 
 way of replacement for the child’s imagination 
 of the unseen? For him there are no intellectual 
 difficulties at all in thinking of God in that same 
 close human way in which he thinks of everything; 
 but the growth of knowledge inexorably takes the 
 child’s mind, even as the other growth takes his 
 body, out of the comfortable crib of the little ideas 
 in which he lay so contentedly and played. The 
 universe has expanded so immeasurably that we are © 
 bewildered in the midst of its shivering immensity 
 of space. Once it was so compact that it was not 
 dificult to think of a God greater than any human 
 
 37 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS LONGO 
 
 being, and yet not removed from human likeness 
 by any too vast degree. The earth was the centre 
 of the whole creation, and above the blue arch 
 of the sky, with the stars like torches at its gates, 
 was the plain locality of heaven; but then to the 
 minds of men accustomed to this limited and man- 
 ageable universe came first the shock of the Coper- 
 nican astronomy. Of a sudden the old conviction 
 that the earth was the centre of all existence van- 
 ished before the awful imagination of a solar 
 system with its immeasurable distances, through 
 which gigantic planets cruise, in comparison with 
 which the tiny globe of earth is like a mote dancing 
 in a ray of the sun. The old thought of heaven 
 there above the visible firmament was rolled up 
 like a scroll, and men’s eyes looked aghast into a 
 vast emptiness between the uncounted stars. When 
 Laplace said that he had searched the heavens 
 with his telescope and found no sign of God, he 
 was only expressing, from the somewhat cynical 
 point of view of the man of learning, the doubt 
 which the common man wistfully felt. God’s 
 throne and abiding place seemed to have vanished, 
 and the mind fainted before the awful distances 
 through which it would have to try to follow Him. 
 
 Later there came the discoveries of the geolo- 
 gists and brought to the old ideas of time the same 
 dislocation which had already come to the ideas of 
 space. Whatever the immensity of the universe, 
 
 38 
 
DHE RE AL ET Ye Ob GOD 
 
 ‘when men concentrated on the history of their 
 own race on this planet, they found themselves 
 back in the realm of a conception limited enough to 
 be understandable. A few thousand years com- 
 prehended the whole history of mankind from the 
 Garden of Eden to the beginning of the Christian 
 era, and the Old and New Testaments, and Chris- 
 tian history, taking up the story where the New 
 Testament left it off, if judiciously read, made plain 
 the relationship of God with His human children 
 from the definite beginning all down the well- 
 marked way. But the geologists rolled back the 
 beginning of history into a timeless void before 
 which the imagination staggered; and swift upon 
 the heels of the geologists came the new teachers 
 of evolution with their conception of the rise of 
 man out of primitive pre-human forms through 
 a process in which the recorded history is only 
 a little moment in comparison with the aeons of 
 the unrecorded years. There vanishes then like a 
 dream the simple picture of the Garden of Eden, 
 vanishes too the thought of a God who created 
 man and all the world he lives in, as though with 
 visible hands, and in the cool of the day walked 
 in the garden where He had placed the man He 
 made. Before this new teaching many would-be 
 religious folk who wanted to hold on to old con- 
 victions and now did not know how, made doleful 
 clamor. They said—and some say yet—that if 
 
 39 
 
SOM EVO PEN OW ALY S. of OGD 
 
 the evolutionists were listened to, God were as 
 good as lost. If life developed in the way the 
 evolutionists said it did and through the incon- 
 ceivable time which the geologists claimed, then 
 what would become of any thinkable idea of a 
 divine creation? “Ihe very conception of creator- 
 ship seemed to them to vanish, and along with it 
 the Creator Himself. 
 
 Of course it is true that other suggestions from 
 philosophy and poetry came along to try to fill 
 the void which the troubled religious conscious- 
 ness felt. Men might try to be content, as Words- 
 worth was, with 
 
 ‘‘A sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean, and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things.” 
 
 But it was, after all, a thin contentment. That 
 thought of God might be all very well for a poet’s 
 rhapsody; but it does not feed the actual hunger 
 of the heart. Yet it is as much as many people 
 possess. God is swallowed in His universe. He 
 may “roll through all things’; but it is like the 
 
 40 
 
MH aweAL LLY) OF) GOD 
 
 rolling of a mist which takes elusive shapes and 
 then is gone. 
 
 That, then, is one reason why faith in God is 
 vague for so many men and women now. We have 
 put away childish things and have not yet won the 
 more mature perception in their place. Before 
 we can effectively believe in God, we must attain 
 a thought of Him which will be adequate for our 
 changed universe, and yet will be close and satis- 
 fying for those same human needs which men feel 
 now as surely as they did when intellectually the 
 universe seemed so simple and so small. 
 
 2. The second reason why it may be difficult in 
 our time to believe greatly in God is because we 
 live in the midst of a civilization so huge and self- 
 sufficient that often it seems to make quite unim- 
 portant the question as to whether there is any 
 God or not. It would appear as though the sys- 
 tem which we had created could take care of it- 
 self. There is such multiplicity of physical and 
 material causes producing the things we want that 
 there may not seem any necessity of concerning 
 oneself about a great First Cause who for practi- 
 cal purposes appears to be very remote, even as- 
 suming that He exists at all. 
 
 In earlier and simpler times that, of course, was 
 not true. When men lived closer to the primal 
 realities, and no long chain of human intermedi- 
 aries intervened between themselves and the 
 
 41 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 sources of their life, they were conscious of the 
 more immediate meaning of God. The great 
 prophets often were men who dwelt in the desert. 
 Of such were Elijah, and Amos, and John the 
 Baptist. Moses did not come to Egypt ready for 
 his leadership until he had passed his lonely exile 
 in Sinai. David went down to the camp of Saul 
 to fight Goliath from the solitude of his mountain 
 pastures, where he was alone with his own 
 thoughts and with his sense of the presence of 
 God. Jesus came out of the little town of Na- 
 zareth, and spent his life with men who lived close 
 to the simplicities of nature—fishermen familiar 
 with the daily hazard of the lake, tillers of the 
 fields, carpenters, and other workers with their 
 hands. When men thus do touch for themselves 
 the basic things of earth—the soil with its fer- 
 tility, into which they must cast seed in trust, wind 
 and weather, the unpredictable changes of frost 
 and heat, of sun and storm, then along with the 
 consciousness of their own limitations there grows 
 the sense of reverence for the ultimate power into 
 whose presence they are brought. Standing upon 
 the borderland of fact, they look across it into the 
 realm of mystery with which their daily interests 
 are brought into immediate contact, and it matters 
 vitally whether in the midst of that mystery of the 
 environing forces there is one whom they can call 
 God. Whether the seed will grow, whether the 
 
 42 
 
Tbh Reb Ade iD iy OW? GOD 
 
 tree will blossom and the blossom ripen to its fruit, 
 whether the lake will yield its fish, depends upon 
 there being something friendly at the heart of 
 things which answers to the need of man. The 
 simpler man’s work is, and the nearer he comes to 
 those original elements out of which all human 
 production is built up, the less he can depend upon 
 the manipulations of other men to bring him ad- 
 vantage, and the more he perceives the prime ne- 
 cessity of God. That is why there is usually a 
 more instinctive sense of God, a sturdier and more 
 native religious consciousness, among people who 
 live in the open than among those who live in 
 cities. No long train of artificialities stretches be- 
 tween the results they work for and the sources out 
 of which they come. You can explain a city by 
 expatiating upon the restless energies of men; but 
 you cannot explain that way the ripening of the 
 grain, the silence of the winter snow, or the 
 wakening magic of the birth of spring, the flight 
 of the migrating birds, or the march of stars 
 across the open sky. 
 
 In our modern civilization, more and more in- 
 dustrialized, men are removed from any fresh per- 
 ception of those things upon which all work and 
 the wealth of the world depend and begin to as- 
 sume that the machinery which brings them the 
 thing they want has somehow created it too. They 
 buy their food in a market to which the railroads 
 
 43 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 have brought it. They live in a house which some- 
 body else has built. They wear clothes which have 
 been woven on the looms of some distant factory. 
 Nearly all of the products they consume come to 
 them ready-made out of a process which seems to 
 be everywhere material and nowhere spiritual. 
 Let a man drop a piece of money in the industrial 
 machine, and the intricate wheels of its exchange 
 go round, so that, without further ado, there is 
 delivered to him meat for his dinner, the suit of 
 clothes for him to wear, the book for him to read, 
 or anything else for which, for the price attached, 
 he may choose to call. In this society which we 
 have constructed, it would appear to be quite non- 
 essential to a man’s success that he have any par- 
 ticular idea about God, but very essential that he 
 have an accurate idea of the way to relate him- 
 self to the business machine. God helps those who 
 help themselves, a man is told. The important 
 thing, therefore, is that a man should help him- 
 self. ‘The question as to what God will do, if any- 
 thing, may be left to the pious aftermath of con- 
 sideration in whatever time may be left after the 
 practical matter is seen to. 
 
 As matters stand with us, God very often does 
 not appear except through some violent dislocation 
 which makes a breach in our complacent order. 
 Steamship companies print on their tickets refer- 
 
 44 
 
EL Be Roe A TTY, OCF GOD 
 
 ence to possible “‘acts of God,” by which they mean 
 storm, fire, collision, and other unpredictable 
 calamity, and give no indication that it may be 
 the “act of God” which drives the turbine, and 
 sets the compass, and illumines the intelligence of 
 the captain who steers the ship. In the healing of 
 the sick, we most of us depend completely upon 
 the physician, and sometimes upon very materialis- 
 tic medicine at that, and turn to God only when 
 it is time for proper words to be said above the 
 dying. The minister may be admitted a few steps 
 before the undertaker. Too many of us are like 
 the passengers on the vessel who, when the cap- 
 tain told them that the storm had become so vio- 
 lent that the ship was in grave peril and they had 
 better go to their cabins and pray, said, ‘Oh, 
 Captain, has it come to that?” In the story of the 
 sinking of the Titanic written by one of the sur- 
 vivors, it has been told that, when men and women 
 stood on the decks of the stricken liner on that 
 still winter night when the iceberg had stabbed her 
 to her doom, and later, when those of them who 
 had not gone down with the liner floated here and 
 there on the empty sea in the life-boats, even those 
 who were little accustomed to religious utterance 
 kept saying the Lord’s Prayer and old hymns like 
 “Nearer my God to Thee’; but while the proud 
 ship was speeding on her way, it is likely that her 
 
 45 
 
SOME OREN WANs TO G.@ia 
 
 company were mostly quite satisfied with the suf- 
 ficiency of that luxurious thing which human skill 
 had built and human confidence had launched. At 
 any rate, that is true of multitudes in the general 
 environment of our elaborate civilization, except 
 when some rare iceberg-thrust brings a sterner 
 realization. We are prone to assume that the de- 
 vices which materialism have created are so satis- 
 fying and so dependable that there is no special 
 incitement to go in search of God. 
 
 3. The third reason why belief in God has be- 
 come exceptionally dificult for many persons in 
 our day is because of the contradiction to belief in 
 a loving and sovereign purpose which is caused by 
 the sufferings and the moral evils in the world. Of 
 course these things have been part of men’s ex- 
 perience from the beginning. But two factors of 
 late have accentuated the difficulty. For one thing, 
 there is the almost miraculous development of the 
 means of communication, so that, to the alert in- 
 telligence in any country of the civilized earth, 
 there is immediately brought the news of what- 
 ever critical event may happen in the world’s re- 
 motest places. Until a little more than a century 
 ago, men lived in very narrow circles of movement 
 and of knowledge. They were in touch with the 
 affairs of exceedingly small communities. In the 
 years when America became a nation, it took from 
 
 46 
 
erik baal IYO 5G Oi 
 
 six to nine days for a letter to go from Boston to 
 New York and anywhere from eight weeks to five 
 months for mail to come from England to the 
 United States by way of the sailing vessels that 
 made their way as best they could against the 
 storms and hazards of the Atlantic. Rough roads, 
 muddy and sometimes all but impassable, were 
 the only links of communication between the scat- 
 tered settlements, so that the human awareness 
 of men was provincial to a degree now difficult 
 for us to imagine. The gravest convulsion, either 
 of nature or of war, might break in one country, 
 and by the time the news of it crept through to 
 another people, it would have lost the vividness of 
 immediate fact and become the chronicle of some- 
 thing that had already drifted into the past; but 
 in our modern times, the cable, the telegraph, the 
 newspaper, and now but yesterday the radio, have 
 brought the whole world to the doors of every 
 man’s mind. Mount Etna breaks into eruption in 
 Sicily, and while the smoke and fire of it are still 
 lurid in the Mediterranean sky, men and women 
 are reading of it in Boston and New York and 
 San Francisco. It is not something over and done 
 with, but an immediately contemporary fact which 
 challenges, not only their attention, but their re- 
 sponsibility for help. An earthquake shatters 
 great cities of Japan, kills thousands and tens of 
 
 47 
 
SO'MEE CO PRIN OW AWS) wl OnrG md 
 
 thousands of their inhabitants and leaves a great 
 population destitute, and immediately this thing 
 lays hold, not only of the interest but of the re- 
 sponsible conscience of all civilization, and the 
 calamity becomes a fact upon which the active 
 awareness of innumerable people is concentrated. 
 Thus there is accumulated in the minds of men 
 a mass of impressions which altogether cast their 
 growing shadow over the belief which they might 
 like to cherish in a loving God who holds the earth 
 and its inhabitants in His keeping. The difficulty 
 is made worse by that exaggerated perspective to 
 which the circulation of world news is always sub- 
 ject. The normal processes, both of nature and 
 of human life, the quiet growth of harvests, the 
 homely contentment of millions of families, the 
 inconspicuous acts of human friendships, never 
 get into the news, because they are the common 
 things, taken for granted and assumed as a matter 
 of course; but the calamities, which by the very 
 fact of their singularity stab the attention wide 
 awake, are broadcasted everywhere. Uncon- 
 sciously the ordinary man falls a victim to this dis- 
 torted emphasis. He hears so much of terror and 
 distraction that the world may seem to him a ter- 
 rible and ominous place. What he most often 
 is led to think concerning God is destructive, at 
 least to that sort of idea of Providence which the 
 
 48 
 
Sides SO ABO Ch OL kG 0 1 
 
 childlike mind may hold. He may come to doubt 
 profoundly whether the evidence of the world 
 gives any right to believe in the supremacy of the 
 only kind of God one would desire. 
 
 This process in the human mind was very 
 marked during the years of the war. Of a sudden, 
 all the normal course of things seemed to be 
 swept into a maelstrom of darkness and destruc- 
 tion. From all parts of the earth, from Canada, 
 from far-off Australia and New Zealand, from 
 India and from the United States, the youth of 
 the nations, by the tens of thousands, went to die 
 upon the battlefields of France. Everywhere 
 there were empty homes. Everywhere the shadow 
 of a dark anxiety shut down. Europe itself was 
 shaken to its foundations and racked by the con- 
 cussion of human passions worse than the dreadful 
 concussion of the guns. Not only the mind of 
 soldiers at the front but the whole spirit of great 
 peoples was in a measure shell-shocked. ‘There 
 was a cry, sometimes wistful, sometimes wild and 
 blasphemous, ‘‘What has become of God?” “J 
 have been a Christian all my life, but this war is 
 a bit too serious. So saying,” writes C. E. Mon- 
 tague, “a certain young army recruit had folded 
 up his religion in 1914 and put it away, as it were, 
 in a drawer with his other civilian attire to wait 
 until public affairs should again permit of their 
 
 49 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 use.’ And the greater question is as to whether 
 the ideas of God and of religion which men may 
 have had before the war and which they laid aside 
 in face of the war’s contradiction have in many 
 cases ever been got out again. Some have given 
 up the effort at interpreting this distracted world 
 of ours in religious terms. To their mind there 
 does not seem to be any living God within it, or, 
 if there is one, then they doubt whether He is 
 sufficient for the task He has on His hands in set- 
 ting a mad world right. 
 
 Such, then, are some of the difficulties to re- 
 ligious faith, some of them new to our time, some 
 of them old, but now accentuated. Nevertheless, 
 in the face of them, men are hungry for something 
 they cannot find until they find God. It is true 
 now, as it was true with Augustine, that a deep 
 human instinct cries out to something within the 
 unseen, ‘Thou hast made us for thyself, and our 
 hearts are restless till they rest in thee.’ As Sir 
 Philip Gibbs has written: 
 
 “Yet, by a strange and tragic contradiction, 
 there has been no time in modern history when the 
 peoples of the old civilization have been so des- 
 perately eager for spiritual guidance. There is a 
 great thirst for spiritual refreshment among those 
 in the dry desert of our present discontent. I find 
 expression of that among many men and women 
 not ‘religious’ in temperament nor of a sentimental 
 type, but rather among cynics and realists. In 
 
 50 
 
er tae Reba Ly) Oo be) Gor 
 
 conversation, at the end of pessimism, they are apt 
 to admit that ‘nothing can save us all but some 
 new prophet of God.’ ”’ 
 
 If 
 
 One by one, therefore, let us take up the diff- 
 culties which we have seen beset contemporary be- 
 lief in God and consider by what ways we may go 
 through them to the faith which may lie on the 
 other side. 
 
 1. We need a new conception of God. We 
 have outgrown, as we saw, the naive, childish 
 thoughts, and we must achieve something at once 
 intellectually intelligible and humanly satisfying to 
 take their place. 
 
 It is well to remember that there is no occasion 
 for dismay in the fact that this recasting of our 
 ideas is necessary. That old forms of belief prove 
 no longer tenable may be a sign not of death but 
 of expanding life. 
 
 As Pringle-Pattison has nobly said in his Giffert 
 Lectures: 
 
 ‘Each time that an earthly body of a belief is 
 laid in the dust, it receives a more glorious spirit- 
 ual body, in which it continues to function as of 
 old in the heart of man. ‘Timid theologians who 
 tremble for the ark of God at every advance of 
 scientific knowledge do but repeat the sacrilege of 
 Uzzah in the sacred legend, smitten by the anger 
 
 Ly! 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 of heaven for his officious interference. Faith, 
 which is an active belief in the reality of the ideal, 
 is the very breath by which humanity lives, and it 
 will reconstitute itself afresh as long as the race 
 endures.”’ 
 
 In order to restate our thought of God, we need 
 to begin at the centre of our own most vital knowl- 
 edge and to work outward from that. ‘The one 
 thing which every man knows with immediacy of 
 understanding is his own self. He is aware of 
 himself as a living focus of sensation, thought, de- 
 sire, and action. He is a mind that meditates, a 
 consciousness which feels and discriminates be- 
 tween this and that, a will that launches its ener- 
 gies into his environment. In short, the man him- 
 self is not his body, nor the material world in which 
 his body moves, but that living and energizing 
 self-consciousness, the invisible but most real per- 
 sonality which he knows when he shuts his eyes and 
 looks within. Here within ourselves, in the aware- 
 ness of one separate spirit, every one of us has his 
 most certain consciousness of reality. Now we 
 turn to the words of Jesus, and we read that He 
 said, ‘‘God is a spirit.” If then we want to real- 
 ize the meaning of God, we may well begin by 
 considering what a spirit is and what it does. In- 
 stead of looking first for the reflection of God in 
 the material creation, in solar systems and 
 geologic processes which bewilder the imagina- 
 
 §2 
 
Tea EY ORE Ak WC Ys Obes GOD 
 
 tion, in the making of worlds and rocks and trees 
 and all the designs of things too intricate for us to 
 unravel, we had better postpone all these which 
 we can never know except at second-hand, and look 
 at our own selves, which we know at first-hand, and 
 see what idea of God we can find reflected there. 
 
 When we try that, we come close to some very 
 simple facts, and simple facts are exactly what we 
 need. It may turn out that, in order to find God 
 and understand Him, we do not have to enter upon 
 some elaborate process of argument, but only to 
 take at their clear value the very clearest of our 
 everyday experiences. That clearest and most cer- 
 tain experience is the fact that the invisible spirit 
 which we call ourself is constantly projecting its 
 expression and making its influence felt out in the 
 world of the visible things. A great orator stands 
 up and pleads a cause. People may say that they 
 look at him and see him standing there before their 
 eyes; but, as a matter of fact, of course they do not 
 see him at all. They only see a more or less ani- 
 mated face. They hear some sounds which are 
 made by tongue and teeth in rapid motion. And 
 yet by these means the miracle is being wrought 
 that the man there before them, the invisible per- 
 son who is looking through that face and speaking 
 through that voice, does use those instruments to 
 convey his thoughts into the minds of those other 
 invisible persons who sit in the listening throng. 
 
 a 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 Meanwhile where is the man who is pouring out 
 the passion of his plea? He is there in his body, 
 of course, you say. Butishe? He uses his body; 
 but he certainly is not in it in any limited spatial 
 sense. He is in control of a body which is the fo- 
 cus of his self-expression; but he is not only there, 
 if the multitude is listening to him; he in a real 
 sense is as truly yonder among the crowd as he is 
 at the place where his body stands. Thus while 
 he remains himself, the man is entering into other 
 selves, and not merely into different persons in suc- 
 cession, but into many persons at the same time. 
 Wherever he makes himself understood and felt, 
 there the actual spiritual fact of him is. 
 
 To make still more clear what I mean, let me 
 put it this way. I know of two men who live in 
 different cities, and one day one of them fell to 
 thinking of his absent friend. He sat down and 
 wrote him a letter, simply to tell him that he was 
 thinking of him and missing the sight of him. A 
 few days later there came a reply from the one to 
 whom the letter went, and this is what he wrote. 
 He said, ‘Your letter came at exactly the right 
 time. It so happened that I was feeling very blue 
 and discouraged that morning because I was facing 
 a business interview which I shrank from very 
 much. The men whom I was to meet had been 
 prejudiced against me by representations made to 
 them beforehand to my disadvantage, and I had 
 
 54 
 
Te beOR bh Ao leh Y" .Ob.G.OD 
 
 very little hope of being able to get my own pro- 
 posal fairly considered. Then your letter came, 
 ‘just when a feller needed a friend,’ and bucked me 
 up so that I went to the meeting with a new con- 
 fidence, presented my case with conviction and car- 
 ried the point I was fighting for.” 
 
 Where that day was the man who wrote the first 
 letter of affection to his absent friend? In com- 
 mon speech it would be said that he was where his 
 body was—that is to say, that he was hundreds of 
 miles distant from the city where that friend of his 
 was facing his particular difficulty; and yet it 1s 
 perfectly clear, as a matter of living fact, that he 
 was not only where visibly he seemed to be, but 
 also where his friend, with the apprehension of his 
 spirit, found him to be. The thought of the one 
 had gone out to the other. His affection and sym- 
 pathy were with his friend, and to that friend’s 
 apprehension it was exactly as though he were 
 there. In the immediate relationship to his 
 friend’s consciousness, that is exactly where he 
 was. 
 
 When men were at the front in France, they 
 were often desperately lonely. Sometimes in their 
 loneliness, when they got out of the lines, they 
 would go and do unclean things because all the 
 decent safeguards of home were far away. But 
 there were men who carried with them a picture of 
 their mother, or a Bible perhaps which they had 
 
 a8) 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 had from her. Another man might have with him, 
 there in the pocket of his uniform, a letter from 
 the girl he loved at home. When they remem- 
 bered these, they were aware of something that 
 bridged the far distance between themselves and 
 home. The spirit of the one they loved was stand- 
 ing at their side with a sweetness of high expecta- 
 tion, and confidence, and strength; and those men 
 were stayed, and kept clean and courageous, be- 
 cause of the presence that walked, unseen to others, 
 at their side. 
 
 Such facts as these help at least to point the way 
 toward our right thought of God. The more we 
 think of our own spirits and of the human spirits 
 which come into touch with ours, the more we com- 
 prehend the living Reality, invisible and imma- 
 terial, which can express itself irrespective of space 
 or time. 
 
 The beauty of this conception of God is that it 
 is not something to be settled by abstract argu- 
 ment, but that it can be put to the test. It need 
 not be inferred from books. It can be demon- 
 strated through obedience. As there are certain 
 laws of the physical world by which, when a man 
 conforms to them, he possesses power which is 
 ready to flow through them to him, so there are 
 spiritual laws concerning the communication of 
 God through which a man may test the truth of 
 that which he would fain believe in. Both in the 
 
 56 
 
Ri akeA TTY, (One Gow 
 
 physical world and in the spiritual, the miracles of 
 the realized experience wait for him who will not 
 stop before the empty curtain of appearance. We 
 sit, for example, in a room where all is silent. 
 There are no voices in the air, we think, and yet 
 there are. Let a man set up the antenne of his 
 radio. Let him turn its adjustment by so much as 
 a hair, and suddenly out of the void come the 
 voices. Here is the music of someone singing yon- 
 der in a distant place. Here are the accents of a 
 man speaking on some great national concern. 
 These things are going on in the world whether we 
 are conscious or unconscious; but when we adjust 
 ourselves to them, they become part of the world 
 in which we live and move and have our being. 
 Thus is it also with our spiritual contacts with God. 
 As material science makes plain to us that the uni- 
 verse is full of possibilities hitherto undreamed of, 
 to which we can link our familiar experience, so 
 religion teaches us that the spiritual atmosphere 
 also is filled at every instant with those energies 
 that speak directly to the soul of man. God is not 
 far from any one of us. He is near and close, 
 personally to be known, lived in, and thereby 
 proved. 
 
 But someone may say of this idea that God 
 exists and can make Himself felt by us in the same 
 way in which one human personality makes itself 
 upon another, that all the corroborative evidences 
 
 57 
 
SOME) OPEN WANS, “CO mGaoe® 
 
 which make us able to believe in the human per- 
 sonality are lacking in the case of God. We hear 
 another person speak, and so infer directly the liv- 
 ing consciousness which is speaking. We see the 
 expression on the visible face. We look at the 
 light in visible eyes; but we cannot see any embodi- 
 ment of God nor hear any accents of His voice, 
 and there are apparently endless logical difficulties 
 to believing thus in God. How do we know that 
 our thought of Him is anything more than the im- 
 age of our own desire projected into the empty 
 infinite,.as the tiny picture within the stereopticon 
 is projected outside itself upon a screen? That is 
 what much of the modern psychology is saying: 
 religion is simply an interior complex; God is a 
 figment of our own brains. 
 
 To that question this is the answer. Let us re- 
 member what happens when men lay hold of the 
 bold hypothesis—if in the beginning it be no more 
 than that—that God is the living Spirit with whom 
 their own spirits can come into touch in the same 
 essential way in which one human spirit enters into 
 the life of another. It is true that we identify 
 every human personality whom we know with a 
 particular human body—with a face and eyes and 
 a look we love—in which that person seems to 
 dwell; but the more we reflect upon the inner real- 
 ity of spirit, and the more we experience the power 
 of another spirit to find us, to follow us, and to 
 
 58 
 
PH be eR EAL Ty: OR? GOD 
 
 touch our inner understanding, the more we begin 
 at least to find it thinkable that the infinite Spirit 
 of God can be independent of any physical focus, 
 and that, though He does not dwell in any body 
 which our physical eyes can look upon, neverthe- 
 less from that centre of thought and love and will 
 which is Himself, the immediate reality of His 
 Spirit can go out everywhere to all His children 
 who will let themselves become aware of Him. 
 And when a life is joined in belief to God, then 
 the experience of religion proclaims that there 1s 
 such a blossoming as testifies to the reality of the 
 cause which has produced it. Fruit does not grow 
 unless it is joined to the living tree; and if through 
 the influence of religion, the spirits of men do be- 
 come fruitful with new courage, confidence, and 
 hopeful power, then it may fairly be concluded 
 that they are joined to the tree of life the roots of 
 which are final truth. 
 
 This puts the proof of religion in the realm of 
 practical testing where it ought to be. It does not 
 solve all philosophical difficulties. It does not 
 work out a finished chart as to how God has been 
 related to all history in the evolutionary process. 
 We can wait for further light on that if once we 
 have achieved a standing ground in our own ex- 
 perience. If a man feels within himself, and his 
 neighbors perceive in him, a new fulness of life 
 ‘which he possesses in exact proportion as he be- 
 
 a 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 lieves in and lays hold upon a reality outside him- 
 self, then that man presents the one witness for 
 God which is ultimately convincing. Nothing less 
 can satisfy any one of us. If once we are satisfied 
 to that extent, then we know with an indubitable 
 inner conviction that we have laid hold upon the 
 divine fact which somehow and sometime will in- 
 terpret the rest of the universe which now we do 
 not understand. 
 
 2. The second difficulty in the way of belief in 
 God today we saw to be the self-sufficiency of our 
 modern civilization. That dificulty, however, is 
 by no means as stubborn now as it was a little time 
 ago. Men’s confidence in their ability by a shrewd 
 materialism to produce all that they want has been 
 considerably chilled since 1914. The stones of our 
 piled-up materialism cannot by themselves make a 
 structure in which the life of men can securely 
 dwell. Unless these things are cemented together 
 by the mortar of a moral consciousness, the whole 
 building comes tumbling about our ears. That is 
 exactly what has been happening in the last decade, 
 and men look up out of the debris and confusion 
 where their towers of Babel have fallen down and 
 begin to ask themselves whether the trouble was 
 that they builded without thought of God. Is He 
 needed, after all, to hold together even that fabric 
 of our so-called practical affairs which once we 
 
 60 
 
Dl RE ALT Yo? OR? GOD 
 
 thought could be the sufficiency that should prove 
 we had no need of Him? 
 
 What is the reason why the world is so slow to 
 recover from the shock of the war? What is the 
 cause for the continued prostration of so much of 
 Europe? It is not lack of physical resources. 
 There are the same fields with the same fertility as 
 before. The sun shines, and the rain falls, and the 
 grain would grow. In spite of brutal destruction 
 here and there, trees bud in the forest, and coal 
 and iron ore in abundance can be taken out of the 
 ground. The technical skill which men had before 
 the war has not been lost; but the human factor in 
 industry has been disrupted. The problem of Eu- 
 rope and the problem of the world is not material 
 but spiritual. We are face to face with the stag- 
 gering fact that, in a world full of potential pros- 
 perity, factories can stand idle and crowds of hun- 
 gry and hopeless men wander unemployed. Whole 
 populations can feel the pinch of bitter privation, 
 and nations can stagger toward the precipice of 
 anarchy and economic dissolution, all because the 
 human spirit is torn by suspicion, jealousy and 
 hate. Human passions have got into a vicious 
 circle where they go round and round in their own 
 blind madness. The wisest men begin to think 
 that there is no power to break it, unless a power 
 greater than any of our contemptible little selfish 
 calculations reaches down to touch the hearts of 
 
 61 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 men with a religious passion which will deliver 
 them from themselves. 
 
 Furthermore, the war brought to a focus and 
 exhibited in unmistakable fashion the result of 
 tendencies which had been operating everywhere 
 in supposedly peaceful pursuits, and it has made 
 plain that in our conduct of everyday affairs we 
 may be heading straight for disaster unless we can 
 put into the hearts of men those very religious 
 convictions which we had thought that we could 
 get along without. Industry and business had come 
 to be in large measure war. The interest of the 
 individual was pitted against some other individ- 
 ual, the interest of one industrial class against an- 
 other class, everyone following the supposed wis- 
 dom of selfishness: that the prize is to the strong, 
 the race is to the swift, and may the devil take the 
 hindmost. ‘The result is that there is a pleasant 
 prospect that the devil may take us all. Capital- 
 ists who have manipulated their privileges to ex- 
 tort money from the public and to grind the last 
 ounce of effort out of the men whose labor they 
 control, and workmen whose one idea of their part 
 in the community, now that their day of power has 
 come, seems to consist in extorting as high wages 
 as possible by any method of strikes and intimida- 
 tion, while making the work they do more slovenly 
 and shoddy all the time—these between them have 
 cursed our world with so much stupid wasteful- 
 
 62 
 
Tei ke AGL) bin y \ OP 4G Ob 
 
 ness and deliberate inferiority that it is hard for 
 any one to consider what we have produced with- 
 out a bad taste in his mouth. 
 
 Against such facts the hopeful and inspiring 
 thing is that men of vision are realizing the difh- 
 culty and setting themselves to correct it. Here 
 and there in the midst of industry are rising the 
 leaders who see that a new spirit must be brought 
 into our common work if its results are to be suc- 
 cessful; that there must be a codperation of a finer 
 mutual confidence; that, in order that the wheels 
 of industry may turn without friction and collision, 
 there must be a new human spirit in the wheels. 
 
 A recent number of the “Survey Graphic’ car- 
 ried an article entitled, ‘““B. & O. Engine Number 
 1003.” It describes what has been happening in 
 the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad shops at Glen- 
 wood. After the long and costly strike of the 
 railroad shopmen in 1922, this particular railroad 
 determined that a new start had to be made in the 
 relationship between the directors of the industry 
 and the men who did the work. Consequently a 
 policy was worked out of coéperation in produc- 
 tion and stabilization in employment, in which the 
 men, through their union representatives, were in- 
 vited to join with the managers in organizing the 
 conduct of the shop. Formerly the men’s organi- 
 zation represented one interest, the managers an- 
 other. Now the deliberate effort was made to 
 
 63 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 recognize and to express a community of interest. 
 The men were asked in their own union lodge 
 rooms, which formerly had served the negative 
 function of a military base for the laborer fighting 
 against the interest of the employer, to take as 
 part of their own province a discussion of produc- 
 tion, workmanship, job analysis, tool requirements, 
 and material supply. And the opinion of the men, 
 shaped by discussion from their own knowledge 
 and experience, was then carried up to conference 
 with the managers for the ordering of the shop on 
 the basis of common agreement. The result of all 
 this was Engine Number 1003. When it went out 
 upon the tracks, it was the symbol, not only of a 
 new industrial order of things, but of a new human 
 fellowship. It was the outward and visible sign 
 of a reconstruction of the attitudes of management 
 and men toward one another. In other words, it 
 was the sign of that which the wisest leaders, both 
 in the ranks of capital and labor, are beginning to 
 find out, namely, that there can be no industrial 
 efficiency without a right human spirit—and when 
 we speak of a right human spirit, we are going 
 down to those deep realities of character the ad- 
 justment of which is fundamentally religious. 
 
 In April, 1924, there died in Atlanta Mr. John 
 J. Eagan, President of the American Cast Iron 
 Pipe Company. He left an extraordinary will, 
 according to which he assigned all the common 
 
 64 
 
TH Ba aoa Bit Yr Fis G OzD 
 
 stock of his company to trustees who should con- 
 trol the company for the sole purpose of enabling 
 it “to deliver the company’s product to persons 
 requiring it, at actual cost, which shall be consid- 
 ered the lowest possible price consistent with the 
 maintenance and extension of the company’s plant 
 or plants and business and the payment of reason- 
 able salaries and wages to all the employes of said 
 company, my object being to insure ‘service’ both 
 to the purchasing public and to labor on the basis 
 of the Golden Rule given by our Lord and Savior 
 Jesus Christ.” 
 
 The experiment at Glenwood and the will of 
 Mr. Eagan might be put aside as isolated and pe- 
 culiar; but though they are extraordinary, they 
 are neither isolated nor peculiar. They are ex- 
 pressions of a spirit which is spreading rapidly 
 through American business and industry. They 
 are illustrations of the fact that men are feeling 
 the urge of so adjusting their practical affairs that 
 the deep human instincts of codperation, kindli- 
 ness, and mutual service shall not be thwarted and 
 repressed, but instead shall find their full expres- 
 sion in the practical interests of every day. 
 
 Is it not plain that here the roads are open for 
 a nobler consciousness of the presence of God? 
 Here are the mighty energies of the nation in shop 
 and factory and mine. It is possible for these 
 things to represent policies so relentless and cruel 
 
 65 
 
8 OME) OPEN OWaACY S30 OliG aap 
 
 —and in the long run so stupid—that they repress 
 and pervert all the finer human instincts. Con- 
 ceived merely in terms of competitive selfishness, 
 the intended pursuit of profit can mean the de- 
 struction of men’s souls. It can make a mockery 
 of religion by reducing daily life to a sordid selfish- 
 ness barren of any ideal; but through the ugliness 
 of those old conceptions, the nobler possibility 
 breaks like sunlight. As Ramsay MacDonald, the 
 Prime Minister of Great Britain, has written: 
 “The convictions of the heart are never stilled. 
 They not only are unsleeping in supplying stand- 
 ards of excellence alien to those in common use 
 by which the work of Society is appraised, but 
 also in their demands that social structure shall be 
 determined by the higher requirements and by 
 nothing else. . .. The pluto which heaves be- 
 neath Society and which sends tremors through its 
 apparently solid mass is the spirit to which we do 
 homage as Christianity. There lies the conflict. 
 The end may be far off. It may be separated from 
 these times by turmoil, revolution, madness. But 
 the spirit will not die down, because it is one of 
 the powers of creation.’ And in order that those 
 mighty forces of the human spirit which inevitably 
 will remake our social order may work their crea- 
 tive changes not through “turmoil, revolution, 
 madness,” the deliberate conscience of our time 
 must acrept its social responsibility with a relig- 
 
 66 
 
WHE eR Pe Aeb Y) < O.ky GOD 
 
 ious imagination. All the energies of men, as 
 well as the products of the earth, can be used as 
 the gifts of God. Industry can be made a holy 
 thing, deliberately conceived so as to develop a 
 better quality of life in those who work for it and 
 to produce the materials for more spacious living 
 for the people at large. To catch the gleam of 
 that desire is to bring the glory of God down into 
 drafting-room and shop and union lodge and office 
 of management. It is to treat the daily work with 
 religious understanding and to make men fellow- 
 workers with God, for the expression through 
 their commonest work of high purposes in which 
 their spirits can expand. It is to make religion a 
 living fact because the real success of what men 
 do is found to be dependent upon obedience to 
 those very principles of human brotherhood which 
 conscience always had vaguely apprehended and 
 now can boldly recognize to be the voice of God. 
 
 3. Finally there is the difficulty in the way of be- 
 lief in God caused by the suffering and moral evil 
 of our world. How can we believe in God, men 
 ask, in the face of contradictions to the only kind 
 of a God, loving, compassionate, and dependable, 
 who would be worth believing in? 
 
 Confronted by that challenge, we go back and 
 face the totality of facts. It is perfectly true that 
 there is in our world the tragedy of much evil, 
 with all its moral contradiction. Yet evil is not 
 
 67 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 the only thing we find. Side by side with it, we 
 mark the extraordinary uprising of the human 
 spirit perfected into nobler expression by the very 
 evil itself, to meet the moral need, and overcome 
 it. This fact we cannot leave out of the reckon- 
 ing. There are two elements in the reality, evil 
 and the goodness which grapples with it. To 
 which of these shall we give our verdict as the 
 one most likely to hold the clue to truth? 
 
 The characteristic of religion is that it dares to 
 cast its hazard on the nobler side. Religious faith 
 espouses its conviction of God, in spite of all those 
 appearances which for the moment are contradic- 
 tory, and deliberately selects out of its knowledge 
 the nobler elements and throws the substance of 
 its life into the scale to prove these good. 
 
 In such a faith as that the great souls in all the 
 centuries have dared to live. We turn back and 
 read the old story of Joseph sold into Egypt by 
 his brethren, condemned to undeserved disasters, 
 yet through the stark evil that everywhere seemed 
 to be arrayed against him, battling his courageous 
 way toward that triumph of his own integrity 
 which was all the brighter because of the odds 
 through which he fought. The greatness of his 
 living lay in the fact that he never whimpered 
 beneath misfortune nor lost his confidence in the 
 ultimate guidance of God, even when defeat and 
 disillusionment shut in most darkly round him. 
 
 68 
 
THE REALITY OF) GOD 
 
 In that final day when his brethren who had sold 
 him as a slave into Egypt stood before him lifted 
 now to power next to Pharaoh, Joseph, remember- 
 ing all the evil they had done him, could look be- 
 neath that to the mysterious and blessed power 
 which had overruled it by His own better way. 
 “So now it was not you that sent me hither. It was 
 God,” he said—God, who had turned the very 
 instruments of evil into honor and praise. 
 
 So Paul, through the sufferings he endured for 
 the Cross of Christ, could hear the inward voice 
 that spoke to him: ‘‘My grace is sufficient for 
 thee, for my strength is made perfect in weak- 
 ness,” and he answered, ‘“‘Most gladly, therefore 
 will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power 
 of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take 
 pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessi- 
 ties, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: 
 for when I am weak, then am I strong.” 
 
 And through Gethsemane Jesus Himself went 
 on, past Calvary, to the vindication of Easter 
 morning. There in His agony in the garden, all 
 the dark shadow of human sin closed down. It is 
 possible, of course, for men to think that the 
 Gethsemanes of life have the last word to say, and 
 that the roads of reality end on the hill where the 
 cross of unmerited suffering may be the final por- 
 tion not only of the evil, but also of the good. 
 But religion dares to hold that tragedy and dark- 
 
 69 
 
SOME OPENS W AY So OlG Op 
 
 ness never are the end, and that past these things 
 there is the leading of the hand of God which 
 brings men out to the vindication of a mightier 
 
 life. 
 III 
 
 Thus the way is open for belief in God. The 
 difficulties which are incident to our time can dis- 
 solve like a fog through which one passes to the 
 sunlight on the other side. Yet it is not enough 
 to recognize that the way is open. We must go 
 ahead to walk upon that way. It is not enough to 
 believe in God. In actual fact we must find Him. 
 How, then, shall we do that? 
 
 1. First of all, we enable ourselves to appropri- 
 ate the reality by letting our thoughts dwell on the 
 wonder of its living fact. There comes a point 
 where we need to lay aside all those abstract con- 
 ceptions of religion which busy themselves with 
 speculations of this and that. We must lift our 
 souls to consider the glowing truth of a God who 
 ultimately needs not to be argued about, needs 
 not to be proved by theories, a God who is, and 
 who in His own impulse reaches out to us. We 
 can be quiet in our own searchings and let our 
 spirits expand with the thrilling consciousness that 
 we ourselves are sought by Him. ‘‘We love Him,” 
 wrote St. John, ‘because He first loved us.” “I 
 
 70 
 
hte REALITY OF) GOD 
 
 press on,” said St. Paul, “if so be that I may ap- 
 prehend that for which I am already appre- 
 hended.” No less objectively sure than the hands 
 which we reach up to God are the hands of the 
 steady love with which He reaches down to us. 
 
 “Do you wake?” asked St. Bernard. “Well, 
 He too is awake. If you arise in the night-time, 
 if you anticipate to your utmost your earliest 
 awaking, you will already find Him awaking. You 
 will never anticipate His own awakings. In such 
 an intercourse, you will always be rash if you at- 
 tribute any priority, any predominant share to 
 yourself; for He loves both more than you love 
 and before you love at all.” 
 
 Once we have steeped our spirits in this con- 
 sciousness, then the whole aspect of our world be- 
 comes a different thing. No longer are we wan- 
 dering wistfully in what may prove a void, depend- 
 ing upon our desperate desire to find something 
 which may not be there. We are moving instead 
 through a creation filled with the spirit of Him 
 who has made it, and who, through a thousand 
 points of contact, presses home to the souls of men 
 whom He has created for Himself. 
 
 2. God can come close to us through the beauty 
 of external things. No one can contemplate the 
 life of Jesus without perceiving how real was this 
 religious ministry which earth and field and sky 
 wrought for Him. Up into the hills He went 
 
 Ae 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 when He would commune with God, or under the 
 brooding stillness of overhanging trees, or out in 
 the wide darkness, lighted only by the quiet stars. 
 The glint of a bird’s wing, the color of the flowers 
 in the field, the wide shimmer of the blue waters 
 of the lake, were eloquent of a beauty deeper than 
 all transient form—the inexhaustible beauty of the 
 grace of God, whose purposes are beautiful for all 
 his children’s life. Even as Jesus did, so do we 
 also need to do. We need to look at the loveli- 
 ness of the universe around us, not merely as those 
 who look at sights of aesthetic pleasantness, but 
 with the expectation of those who remember that 
 through the things they see may come the conscious- 
 ness of the living God, with whom the commonest 
 bush may be aflame. To stand, even if it be but 
 for a moment, by the open window at the waking 
 of the day and look into the wideness of the sky; 
 to catch a glimpse, through the noonday turmoil, 
 of a tree or flower, or the glint of water at the end 
 of a crowded street; to lift the eye at evening to 
 the quiet of the stars—even these little things may 
 be enough to keep open the channels through which 
 the reality of God shall flow. Only the other day 
 I heard of a girl who bent over her typewriter, 
 high up in one of the great office buildings of lower 
 New York, weary and dejected, when another girl 
 came by and saw her. By a quick instinct she per- 
 ceived that something was wrong, and called her 
 
 72 
 
RE REAL DY OF: GOD 
 
 to the window. There below them, beyond the 
 rush of the city, lay the flowing river, reaching out 
 toward the far horizon and the distant suggestion 
 of the sea. ‘Whenever I get tired,” the second 
 one said, ‘I come and stand and look at that, and 
 it makes me remember that God is big enough to 
 take care of me.” 
 
 3. Again, God can come home to us as a living 
 reality through the routine of daily duty. There 
 is no need of that division by which so much of 
 life is often set apart as secular and treated as 
 an uninspired thing, to be lighted only with fugi- 
 tive glimpses from special moments of religious 
 experience, attained only in a particular place and 
 on a particular day. Through God, in whom all 
 life may live and move and have its being, all the 
 commonest responsibilities may become gateways 
 of the divine. If God has put His children at the 
 posts of ordinary faithfulness, the communication 
 there and then of the grace which comes from God, 
 the lifting up of our daily occupations from shal- 
 lowness of interest into the more brimming fulness 
 of an inspiring meaning, depends simply upon our 
 recognition of the divine possibility which is al- 
 ready there. The smallest duty has within itself 
 the capacity to hold the greatness of God. What 
 is needed simply is that our spiritual awareness 
 should open the channel gates through which the 
 tidal consciousness of God shall enter. 
 
 rs: 
 
SOME | OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 In his life of the great reformer, Dr. McGif- 
 fert has quoted these fine words of Martin 
 Luther: 
 
 “What you do in your house is worth as much as 
 if you did it up in Heaven for our Lord God. For 
 what we do in our calling here on earth in accord- 
 ance with His word and command He counts as 
 if it were done in heaven for Him.... In 
 whatever calling God has placed you do not aban- 
 don it when you become a Christian. If you are 
 a servant, a maid, a workman, a master, a house- 
 wife, a mayor, a prince, do whatever your position 
 demands. For it does not interfere with your 
 Christian faith and you can serve God rightly in 
 any vocation. ... Therefore we should accus- 
 tom ourselves to think of our position and work 
 as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on its own 
 account, but because of the word and faith from 
 which our obedience flows. No Christian should 
 despise his position if he is living in accordance 
 with the word of God, but should say, ‘I believe 
 in Jesus Christ, and do as the ten commandments 
 teach, and pray that our dear Lord God may help 
 me thus to do”... It looks like a great thing 
 when a monk renounces everything, goes into a 
 cloister, lives a life of asceticism, fasts, watches, 
 prays and the like. On the other hand it looks 
 like a small thing when a maid cooks, and cleans, 
 and does other housework. But because God's 
 command is there, even such a lowly employment 
 must be praised as a service of God, far surpass- 
 ing the holiness and asceticism of all monks and 
 nuns. 
 
 74 
 
WHE REALTY: OF) ‘GOD 
 To those words of Luther might well be added 
 
 these which were written by a Chinese woman to 
 whom the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ 
 had come: 
 
 “When opening the door, I pray Thee, Lord, to 
 ppen the door of my heart that I may receive Thee, 
 Lord, within. 
 
 “When washing clothes, I pray Thee, Lord, to 
 wash my heart and make it pure and white as 
 snow. 
 
 “When sweeping the floor, I pray Thee, Lord, 
 sweep my heart from all evil and make it clean. 
 
 “When buying oil, I pray Thee, Lord, to give 
 me wisdom like the wise virgins who had the oil 
 ready in their vessels. 
 
 “When receiving or sending letters, I pray Thee, 
 Lord, to give me more faith that I may hold con- 
 stant communication with ‘Thee. 
 
 “When drawing water, I pray Thee, Lord, to 
 give me the Living Water that I may never thirst. 
 
 “When lighting the lamp, I pray Thee, Lord, let 
 Thy true light shine within my heart, and make 
 me in all that I do to be kind and good like a 
 lamp which lightens others. 
 
 “When watering plants, I pray Thee, Lord, to 
 send down spiritual showers upon my heart so that 
 it may bring forth good fruit. 
 
 “When boiling water to infuse tea, I pray Thee, 
 Lord, to give spiritual fire to warm my cold heart, 
 and give me a heart on fire to serve bees 
 
 4. Finally, and best of all, the consciousness of 
 God may come to us through our friendships, and 
 
 75 
 
5 OoMCE VOLPE NAVAS Goa 
 
 our loves. It is impossible to see some other life 
 which manifestly is filled with holiness and beauty 
 without feeling God’s Spirit there. It is the busi- 
 ness of religion to make continually more explicit 
 this recognition of God as He comes through hu- 
 man souls. A reading of the lives of great Chris- 
 tian saints and heroes will open new windows into 
 the apprehension of God. A constant study of the 
 life of Christ, of course, is best of all. But not 
 only through the figures of the historic past, but 
 also through our comrades of the present, this 
 reality of God may be presented. To see in the 
 faithfulness of some friend, in the invincible de- 
 votion of the mother, in the loyalty through good 
 or ill of a woman to the man she has married, 
 that which surpasses a mere individual excellence 
 and represents instead some of the meaning of 
 the eternal holiness and love, is to come into con- 
 tact with the presence of God. 
 
 So also this finding of God through personal 
 relationships is not only a matter of what we per- 
 ceive, but also of what we create. The best way 
 for any life to possess the glory of God is to con- 
 vey God to another. If, for example, the mother 
 thinks greatly of her child and her child’s possi- 
 bilities, if she desires for that child not mere in- 
 dulgence in trivialities and shallow make-believes, : 
 but rather the deep worth of character and of true 
 accomplishment, then she will know that she must 
 
 76 
 
RHE RE ALT TY (OB GOD 
 
 lay hold of a life that is abler than her own, and 
 the instinctive outpouring of her own desire 
 toward her child will make her draw from the 
 fulness of God to fulfil that which is lacking in 
 herself. If a man wants to serve his friend, or 
 if in company with others of like spirit with him- 
 self, he wants to serve some public cause of truth 
 and righteousness, he too, the more he gives him- 
 self to the utmost to that which unselfishly he 
 wants to accomplish, will call to himself the real- 
 ized comradeship of God. The better and nobler 
 any soul tries to make the contribution of its life 
 to others, the more it becomes aware of its need 
 of God, and the more vividly it becomes assured 
 of Him as-He comes to supply that need. There 
 are many whose fine sense of responsibility makes 
 them say, as they look upon the sorrows and hun- 
 gers and unfulfilled possibilities of the lives that 
 touch their own, in the words of the parable of 
 Jesus, “A friend of mine has come to me in his 
 journey, and I have nothing to set before him,” 
 and because they want to set before him that real 
 food of the Spirit which they do not sufficiently 
 possess, they go and knock at the doors of God, 
 and pass those doors to which an unselfish need 
 has sent them, they find themselves face to face 
 with Him. “I will therefore,” said Luther, 
 “sive myself as a sort of Christ to my neigh- 
 bor, as Christ has given himself to me, and will do 
 
 77 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 nothing in this life except what I see to be need- 
 ful, advantageous, and wholesome for my neigh- 
 bor, since through faith I abound in all good things 
 in Christ . . .... Man does not live for himself 
 alone in this mortal body, in order to work on 
 its account, but also for all men on earth; nay, 
 he lives only for others and not for himself. For 
 to this end he brings his own body into subjection 
 that he may be able to serve more sincerely and 
 freely .... Itis the part of a Christian to take 
 care of his body for the very purpose that by 
 its soundness and well-being he may be able to 
 labor and to acquire and save property for the aid 
 of those who are in want, that thus the strong 
 member may serve the weak, and we may be sons 
 of God, thoughtful and busy one for the other, 
 bearing one another’s burdens and so fulfilling 
 the law of Christ. Behold, here is the truly Chris- 
 tian life, here is faith really working by love, when 
 it applies itself with joy and love to the work of 
 freest servitude, in which it serves others freely 
 and spontaneously, itself abundantly satisfied with 
 the fulness and riches of its own faith.” 
 
 Thus through the fulness of experience men may 
 lay hold of the fact of God. As the only way to 
 understand life is by living, so the only way to 
 know the present power of the divine life is to 
 live in sympathy with the divine. When men 
 order their choices, their assumptions of what is 
 
 78 
 
TARE mR AL Tn) Oe By Gi Oni 
 
 real, and their experiment of action in the light 
 of a trust in the living God; when with deliberate 
 eyes they shape their adventure on the roads of 
 faith;—at the end of it they shall find the fulfil- 
 ment of the promise, /f with all your hearts ye 
 truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me, saith 
 
 the Lord. 
 
 79 
 
CHAPTER III 
 JESUS CHRIST 
 
 THE most remarkable element in the question 
 of belief in Jesus Christ is the fact that it should 
 interest us at all. 
 
 On the day when He died, nothing seemed more 
 evident than that the world would take account 
 of Him no more. He had lived for a little time, 
 not more than thirty-three years at most, in an 
 unimportant province of the Roman Empire. His 
 preaching and His ministry, though welcomed by 
 the common people, had been met by a growing 
 hostility among the leaders of His people both 
 in Church and State. At length they pitted their 
 authority against His in one decisive trial of 
 strength, and to all appearances they had won. 
 The crowd had turned away from Him, some of 
 them cowed, some of them angered and resentful 
 that the deliverance and prosperity which they 
 thought He would bring them had not come to 
 pass. The Chief Priests arrested Him in the 
 Garden of Gethsemane. With the mob stream- 
 ing behind, they carried Him before the Roman 
 Governor, Pilate, whom they so intimidated that 
 he delivered Jesus up to be crucified. Between 
 two thieves on Calvary, they put Him to death. 
 
 80 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 They mocked Him as He hung there dying, and 
 when the day was over and they turned back to 
 the city, that broken body on the cross against 
 the sky seemed the manifest witness that Jesus 
 was defeated and that His enemies were tri- 
 umphant. It looked as though they were right 
 when they said He pretended to a power He did 
 not have. He was out of their way now, once 
 and for all. They and their successors need con- 
 cern themselves no further with Him. 
 
 Since that time some nineteen centuries have 
 gone by. The Chief Priests have sunk into ob- 
 livion. All their little power and pride is buried 
 with the dust of long dead centuries; but the Man 
 they thought they killed they did not kill. His 
 Spirit is alive in the world today. Out to the 
 far quarters of a world more vast than that which 
 any man in Palestine ever dreamed, His Name 
 has been carried. The cross which once was a 
 symbol of defeat and shame has become a sacra- 
 mental thing in the strength of which heroes have 
 struggled and martyrs have died and saints in dra- 
 matic and undramatic places have fashioned the 
 stuff of nobler living day by day. That fact needs 
 no explanatory theories to make it wonderful. It 
 needs no cloud of argument gathering round it to 
 make it loom magnified in size like an object seen 
 in a mist. There it stands on the horizon of the 
 world’s realities like some mighty mountain-peak 
 
 81 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 towering sheer above all surrounding things, glis- 
 tening between the earth and sky. Whatever else 
 men may believe or doubt concerning Jesus, they 
 cannot escape the fact that the men were wrong 
 who thought that they had finished their reckon- 
 ing with Him when they nailed Him to His cross. 
 The power that was in Him conquered His con- 
 querors. He is a fact that cannot be forgotten. 
 Tie must be dealt with for yea or nay. 
 
 There is something immeasurably awe-inspiring 
 in this fact of the inescapableness of Jesus. The 
 symbol of the mountain does not sufficiently ex- 
 press Him. It is not alone that His continuing 
 power is like a silent witness, an historic fact 
 which we can abstractly consider from afar. 
 Rather it is a living presence that follows on all 
 the paths of men. Like the Hound of Heaven, 
 the strange authority of His pursuing Spirit haunts 
 the minds of men, and 
 
 “Still with unhurrying chase, 
 And unperturbed pace, 
 Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
 Come on the following Feet, 
 And a Voice above their beat— 
 ‘Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.’ ” 
 
 Recognizing, therefore, the unquestionable sig- 
 nificance of Jesus Christ. for the intellectual and 
 spiritual interests of men, what we want to do is 
 
 82 
 
PE Os ACT KT Sul 
 
 to consider as clearly and thoroughly as we can, 
 how and why it was that He was attained, and 
 whether in this twentieth century He still can hold, 
 this extraordinary position to which the history of 
 nineteen hundred years bears record. 
 
 I 
 
 As we go forward to this consideration, we re- 
 member that there are two elements in the esti- 
 mate which men have had of Jesus, and it is this 
 double fact which has led to the deep and often 
 passionate differences of interpretation concerning 
 Him. For He has been accounted not simply a 
 great exemplar of the strength and winsomeness 
 of human personality, not simply one among the 
 saints and heroes who witness to the noble striv- 
 ings of the human soul; He has been lifted to that 
 divine supremacy before which all other human 
 souls bow down. It is not only that He has relig- 
 ious and inspirational value, He has become Him- 
 self a religion. When, therefore, we try to under- 
 stand Him, it is this complex fact which we must 
 try to understand. Our thought will deal, there- 
 fore, with a subject which has great heights and 
 depths of wonder, and widenesses of meaning 
 where our ordinary analyses may stand halted 
 upon the borderland of mystery into which only a 
 very sensitive intuition can press through. 
 
 Nevertheless, though it is true that men’s 
 
 83 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 thought of Jesus is bound thus to lead ultimately 
 to facts which tax the utmost richness of their ex- 
 planation, yet it is not true that there is needed 
 any standing ground of an elaborate learning from 
 which to begin. Nothing has been more respon- 
 sible for the confused and hopeless ideas which 
 many people have of Christianity, than the heavy 
 insistence of some theologians that all the ponder- 
 ous ideas which thinkers have arrived at should be 
 dinned into the ears of the inquirer when he first 
 asks who and what Jesus may be. As a matter 
 of fact, the real knowledge of Him always has 
 begun and always will begin, from very vital sim- 
 plicities. ‘That is the way it was for the first dis- 
 ciples, and those today who would recapture their 
 experience must begin where they began. 
 
 I. First, then, let us consider how the attach- 
 ment of the original disciples to Jesus did actually 
 take place. 
 
 It was a very simple thing at first—that attach- 
 ment of themselves to Him. They did not start 
 with any elaborate theories about Him. They 
 did not join themselves to His company through 
 any articulated theological reasons. It was a very 
 human matter of personal attraction. They were 
 going about their ordinary business with no notion 
 of any extraordinary career about to open before 
 them, and then this figure crossed their paths. 
 His environment and His associations had not been 
 
 84 
 
JESUS) (CHRIST 
 
 different from that of other men; but He was 
 different. There was a strength and a magnetism 
 about Him which marked Him out from the crowd. 
 There was a strange quality of leadership and an 
 ability to win confidence and to awaken love. So 
 when He invited men to come with Him, they fol- 
 lowed Him as though it were the most natural 
 thing in the world to do. Peter and Andrew and 
 James and John left the fishing boats where they 
 were, pulled up the nets by the side of the lake, 
 abandoned the old work which they had followed 
 all their life, to go with Him. Levi the tax-gath- 
 erer gave up the position which doubtless he had 
 gotten through much shrewd pains and costly ef- 
 fort. Tax-gathering had been all very well until 
 He saw Jesus, and then the old job lost its allure- 
 ment. It was only a poor, sordid thing beside this 
 new chance, and he turned his back upon it once for 
 all. So also the others were gathered into the 
 fellowship. They did not know what it was all 
 going to lead to, but they were content simply to 
 know that they would rather follow Jesus and 
 try to live like Him than to do anything else in 
 the world. 
 
 2. It is plain, however, that to say that the dis- 
 ciples followed Jesus simply because they felt this 
 passing attraction of His human personality is not 
 the whole of the story. That was not the way they 
 ended. They saw Him at first as a man like other 
 
 85 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 men, only greater, more masterful, and more win- 
 some. They came finally to see that there was in 
 Him something so vast that their everyday human 
 explanations never could compass it all. 
 
 Down various tracks of wandering, their minds 
 began to go in search of an understanding of this 
 personality of Jesus, which every day grew more 
 impressive before their eyes. Those first disciples 
 were Jews, so they followed first of all the gleam 
 of that great ideal which had been kindled by the 
 prophets of Israel like a beacon-fire upon the 
 mountains, shining down the long pathways of a 
 people’s hope. In every Jewish heart there was 
 the slumbering dream of the coming of Messiah. 
 He should be God’s Deliverer, bringing in the new 
 day of release and blessing for His chosen people. 
 Often the expectation of the Messiah had come 
 to assume very concrete and materialistic form. 
 He should be the Conqueror, and should build 
 Himself a spiritual kingdom in which those who 
 followed Him should rule with an authority from 
 God. Flashes of this idea strike fire more than 
 once through the pages of the Gospels, from the 
 mind of the crowd and from the minds of the 
 disciples themselves. In the Fourth Gospel it is 
 recounted that once a multitude seemed about to 
 come to take Jesus by force and make Him a king. 
 The revolutionary instincts of Israel searching for 
 
 86 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 a leader flooded round this figure with His extra- 
 ordinary strength and command. The disciples 
 also had caught some of the excitement of this 
 hope. One day James and John came to Jesus, 
 saying, ‘Master, we would that thou shouldst do 
 for us whatsoever we shall desire.” And he said 
 unto them, ‘“‘What would ye that I should do for 
 you?” They said unto him, ‘‘Grant unto us that we 
 may sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on 
 thy left hand, in thy glory.” They desired the 
 thrones that should be next to His in the kingdom 
 which they hoped might be set up. 
 
 It was a hard lesson, but one which the disciples 
 had to learn, that the idea of Messiah and His 
 Kingdom which they shared with the crowd was 
 not the idea of Jesus. He had not come to be a 
 conqueror by any force of arms. He had come to 
 bring a new order of human relationships to the 
 earth, but not by any weapons of violence. He 
 had come with the persuasion of the beauty of 
 God’s holiness and the power of God’s love, to 
 venture for an infinite gain which must be bought 
 at desperate present loss. He would win a final 
 spiritual victory for which the hearts of men could 
 be made ready only through the witness of His own 
 readiness to suffer and to die in its behalf. So— 
 challenging the sins of men in high places and call- 
 ing common men to a pitch of consecration from 
 
 87 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 which they often rebelled in anger—Jesus moved 
 straight forward to the inevitable collision of His 
 life with the misunderstanding and hatred which 
 were to crucify Him. He died, and with His 
 death, it looked as though to His disciples there 
 had come a double and complete disaster. The 
 human personality which they had loved and fol- 
 lowed had been killed. The hope of a great de- 
 liverance of God through Him as Messiah had 
 been brought to nothing. 
 
 But through the strait gate of what seemed for 
 the moment their utter loss, the disciples found 
 themselves suddenly passing out into a spacious 
 world of new understanding. Jesus had died, but 
 He was not dead. No one can read the records 
 of the early Church as they are preserved in the 
 Gospels, in the Book of Acts, and in the Epistles, 
 without perceiving the invincible certainty which 
 the disciples possessed that they had again been 
 in contact with the risen and living Spirit of Jesus. 
 He had come back to them to bring them the cer- 
 tainty of the triumph and love of God. Then 
 in the light of that fact they began to see all their 
 previous experience in a new perspective. The old 
 crude thoughts of an earthly kingdom of Messiah 
 did not matter any more. What counted was that 
 Jesus had brought them God. In His presence 
 they had felt the nearness of God. There was 
 
 88 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 a new light on even the common things. There 
 was a gladness in living because there was a sense 
 of the greatness of life. God, who to many people 
 is only a distant name, had been to them a glow- 
 ing fact which they had experienced through Jesus. 
 He was that “which we have heard, which we 
 have seen with our eyes, which we have looked 
 upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word 
 Ofiten: 
 
 When men have found God, they know then 
 that they have found the only thing which su- 
 premely satisfies their hunger. All the selfish covet- 
 ings and the mean ambitions are the husks with 
 which men try to feed themselves when still un- 
 wittingly they are starved for God. The disciples 
 had thought they wanted thrones, wealth, and the 
 other honors which the crowd clamored for. Now 
 they found that, whatever else they had or failed 
 to have, made little difference so long as they 
 had the fulness of God in joy and peace and 
 strength coming to them through Jesus. Life had 
 found its source of power and its centre of rest. 
 Through every changing appearance they could 
 trust the reality which they had seen Jesus live by. 
 The great Life, without which men’s little lives 
 are empty, had come to them, and behold, the in- 
 finite was revealed to be near and human and 
 understanding because they had seen it and had 
 touched it in Jesus. 
 
 89 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 We shall never understand the meaning of 
 Christian theology until we realize the deep roots 
 of the personal experience out of which it grew. 
 In Jesus, men for the first time seemed to possess 
 that which wistfully through many centuries the 
 heart of man had been desiring. In the dark lone- 
 liness which seemed to shut him off from God, 
 Job cried out, “For he is not a man, as I am, that 
 I should answer him, and we should come together 
 in judgment. Neither is there any daysman be- 
 twixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both.” 
 Again and again, out of the human darkness, that 
 cry has sounded—the cry for a God who might 
 come near and interpret Himself to human need. 
 That cry throbs with an instinct equally poignant 
 and real whether it express itself in some childish 
 word or in the thought of a religious seer. One 
 night a little girl was left in her bed upstairs, as 
 her mother kissed her good night and went down 
 for the evening. To the child, reluctant to be left 
 alone, the mother said, “‘But dearest, you are not 
 alone. Your doll is here, and then you know that 
 God is always with you.” “Yes,” said the child, 
 “but even if I have my doll, and even if God is 
 here, I want somebody with a skin face!” And 
 with far lift of language from that of the little 
 child, yet with the same simplicity of wistful de- 
 sire, Browning makes David sing to Saul: 
 
 90 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 “Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my 
 
 flesh, that I seek 
 
 In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul 
 it shall be 
 
 A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man 
 like to me, 
 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand 
 like this hand 
 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! 
 See the Christ stand!” 
 
 Men who long ago stood in the presence of Jesus 
 and those who spiritually have stood in His pres- 
 ence since then have felt this intimate precious- 
 ness of God come close to them in Him. They 
 know that there is nothing greater they could 
 ask than that God in all the fulness of His reality 
 should be just what Jesus was and is. So the 
 movement of Christian faith has always been from 
 the known Jesus out into what, save for Him, 
 might be the unknown or the dimly known. It 
 has been truly said that the doctrine of the divinity 
 of Jesus is not so much a doctrine about Jesus 
 as it is a doctrine about God. Here is His figure 
 clear for us to understand, with His beauty of holl- 
 ness, His white hatred of sin, and yet His infinite 
 tenderness for the struggling sinner, His strength, 
 and yet His gentleness, His might of moral au- 
 thority and His stoop of infinite compassion. Is 
 
 gl 
 
SOME’ OPEN? WAYS 270 “GiOgg 
 
 God like that? This is what we want to know. 
 And the leap of Christian faith proclaims tri- 
 umphantly that He is. The destinies of the uni- 
 verse, the ultimate control for ourselves, and for 
 the forces which affect us, are in the hands of Him 
 whom Jesus called His Father and whose nature 
 we may understand through the One who knew 
 Him best. It is because of that sure confidence 
 which moves through its experience of Jesus as 
 the Way and the Truth that one can write as Dr. 
 Grenfell has written: “This is what life means to 
 me—a place where a Father above deals ditter- 
 ently with His different children but with all in 
 love; a place where true joys do not hang on 
 material pegs, and where all the while the fact 
 that God our Father is on His throne lines every 
 cloud with gold.” 
 
 The theologies of Christendom are simply the 
 effort to put into words some expression of that 
 reality of God as found through Jesus which men 
 have always felt more deeply and more surely 
 than they can ever explain. It is a mistake to hold 
 any theological formulas with too desperate an 
 importance, for no one of them fully represents 
 nor contains within itself the fulness of the experi- 
 ence out of which it grew. Already in the New 
 Testament we can see the blossomings of various 
 theologies. The Gospel of John has one way of 
 trying to explain the meaning of Jesus as the Word 
 
 Q2 
 
PES Us CP RUSE 
 
 of God. Paul has other ways of thought and other 
 terms. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews 
 has others yet. And all down through the Chris- 
 tian centuries there have been many efforts both by 
 individual seers and saints and by great councils, 
 meeting together, to try to formulate their creeds 
 to express the meaning of Jesus. The so-called 
 Nicene Creed, for example, still regularly used in 
 far the greater part of Christendom, represents 
 the effort of the most acute thinkers and devoted 
 teachers of the Church in the fourth century, to 
 proclaim in sufficient form the permanent elements 
 of Christian belief. They taught the Church to 
 confess its faith “in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the 
 only begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father 
 before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, 
 very God of very God, begotten not made, being 
 of one substance with the Father, by whom all 
 things were made.” There is no question but that 
 these words, to many persons not habituated to 
 them, have today an antique and unreal sound. 
 They represent categories of thinking into which 
 the conceptions of our time do not instinctively fit. 
 They express religious values according to the con- 
 cepts of the fourth century Greek philosophical 
 tradition which to men living then was as native 
 as the tongue they spoke, but which, to our later 
 mind, has become somewhat awkward and con- 
 
 Pde. 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 strained. In the Nicene Creed, therefore, and in 
 all other efforts of individuals or Church councils 
 to express in words the meaning of Jesus Christ, 
 two elements must be distinguished. On the one 
 hand, there is a form of expression necessarily 
 local, necessarily transient, and never to be made 
 by any mistaken hardening of Church tradition into 
 a straitjacket for the mind of the Church in later 
 times. On the other hand, there is the religious 
 conviction itself which was striving for expression, 
 and this living thing which created the form 1s that 
 which enduringly needs to be understood and re- 
 possessed. The expressions in creeds and theolo- 
 gies are like flowers, full of the odors of a rich 
 devotion, often very beautiful, but no one of them 
 final nor exhaustive; and the changing centuries 
 will inevitably bring forth new blossomings of in- 
 terpretation from that which is always the source 
 of Christian life, namely the deep rootage of the 
 heart and conscience in the experienced reality of 
 the nature of Jesus. 
 
 Usually our best theologies are not in formal 
 creeds, which may have about them the inevitable 
 rigidity which comes from being hammered out 
 in the midst of men’s intellectual conflicts. The 
 best theologies are our prayers and hymns, for 
 these preserve the quickened heart-beat, the rhap- 
 sody, the lift of wings, the thrill of the inner song, 
 
 Ey 
 
CES US CE REST 
 
 which are the ever vital marks of the real religion. 
 “My Jesus, my King, my Life, my Ali, I again 
 dedicate my whole self to Thee,” wrote David 
 Livingston on his last birthday; and Bernard of 
 Clairvaux sang long ago the truth in which the 
 Christian spirit perennially is glad: 
 
 ‘Jesus, Thou Joy of loving hearts! 
 Thou Fount of life! Thou Light of men! 
 From the best bliss that earth imparts 
 We turn unfilled to Thee again. 
 
 ‘Thy truth unchanged hath ever stood; 
 Thou savest those that on Thee call; 
 
 To them that seek Thee, Thou art good, 
 To them that find Thee, all in all.” 
 
 II 
 
 Thus far we have been speaking generally about 
 the personality of Jesus Christ. The fact, how- 
 ever, cannot be ignored that for innumerable 
 people the thought of Jesus Christ Himself is so 
 confused with certain perplexities which they find 
 in their reading of the New Testament that they 
 are uncertain whether or not they can truly say 
 that they believe in Jesus Christ in any way which 
 organized Christianity would acknowledge. They 
 cannot somehow get His figure out of its back- 
 
 2h 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 ground into a distinctness and approachableness 
 which make their conviction able to lay hold on 
 Him. According to the New Testament accounts 
 and according to the interpretation of these which 
 some very emphatic Christian teachers say is ne- 
 cessary, the figure of Jesus seems to draw behind 
 it a great train of representations so remote from 
 our present experience that He Himself seems to 
 be involved in a cloud that dims the outlines of 
 His reality. Men say that in our time we are not 
 accustomed to miracles, and do not expect them, 
 but the New Testament account seems to be full 
 of miracles. How, then, are we going to get the 
 figure of Jesus vividly present in the world of our 
 contemporary thought and experience, if we are to 
 be dogmatically obliged to think of Him in terms 
 of the New Testament miracle narratives, liter- 
 ally interpreted and completely received? 
 
 Here is a real difficulty, and we must meet it 
 fairly and try to find a way through. What con- 
 ception of the New Testament miracles can we 
 arrive at which will retain for us a reverent sense 
 of the essential value of the biblical tradition, 
 and yet not force us to identify the ministry of 
 Jesus with conditions fundamentally different from 
 any with which we can possibly be familiar today? 
 
 As we do thus try to consider the whole matter 
 of the miracles and our possibility of knowledge 
 
 96 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 concerning them, we realize that there is a double 
 element in the material presented for our think- 
 ing. In the first place, there was the fact of a 
 supreme personality uniquely in touch with those 
 resources which lie beyond the common boundary 
 of our ordinary experience. The spirit of Jesus, 
 in its contact with men and with matter too (that 
 matter which our latest science reveals to be a thing 
 so mysterious in its amazing energies), was alto- 
 gether likely to produce reactions of an extraor- 
 dinarily vital kind. That is one element of the 
 record as it comes down to us; but the other ele- 
 ment is this. The record was written in an age 
 which had no conception of the exactitudes of 
 science such as we know. It was written by men 
 of Oriental mind, full of symbolism and poetry, 
 indifferent to our literalisms, men who cared more 
 for the color and spiritual impression of the fact 
 than for its prosaic measurements. Neither their 
 temperament nor their interest inclined them to 
 make an absolute facsimile of the event they de- 
 scribed, with every factor of evidence laboriously 
 verified and unerringly set down. ‘They were poets 
 of the wonder of their Lord, not prose investi- 
 gators furnishing material for the laboratories 
 of undreamt-of commentators. It is no more pos- 
 sible to get out of some of the Gospel records of 
 the miracles objective and first-hand knowledge of 
 
 O% 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 the original fact than it is possible to count the 
 blades of grass in the field of a landscape which 
 some artist has painted. Unquestionably this 
 makes a difficulty for our thought today. We can 
 well believe that thrilling things occurred when 
 Jesus stood in the presence of the needs of men, 
 but exactly how to separate the occurrence, as 
 modern scientific eyes might view it, from the lu- 
 minous mist of the tradition through which it 
 comes to us, we simply do not know. 
 
 Yet there is no reason why we should be 
 troubled about that. We do not have to know 
 everything all at once. We can make the best 
 of what we do know and leave the rest to be found 
 out when the time may come. Some of the mira- 
 cles, as we read them in the Gospels, are easier 
 to appropriate with a full sense of reality than 
 are some others. The most recent truth which 
 men are learning in the realm of mental diseases 
 gives new vividness to those incidents in which 
 Jesus laid hold of some poor disassociated per- 
 sonality, with its wild, evil instincts in possession, 
 and, by the authority of His spirit, so brought it 
 into wholeness that the ‘“‘casting out of devils” was 
 not too strong a term for those who saw that heal- 
 ing to employ. Neither is it difficult for the rey- 
 erent spirit to conceive of the blind suddenly re- 
 possessing sight, of men who had been deaf be- 
 
 98 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 coming able to hear again, of the lame leaping 
 up to walk, before that tremendous power which 
 the surcharged life of Jesus could communicate. 
 
 Other accounts of miracles puzzle us more,— 
 such, for example, as the story of the coin in the 
 fish’s mouth, the withering of the fig tree, the 
 turning of the water to wine, the walking on the 
 water, and the physical multiplying of the loaves 
 and fishes. 
 
 In the case of some of these, the difficulty is that 
 they do not seem consonant with our conception of 
 the spirit of Jesus. Did He actually pronounce a 
 curse upon a fig tree because He found no fruit on 
 it, so that the next day the disciples saw it to be 
 withered from the root up? Did He actually send 
 Peter to catch a fish in the lake and cause a coin to 
 appear in the fish’s mouth for the astonished Peter 
 to discover? It is true that we find these things 
 written in our New Testament; but, drawn far 
 more vividly there, is a picture of Jesus in His 
 constant avoidance of mere wonder-working with 
 which these accounts do not seem to agree. There- 
 fore, does the story of a particular fig tree with- 
 ered, represent a fact, or is it a later report which 
 grew out of Jesus’ parable concerning an unfruit- 
 ful tree? And may not the story of the coin in the 
 fish’s mouth go back to some incident much simpler 
 and more nearly related to the familiar ways of 
 
 99 
 
SOME OPEN TW YS DO (Gow 
 
 Jesus, which the crude imagination of the crowd 
 laid hold of, and with the unconscious bias of the 
 popular desire for magic and marvel, made into 
 the story which had become part of the tradition 
 when the evangelist wrote? ‘These are questions 
 which earnest students of our gospels ask them- 
 selves, not because they lack faith in the gospels 
 but because they have such an overwhelming faith 
 in that personality of Jesus which the gospels pre- 
 sent that any detail which clashes with that is of 
 necessity set aside for further scrutiny. 
 
 In the case of some of the other miracles, the 
 difficulty is a different one. For example, in the 
 story of the walking on the water, in the phv;ical 
 multiplying of the loaves and fishes, and even in 
 the turning of the water into wine, there is noth- 
 ing out of harmony with the spirit of Jesus, who, 
 though He never used His powers for mere dis- 
 play yet did always instantly bring the utmost that 
 was in Him unselfishly to meet the needs of His 
 friends. Rather the difficulty here is one of ad- 
 justing the tradition concerning Jesus to the re- 
 sults of our observation of the actual ways of 
 God. Does God ordain, and did He ordain, that 
 our physical universe should be as malleable to 
 the touch of even the divinest human hands as 
 some of these accounts of miracles, in the form in 
 which we now have them, represent? Such a ques- 
 
 100 
 
[BS USsC RH RUS 
 
 tion embodies no unfaith, and certainly no denial. 
 It may arise in minds quite free from any ante- 
 cedent stubbornness of idea that things unprece- 
 dented are impossible with God. In this wide unt- 
 verse, so full of marvel and of mystery, and breath- 
 ing everywhere the infinite creativeness of Him 
 who is behind it, nothing need be impossible. But 
 the question is one of balancing probabilities from 
 all the evidence which we are bound to take into 
 account. Somehow there must be a sure thread 
 of consistency which shall bind together all that 
 we are meant to learn of the life of Jesus with all 
 that the God of truth reveals to us in His work- 
 ings always and everywhere. We see that His 
 spirit does enable His children, just in so far as 
 they are eager and obedient to discover His law, 
 to heal diseases of body, mind and soul; and so we 
 are the more swift to recognize that He who was 
 uniquely the Son of the Infinite could give men 
 life and soundness in such essential ways as the 
 gospel has described. But we do not see signs that 
 it is the Father’s way of working that human 
 bodies should walk on water, or that men’s hunger 
 should be fed by the short cut of a physical mir- 
 acle which immediately multiplies the sustenance 
 at hand. Perhaps that was His way with Jesus, 
 in exactly such forms as the evangelists report. 
 It is also possible that He means for all human 
 IOI 
 
SOME OREN WAYS (LO eG Gao 
 
 life to aspire toward the same such spiritual mas- 
 tery over this physical universe, as rapidly as the 
 human spirit approximates toward the nature of 
 Jesus. No Christian disciple can fail to contem- 
 plate that possibility with a reverent awe. Yet, 
 on the other hand, it is certainly true that even 
 for Jesus Himself the physical order was often not 
 malleable, and that the glory of His spirit rose to 
 its supreme expression precisely because it did con- 
 front a world which in its Gethsemane and its Cal- 
 vary was, for the moment, so intractable. Also, 
 as we study the long record of the Christian gen- 
 erations since the Master lived, it would appear 
 that God’s ways are long and patient, dependent 
 too not on extraneous marvels but on the disci- 
 plined activities of men’s minds and souls. Ap- 
 parently He has put us in a world which, in its 
 underlying framework, is an ordered system, a 
 world in which we cannot feed the hungry merely 
 by a touch, but can feed them in a society in which 
 all shall work in honorable toil and each shall 
 share what he has with his neighbor; a world in 
 which fire will burn, and water will drown, and 
 death will kill even the saints and heroes whose 
 victory is to come not through physical miracles, 
 but through the triumph of the spirit over all 
 physical things whatever. With these different 
 considerations weighing in the balances of judg- 
 102 
 
Ges US he Fe Ris 
 
 ment, it is natural that the scales should incline 
 this way for some people and that way for others. 
 Some will feel that just because Jesus Himself was 
 so different, what He did must therefore have 
 been different. They will accept all the reports 
 of miracles exactly as they stand and accept them 
 the more readily just because they so uniquely 
 transcend all usual human experience. But for 
 other minds, there will be preponderant weight in 
 the thought that Jesus’ life was meant to be nor- 
 mative for all those who seek to follow Him, 
 that so far at least as we have yet been able to 
 discover, there are certain physical limitations past 
 which it is not normative that our powers should 
 go, and that the gospel accounts concerning Jesus, 
 passing as they did through the medium of men 
 who were not much concerned with scientific veri- 
 fication, may need some re-thinking to lead us back 
 to the original fact. Certainly there is no room 
 for dogmatic insistence here. In many things 
 our vision may be too limited and our spiritual 
 experience too immature to understand aright. 
 But surely we may know that it carinot be wrong 
 to confess uncertainty, since there is enough in the 
 gospels which does agree with all that we see of 
 the ways of God for us not to be unduly troubled 
 if our judgment frankly stands in suspense con- 
 cerning certain accounts of miracles which, in their 
 103 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 present form, do not fit intelligibly in to the rest 
 of our knowledge of the ways of God. 
 
 III 
 
 Besides the questions of miracles wrought by 
 Jesus, there is the even greater matter of the 
 miracles recounted by the gospels as wrought in 
 Him. One of these is the Resurrection, the other 
 the Virgin Birth. 
 
 1. Now concerning the Resurrection,—if it 
 were an unrelated fact, there would doubtless be a 
 tendency in the minds of many to question it, 
 simply because our usual human experience seems 
 to give us little vivid and immediate evidence of 
 a rising from the dead. But it is not an unrelated 
 fact. It stands linked with certain other very 
 great and evident historic realities which cannot 
 be evaded and of which the Resurrection presents 
 itself as the explantion. 
 
 These realities have to do with the existence 
 of the Christian Church. Here the Church is, a 
 fact inwrought into the history of the centuries; 
 here it is as one of the dominant influences in the 
 life of a great part of the human race since Jesus 
 of Nazareth lived on earth. How did the Church 
 come into being? It began, of course, in the fel- 
 lowship which gathered round Jesus Himself; but 
 the death of Jesus, if nothing else had followed 
 
 104 
 
TESUS TCH RUS D 
 
 that, would have been the end of the fellowship. 
 No unprejudiced student of the records can avoid 
 that conclusion. When Jesus died and the dis- 
 ciples had taken His body down from the cross and 
 laid it in the grave, they turned with blank eyes 
 to face one another in the midst of what appeared 
 an empty world. Life had seemed to come to an 
 end for them. It was as though the heavens were 
 brass and the earth were full of mocking voices. 
 They thought they had followed the Savior, and 
 now they were turning away from the tomb 
 where, pierced and outraged, the crucified body of 
 Him they had loved was laid. There is no sign 
 that in these men who had loved Jesus there ex- 
 isted then any courage to carry on His work. They 
 were paralyzed with a blank hopelessness. Their 
 spirits staggered as a man staggers who has been 
 struck a mortal blow. The dreams which had 
 been so fair in the life they had lived with Him, 
 vanished before a ghastly disillusionment. What 
 was there left to do but to go back to Galilee and 
 begin life over again on the old and commonplace 
 plane from which they had risen for a time on 
 the wings of an aspiration which seemed forever 
 broken? 7 
 
 That, then, is all that there seemed to be for 
 present or future when Jesus died. But something 
 happened to produce a contrast sudden and 
 complete. 
 
 105 
 
SOME ORIEN “WATS TO "GO 
 
 On the morning of the first day of the week, 
 certain disciples of Jesus, going to the tomb where 
 they had laid His body, came back with the tidings 
 that He was not there. That day the figure of 
 Jesus appeared in the garden to Mary Magda- 
 lene; He appeared also to Peter; He showed Him- 
 self to all the disciples gathered together in an 
 upper room. At least that is what the disciples 
 said, and the record consists not only in what they 
 said but in what they did in the strength of what 
 they said. The clear fact stands that men, who on 
 the day of the crucifixion were bowed in despair, 
 now were lifted up in the transfigurement of a 
 new confidence. They began to preach in Jeru- 
 salem—in the place where Jesus had died and 
 where His enemies were centered—their convic- 
 tion that He was risen victorious into life. Upon 
 that faith, in spite of persecution and death, they 
 built a Church. Upon the wings of that faith 
 they went out as missionaries into the world. They 
 created the new fact of a spiritual experience 
 which depended upon fellowship with the risen 
 Christ, and by that they built an organization 
 which, with all outward odds against it, neverthe- 
 less prevailed and spread and grew. 
 
 It is interesting, also, to note that the most 
 characteristic observances of the Christian Church 
 testify to the central fact of the Resurrection. 
 
 106 
 
JESUSy CHRIS LT 
 
 The early disciples, as Jews, had kept the seventh 
 day of the week as the Sabbath. Nothing less 
 than some overwhelming influence could have made 
 them depart from an observance so bulwarked by 
 all their inherited sense of an absolute religious 
 authority. Yet they changed from the seventh 
 day to the first day of the week for the Christian 
 day of worship, and all through the years since 
 the beginning, every opening of Christian doors 
 for worship on the first day of the week is the 
 repeated witness to the faith in the Resurrection 
 which the first disciples said had happened on that 
 day. 
 
 The sacrament of the Communion, also, owes 
 its spiritual greatness to belief in the Resurrection. 
 Had it been a mere memorial of Jesus’ death, its 
 observance would have died out because the hopes 
 which had gathered round Jesus Himself would 
 have stood defeated; but since those first days 
 the Communion has represented for Christian 
 disciples a Communion with the living Lord. 
 Without the power of that faith, this central act 
 in Christian worship would long since have dis- 
 appeared. 
 
 Therefore, when men ask themselves whether 
 or not they shall believe in the Resurrection, they 
 must face the question as to how they can explain 
 certain inescapable facts of history without it. If 
 
 107 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 our intellectual processes are to be coherent, we 
 are bound to recognize that great results require 
 us to find some cause adequate to explain them. 
 A light and flippant skepticism might wave aside 
 the Resurrection, but it cannot wave aside the 
 facts which the Resurrection, or something equal 
 to it, is needed to account for. Cowed men are 
 not turned into men who lay down their lives for 
 a conviction, the spirit of despair is not turned into 
 a conquering and unswerving faith, a great organi- 
 zation which binds together through the centuries 
 multitudes of men and women in the power of what 
 they claim to be a living experience, cannot come 
 into existence and endure without some vast reality 
 out of which so great a consequence could reason- 
 ably proceed. Therefore, for the mind which is 
 not deliberately biased against the spiritual possi- 
 bilities of our universe,—for the mind, that is to 
 say, which has not destroyed its impartial receptiv- 
 ity to truth by arbitrarily describing beforehand 
 the limits within which reality shall move—belief 
 in the Resurrection of Jesus can become far more 
 rational than any disbelief. For, indeed, there is 
 a sense in which the Resurrection was no miracle 
 at all. It would have been far more surprising 
 and less natural that it should not have happened 
 than that it should. For such a spirit as Jesus, 
 nothing could seem so normal as a continuing and 
 108 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 victorious life; and the inherent sense of spiritual 
 fitness links itself with the facts of history to con- 
 firm the faith that the Resurrection did occur. 
 Nothing else than the living influence of Jesus 
 could have transformed human lives and have 
 made that power of the early Church which we 
 have already considered; and the simplest way to 
 understand that influence is to recognize that ex- 
 actly that thing happened which all the New Test- 
 ament proclaims. Of the details and manner of 
 the Resurrection, the various accounts in the New 
 Testament are not always clear; but this great 
 fact stands forth, and only in the light of it is the 
 history intelligible—namely, that Jesus who had 
 been put to death, came back to His disciples in 
 a fashion so convincing that they knew that it 
 was He. 
 
 2. Then there is the story of the Virgin Birth. 
 Concerning this, as everybody knows, there has 
 been of late a discussion earnest almost to the 
 point of passion. Some people in the Church, as 
 well as people outside it, have held that the doc- 
 trine of the Virgin Birth has no necessary con- 
 nection with belief in Jesus as the Incarnation of 
 the life of God, and others insist that, without the 
 Virgin Birth, all the fulness of the old belief 
 would be built on sand. 
 
 Take the conservative position first. It has the 
 ereat strength of seeming to be the bulwark of 
 
 109 
 
SOME: OREN UWAYS (20 "GO 
 
 a conception of the value of Jesus which is of 
 immeasurable importance. For there are two 
 ideas about Jesus, and they differ widely, not 
 merely in theological clothing, but in actual prag- 
 matic value. One idea would rest content with 
 the belief that in Him we have the highest achieve- 
 ment of humanity. He is the spiritual mountain- 
 peak towering above all lesser heights, thrusting 
 up most grandly toward the sky. He is man at 
 his highest, man most filled with the consciousness 
 that points the way to God. It is obvious that such 
 a conception of Jesus is beautiful and inspiring; 
 but it is equally obvious that it leaves empty spaces 
 in the depths of human desire for what men want 
 to know. For this would still leave men saying 
 to themselves, “In Jesus we know what man 
 ought to be like when he reaches up toward God. 
 But do we know what God is like? We are try- 
 ing to get to Him. But is He trying to come to 
 us? May there, after all, be vast elements in the 
 nature of God which do not correspond to this 
 aspiration of the human soul which we see in 
 Jesus? Jesus was loving. But is God really loy- 
 ing? Jesus valued the least of human souls. But 
 does God stoop to the lowly? Jesus we can under- 
 stand. But can we understand God?’ That is 
 where we are left if we think of Jesus as only 
 the farthest adventure and discovery of the human 
 spirit out into the realms of the infinite. 
 I1O 
 
PEt Clo) CERES ok 
 
 But the result is wholly different when one fol- 
 lows the richer faith of Christendom. According 
 to that faith, Jesus was not only an excursion of 
 human excellence upward. He is the incursion of 
 God’s reality coming down to us. In Him we may 
 feel that the finite and the infinite are linked, and 
 that the great tides from the ocean of God flood 
 full into our human life. Believing this, the Chris- 
 tian can believe that though, with his limited 
 knowledge, he cannot know all that there is of 
 God, yet, nevertheless, there will be nothing in 
 God which is inconsistent with what he does know 
 in Jesus. All the beginning and end of reality 
 find their focus in that great soul. What Jesus 
 was is not only what man courageously in his lone- 
 ly effort must try to be. It is what God is and 
 therefore what the God in man is destined to 
 become. 
 
 All this the great consensus of Christian thought 
 has always believed, and it io a belief without 
 which Christianity would be infinitely tmpover- 
 ished. So far, as to the chief facts of the past 
 and as to the values of the present, there is agree- 
 ment. 
 
 But as concerns the question of what the spe- 
 cific conceptions are out of which these beliefs are 
 reached and in the strength in which their values 
 will be preserved, there is a marked, and, in our 
 day, a very eloquent division. Conservative theo- 
 
 III 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 logians who hold fast to the letter of the tradi- 
 tion, tell us that the only way in which one can 
 surely possess the full sense of the meaning of 
 Jesus is by holding literally to that belief in His 
 entrance into the world by a miraculous birth 
 which has for a long time been a teaching of the 
 Church. I say “for a long time” rather than 
 ‘from the first,” because much of the present dis- 
 cussion hinges on the point as to whether the Gos- 
 pels of Luke and Matthew, as we now have them, 
 represent the original tradition, or only a later 
 representation of the birth of Jesus of which 
 the first gospel traditions and the first apos- 
 tolic writings knew nothing. Nevertheless, the 
 conservative belief is not only that Jesus was 
 born of a human mother (a deep fact which 
 the first Christians were eager to safeguard 
 in order that the certainty of His humanity might 
 be understood), not only that He was born of 
 Mary, the white-souled Maid of Nazareth, but 
 also that He was born of her through a physical 
 miracle. He thinks that without exactly this kind 
 of conception of the story of the Virgin Birth, 
 it is impossible to believe in Jesus’ uniqueness at 
 all. And sometimes the conservative is very em- 
 phatic in his insistence that the Christian thinker 
 who recognizes less readily than he the authority 
 of tradition, has no proper place in the Church’s 
 recognition at all. The conservative finds certain 
 112 
 
FES US (CHRISIE 
 
 traditional gates of such absolute value for him 
 that he is inclined to think that no other gates 
 exist; and, confronted with the apparent fact that 
 other persons who did not go through his gate 
 somehow have arrived at the same conviction in 
 which he wants to dwell, he either declares that 
 their apparent presence in any such proper theo- 
 logical place is an hallucination contrary to the 
 facts, or else that if they are there they climbed 
 like trespassers over the wall and ought to be put 
 out. Whereas what these other disciples are main- 
 taining is that the circuit of the walls is wide, 
 and that there really are gates on the other side 
 through which they have come into the Holy City, 
 and that the Holy City is quite the same place to 
 them that it is to their conservative brothers who 
 have come up the more travelled way. 
 
 In short, those within the Church who may 
 be called today the liberals, differ from the con- 
 servatives in this: they believe that the important 
 thing is not the direction from which, but the 
 destination to which, conviction comes. ‘They 
 agree with the conservatives that Jesus is the ful- 
 ness of the Godhead bodily, and that God was 
 in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself; but 
 they are mastered by the conviction that the ques- 
 tion of a biological miracle has nothing essentially 
 to do with this divineness of Jesus. It seems to 
 them that we could believe Him to be not less fully 
 
 113 
 
SOME OPEN’ WAYS TO GOD 
 
 divine if the Church had never possessed the chap- 
 ters concerning the infancy in Matthew and Luke 
 and had known of its Master only from the rest of 
 the gospels and from the epistles of the New Tes- 
 tament, through all of which men seem to be find- 
 ing Him their Lord and yet implicitly assuming 
 that He was Joseph and Mary’s son. As Jesus 
 Himself taught us, God is a Spirit, and the full 
 coming of God who is the Spirit, into the soul of 
 the Man of Nazareth, is a reality which moves on 
 a level with which the physical question has noth- 
 ing to do. 
 
 What then shall be said today to the would-be 
 disciple of Jesus Christ who finds neither his in- 
 tellectual conviction nor his religious emotion laid 
 hold of by the traditional teaching which insists 
 on a physical miracle of the Virgin Birth? I 
 know what I should say, for I know what I say 
 to my own soul. I am a child of my own genera- 
 tion. I cannot escape the influence of the things 
 which we know and believe today. I know that 
 many New Testament scholars, spending their 
 life in trying to discover, not some argumentative 
 support of traditional beliefs, but truth and the 
 truth only, find the evidence for a physically mi- 
 raculous birth of Jesus open to historic question. 
 They point out that it may be, not a fact in that 
 plodding sense of prose which our western mind 
 is accustomed to, but the poetry of spiritual belief 
 
 114 
 
JESUS + CE RT Soh 
 
 in which the oriental mind represented the unique- 
 ness of the Lord. I remember, too, and this 
 is most important, that Mark, who wrote the first 
 gospel and wrote it because he thought that there- 
 in he had summed up what men needed to know 
 of Jesus for the saving of their souls, made no 
 slightest mention of the Virgin Birth. I remember 
 that the fourth gospel, which bears the name of 
 the Beloved Disciple John, has no mention of it, 
 and that, on the contrary, its whole conception of 
 the relation between Jesus of Nazareth and the 
 invisible Father is built upon ideas which have no 
 need of a physically miraculous birth to make the 
 oneness of the Father and the Son complete. I 
 remember too that Paul, that flaming messenger 
 of the greatness of his Lord, needed no word con- 
 cerning such manner of birth in the gospel which 
 he preached. He never wrote of it to any of his 
 churches nor seemed to find it vital in his own 
 faith. Then in the light of these things, I say 
 to myself, and say to any inquiring souls who come 
 to me, “It is not needful that we be troubled if 
 we have doubts about the Virgin Birth, nor has 
 any man or group of men a right to make that 
 honest difficulty of the mind into a barrier between 
 the soul and the Master whom it seeks.” I can 
 not say to myself, and I can not proclaim in my 
 preaching, that a man must believe in a physically 
 miraculous birth in order to believe in Jesus 
 
 es 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 Christ as Son of God and Savior. I believe that 
 the Incarnation may be so interpreted that the 
 fulness of God in Jesus may be felt as truly by 
 those who do not, as by those who do, believe that 
 He was thus born. Our whole philosophical 
 background is changed from that in relation to 
 which men thought when the creeds were written. 
 We do not think in the old way of a mingling of 
 substances between the divine and the human as 
 the method by which the life that was to bring 
 God and man together must have been created. 
 The only crucial miracle is the miracle of the 
 Spirit. God, as Jesus said, is a Spirit, and if we 
 believe it to be true that the Spirit which was in 
 Jesus of Nazareth is completely and finally the 
 embodiment for us of the Spirit of the eternal 
 God, then Jesus is the Lord for us in a fulness 
 which no manner of birth one way or the other 
 can affect. 
 
 That being so, a man can say the Apostles’ or 
 the Nicene Creed and rejoice to Say it, even 
 though he may frankly be uncertain whether the 
 Virgin Birth was demonstrable fact, or only a rev- 
 erent and lovely tradition of the early Church. 
 What the creeds in the deep heart of them have 
 cherished, that he also cherishes. He believes in 
 Jesus coming to this world from God, incarnating 
 here God’s fulness as no other life has done, rising 
 from death in the triumph of His eternal life, In- 
 
 116 
 
FES US VC MRS 
 
 terpreter for us of all reality, Foundation-Stone 
 upon which we build all that we would try to be 
 and do. He was conceived of the Holy Ghost. 
 Yes. He was born of the Virgin Mary. Yes. 
 But whether, when a man says that, he is confi- 
 dent that in literal terms some unprecedented phys- 
 ical miracle was wrought, or whether the only thing 
 he is sure of is that, over the coming of that Spirit 
 of Jesus into this world and His sheltering by the 
 love of the Mother who bore Him, God’s spirit 
 brooded in such marvelous way that the spiritual 
 miracle was wrought of that life of Jesus which 
 all the Christian generations have known and 
 have adored, equally the Jesus whom he confesses 
 can be to him the Savior who is the Incarnation of 
 the all-sufiicient God. 
 
 In the Gospel of St. Luke stands the lovely story 
 of the Annunciation Angel, of the Maid of Na- 
 zareth, and of the Holy Night in Bethlehem when 
 the choirs of Christmas angels sang. I would 
 treat these exquisite records with a wondering 
 reverence, as every sensitive spirit must; I would 
 not touch with one fingerweight of contrary in- 
 fluence the glad freedom of any Christian disciple 
 to accept these as the exact record of literal and 
 physical fact. No one can disprove that such they 
 were; and surely no Christian will forget that 
 round the incomparable figure of Jesus are far 
 horizons of mystery where our precise analysis 
 
 117 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 can never reach. Yet to those who find it neither 
 helpful nor possible to read the story of the mira- 
 culous birth as scientific literalism, it is right to say 
 that what the earliest gospel never mentioned, 
 what Peter and John and Paul, so far as the New 
 Testament writings give any indication, never 
 preached, is not necessary for the heart’s full faith 
 now in the Incarnate Son of God. The eager, 
 yet intellectually perplexed believer, can lift the 
 creeds into that realm of poetry where the spirit 
 finds its wings, and say to himself, I may think 
 of the greatness of Jesus not in terms of my ability 
 to afirm a physical miracle of birth for Him, but 
 in His ability, as the eternal and self-evidencing 
 power of God, to bring the divine birth of the 
 Spirit down among men, and to bring it—if I will 
 have it so—again today in me. 
 
 By such use as that, the creeds are not belittled; 
 rather they are lifted to their noblest and most 
 vital worth. For thus they become an evidence of 
 that which ever ought to be true of the Christian 
 Church——namely, that the fellowship of Jesus is 
 built not upon identity in definitions but upon a 
 community of devotion. Loving Jesus Christ, two 
 men may stand together and confess their faith 
 in Him through the Church’s ancient words, and 
 by their brotherhood in that confession be each 
 the more uplifted, even though from the central 
 ground of their common loyalty to their Lord 
 
 118 
 
JESUS HOH R Usa 
 
 their thoughts may range on different ways. One 
 man may accept the creeds with an utter literalism, 
 holding even to those conceptions which most 
 thoughtful minds of this generation, and the im- 
 plicit judgment of a large part of the Church it- 
 self, have moved beyond. When he proclaims 
 his faith in God the Father, ‘Maker of Heaven 
 and earth,” his thought may repudiate the whole 
 conception of evolution which multitudes in Chris- 
 tendom today accept, and may cling instead to the 
 idea of the earth created in six days of twenty- 
 four hours each, as for centuries the whole Church 
 inflexibly believed. When he repeats that Jesus 
 “ascended into heaven,” he may picture the form 
 of Jesus as visibly moving upward through the 
 clouds until it came to the gates of heaven, there 
 only a little beyond men’s sight within the sky. 
 When he speaks of ‘“‘the resurrection of the body,” 
 he may mean the re-assembling of all those physi- 
 cal particles which belong to the mortal body that 
 is buried—as also through many centuries the vast 
 preponderance of the Church’s teaching pro- 
 claimed. And when he speaks of Jesus as “born 
 of the Virgin Mary,” he may mean the physical 
 miracle which most of the Church’s interpreters 
 insist upon now. Certainly no one would question 
 the Church’s welcome for the man who thus con- 
 ceives the creed. And on exactly the same 
 ground, the Church, being wise enough to know 
 
 119 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 that willing devotion is more important than in- 
 tellectual infallibility, welcomes equally the other 
 man, who conceives the creed not in terms of a 
 once orthodox but now largely outgrown past, but 
 in terms of what the thought of the Church partly 
 now is, and of what he believes in further part it 
 will come to be. And this man will claim his 
 heritage as simply and rightfully as the tradition- 
 alist claims his. He may think that if the Church 
 were framing a creed now for the first time it 
 might conceivably frame one which should have 
 less debatable metaphysic in it than the Nicene 
 Creed, and a larger emphasis on the Gospel of 
 Jesus—instead of the Church’s doctrine about 
 Jesus—than either the Nicene or the Asoptles’ 
 Creed expresses. He may think it possible that 
 the Church of tomorrow may incorporate into her 
 liturgy new creedal expressions born of the desire 
 more clearly, more simply, and more command- 
 ingly to commit the would-be Christian to that 
 program of the Kingdom of God which Jesus 
 lived and died for. He will be ready to make 
 plain wherein his own thought differs from some 
 of the traditional interpretations of the accepted 
 creeds, and he will commit his vindication to that 
 living and widening judgment of the Church to 
 which every unafraid disciple has the right to ap- 
 peal, But he recognizes the heritage of history, 
 and he prizes fellowship rather than division. He 
 I20 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 perceives that for the corporate worship of the 
 congregation, the historic creeds—like ancient 
 flags, the very dust upon whose folds is hallowed 
 —bring a glory of suggestion which no symbol 
 sewed together out of the most exactly colored 
 words of our modern thinking could now bring; 
 and so with that same essential devotion which the 
 worshippers of other centuries have expressed, he 
 takes the words of the creed upon his lips. 
 
 IV 
 
 Realizing thus that the supreme concern for 
 Christians is not a uniformity of opinion about 
 Jesus, but a religious appropriation of the reality 
 which was in Him, I should like to conclude this 
 chapter by making plain the practical meaning of 
 certain great truths which Christian theology has 
 long sought to express. 
 
 1. To begin with, there is the Incarnation. The 
 Christian faith is that in Jesus the divine and hu- 
 man came into a union which is unique in its saving 
 importance for all the life of men. We lose the 
 meaning of that belief if we make it a mere spec- 
 ulation about Jesus. We gain it only as we make 
 it the revelation of new possibilities through Him 
 for ourselves. 
 
 For the Christian conception holds that Jesus 
 of Nazareth was that perfect embodiment of the 
 
 121 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 life of 'God’and of the'meaning of God fomeie 
 
 human children which all the long aspiration of 
 the years had been dimly reaching for. Because 
 of the Christ in Him, He seemed unspeakably 
 different from all other men; and yet, at the same 
 moment, this paradox was true,—that because of 
 the Christ that was in Him, he drew others to 
 Him and made them feel that somehow they never 
 found themselves until they had joined their lives 
 with His. The Christ in Him was what He alone 
 fully was, but what all men in the truest destiny 
 of their spirits are meant to try to be. 
 
 So the Christ that was in Jesus comes and stands 
 by every man forever. It is Jesus-like. It speaks 
 to us again with the voice of Jesus. It holds out 
 to us hands like His. It bids us walk on paths 
 where Jesus’ feet have gone. And the Christ in 
 Jesus is not some alien principle separated by a 
 great gulf from the essential nature in ourselves. 
 We only recognize God in Him because that which 
 is of God in us, blind, fumbling, imperfect though 
 it be, reaches up to claim its own in Him. The 
 Christ who walks beside us is forever God and 
 man, the beauty and holiness which are so far 
 above us coming down to incarnate themselves in 
 the struggling ideals that are within. For every 
 man the Christ-voice that calls him to come home 
 to his Father has in it a strange intimacy of com- 
 pulsion which he understands only when at length 
 
 122 
 
TESuUS. CHRIS 
 
 he realizes, like the son in the far country of the 
 parable, that in answering that voice, he has for 
 the first time come to himself. Christ who stands 
 outside us in the ever familiar personality of Jesus, 
 appeals to us not by any outward authority alone, 
 but by the awareness that in Him is revealed the 
 possible glory of our Christed selves. 
 
 There is no depth nor distance in the earth 
 where men can hide from this challenge of the 
 Christ spirit. The thing in them that is akin to 
 it will draw it after them on an unerring track. 
 
 ‘Fear wist not to evade 
 As Love wist to pursue.” 
 
 Yet it is true that, to many, Christ may seem at 
 first not as a friend but as a pursuing presence 
 which they would fain escape, knowing not yet His 
 beauty and His healing. ‘There are thousands of 
 men and women, even in the Christian churches, 
 to whom the thought of Christ is a disturbing 
 thing because they will not let Him woo them 
 from the false satisfactions in which they try to 
 rest. These are the men who secretly see their 
 better natures fettered in the midst of their mer- 
 cenary pursuits; women cursed with restlessness in 
 the midst of a thousand luxuries because they feel 
 the emptiness of their existence; young men and 
 girls who may try to hide their innate idealism 
 under the brazen acceptance of the selfish stand- 
 
 123 
 
SOME (OPEN, “WAYS *T:0'°GOD 
 
 ards of their world, yet who have their moments 
 when in the presence of some noble and courageous 
 thing they stand consciously cheapened and 
 ashamed. For such lives the message of the Gos- 
 pel is still urgent°and powerful. It speaks in the 
 same old terms that never lose their vital reality, 
 of the Christ who follows in spite of sin, indiffer- 
 ence, and denial. “If we believe not, yet he 
 abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.” To 
 the foolish heart, seeking its fulfilment in vain 
 things, He comes with an offer of that joyous re- 
 demption which is only found when the heart sur- 
 renders all things to the touch of that transfiguring 
 Friend. Men will not find Christ by blind obei- 
 sance of their intellects to old formulas, no matter 
 how stubbornly the teachers may insist upon that. 
 Christ is not seeking servants who recognize 
 formal authority and clothe themselves in a mere 
 livery of His Name. Christ calls men to be His 
 friends, and only to His friends can He reveal 
 Himself convincingly. If any man would be His 
 friend today, if, in spite of any creedal perplexi- 
 ties whatever, he will yet look honestly into the 
 face of the matchless Christhood of Jesus, he will 
 feel that Christ in Him appealing to the Christ 
 in his own soul, and will go out with such faith- 
 fulness and courage as he may to live his life in 
 that spirit of Jesus which is for ever plain to the 
 conscience that will be guided by Him. ‘Then the 
 
 124 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 roads of life shall not be uncompanioned, but on 
 them will move the presence of the Lord Him- 
 self. 
 
 2. We pass on to another cardinal Christian 
 doctrine which must be turned into life. It is the 
 doctrine of salvation through the atoning death of 
 Christ. I do not intend now to attempt to enter 
 into all its theological implications. It has far 
 wider meanings than those which I shall even try 
 to suggest, but this at least I am sure that it does 
 mean: Jesus Christ lived and died not only to 
 save men from the penalty of their sins, but from 
 their sinning. And in order that He may save 
 them and lead them back into the fellowship of 
 the love of God, often He must help them pass 
 through His own experience of the cross. 
 
 There is a strange short drama by Charles 
 Rann Kennedy which seems to me immensely 
 moving. It is called “The Terrible Meek.” The 
 whole scene of it is set in darkness, and out of 
 the darkness come the voices of those who speak. 
 The scene is the top of Calvary in that blackness 
 which settled upon the world when Jesus died. 
 A Roman soldier is there first, then comes the 
 voice of the Centurion, then presently out of the 
 darkness is the sound of weeping;—it is the 
 mother of the one hung there above the ground. 
 The soul of the Centurion has been wrestling with 
 the awe and terror of the strange scene which he 
 
 125 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS £0 °GOD 
 
 has witnessed, and out of his inner turmoil a pas- 
 sionate new conviction of scorn for the things 
 which he had served, of dawning faith in things 
 which he had only begun to dream, flames out in 
 the words he speaks to Mary. 
 
 ‘And so we go on building our kingdoms—the 
 kingdoms of this world. We stretch out our 
 hands, greedy, grasping, tyrannical, to possess the 
 earth. Domination, power, glory, money, mer- 
 chandise, luxury, these are the things we aim at; 
 but what we really gain is pest and famine, grudge 
 labor, the enslaved hate of men and women, 
 ghosts, dead and death-breathing ghosts that 
 haunt our lives forever. . . . We have lost both 
 earth and ourselves in trying to possess it; for the 
 soul of the earth is man and the love of him, and 
 we have made of both a desolation. I tell you, 
 woman, this dead son of yours, disfigured, shamed, 
 spat upon, has built a kingdom this day that can 
 never die. The living glory of him rules it. The 
 earth is his and he made it. He and his brothers 
 have been moulding and making it through the 
 long ages: they are the only ones who ever really 
 did possess it: not the proud, not the idle, not the 
 wealthy, not the vaunting empires of the world. 
 Something has happened up here on this hill today 
 to shake all our kingdoms of blood and fear to 
 the dust. The earth is His, the earth is theirs, 
 and they made it. ‘The meek, the terrible meek, 
 the fierce agonizing meck, are about to enter into 
 their inheritance.” 
 
 It is true that the earth is His, for He made it. 
 126 
 
RES URS) A CueL Rilsih 
 
 The meek, the terrible meek, the terrible self- 
 sacrificing Christ, shall enter into His inheritance 
 when those who bear His name are brave enough 
 to claim it. 
 
 Said St. Paul long ago when he faced the stub- 
 born pride of the old conservatism of the Jews, 
 and the cynical disbelief of the Greeks who 
 imagined that there was no reality which their 
 philosophy could not explain: ‘We preach Christ 
 crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and 
 unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto those who 
 are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the pow- 
 er of God and the wisdom of God.” 
 
 There is power in the gospel of Jesus to build 
 the world anew. It has built anew the temples 
 of individual souls. It can build, if it shall find 
 the architects who are great enough to plan it, 
 the temple of the soul of all the race. But in 
 order for that to come true there must be the 
 willingness on the part of Christian men and 
 women to dare and to suffer, if need be, as Christ 
 did, for great ideals which seem forlorn. Our 
 social life cannot be fashioned into brotherhood, 
 our economic and industrial system cannot be 
 brought into some likeness to the Kingdom of 
 God, our whole world cannot be delivered from 
 the greed and passions which lead to war, until 
 people, inspired by the spirit of Christ, are willing 
 to espouse that which the derisive laughter of this 
 
 127 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 world calls visionary and in the service of an 
 abiding faith to fill up by their own sacrifices “that 
 which is lacking of the affliction of Christ.” For 
 the great ideals do not enter into the world full- 
 orbed and convincing. They come to the world 
 through the venture of faith of those who are 
 great enough of soul to believe and who, having 
 believed, will seek against weary postponement 
 and long delay to advance the cause of that un- 
 wearying faith. In the vision of the Book of 
 Revelation those who sat about the throne of the 
 Lamb were those who had come out of great tribu- 
 lation. It will not be strange if in the final reck- 
 oning those who shall redeem the earth from 
 many of the evils which curse it now, shall have 
 brought that earth to God out of a tribulation 
 which shall be very real in heart, and soul, and 
 action. 
 
 3. Linked with the thought of the atoning death 
 of Jesus, it is fitting that we should understand 
 also the spiritual message of His resurrection. 
 Already we have considered the fact of the resur- 
 rection as it pertained to Jesus Himself and have 
 reviewed the reasons why no fair accounting of 
 the facts of history can escape the conclusion that 
 He who was crucified and buried in the garden 
 tomb did come back and manifest Himself alive 
 to His disciples; but the significance of the resur- 
 rection in the thought and life of Christendom 
 
 128 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 widens out far beyond belief in the solitary fact 
 of the rising again of Jesus. The Christian ex- 
 perience has been guided by the light of those 
 words of Jesus Himself, ‘Because I live, ye shall 
 live also.”” His whole personality made the hu- 
 man spirit seem essentially so great, and life 
 rather than death so surely its normal expectation, 
 that all spiritual consciousness has been lifted to 
 a new dignity of faith in its own immortality. In 
 the letters of William James there is a reply which 
 he wrote to the questions of a correspondent who 
 asked him about his own religious beliefs. Con- 
 cerning personal immortality, he answered that he 
 believed in it more strongly as he grew older, and 
 this was the reason that he gave for that belief— 
 “because I am just getting fit to live.” It was 
 from the influence of Jesus Christ more than from 
 any other cause in history that men have learned 
 to think of life as so noble a matter that the uni- 
 verse would be unintelligible if death of necessity 
 destroyed it. There is an invincible impulse to 
 believe that the human soul in its highest spiritual 
 exercise is lifted to a level of existence on which 
 physical death has no power to touch it. It is a 
 fact to which all the centuries bear witness that the 
 more fully men have tried to live like Jesus, and 
 the more earnestly they have sought to lift their 
 own spirits to that exalted plane on which His 
 moved, the more surely they have felt this convic- 
 129 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 tion of immortality. With quiet inner confidence 
 they have believed that they were “‘just getting fit 
 to live’ and that death’s toll-gathering fingers 
 should simply strip from them mortality and set 
 the spirit free. 
 
 Nor is the significance of the resurrection 
 limited to that faith which it brings to men in a 
 life that continues beyond the confines of this 
 world. It has taught those, who turn to Jesus 
 Christ for guidance, to live here ‘in the power of 
 an endless life.’ It has taught men to strive and 
 dare more gallantly because they can trust that 
 all victory is on the side of those who live for 
 God. They remember that through Gethsemane, 
 and over the brow of the dark and tragic hill, 
 Christ went His way to triumph. His victory is 
 the eternal symbol of that which is unseen over the 
 brutal weight of the near and obvious, the victory 
 of the quietness of God over the tumult of the 
 world’s rejection. Always the thought of Easter 
 has enabled men to trust in the unarmed power of 
 goodness. It makes them know that, in spite of 
 any momentary appearance to the contrary, no 
 pure act of goodness is ever lost. Let men 
 stand in some measure of Christ’s likeness for 
 truth and right, and the contribution which they 
 make to the ennobling of their generation will 
 have its Easter-day of vindication. For no impulse 
 whatever that is conceived according to the grace 
 
 130 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 of God, is Calvary the last word. The resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus is, for all who look to Him, the im- 
 mortal witness that the quiet power of goodness 
 shall at last ascend its throne. 
 
 4. Finally, there is the faith in a mighty second 
 coming of Jesus Christ. The New Testament 
 formulations of that faith are confusing. We 
 cannot tell how far the current apocalyptic expec- 
 tation of the Jews may have colored the disciples’ 
 minds and may have affected their report to us 
 of the words of Jesus. But certainly this great 
 faith has always been characteristic of Christian- 
 ity,—that somehow and in some manner, the 
 Christ spirit which stooped to what seemed its 
 humiliation in the death of Jesus, should come 
 back to the world in power and manifest authority. 
 
 Now the thing which it seems to me we need 
 to understand, is that this coming of the power 
 of Jesus depends not so much upon Him as upon 
 us. It is not a matter of the miraculous approach 
 of an absent Christ for which we have nothing to 
 do but to wait. It is a matter, rather, of recog- 
 nizing that Christ is always present, wherever and 
 whenever the faith of men will open the gates to 
 let Him in. 
 
 When the grace of God came among men in the 
 human figure of Jesus of Nazareth, the hard-eyed 
 men of His world saw in Him nothing important. 
 ‘When Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence 
 
 131 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 He is,” they said, “howbeit we know this man 
 whence He is.” Was He not the carpenter’s 
 son? Had He not come out of despised Naza- 
 reth? Was He not the friend of common people, 
 who ate with publicans and sinners and obviously 
 was no person of whom either the socially re- 
 spectable or the ecclesiastically important people 
 need take notice? The very suggestion that this 
 man out of Galilee should be called the Messiah 
 toward whom the hopes of Israel for centuries 
 had pointed forward, seemed to them either in- 
 sanity or blasphemy, or both. When Messiah 
 should come, men would know Him by His great- 
 ness, by the heavenly powers that gathered at His 
 back, by the crown of dominion He should wear, 
 by the sceptre of miraculous sovereignty which He 
 should wield. To suggest that the carpenter 
 might be the Messiah, this man sprung from the 
 common people might be the King—what was this 
 but to degrade into a travesty the long grandeur 
 of the messianic hope? So they reasoned, and 
 men of worldly wisdom said they reasoned well. 
 On the brow of Jesus, meanwhile, there was a 
 crown; but they could not see it. In His grasp 
 there was a sceptre; but they saw the empty hand, 
 or, at the last, the blood-prints of the nails. Like 
 Pilate, they could not understand a kingdom that 
 was not of this world. Before their eyes, in the 
 L232 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 majesty of His spiritual lordship, He went His 
 way: but they did not and would not see. 
 
 Yet nothing is clearer concerning Jesus than 
 the fact of His own consciousness that in Him the 
 glory of God’s presence had come into the midst 
 of men. He did not seek for any outward pan- 
 oply of royalty, for He did not need it. In John 
 the Baptist, notwithstanding the fact that he died 
 in a prison, He saw the Elijah of the new dis- 
 pensation. In Himself, He beheld the true long- 
 ing for the Messiah satisfied. To believe in Him, 
 to understand His spirit and to share it, was to 
 enter into the greatness of the Kingdom of God. 
 
 Every age has in itself the possibility of becom- 
 ing by its own creative choice the age of a tri- 
 umphant new advent of Christ. The time is not 
 a matter of arithmetical calculation. It is a mat- 
 ter of spiritual preparation. We need not look 
 wistfully to the future. We only need to deal 
 grandly with today. Christ is forever coming 
 again. He stands at the door and knocks. Our 
 business is to let Him in, and the reason that so 
 often we do not let Him in is because stubbornly, 
 like the men of old, we are looking for some 
 haughty presence which will minister to our own 
 pride instead of looking for Him who comes 
 again, as He came at the beginning, in the lowli- 
 ness of the spirit that worldly wisdom mocks at 
 
 133 
 
SOME. O PEIN W AS TO SGione 
 
 and only eyes fresh to the value of God behold 
 as the presence of the King. 
 
 Is it not greatly possible that in this time of 
 ours Christ may come to men’s intellectual com- 
 prehension with a vividness such as few of the 
 ages have known? ‘The promise of such a result 
 lies in the urgent genuineness of our time’s desire. 
 Men want today a Christ who will answer our 
 present needs. ‘Chey want one who is close to our 
 immediate apprehension and of whom they can 
 think in such a way that their own problems and 
 “necessities become interpreted through His light. 
 They are not greatly interested in what Greek 
 theologians said about Him fifteen hundred years 
 ago. It is not that they deny the orthodox cor- 
 rectness of those formulas, but simply that those 
 formulas seem to them to have no easily under- 
 stood meaning for present thought. They are 
 not in the language of our experience. They do 
 not touch us at the living points of our desire. 
 They may bring a Christ who is flawless in their 
 abstract definition; but they do not bring a Christ 
 whom the twentieth century can understand; and 
 it is this Christ that we must have. 
 
 If this new coming of Christ be possible, why 
 then is it held back? Is the reason not the same 
 that it has always been, namely, that men are 
 looking afar for some miracle on the horizon in- 
 stead of beholding with marvelling eyes the mira- 
 
 134 
 
Jive USC EPR USE 
 
 cle of the new desire in their midst? Many would 
 insist, by the stubborn error of their mistaken 
 reverence, that Christ is not come and cannot come 
 until He comes in the form in which they hold 
 that it is alone proper that He appear. So the 
 conservative theologians today refuse to recognize 
 the force in that great hunger for Christ which 
 would interpret faith in Him in simple terms which 
 men can understand. They would clothe Him in 
 the Kingliness of their inherited formularies, or 
 else it shall not be allowed that He is here at all. 
 They insist on interpreting His godhead in such 
 a way as makes Him alien to our human experi- 
 ence, setting Him apart from present existence by 
 emphasis upon ancient miracles, declaring that no 
 man can believe in Him except in the metaphysical 
 terms of Greek philosophy, and so denying the 
 simplicity with which He can come to the heart 
 that is eager for the Spirit of Jesus now. The 
 time has come when the Church must beware lest 
 the creeds themselves should become a disguise 
 to hide the coming of Christ. She must beware 
 lest she teaches men to say, I cannot believe in 
 Christ till in some tremendous way He has 
 stormed my understanding. She must beware lest 
 she make Christ seem remote when really He is 
 near. Just as the kind of Messiah whom the 
 Jews expected, one clothed in the majesty of cloud 
 and lightning, seemed still far off when the Mes- 
 
 135 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 siah was actually in their midst, so the kind of 
 Christ whom the traditional theologians have in- 
 sisted on, Christ clothed in the cloudy metaphors 
 of Nicene theology, must also seem far off from 
 the faith of this different age of ours, when in fact 
 the real Christ is knocking at our hearts. In one 
 of his essays published during the war, Donald 
 Hankey made plain how essentially Christian are 
 the instincts in many men who have not the slight- 
 est idea that it is possible that they should call 
 themselves Christian. They have associated 
 Christianity with the miraculous, the strange, the 
 unintelligible, and they do not know that Chris- 
 tianity is so simple a thing as the mastership of 
 Jesus over their hearts, proving His Godhead 
 through the living fact that He alone releases the 
 God in men. If the Church could only remember 
 this and teach it, then the Christ who was unrec- 
 ognized once because men refused to recognize 
 the simplicity of the spirit He came in, may be 
 recognized now through the truer vision which 
 perceives that the mightiness of His advent into 
 human faith might be at hand. 
 
 As there is a possibility of the larger coming 
 of the spirit of Christ into our intellectual under- 
 standing now, so there is the possibility of His 
 larger coming into the realm of the re-adjustment 
 of our practical concerns. 
 
 There were men in Jerusalem, able men and 
 
 136 
 
JESUS ICH RUST 
 
 leading citizens, who lived at the time when the 
 Carpenter of Nazareth came up to the great city 
 which was the centre of Israel’s affairs. They be- 
 lieved in religion too. They were sure that the 
 Temple was the most important institution in the 
 people’s life. ‘They had an alliance between the 
 Temple and the business that gathered round its 
 courts. They were determined at all hazards to 
 maintain it. They recognized in a general way 
 that there were a great many things in life that 
 were wrong, and they were busily hopeful that 
 some day, probably a long time off, the Messiah 
 would come and set these things right in a way 
 which everyone would approve; but meanwhile 
 there was a disturbing person in their midst. He 
 had claimed to be the Messiah. He dared say 
 that this Gospel of the Kingdom of God, which 
 broke down barriers and exalted common people, 
 and proclaimed that peasants and fishermen and 
 even the outcasts were of as much value in God’s 
 eyes as the men who had made themselves rich and 
 great, would bring in the new heavens and the new 
 earth. They looked at Him with outraged indig- 
 nation. How did He dare to set His judgment 
 up against theirs? Who was He that His haughty 
 self-importance should be regarded? What fi- 
 nancial stake did He have in the country? He 
 did not have any place to lay His head. What 
 did He have to lose if this dissatisfaction that He 
 
 137 
 
SOME "OPEN OUWAY'S (10 tGaorD 
 
 was sowing among the people began to be serious? 
 But they had everything to lose. So it was a man- 
 ifest matter of good citizenship that this disturb- 
 ing prophet of Nazareth should be crucified; and 
 crucified He was. 
 
 Christ stands today outside the shut gates of 
 much of our economic system. He stands there in 
 the great hunger of the unprivileged multitude 
 for wholesomeness of life. He knocks in the vast 
 demand of millions for a chance not to work and 
 live like driven brutes, but in a manner that shall 
 give some freedom to let the mind and soul ex- 
 pand. He stands there in the modern demand for 
 justice and for brotherhood and for the recogni- 
 tion of the human value of the lowliest toiler as 
 being more sovereign in a Christian democracy 
 than the richest financial stake. When He enters 
 in, there will be readjustment which will be hard 
 for some to face, and that is why the gates are 
 often barred against Him by frightened privileged 
 hands. When He comes in, as come some day He 
 shall, He will make for all of us a life of which 
 we can be more glad than of the hard inequalities 
 and the often unconscious cruelties in the midst 
 of which now we live. He can make for us a life 
 in which it will be possible for all men for the 
 first time to live as Christians, because they will 
 be living as brothers in a society conceived more 
 
 138 
 
JESUS CHRIST 
 
 nobly and more truly than now it is in terms of 
 the common good. 
 
 So comes again the question to us at it came to 
 the conscience of Pilate, ‘‘What shall I do then 
 with Jesus which is called Christ?” Mark the 
 inexorable requirement of that word, “what then 
 shall I do?” We may nail Him upon His cross; 
 or we may take that cross of His on our shoulders 
 and walk with Him upon His way. It is one or 
 the other, for He will have’ no half-measures, 
 and we cannot ignore Him nor make as though 
 we did not know that He is in our midst. Wheth- 
 er a man may know much or little of theology, 
 when his conscience stands before the challenge of 
 the life of Jesus Christ, he knows within himself 
 that nothing less authoritative than God reaches 
 out through Christ to claim him. And when he 
 obeys, through Christ, that call of God, he makes 
 the one effective recognition of the divineness of 
 Jesus which Jesus Himself would be concerned to 
 have. 
 
 139 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 In CHRISTIAN teaching as it is usually given and 
 received, there is probably no subject which leaves 
 the average person more vaguely perplexed than 
 the subject of the Holy Ghost. It is relatively easy 
 to think vividly of Jesus Christ. It is not so diff- 
 cult also to have a fairly definite conception of God 
 the Father as the power that created all men, and 
 the love which reaches out through that redemp- 
 tion which Jesus came to show. But how to fit 
 in the thought of the Holy Ghost to the rest of our 
 thinking is a matter that leaves many religious 
 people nonplussed. 
 
 The representations in art do not give much 
 help. In the Boston Public Library, opposite the 
 noble frieze of the prophets, Sargent has painted 
 an appalling thing which is alleged to represent 
 the Trinity. There are three remote and passion- 
 less figures sitting side by side, all alike, and all 
 joined with one interminable robe, and one of these 
 is supposed to be the Holy Ghost. From that 
 kind of symbol, as indeed from much crude preach- 
 ing, in which the Holy Ghost is spoken of as 
 though He were one among three Gods, the man 
 or woman seeking light would gain as little as 
 
 140 
 
dee LIND W EU LDN Gis RiP Re 
 
 from a pagan idol. The symbol in the paintings 
 of the older centuries is better. There the Holy 
 Ghost is usually represented as a hovering dove. 
 That has the value at least of suggesting the bene- 
 diction of God brooding over the life of men. 
 But how are we going to translate the symbol back | 
 into theology? What or who is the Holy Ghost? 
 
 If we look for definitions, we can find them; 
 but they are not always helpful. For example, in 
 the Articles of Religion as printed in the Book of 
 Common Prayer we may turn to Article V, Of the 
 Holy Ghost, and read as follows: “The Holy 
 Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, 
 is of one substance, majesty, and glory, with the 
 Father and the Son, very and eternal God.” All 
 of which may be true to the utmost, but still it 
 does not seem to get us anywhere. It only leads 
 us round a circle of sonorous words and lands us 
 back at our original problem of understanding just 
 what the thought of the Holy Ghost has to do 
 with our appropriation of the full richness of God 
 for actual religion. 
 
 The first thing which I think we need to do 1s 
 to replace in our own minds that name “Holy 
 Ghost”? with the better name “‘the Holy Spirit.” 
 We shall find the old words remaining still, of 
 course, in the formularies of the Church, where 
 long usage brings the language of earlier cen- 
 turies down into our own time even after it has 
 
 141 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS) 1.0) Gio 
 
 grown antique; but we can think in terms of the 
 Holy Spirit even on occasions when we say the 
 syllables, “the Holy Ghost,” for the word ‘“‘ghost”’ 
 originally meant spirit, in all its living and breath- 
 ing sense. It did not mean any disembodied 
 shadow. It meant the very soul of life; and this 
 is what religious experience has been trying to ex- 
 press when it has spoken of the Holy Spirit. It 
 has meant a reality which has come out from God, 
 vital, quickening, and most immediately real. 
 Moreover, we must remember that faith in the 
 Holy Spirit did not begin with an abstraction. 
 Men were not playing theoretically with the idea 
 of God and devising ingenious elaborations, of 
 which the Holy Spirit was one. On the contrary, 
 all that was said about the Holy Spirit was a re- 
 flection of what at first was very deeply felt. Back 
 of theology lay the religious experience which 
 theology was simply the effort to explain. There- 
 fore, as we begin to think of the Holy Spirit, just 
 as when we were thinking of the divinity of Jesus, 
 we must begin by remembering what men experi- 
 enced, and interpret what they tried to say always 
 in relation to that original and predominant fact. 
 
 I 
 
 1. If we turn to the New Testament, it is easy 
 to see that, when men talked of the Holy Spirit, 
 
 142 
 
Tere eh NCD EW Eis PNG S Bik ie k 
 
 they were talking of something which had made 
 a tremendous difference in the immediate matter 
 of their daily living. They were conscious of a 
 baptism from on high. ‘They knew that something 
 had entered into them which enabled them to live 
 differently from the way in which they had ever 
 lived before, and they believed that this something 
 was the personal inbreathing of the very life of 
 God Himself. The music of this consciousness 
 which set itself to the name of the Holy Spirit 
 rings through the New Testament like a chime of 
 bells. It throbs with mighty notes of power. It 
 sings, a carolling of joy, that wakens the morning 
 with the music of a golden hope, and floats like 
 the evening angelus, full of serenity and quietude 
 and peace. On that last night in the upper room, 
 Jesus had promised the coming of the Holy Spirit. 
 “T will pray the Father,” He had said, “‘and he 
 shall give you another Comforter, that he may 
 abide with you for ever.”’ And He did come, this 
 mighty Comforter, not only in the sense which 
 we give now to that word, as one who brings con- 
 solation, but in the stronger, earlier sense which 
 the word conveyed of the Empowerer. On Pente- 
 cost, the disciples felt the fulfilment of Jesus’ 
 promise. There came upon them such an impulse 
 from on high that they spoke the message of Jesus 
 boldly, and with new courage and imagination set 
 themselves to build up a fellowship in which men 
 
 143 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS (TO GOD 
 
 should show to one another the spirit of the love 
 of Jesus. When new disciples came into the 
 Christian company, it was expected that their new 
 life should bring them a definite access of power 
 and joy. Peter and John, coming down to Sa- 
 maria, where there was a little company of dis- 
 ciples, asked them, as the matter first to be ex- 
 pected, whether they had received the Holy Ghost; 
 and learning that they had not, the apostles laid 
 their hands on them and prayed that the divine 
 gift might then and there be given. To use the 
 words which a Christian hero in later years made 
 immortal, those first disciples dared ‘attempt 
 great things for God,” and therefore they did not 
 fear “‘to expect great things from God.” They 
 trusted that, over and above their ordinary human 
 efforts, there was a definite divine reality ready 
 to enter into them, to make them be what they 
 could never be alone. “The law of the Spirit of 
 life in Christ Jesus,’’ said Paul, ‘hath made me 
 free from the law of sin and death.” “Ye are not 
 in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit 
 of God dwelleth in you.” “For ye have not re- 
 ceived the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye 
 have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we 
 cry, Abba, Father.” ‘The Spirit itself beareth wit- 
 ness with our spirit, that we are the children of 
 God.”’ He wrote to the Corinthians that he had 
 come to them “in demonstration of the Spirit and 
 
 144 
 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 of power: that your faith should not stand in 
 the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” 
 “Now we have received not the spirit of the 
 world, but the spirit which is of God; that we 
 might know the things that are freely given to 
 us of God.” For “the fruit of the Spirit,’ he said, 
 “is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, 
 goodness, faith.” 
 
 Such are the results men felt when they trusted 
 in the Holy Spirit. They did not produce these re- 
 sults themselves. They were produced in them 
 from above. That was their practical theology. 
 They had found God because He first found them. 
 In the fulness of God’s nature, there must be a 
 Holy Spirit because that new spirit which moved 
 and breathed in them was nothing less than God. 
 The throbbing fact of their threefold religious 
 consciousness was summed up in that beautiful 
 blessing of the Apostle, “The grace of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellow- 
 ship of the Holy Ghost, be with you all ever- 
 more.” 
 
 2. Thought of that way, the doctrine of the 
 Holy Spirit is very evidently a thing of grace and 
 beauty. It is only when men get tangled in theo- 
 logical subtleties and are offered some arid form 
 of words instead of the living fact that the signifi- 
 cance of the Holy Spirit is robbed of its tremen- 
 dous meaning.. Yet the theologians and the com- 
 
 145 
 
SO MEO PEN OWA YS 2 DO VG oie 
 
 mentators generally can do us service provided 
 that we do not let them be our masters. What 
 we can do is to look at their explanations for what 
 they are worth, profit by such gleams of true sug- 
 gestion as do break through their words, and 
 cheerfully refuse to follow when all that they do 
 is to invite us into a fog. We may well remem- 
 ber also that, through the most bewildering theo- 
 logical terms there is a genuine spiritual intuition 
 which is trying to find the way to truth for us; and 
 if we can strike hands with -that, it will lead us 
 right,—just as a child can show us a path when, 
 if he tried to tell us of it, and describe its turns 
 this way and that, he would only leave our minds 
 distracted. To take such a formidable description 
 as this for example, which comes—like the words 
 we quoted a while ago—from the Articles of Re- 
 ligion in the Book of Common Prayer: “There 
 is but one living and true God. ... And in 
 unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of 
 one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, 
 the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’ That seems sheer 
 contradiction, and taken as it stands in our modern 
 language, some of it is. But when we press 
 through the baffling words to the experience which 
 the laboring teachers tried to communicate, we 
 begin to get at something real. That word ‘‘per- 
 son” did not originally mean three separate identi- 
 ties, as we think of when we use the English word. 
 146 
 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 The old persona of the Latin from which our word 
 “person” comes, was a term of the stage, and 
 had reference to the different parts which one 
 actor might play in the same drama. There were 
 separate representations, but back of them was 
 the same life. That is the symbolism which the 
 early Christian theologians used, and which all 
 their successors since have more or less conscious- 
 ly been employing to express their conviction of 
 the equal authority of the three ways in which God 
 had been made known to them. They had looked 
 into the face of Jesus Christ, and they had found 
 God there. Through His eyes they had looked 
 upon their world and trusted that, in spite of all 
 its sorrow and its perplexity, nevertheless back of 
 it is a love like the love of Jesus, which holds 
 men’s destinies in His hands. And so they be- 
 lieved in God the Father. And then they looked 
 within themselves and were conscious that the same 
 God whom they had seen in Jesus and trusted in 
 the heavens entered with His actual presence into 
 them. ‘That is the heart of Christian theology. 
 It believes in the richness and yet in the oneness 
 of God. It trusts that the universe is not made 
 up of a multitude of jarring forces, with devils 
 and demons and all sorts of ultimate contradic- 
 tions, but that there is one reconciling principle 
 running through it all, and that Christ who is be- 
 fore us, and God who is above us, and that urgent 
 
 147 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 Spirit which is within us, are all one God. For 
 those who love God all things, whether of the 
 inner life or of the outer world, may be trusted 
 to work together for good. 
 
 That facile and brilliant writer, H. G. Wells, 
 whose books have probably been read by as many 
 people as the books of any other living man, turned 
 some years ago from his novels to produce his 
 “God the Invisible King’; and in it there is a 
 passage which might well stand as a description 
 of that experience which Christian thought has 
 always associated with the Holy Spirit: 
 
 “Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own 
 time, God comes. This cardinal experience is an 
 undoubting, immediate sense of God. It is the 
 attainment of an absolute certainty that one is not 
 alone in oneself. It is as if one was touched at 
 every point by a being akin to oneself, sympa- 
 thetic, beyond measure wiser, steadfast and pure 
 inna ithe wa 
 
 “The moment may come while we are alone in 
 the darkness, under the stars, or while we walk 
 by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit and 
 muse. It may come upon the sinking ship or in 
 the tumult of the battle. There is no saying when 
 it may not come tous. ... But after it has come 
 our lives are changed, God is with us and there 
 is no more doubt of God. Thereafter one goes 
 about the world like one who was lonely and has 
 found a lover, like one who was perplexed and 
 
 148 
 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 has found a solution. One is assured that there 
 is a Power that fights with us against the confu- 
 sion and evil within us and without.” 
 
 But H. G. Wells would not admit that this 
 description has any direct relation to the Christian 
 faith in the Holy Spirit. He would discard the 
 terms of Christian theology altogether. He has 
 no patience with that historic conception of God 
 as the triune life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 
 “An issue upon which this book will be found 
 particularly uncompromising,” he says in his pre- 
 face, ‘‘ is the dogma of the Trinity.” It is “an 
 incoherent accumulation of antique theological no- 
 tions.’ So Mr. Wells proceeds to fashion his own 
 idea of God which he thinks will be more cohe- 
 rent. ‘Modern religion,’ he says, “appeals to 
 no revelation, no authoritative teaching, no mys- 
 tery.’ He cannot blink the fact that there is 
 mystery in our universe; but he would put it out 
 of his religion. ‘At the back of all known things 
 there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of 
 existence is a Veiled Being, which seems to know 
 nothing of life or death or good or ill. The new 
 religion . . . does not even assert that God 
 knows all or much more than we do about that 
 ultimate Being.” God is finite. He is the spirit 
 of the higher life in man. He is a limited in- 
 fluence pressing for expression through humanity, 
 in a universe which He did not create and which 
 
 149 
 
SOME OPEN) WAYS) DOGG 
 
 we cannot be sure that He explains. That is God, 
 and that is all the God there is. 
 
 Now Mr. Wells is no authoritative theologian, 
 but he is a highly skilful interpreter of the popular 
 mind. Miultitudes of people are impatient—yjust 
 as he represents himself to be—with the complex- 
 ities of theology which disguise the reality of re- 
 ligion. They are captivated by the idea of getting 
 rid of complexities. But the trouble is that in get- 
 ting rid of the complexities, they forget the like- 
 lihood that they may unwittingly get rid of a 
 large part of the religion too. 
 
 It is worth our while to dwell on this danger 
 of a too glib attempt to produce a simplified re- 
 ligion, stripped of mystery. Against its thin re- 
 sult, the full meaning of a right conception of 
 the Holy Spirit appears in rich relief. ‘The Chris- 
 tian belief in the Holy Spirit embraces all those 
 positive values which Mr. Wells—and those for 
 whom he speaks—ascribe to God. The Holy 
 Spirit is “the immortal part and leader of man- 
 kind.” He is the divine urge within our human 
 hearts; and therefore He is God. But He is not 
 all there is of God. 
 
 Here enters in the august worth of that con- 
 ception of the Triune God which the instinct of 
 historic Christianity has clung to in spite of the 
 struggling inability of theologians to explain it. 
 The unconquerable hunger of mind and heart for 
 
 I50 
 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 religion cannot be answered by a debonair method 
 which disposes of our ultimate questionings 
 through the convenient device of saying that God 
 has nothing to do with them. In the long run, 
 the religious hunger will press on to find a God 
 who not only interprets the aspirations of the soul 
 within us, but who also can give us through Him- 
 self the sense of a right and sure relationship to 
 the wholeness of this universe with which we 
 have to do. 
 
 It is to such a God that Christian faith leads 
 us. The Holy Spirit within us is God come down 
 to the limits of our present experience; but beyond 
 the Holy Spirit is the mightier Fulness of God 
 whose sufficiency we can trust for those mysteries 
 which now we cannot understand. 
 
 In the richness of such a thought of God, cer- 
 tain values which are often torn apart and mutil- 
 ated by impatient thinkers, find their wide inclu- 
 sion. So it is with what the theologians have 
 called the transcendence and the immanence of 
 God. Each of these represents something which 
 the permanent hunger of the human heart would 
 find in God; and either, without the other, leaves 
 one great element of religious need unsatisfied. A 
 God who is conceived of as transcendent in the 
 sense of some distant Absolute, an awful power 
 ruling from a far-off throne, the “Allah” of the 
 Mohammedan, whose will is to be bowed to and 
 
 ISI 
 
SOME OREN WAY SY LO (6 @up 
 obeyed, or the Jehovah of the earlier Old Testa- 
 
 ment conception, who “‘sitteth upon the circle of 
 the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grass- 
 hoppers,” brings no intimate joy to the worship- 
 ping soul. Somehow He must draw near, and 
 become immanent in the daily strivings of men, 
 if the ineradicable religious longing for a divine 
 companionship is to be satisfied. Yet, on the other 
 hand, if God is thought of as immanent only, re- 
 ligion may degenerate into the welter of panthe- 
 ism where all discriminations of higher and lower 
 are lost, and worship becomes the mere sponge- 
 like acceptance of whatever the shifting currents 
 of the time happen to bring into the consciousness. 
 Over and above the instincts colored and fed by 
 the world as it is, over and above the wash of 
 vague religious sentiment, must rise the challenge 
 and correction of some transcendent thought of 
 the greatness and glory of God. All this the 
 Christian conception of God remembers and ex- 
 presses. Jesus taught His disciples to believe in 
 and to expect the Spirit which should come to 
 them as the indwelling God. But He also believed 
 in One, from whom that Spirit comes out, who is 
 “Lord of heaven and earth,” who not only sends 
 to men the inspiration for their daily striving but 
 who can and does so control the mysteries of life 
 and death and the final forces of our universe that 
 men can commend their spirits into His hands and 
 152 
 
PEE oOUN DWE LENG: SBR oe 
 
 know that through Him their striving is not in 
 vain. That faith does not lend itself to compla- 
 cent definition, finished—_as Mr. Wells would fin- 
 ish his “new religion’’—all with sharp edges like a 
 pattern cut with scissors from a piece of paper. 
 But it is like a sign-post pointing to a road, of 
 itself no explanation but only an invitation to that 
 road; and on the road are far vistas where the 
 understanding walks in twilight, and long perspec- 
 tives melting into mystery over the hills; but along 
 the road are the fruits of an increasing confidence 
 to feed those who walk. that way, and from the 
 end of it shines the truth that leads to life. 
 Furthermore, the Christian thought of the Tri- 
 une God helps to link into one unity of Christian 
 experience two other conceptions which otherwise 
 might be antagonistic. A contrast has been drawn 
 in some of our contemporary philosophy and re- 
 ligion between God Being, and God Becoming. 
 Bergson in his “Creative Evolution” wrote: 
 “Things and states are only views, taken by our 
 mind, of becoming. ‘There are no things, there 
 are only actions. “God... has nothing of the 
 already made: He is unceasing life, action, free- 
 dom.” According to this conception, God Him- 
 self, like the world, is forever in the making. ‘The 
 spiritual experience of men from day to day as 
 they try to follow their noblest instincts is creat- 
 ing the divine reality which we call God. And in 
 
 153 
 
SOM E* OP EINGW iA YS 0b Ol Gone 
 
 this conception of an unfinished reality, in the 
 realm even of the highest, there is thrilling sug- 
 gestion of the significance which human living may 
 possess; for it would seem to mean that the very 
 glory of God Himself is not yet complete, but 
 waits for our codperation to be achieved. 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, in “The Meaning of 
 God in Human Experience,” W. E. Hocking has 
 written, “Unlimited codperation with God in 
 world-making we have: not however in ultimate 
 God-making. The religious object offers that 
 Identity without which creative freedom itself 
 would lack, for us, all meaning. ... If we are 
 offered a man-made God and a self-answering 
 prayer, we will rather have no God and no prayer. 
 There can be no valid worship except that in which 
 man is involuntarily bent by the presence of the 
 Most Real, beyond his will.” 
 
 “The presence of the Most Real, beyond his 
 will.” Certainly it is true that without the sense 
 of that, the substance vanishes from religion. 
 Men need a reality external to themselves and 
 to their devisings, in which to trust. Travellers 
 to India tell of Hindu wonder-workers who can 
 appear to those who watch them to throw a rope- 
 ladder into the air, and then to climb up that rope 
 suspended there in emptiness; but religious faith 
 can ultimately climb the ladder of its aspiration 
 only as that ladder rests upon the solid fact of 
 
 154 
 
TEER GNDWELLING SPER DT 
 
 an existing God. Back of the consciousness of 
 divine becomings, there must be the assuring sense 
 of a God whose Being already gives support to 
 what we hope and will to do. 
 
 Is it not plain that these two values meet in the 
 full-orbed Christian consciousness of God? In the 
 Holy Spirit, there is an aspect of God in which He 
 is still becoming—a divine experience growing, en- 
 larging, entering into and interpreting the new 
 and orginal material of expanding life. Yet that 
 toward which the divine-in-man is growing is no 
 chance goal blindly fumbled for in the dark. God 
 who already is, God to whom the Spirit “maketh 
 intercession for us,” is that Ideal already living 
 by which all the becomings of the God-in-man are 
 guided and inspired. Our human strivings after 
 righteousness can look up to a righteousness which 
 is an eternal fact; our answering affections can 
 turn to a love which was and is the flame that 
 kindles ours; and the Spirit “which proceedeth 
 from the Father” teaches the Father’s children 
 that what He would become in them is what in 
 His own being He already is. 
 
 II 
 
 In this consciousness, therefore, let us press on 
 to consider the practical effects which faith in the 
 Holy Spirit ought to bring. By that faith men 
 
 155 
 
9 ODE YO PE NW ASY'S On Gers 
 
 and women today can believe that through their 
 mind and heart and will the reality of God Him- 
 self presses through to that new expression of 
 Himself in life to which they open the way for 
 Him. | 
 
 1. In the first place, then, the Holy Spirit is to 
 be the Spirit of goodness. I use that word in a 
 wide sense. It is the Spirit which helps us satisfy 
 that instinct of excellence which all normal human 
 beings feel if they do not deliberately kill it. It is 
 the Spirit which helps us to aim higher, to try 
 harder, and to measure up more steadily to the 
 best we know. 
 
 That means, to begin with, a new heart in the 
 common work. A great deal of life is made up 
 of drudgery. There are tasks which have got to 
 be done simply because necessity requires them. 
 Some of the things we do are dull enough, and in 
 themselves monotonous and wearisome. If a 
 man’s own thought of his work is isolated through 
 lack of religion, then the narrow routine of it may 
 become intolerable. It is as hateful to his spirit 
 as the constant sound of one unvarying note of 
 music would become hateful to the ear. Only 
 when the one note is put together with other 
 notes does it make the symphony, glorious in its 
 inspiration; and only when the one thing which 
 a man may do is linked by a larger imagination 
 with the wide purposes of God in His world does 
 
 156 
 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 his spirit move out through the small task into the 
 ennobling consciousness of the larger whole. That 
 is no idle sentiment. It is vital fact. The quaint 
 old chronicle of Brother Lawrence can have its 
 representations in all times. He was a cook in 
 the monastery kitchen, but that did not keep him 
 from having the singing heart of religious glad- 
 ness. He said he felt God as near to him when 
 he was peeling potatoes there in the kitchen as 
 he did when he was on his knees before the altar, 
 and the reason doubtless was, that, because he 
 ennobled his work by doing it so thoroughly and 
 well that it might be honorable in God's eyes, his 
 work ennobled him. 
 
 In the Book of Exodus there is an account of the 
 building of the tabernacle, and it is told there how 
 God spoke to Moses about a man named Bezaleel, 
 and this is what He said, “I have filled him with 
 the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understand- 
 ing, and in knowledge, and in all manner of work- 
 manship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, 
 and in silver, and in brass.” In other words, here 
 was a man who was serving God by the skill of his 
 hands. In the delicate ingenuity of his craftsman- 
 ship, in his ability to take dead timber and metal 
 and make them live and grow in beauty, God's 
 spirit was at work to make His world a more 
 seemly place. Another fine example of the conse- 
 cration of a man’s ability in practical things ap- 
 
 157 
 
5.0 MEY O'R ENWiWiALY S (1.O 1G aap 
 
 pears in Joseph, to whom Pharaoh paid the in- 
 stinctive tribute of his question,—“‘Can we find 
 such an one as this, a man in whom the Spirit of 
 God is?” In the case of Joseph, the Spirit of God 
 was to show itself, not in organizing worship and 
 in interpreting the moral law like Moses, not even 
 in the building of a tabernacle like Bezaleel. It 
 was to show itself in practical business Sagacity 
 and a knowledge of organization which was to 
 conserve the food resources of a nation with com- 
 mon sense in the time of plenty, so that in the time 
 of need which was coming, there would be enough 
 for all. St. Paul wrote to the early Christian dis- 
 ciples that they should be fervent in spirit, and 
 with that he linked the requirement that they 
 should not be slothful in business. He warned the 
 Christians in Thessalonica that it was no way to 
 show their joy in what they thought was the near 
 coming of Jesus by neglecting their daily task. 
 They were to go to work in the name of God. 
 “Study to be quiet, and to do your own business, 
 and to work with your own hands, as we com- 
 manded you: that ye may walk honestly toward 
 them that are without, and that ye may have lack 
 of nothing.” And he added, “Be not weary in 
 well doing.” It was no accident that, in a letter 
 to these same Christians, he said to them, ‘Quench 
 not the Spirit.’ One of the things that they need- 
 158 
 
PEE SEN DWE LULN Ges Pip Ril 
 
 ed the unquenched Spirit for was the grace to be 
 glad and faithful in the work of every day. 
 
 Not long ago I was preparing a group of boys 
 for Confirmation, and I had wanted to make them 
 understand that the main business before them 
 was not learning a certain amount of instruction 
 from the Bible and Prayer Book, but fastening in 
 their minds and hearts the consciousness that they 
 were about to devote themselves afresh to Jesus 
 Christ, and that, because of that, they must be dif- 
 ferent from what they would have been without 
 Him. I said to them, ‘“‘What is it going to mean 
 to you next week that you should have the Chris- 
 tian Spirit?” One boy answered, ‘It means that 
 if you strike a hard place in arithmetic you won't 
 give it up, but will try to do it right.” One might 
 go far to find a sturdier and truer answer. The 
 coming of the Spirit of God through Jesus Christ 
 will certainly not mean much in the end unless 
 it means exactly that in its plain and straight be- 
 ginning, namely, the will to grapple with the 
 every-day duty in a new sense of responsibility to 
 the inner voice of God. 
 
 There is a fine expression of this thought of 
 God as the inspiration for the common task in 
 the letters of Edward Thring, Headmaster of 
 Uppingham School, and one of the pre-eminent 
 figures in the educational life of England in the 
 nineteenth century. He wrote: 
 
 159 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 ‘Now I unhesitatingly assert that my own work 
 has succeeded with the many just because God 
 gave me a spirit of wisdom to attend to fringes, 
 and blue, and purple, and scarlet ribands, and 
 Pompeian red, and autotypes, and boys’ studies, 
 and the color of curtains to their compartments, 
 and a number of little things of this kind. And 
 I lay claim to have been great as a schoolmaster 
 on this, and on this only, in the main: on having 
 had the sense to work with tools, to follow God’s 
 guidance in teaching beginners by surrounding 
 them, as He did, with noble and worthy sur- 
 roundings, taking care that there was no mean- 
 ness or neglect; getting rid, as circumstances al- 
 lowed, of name-cutting in school, which means 
 ‘rebellious inattention, combined with mischief and 
 vanity,’ or ink-splashing, which means ‘careless 
 dirtiness, and contempt for the great thought- 
 work’; and all the little vilenesses which drag the 
 boy-mind down. It is a slow process, but it is a 
 true one; it is not grand, but it is practical: it needs 
 patience, but it works by degrees hiaher life. May 
 men think of me as one to whom God gave a 
 spirit of wisdom to work all manner of work of 
 the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and 
 of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, and in 
 scarlet, and in fine linen, and of the weaver, even 
 of them that do any work, and of those that de- 
 vise cunning work. I take my stand on detail.” 
 
 And again he wrote: 
 “How strange life is! How little one knows 
 
 what is best! Life is best, the living the day man- 
 160 
 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 fully, truly, and humbly. Not what we plan, but 
 how we live. Not what we aim at doing, but how 
 we do what we have to do—that is God’s life.” 
 
 Yet the doing of our own individual tasks, of 
 course, is not all there is to life. Each man must 
 bear his own burden; but it is also true that, 
 when each has borne the burden that is his, he 
 must help to bear the burden of some other soul 
 which staggers under its own. For that sort of 
 unselfish burden-bearing, a man needs God. Raw 
 human nature carries with it much of its primal 
 heritage of unwitting cruelty—a cruelty which 
 seeks its own advantage and lets the bruised and 
 wounded thing at its side shift as best it may. 
 Something more than ordinary instinct is needed 
 to lift men above that callous self-concern of the 
 human herd. Men will jostle and trample one 
 another, partly in fear lest they themselves be 
 trampled; until a higher goodness has lifted them 
 to a stature in the strength of which they cease to 
 be afraid. It is only the souls which have grown 
 tall by the grace of God that see life from those 
 levels of compassion which make them want to 
 stoop to those in need. 
 
 Not very long ago in a great city, a prominent 
 and wealthy man was stricken suddenly and died 
 in a public place. None of his friends were with 
 him, but a stranger who happened to be next him 
 helped him all he could. That night those who 
 
 161 
 
SOME O PEIN IW AY S326 © 3Giorp 
 
 were closest to the man who had died determined 
 to try to find the stranger who had been good to 
 the one they loved. In some manner they discov- 
 ered his name and where he lived. It was an hour 
 of tragic and overwhelming sorrow, but one espe- 
 cially in that shadowed house was not thinking of 
 herself. Out of the agony of grief, her heart 
 went out to carry its self-forgetting gratitude. 
 
 She sent a friend, the lawyer of her husband 
 who had died, to seek the strange man who had 
 been with him. Out beyond the city his directions 
 led him, till he came to a lonely section with a few 
 desolate houses here and there. He knocked at 
 the door of the one which bore the number he was 
 looking for. 
 
 A woman opened the door and looked out in 
 a frightened and startled way. The visitor asked 
 her 1f the man of such and such a name was there. 
 “No,” she said, “no, you cannot find him here.” 
 “Oh,” he said, “I am very sorry, for he was kind 
 to a friend of mine today, and I had come to 
 thank him.” The woman’s face changed. ‘Come 
 in,” she said. | 
 
 Then she called upstairs, and the man who was 
 sought came down. He looked troubled and em- 
 barrassed. “You will have to forgive us,’’ he 
 said, ‘for what my wife said at the door. The 
 truth is that we are about to be turned out of the 
 house by the foreclosure of a mortgage. I have 
 
 162 
 
fella PNeDIWiE I GDN GA SiR 
 
 been downtown all day, trying to get an extension 
 of time, and I could not get it. When we heard 
 you knock, we thought you were a process-server 
 coming to turn us out.” 
 
 His visitor explained the reason why he had 
 come. « “You were so good,” he said, ‘‘to the man 
 we loved that I have come tonight to thank you.” 
 Then suddenly he said, “Have you a lawyer?” 
 “No,” said the man, “I would not have any 
 money to pay a lawyer.” “Well,” said his visitor, 
 “vou have a lawyer now; and if you will come to 
 my office tomorrow, I will see that your mortgage 
 is paid in the name of the man you helped today.” 
 
 Who was it who knocked that night at the for- 
 lorn door? Was it only a human visitor, or was 
 it a diviner grace of God? Was it only a hand of 
 man, or was it a greater Hand that had been 
 scarred? Who was it sent that messenger on 
 that errand which ended in a chance for helpful- 
 ness so dramatic, yet so unforeseen? Was it only 
 a human impulse, or was it the obedience of a 
 heart which had become that day the instrument 
 of the goodness of God? 
 
 We see the hard texture of our world’s affairs, 
 and we do not always see the lovelier things. We 
 cannot count, because we do not know, the name- 
 less acts of unremembered love. In many an ob- 
 scure place where the Holy Spirit moves, there 
 is the fragrance of holy deeds as sweet as the 
 
 163 
 
SOME OPEN. WAYS LO (Gop 
 
 ointment in the alabaster box. ‘He shall receive 
 of mine and shall show it unto you,” said Jesus 
 of the Holy Spirit. And it is through the moving 
 of that Holy Spirit in the hearts of men that the 
 grace of Christ does come back to His earth. 
 
 ‘‘Loud mockers in the roaring street 
 Say Christ is crucified again: 
 Twice pierced His gospel-bearing feet 
 Twice broken His great heart in vain. 
 
 “I hear, and to myself I smile, 
 For Christ talks with me all the while. 
 
 “Poor Lazarus shall wait in Vain, 
 And Bartimaeus shall go blind; 
 The healing hem shall ne’er again 
 Be touched by suffering humankind. 
 
 “Yet all the while I see them rest, 
 The poor and outcast, in His breast.” 
 
 We have thought of the things which the Spirit 
 of goodness helps us to do—the work that we must 
 do each man for himself, and the service that we 
 may do each one for others. Yet there is some- 
 thing else also for which the Spirit of goodness 
 comes. He helps us not only to do but to bear. 
 
 In the last and most beautiful chapter of his 
 little book entitled ‘Personal Religion and the 
 Life of Devotion,” Dean Inge has written of be- 
 
 164 
 
 
 
Ah aN Ww By PNG Seek 
 
 reavement. Therein he says, “A generation which 
 wishes for a religion without tears must find it 
 difficult to adjust its beliefs to the teaching of the 
 New Testament and to the facts of life.” And 
 then Dean Inge goes on to say: 
 
 “T think that those who have had to bear this 
 sorrow will agree with me that bereavement is the 
 deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, 
 an initiation more searching and profound than 
 even happy love. Love remembered and conse- 
 - crated by grief belongs, more clearly than the 
 happy intercourse of friends, to the eternal world; 
 it has proved itself stronger than death. Bereave- 
 ment is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; 
 if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain 
 which it cannot remove. And faith can overcome 
 it. It brings the eternal world nearer to us, and 
 makes it seem more real. It is not that we look 
 forward to anything remotely resembling Eze- 
 kiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. Still less 
 could we find any comfort from the pathetic illu- 
 sions of modern necromancy. These fancies have 
 nothing to do with our hope of immortality, which 
 would be in no way strengthened by such support. 
 Rather does pure affection, so remembered and so 
 consecrated, carry us beyond the bourne of time 
 and place altogether. It transports us into a 
 purer air, where all that has been, is, and will be 
 lives together, in its true being, meaning and value 
 before the throne of God.” 
 
 Thus in the Christian experience, the Holy 
 Spirit, divine messenger of a goodness which God, 
 
 165 
 
SOME O PEN Ww WiA Ysa Orsi 
 
 sometimes through the furnace of His refining, 
 would create, can turn calamity into gain. In His 
 presence, as a Christian saint has said, disappoint- 
 ment becomes His-appointment. Out of sorrow 
 may come the-more valiant spirit, out of duress 
 and difficulty the more divinely disciplined soul. 
 By no human ingenuity, but by the grace of God, 
 working sometimes in strange and shadowed ways, 
 the spirits of men find evil turned to good because 
 of the goodness which is fashioned through it in 
 them. ‘They are more strong to do because they 
 have endured, more ready to bear because they 
 have been overborne. As George Matheson has 
 truly written: 
 
 ‘All inward widening is produced by outward 
 narrowing. How shall I pass from the life of the 
 egotist to the life of the humanitarian? Only 
 through my own strait gate. The wing by which 
 I fly to your trouble is the wing which is wounded; 
 the hand by which I help you is the hand which is 
 maimed. In vain shall I enter your desert till I 
 have tasted the waters of Marah. Not by fear- 
 less running shall I overtake and lift your burden, 
 but by halting on my own thigh. The education 
 in sympathy is the experience of personal bruises; 
 of every true comforter we can say, ‘By his stripes 
 we are healed.’ ” 
 
 2. In the second place, the Holy Spirit is the 
 Spirit of truth. It was by that name that Jesus 
 166 
 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 called Him. ‘When he, the Spirit of truth, 1s 
 come, he will guide you into all truth.” 
 
 The first conclusion which needs to be drawn 
 from those words of Jesus is that the Spirit of 
 truth is likely to lead on unexpected ways. That 
 is exactly what had happened in His own life. 
 The Pharisees and Scribes had builded a fence of 
 definitions in which their minds complacently 
 dwelt. They had made God’s reality synonymous 
 with their own traditions. Anyone who went out- 
 side the wall of their permissive thinking was to 
 them a heretic and a traitor to the citadel of an- 
 cient faith; but Jesus did go out on the bold, free 
 paths of His conquest for the larger Kingdom of 
 God. He went out to the common folk, of whom 
 the Pharisees said, “This multitude that knoweth 
 not the law are accursed.” He went out to the 
 sinners and to the socially disreputable. He went 
 to carry the spirit of religion into wide human con- 
 tacts which shocked the Pharisees’ ideas of ecclesi- 
 astical convention. He left their hampering code 
 of ritual and artificial piety behind Him, and He 
 taught that the truth of God’s meaning for human 
 lives is a far simpler and more flexible thing than 
 the iron-bound catechisms of thought and action 
 into which the ecclesiastics of His time had tried 
 to shut it. 
 
 When, therefore, Jesus said that the Spirit of 
 truth would lead men into all truth, when He said 
 
 167 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 further that the Spirit “shall take of mine and 
 shew it unto you,’ He meant that the Spirit of 
 truth, working in the lives of His disciples, would 
 lead men forth into unpredictable adventures in 
 religious thinking and religious practice. His dis- 
 ciples should need to be open-minded to follow the 
 ways of that Spirit out beyond the walls of old 
 precedent in newness of imagination. The thing 
 which made Paul the most flaming influence among 
 the early disciples was that his swift instinct 
 understood this meaning of his Master. In his 
 day, the mental attitude of the men who formed 
 the early Christian Church had not changed much 
 from that of Judaism itself. They clung to the 
 teaching of the law and the regulations of the 
 Scribes. ‘They still identified religion with the old 
 pious conventions and with all sorts of trivial re- 
 quirements which were made authoritative simply 
 because people assumed that they always had been 
 so. Their minds were shocked at the idea that 
 Gentiles should be admitted to the Christian 
 Church—that is to say, that anyone should be ad- 
 mitted who did not speak the ecclesiastical lan- 
 guage, conform to all the ancient definitions, and 
 generally act in exactly the same fashion in which 
 they had always supposed that proper religious 
 people would act. When Paul started forth on his 
 mission to the Gentiles, when he said in effect that 
 a great deal with which the Church was concerned 
 168 
 
THE EN DWELELIN GOS PURET 
 
 had no vital relation to religion at all, and that 
 the business of an Apostle was not to make people 
 bow down before the idol of a supposed ortho- 
 doxy, which had been made up in part out of a 
 knowledge of God, and in a greater part out of 
 the stubborn accumulation of human habit and 
 prejudice, but to bid them rise up as sons of God 
 who found their new freedom in the living com- 
 pulsion of Christ—when Paul did that, in spite of 
 the dismay of timid Christians, he led Christianity 
 forth into its wide possibilities of intellectual and 
 spiritual conquest. 
 
 The same thing was true at the time of the Re- 
 formation. Men arose whom the established 
 hierarchies called heretics and rebels against au- 
 thority. When they protested against most obvi- 
 ous iniquities of the Church, their superiors at- 
 tempted to silence them; and when, made bold by 
 necessity, they went forward to proclaim forgotten 
 spiritual truths—to assert the priesthood of all be- 
 lievers, the right of access for every soul to the 
 Scriptures, and that most courageous doctrine of 
 all for those times, that a man should be justified, 
 not by any works of his own, nor by any mechanical 
 merits of the Church, but through the immediate 
 relationship into which Christ had entered with his 
 own soul—still the established forces of the 
 Church fought as bitterly as they could against 
 them. Those things which we receive from .the 
 
 169 
 
2 OM EO PRN IW.VACY'S lO 1G aa 
 
 Reformation today as our most unquestioned heri- 
 tage, those great conceptions of the liberty of the 
 spirit, came to us through the courage of those 
 who dared to be called heretics in their day, in 
 order that they- might be vindicated as the pro- 
 phets of a nobler orthodoxy for tomorrow. 
 Always the peril of religious loyalty has been 
 that it fails to keep the open mind. Standing 
 guard over the things which have been, it may fail 
 to understand or welcome those things which God 
 means to bring to be; and so the Church has often 
 bitterly resisted that which afterwards it was 
 forced to recognize as true. The Inquisition con- 
 demned Galileo and declared his teaching blas- 
 phemous when he asserted that the earth was not 
 the centre of the universe. Theological teachers 
 without number set up an antithesis between the 
 teaching of evolution and the teachings of Chris- 
 tianity, even as a remnant do today, and by the 
 dilemma which they were determined to maintain, 
 drove out of the Church many people who would 
 not sacrifice their intellectual conscience, and who 
 yet were told that, if they followed it, they should 
 have no place in the Christian fellowship. The so- 
 called fundamentalists in some Christian com- 
 munions continue to denounce all “higher criti- 
 cism’”’ of the Bible, and insist that the Old and 
 New Testaments must be accepted throughout as 
 the infallible and inerrant Word of God, lest the 
 170 
 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 whole fabric of faith disintegrate; and tradition- 
 alists in such a body as the Episcopal Church set 
 up the same rigidity of dogma as do their funda- 
 mentalist brothers, the only difference being that 
 they take the literal clauses of the Apostles’ and 
 Nicene Creeds and by fixity of interpretation make 
 these into the confining walls for thought which 
 the fundamentalist rather more logically builds 
 out of his doctrine of the infallible scriptures. 
 Meanwhile, if either group had its way the 
 thought of the Church would be effectively cor- 
 ralled within the fences which the orthodox of the 
 particular period deem to be “safe.” 
 
 _ But in the face of the long, and sometimes the 
 humiliating lessons of the centuries, those who 
 are the leaders of the Church should learn the 
 spirit of humility and of that reverent open-mind- 
 edness which is quick to apprehend the possibility 
 of a truth beyond that which they have already 
 known. ‘Truth itself is so great and vital, and 
 the changes in men’s apprehension are so swift, 
 that, though none should be disloyal to their own 
 convictions, none can afford to be dogmatic against 
 what some searcher of the future may cry from 
 his hill-top that he sees beyond. As Bishop Law- 
 rence reminds us in his Fifty Years, the famous 
 volume of Essays and Reviews, published in 
 England in 1861, brought to the Church of that 
 generation the message of the modern historical 
 
 171 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 study of the Bible, and so outraged was the Bishop 
 of Oxford, at that time the most eloquent leader 
 of the Church of England, that he solemnly de- 
 manded that all the essayists be compelled to 
 withdraw from the Ministry. Yet the essential 
 message of Essays and Reviews, so startling and 
 unexpected then, has become the commonplace of 
 reverent scholarship today, and Frederick Temple, 
 who wrote the first of them, and whose deposition 
 the Bishop of Oxford demanded, lived himself to 
 become the Archbishop of Canterbury, and head 
 thus of the Established Church. To those who, 
 in the face of all the lessons of the past, stand 
 still in the stubbornness which imagines every 
 opinion to be the very ark of God, the words 
 which Oliver Cromwell once spoke to the Kirk 
 have not lost their meaning: “I beseech you by 
 the mercies of Christ that you imagine it possible 
 that you may be mistaken!” 
 
 The reason why many earnest folk within the 
 Church are always frightened at suggested 
 changes in men’s conception of the truth, or at 
 any recasting of the old phrases in which that 
 truth has been familiarly expressed, is because they 
 have a shrunken conception of what truth is. They 
 treat it nervously as though it were an invalid. 
 They would shut it up inside the room of their 
 pious solicitude, where no draughts from any win- 
 dow open to the wide world’s questionings might 
 
 172 
 
hk eI NDWELLING SPOR TT 
 
 blow upon it, lest it catch a spiritual chill and die. 
 They enfeeble their own belief by this exaggerated 
 nervousness to such an extent that that which 
 passes for truth in their own consciousness does 
 become an anemic, tottering thing. But they need 
 to listen to the stalwart words of old John Milton: 
 “IT cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, 
 unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out 
 and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race 
 where the immortal garland is to be run for, not 
 without dust and heat.” The real Spirit of truth 
 is not served by those who would make it clois- 
 tered and fugitive. On the contrary, it must go 
 out open-eyed ready for encounter; and they who 
 follow truth will behold it thus marching on to 
 seize more spacious fields of life, in its ever more 
 nobly interpreted consciousness of God. 
 
 Furthermore, as the Spirit of truth requires 
 open-mindedness, so also it requires ready-witted 
 adaptation of our energies to meet new situa- 
 tions as they arise. 
 
 The trouble with the would-be defenders of the 
 faith usually is that they defend the wrong posi- 
 tion. They fight desperately in some quarter of 
 the battle-field which has long ceased to be strate- 
 gic. With a tremendous show of flags and argu- 
 mentative array of guns, they hold the trenches 
 in some sector from which the main attack has 
 completely shifted. 
 
 173 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO "Gow 
 
 Jesus said that the children of this generation 
 are wiser than the children of light, and it is cer- 
 tainly true that men in their practical necessities 
 very often show more common-sense than they do 
 in their religion. If the French General Staff had 
 been as hopelessly unimaginative in their way of 
 waging war as many religious leaders are in their 
 way of waging theirs, the German army would 
 have crushed France at its pleasure. To multi- 
 tudes of people who read each morning the war 
 bulletins with a breathless tension of anxiety 
 through those days of August and early Septem- 
 ber in 1914, it seemed clear that the effective de- 
 fence of France must rest upon certain great bor- 
 der fortresses. These were supposed to be the bul- 
 warks of her resistance. If they failed, her cause 
 might be hopelessly imperilled. But before the 
 actual necessities of the hour, the French leaders 
 were following a different conception. Past one 
 by one of the fortresses of the North, past Mau- 
 berge and Lille, and other points hitherto consid- 
 ered vital to the defence of Paris, the French 
 army was withdrawn. If any considerable part 
 of the army had been held within the forts which 
 the unprecedented German artillery had proved 
 its power to smash in pieces, the strength of 
 France would have been divided and consumed 
 little by little until defeat was sure. Instead, the 
 army had to take the open field. It had to learn 
 
 174 
 
eee ND Web TyTN Gol Sa kb E 
 
 an elastic adaptation to considerations of warfare 
 unheard of in old traditions. It had to learn to 
 dig its trenches where the exigencies of the day 
 demanded and to concentrate its power where the 
 changing shock of battle moved. And even past 
 Paris it was ready to withdraw, should defence of 
 the capital itself seem impracticable. Writes John 
 Buchan in his History of the Great War, ‘With 
 incomparable courage and patience, and with the 
 mental elasticity of his race, Joffre faced the crisis, 
 jettisoned his cherished preconceptions, and pre- 
 pared a new plan on the new facts now at last 
 made plain. When he was ordered to detach three 
 army-corps for the defence of Paris, he acquiesced 
 but reserved his opinion. He... was resolved 
 to resist most stoutly the lure of fortified places 
 and keep his army together as a force of man- 
 oeuvre.” Because her leaders did thus in the 
 beginning, and through the years of struggle, use 
 the armies with alert imagination, France was 
 at last victorious. 
 
 But those who take up the defence of Christian 
 belief in the field of religious discussion are usual- 
 ly not as wise as that. They insist upon believing 
 that the old positions are forever vital. They 
 argue vehemently for the exact phraseology and 
 the traditional interpretation of the historic 
 creeds. They insist that the whole citadel of 
 Christian faith is abandoned if those particular 
 
 175 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 arguments concerning miracles or the infallibility 
 of the New Testament, or the authority of the 
 Church, which were the key-points in yesterday’s 
 discussion, should for a moment cease to be main- 
 tained. But thé real matter at issue involves a 
 far more deadly and immediate peril. What 
 would it avail if a little group of devoted and 
 immovable Christian scribes should hold to their 
 immovable ideas, and even make for these theo- 
 retically a highly successful defence, if meanwhile 
 the real tide of battle had rolled round the flanks 
 of these border positions and struck deep into a 
 far more vital region upon which all their com- 
 munications depend? The attack upon Christian 
 faith which the scepticism of our time is making 
 does not sit down to lay siege to particular doc. 
 trines concerning this or that miracle. It assails 
 the basic conceptions of God, and of Spirit in the 
 universe. What the forces of Christian intelli- 
 gence and devotion must do is to meet the shock 
 of denial on that ground where actually it comes. 
 They must stop wasting their time and dividing 
 their strength in matters which for the moment 
 are wholly secondary; but first must prove to the 
 mind of this age, with its rebellious disregard of 
 traditional arguments, the reality of God in this 
 present world and the actual presence and necessity 
 of Christ in the affairs of men. 
 
 Not long ago a mother came to me to tell me 
 
 176 
 
TELE STUN DWELLING SEER EL 
 
 of her problem in the attitude of her son just 
 grown to manhood. He had flung down his chal- 
 lenge quite frankly and defiantly in the face of the 
 most elemental conceptions of morality and re- 
 ligion. He waved his mother’s scruples aside with 
 the complete assent of the other members of his 
 college group. Her ideas of morality, he said, 
 were nothing but Puritan inhibitions. He pro- 
 posed to live his own life in his own way. He 
 could not sincerely believe that she really liked 
 to go to Church. She had too much intelligence, 
 he said, to pretend in these times to believe in 
 God. 
 
 Can that sort of challenge to religion be 
 met by quoting proof texts in support, for ex- 
 ample, of the miraculous birth of Christ? Can it 
 be met by insisting that the Greek philosophy of 
 the early Church fathers was invariably right, and 
 that somehow the precise phraseology of the Ni- 
 cene Creed is a cure for all spiritual difficulties? 
 Ecclesiastics may come together, far removed 
 from the actual impact of the mind of this gen- 
 eration, and with much solemn nodding of the 
 heads and indignant adjuring of one another 
 against altering the methods of yesterday, send out 
 their staff commands to stake the power of Chris- 
 tian faith upon the holding of the old position; 
 but men who feel the immediate nature of the 
 actual task, and feel their minds and sprits kindle 
 
 177 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 with the challenge of an effective warfare, know 
 that Christianity must first of all concentrate its 
 forces to answer and persuade the modern denial 
 of religion at those points where it is visibly in the 
 field. It will take the full force of a united Church, 
 illumined by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, to do 
 that. It will take the power of a glowing Chris- 
 tianity, undistracted by divisions among its own 
 teachers, to make plain first of all that life needs 
 God, and that there are ways for men manifestly to 
 find God, and that, without the grace of God which 
 Christ incarnated, our world will go to chaos and 
 confusion. And when this is said, it does not 
 mean that all the older aspects of Christian theol- 
 ogy which traditionalists would seek to hold have 
 no ultimate meaning. It no more means that these 
 must be considered as carelessly abandoned than 
 France considered Mauberge and Lille to be aban- 
 doned because for the time her warfare had 
 shifted to other ground. It was on the Marne 
 and on the Aisne and in the long struggle of the 
 trenches that victory had to be fought for, in 
 order that at length all the provinces might be 
 regained. In exactly the same manner, if the Holy 
 Spirit of wisdom comes into the Church today, 
 it will come to teach it that the warfare of the 
 Christian intellect must be concentrated now on 
 very vital and simple matters if the victorious 
 178 
 
 le es ee 
 
PeiberlNiDWiR LEN Gis PUREE 
 
 flags at last are to be planted over the wide spaces 
 which are precious to ancient faith. 
 
 But the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of truth has 
 another contribution to make in addition to the 
 ones we have indicated. It does not only teach 
 the way in which Christian truth can be defended 
 against denial. That would leave the Christian 
 witness a passive, half-hearted thing. It brings 
 also the positive awareness by which the mind 
 goes forward to new apprehension of the truth 
 of Christ for today and for tomorrow. 
 
 The tragic contradiction of the facts which led 
 to the crucifixion of Jesus lay in the blind incapa- 
 city of men to understand the reality which they 
 confronted. Leaders of the Church in Jesus’ day, 
 men who said their prayers and went every Sab- 
 bath to worship, and all the lesser crowd who 
 followed the spokesmen of the Church, clamored 
 for Jesus’ crucifixion, not because He was the 
 Savior, but because they stubbornly convinced 
 themselves that He was no Savior at all. They 
 were looking for a Messiah from God, but He did 
 not square with their preconceptions. They 
 wanted a deliverer with prestige and power, 
 crowned and sceptred, with armies at his back. 
 When this man out of the provinces, making His 
 friends among the common people, and having 
 no other title to authority except that curious hold 
 which He had on men’s souls to make them ad- 
 
 179 
 
SOME OREN WAYS TO (GOD 
 
 venture recklessly for the Kingdom of God, spoke 
 of Himself as being the Son of the Most High, 
 they thought it was little short of blasphemy. To 
 let Him live would be to deny their hope of a reve- 
 lation from God which would convince the rich 
 and powerful and all the people generally who 
 think they count for most in this world. So they 
 put Him to death in fierce good conscience. That 
 is what the world will do today unless the Holy 
 Spirit makes men wise. Christ may come again 
 in humble guise. He comes in the aspirations of 
 working men. He comes in the deep rebellion of 
 the toiling masses against the idleness of parasites 
 and the cruelty of irresponsible wealth. He comes 
 to cast down the mighty from their seats and to 
 exalt the humble and meek. He comes in the 
 often inarticulate yet unquenchable hope of the 
 common man to find a way to deliver this world 
 from the abominable snatchings and plunderings 
 of militarists and of so-called patriot statesmen 
 who keep up the old round of war, and to build 
 it instead into the brotherhood of a decent peace. 
 He comes through those disturbing ideals which 
 men who like this world as it is, because they fat- 
 ten on its iniquities, hate and denounce as dan- 
 gerous disturbances. He comes, just as He came 
 in Palestine, with that amazing challenge of the 
 Kingdom of God which makes hard-headed people 
 who call themselves practical, both without the 
 180 
 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 Church and within it, fly into a passion. The 
 power of God for the world’s redemption, that 
 silent, tremendous power which ignores the out- 
 ward appearances and lays hold of the inner 
 springs of life and character, came to the world, 
 and people who had plenty of shrewdness, but no 
 inspiration, could not see it. They had no recog- 
 nition of what He really was; and the question 1s 
 whether there is much more recognition of Him 
 now. ‘When the Son of man comes, shall he find 
 faith on the earth?” asked Jesus. In this present 
 civilization of ours, He may come in surprising 
 influences and from surprising quarters, and the 
 Church will need very acutely the guidance of the 
 Holy Spirit if it is not to be so obsessed with its 
 own notions and with the conventions and com- 
 placencies of respectable and satisfied people, that 
 it should fail to recognize and espouse the dis- 
 turbing and difficult reformation which Christ 
 may come to bring. 
 
 3. In the third place, the Holy Spirit may come 
 as the Spirit of power. ‘There is a fine expression 
 of what this means in the third of the essays, 
 edited by B. H. Streeter and published a few years 
 ago under the title, The Spirit: The Relation of 
 God and Man, considered from the Standpoint of 
 Recent Philosophy and Science. In that volume 
 a physician, Captain J. Arthur Hadfield, writes 
 as follows: 
 
 181 
 
SO ME CORE Ne Wass) 1:07 GOie 
 
 ‘While it has not been the purpose of this Essay 
 to deal with questions of theology, I cannot help 
 pointing out that our discussion of the psychology 
 of power has a very direct bearing on the question 
 of the dynamic of religion, and especially on the 
 power possessed by the Christian religion of liber- 
 ating energies which can transform the living soul 
 into a quickening spirit. In its fundamental doc- 
 trine of love of God and man, Christianity har- 
 monises the emotion of the soul into one inspiring 
 purpose, thereby abolishing all conflict, and liber- 
 ating instead of suppressing the free energies of 
 men. In its doctrine of the Spirit it emphasizes 
 the element of power in religion. No reader of 
 the New Testament can fail to be struck by the 
 constant reiteration in different forms of the idea 
 that the normal experience of a Christian at that 
 epoch was enhancement of power—'‘I can do all 
 things’—an enhancement attributed by them to the 
 operation in and through them of a divine energy 
 to which the community gave the name of the 
 ‘Spirit—‘Ye shall receive power.’ Pentecost, the 
 healing miracles of the Apostolic Age, the tri- 
 umphant progress of the religion through the Ro- 
 man Empire, the heroic deeds of saints and 
 martyrs,—all these point to the sense of a power 
 newly discovered. In contrast, looking at the 
 Church of today, one cannot but be struck with 
 its powerlessness. It contains men of intellect; 
 it produces a type of piety and devotion which 
 one cannot but admire; it sacrifices itself in works 
 of kindness and beneficence; but even its best 
 friends would not claim that it inspires in the 
 world the sense of power. What strikes one 
 rather is its impotence and failure. This want of 
 
 182 
 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 
 
 inspiration and power is associated with the fact 
 that men no longer believe in the existence of the 
 Spirit in any effective practical way. They believe 
 in God the Father, and they are reverent; they 
 believe in the Son, and the Church numbers among 
 its members millions who humbly try to ‘follow 
 in His steps’; but for all practical purposes they 
 are like that little band at Ephesus who had ‘not 
 so much as heard whether there be any Holy 
 Ghost,’ and, lacking the inspiration of such a be- 
 lief, they are weak and wonder why.” 
 
 That is a statement which would be depressing 
 in its description of the present if it were not so 
 full of the better promise for the possible future. 
 To the Church of today and tomorrow, and to 
 the men and women in it, the Holy Spirit can 
 come with fulness of power. Of that I shall not 
 speak at length now, but shall save that rather for 
 the chapter which is to follow on the Church, 
 since it is, 1 believe, through the Church and 
 through the inspiration of its fellowship, rather 
 than to lives in isolation, that the Spirit of power 
 will most truly come. But at this point we can 
 plant at least the banner of our confidence that it 
 does come. Into lives which by themselves are 
 without beauty and without potency, the Holy 
 Spirit can enter like the tide flooding into the bay, 
 to deepen all the channels and to set the ships of 
 stranded energies free for the far ocean ways. 
 
 183 
 
CHAPTER V 
 WHY BELONG TO THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH? 
 
 WHEN we set down on a printed page the word 
 “Church,” there it stands with exactly the same 
 appearance for every eye that falls upon it; but 
 out of those six letters, there will be read as many 
 different meanings as there are minds to frame 
 them. Let one speak of the Church as clearly as 
 he may, yet he has by no means framed a limited 
 little package of significance which every person 
 to whom he would wish to convey it shall receive 
 alike. On the contrary, he has, as it were, touched 
 an electric button which will set in motion the in- 
 finitely different machinery of the associations 
 which in the thoughts of different people are con- 
 nected with that surcharged word. Say that word 
 “Church,” and in the minds of some will rise im- 
 mediately a picture of some dearly familiar place 
 —a slender white spire rising over the elms of a 
 New England village, a plain building at the coun- 
 try cross-roads with the country folk driving up 
 the roads on Sunday; some spacious thing of stone, 
 with glorious stained glass, built in the midst of 
 a great city; a Cathedral, lifting its ancient towers 
 over some grey town of the older world. Say 
 that same word and in one mind there will rise 
 the thought of worship framed in a rich liturgy 
 
 184 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 with music, vestments, and colors; and in the 
 thought of another will rise a picture of some 
 plain meeting-house where worship is conducted 
 with Quaker-like austerity. Or the word 
 “Church” may suggest machinery of ecclesiastical 
 administration, boards and conferences and coun- 
 cils; and to some it will suggest the clamor of 
 theological discussions rising from a miscellany of 
 competing groups more intent upon exaggerating 
 their differences than upon finding an understand- 
 ing which might bind them together. So when 
 today one broaches the question as to what one 
 ought to believe about the Church and what one 
 may rightly feel toward it, one is immediately 
 confronted by this confusion as to the thing with 
 which the belief or the feeling is supposed to have 
 to do. What is the Church, and where shall we 
 find a common denominator by which we may 
 bring men’s multitudinous ideas to one clear basis 
 of relation? 
 
 To answer that, we need to look up along the 
 branching rivers of the many different meanings 
 toward their far unity in the hills. What impulse 
 did all the many loyalties which call themselves 
 by the name of the Church flow from in the first 
 place? What is the creative and continuing 
 source without which there would not be anything 
 to be called the Church? 
 
 185 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 I 
 
 1. To that question, at least, Christians of all 
 names and kinds can answer in essentially the 
 same way. ‘They-would say that the Church is 
 due to Jesus. It is meant to be the embodiment 
 and the expression of His purpose in and for the 
 world. However much the various groups of 
 Christians might emphasize the marks which 
 they consider essential to the properly developed 
 Church of today, all of them would admit that 
 the Church in its beginning was a very much 
 simpler matter than the forms in which it is now 
 known. Some of the Church buildings in coun- 
 tries where Christianity first came into being are 
 immensely ancient. But the Church existed before 
 those most ancient buildings were ever set up. In 
 the liturgies of the historic communions there are 
 creeds and prayers which have been used for cen- 
 turies; but the Church existed long before there 
 were any liturgical forms. There has been deter- 
 mined controversy concerning the proper form of 
 Church government, and back in earliest Chris- 
 tian literature are traces of the origins of pres- 
 byters and of bishops and of the organized struc- 
 ture which since has gathered round those names. 
 But the Church existed before there was any 
 
 186 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 scheme of government whatever. The Church 
 began with a fellowship, intimate, personal, vital- 
 ly related to one central fact. The Church began 
 when Jesus gathered round Himself the little 
 eroup of men to whom He was to communicate 
 His Spirit, and out of whom He was to fashion 
 the builders of His spiritual kingdom. When 
 Jesus walked on the ways of Galilee, when He 
 went out into the wilderness to pray, when He 
 taught and preached and lived every day His 
 visible message of the love of God, with James 
 and John and Andrew and Peter and the rest of 
 His friends around Him, there already the Chris- 
 tian Church, the Ecclesia, the little fellowship who 
 had been called out of the common life to be salt 
 and leaven and seed for the future harvest, 
 existed on earth in its essential spiritual fact. 
 Whatever else might come afterwards could only 
 enrich and confirm the reality which was already 
 there. Sacraments might be needed later to con- 
 vey effectively to men’s hearts that sense of the 
 grace of Jesus which the disciples in their per- 
 sonal contact instinctively felt in Him. Forms 
 of ecclesiastical government would arise to admin- 
 ister the affairs of the Christian community. But 
 all these things could find their value only with re- 
 lation to that first experience which they must 
 hand down like fire through the torches of suc- 
 187 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 ceeding generations, namely,—the kindling emo- 
 tion of lives directly lighted from the thought and 
 will of Jesus. Wherever in any place or time 
 there is a human fellowship which is finding God 
 through Jesus, and, weaving the bond of a com- 
 mon life in Him, there is the Church, and all 
 church buildings, whether they be the log hut of 
 the simplest mission or the mightiest cathedral 
 towering to the sky, all forms of worship, whether 
 of simplicity or grandeur, all forms of church gov- 
 ernment, whether the simplest democracy of the 
 congregation or the august authority of the popes 
 of Rome, will ultimately be judged and valued 
 not by any argumentative and theoretical consid- 
 erations, but only by the living fact of whether or 
 not they do keep men close to that which is for- 
 ever the only heart of the living Church, namely, 
 the life of Jeus communicating itself in mind and 
 deed through His disciples. 
 
 2. I wish to dwell upon this conception of the 
 Church with a very earnest emphasis, for I think 
 it cleanses us from much false pride and brings 
 us into the glow of a central truth before whose 
 touch many little barriers of our stubborn preju- 
 dices go down. We cannot ignore, of course, the 
 conditions in the midst of which we actually find 
 ourselves today. The Christian Church is not 
 visibly one, but is divided into many distinct and 
 
 188 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 sometimes very determined differences. Inevitably 
 the men and women who have been reared in some 
 particular form of Christian organization and 
 with a form of Church worship and of govern- 
 ment which long custom, both of thought and of 
 practice, makes them regard as normal, and there- 
 fore best, will want to preserve the values which 
 they think are precious to Christian experience. 
 I feel that way about the Church to which I be- 
 long. I could not feel at home in any other com- 
 munion which lacked the riches which it seems to 
 me she holds in trust—her inheritance of liberty, 
 yet of continuity too—her tradition of English 
 freedom, yet of that sturdy reverence for tradi- 
 tion which makes the life of today reach back 
 into the deep, rich soil of the experience of many 
 generations—her beauty of worship—her mystic 
 consciousness of the Church itself as no mere so- 
 ciety created casually by any group of human in- 
 dividuals, but as the body of the faithful to whom 
 the Lord Himself has promised to convey His 
 sacramental grace—all this it means to me. Yet 
 when I look back and see the infinite simplicity 
 of my Master, I know that nothing counts either 
 for the Church which I may love or for the 
 Church which any other man may love except in 
 so far as it makes Him manifest. I am not so 
 vain as to imagine that anything which either I or 
 189 
 
5» O-MLE? O PAN GOW AY Sir TtO Grae 
 
 the Church itself, in its most authoritative pro- 
 nouncements, can imagine to confer honor upon ~ 
 the Lord, can really honor Him if in the result 
 His spirit is hidden from the eyes of simple men. 
 Looking at Him, I am quite sure that the Church 
 is most likely to justify all the grandeur of its 
 own conception of its mission in exactly the meas- 
 ure in which it thinks least of this and most of 
 Him. Whenever any part of the Church exalts 
 its supposed prerogatives, it falls into the ancient 
 mistake of the Pharisees and crucifies the actual 
 Christ. I am sure that for any Church to prove 
 that it has the apostolic succession the best way is 
 to demonstrate that it has the apostolic success. 
 If any Church manifestly does succeed as the 
 Apostles did in casting the devils out of men’s 
 hearts and putting the Spirit of Jesus there in- 
 stead, then all theoretical arguments pro and con 
 will be nothing but empty chatter in the face of 
 the fact that the real succession of apostolic grace 
 does evidently flow into that Church from the 
 Apostles’ Lord. And when all the various 
 branches of the Christian Church do demand of 
 themselves and encourage in one another the au- 
 thoritative simplicity of what the Church first of 
 all is meant to be, the living creation of a fellow- 
 ship between the heart of Jesus and the hearts of 
 men, then one day the divided Churches may dis- 
 190 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 cover that they have arrived at an inner unity 
 which will enable all external differences to be 
 dealt with in the adjustment of love. 
 
 II 
 
 But at this point, no doubt the man outside the 
 Church will say: ‘That is all very well as a fine 
 ideal. If the Church were like that, I might be 
 interested in it; but it is not like that. It does 
 not really concentrate on the simplicities of Jesus. 
 It does not really come together on the important 
 things. It is made up of a lot of competing sects 
 filled with people who are not conspicuously better 
 than their neighbors. However I might be drawn 
 to the Church as it conceivably could be but is not, 
 I am not drawn to the actual fact which I am 
 offered.” 
 
 That is what the man outside the Church may 
 say in general. Sometimes his objections are still 
 more explicit. It is well for us to take them up 
 definitely and see what may be said in answer to 
 them. 
 
 1. In the first place, it is often alleged that the 
 Church is not worth entering because it has so 
 many unattractive people init. “Its company does 
 not win me,” says the man outside. So he stays 
 contentedly where he is. 
 
 Now it must be confessed that the Church does 
 
 IgI 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 have unattractive people in it, and a lamentable 
 plenty of them. To begin with, the ministers. 
 They may be as unattractive sometimes as the 
 worst enemy of the Church could desire. There 
 are occasions when, instead of believing in God 
 through His ecclesiastical representative, the 
 would-be disciple must shut his eyes to the gloomy 
 discouragement which some minister whom he 
 knows presents and deliberately climb over him, 
 or go round him, as an obstacle in the path that 
 leads to God. Said Jowett of Balliol to Margot 
 Asquith, “Margot, you must believe in God, in 
 spite of what the clergy say.” Some preachers 
 make religion seem like a dismal penance instead 
 of wings to lift the soul. They look as though 
 they were the “original somebody who is always 
 taking the joy out of life,” and sometimes, which 
 is almost worse, they make religion appear to be 
 a perfunctory routine. It was of such that David 
 Garrick was doubtless thinking when he is reported 
 to have said, as he mused indignantly once on a 
 certain preacher, ‘In my profession I take ficti- 
 tious things and make them appear real, and he 
 takes real things and makes them appear ficti- 
 tious.”’ All this is a bad handicap for the Church 
 to carry. Every dour minister is a forbidding ad- 
 vertisement for the whole ecclesiastical climate, 
 and the man outside, who moves in his irrespon- 
 192 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 sible but on the whole cheerful world, decides that 
 he will stay where he is. 
 
 Nor is the trouble confined to the clergy. Some- 
 body once asked a great preacher, who himself 
 in his gay and brilliant enthusiasm of service was 
 the type of all that the ministry ideally should 
 be, ‘‘Why is it that ministers in general are not 
 better than they are?’ And his quick answer 
 was, ‘Because we have nothing but the laity to 
 draw from.” It is the laity who furnish the min- 
 istry. It is the laity who sometimes are account- 
 able for the shortcomings of those who are try- 
 ing to minister to that same very refractory lay 
 flock. There was an old colored preacher once 
 who made the following announcement to his con- 
 gregation: ‘‘Bredren, I hear dere’s been some 
 complaint about de longness of de sermon, and 
 I’s got a complaint to make. It’s about de small- 
 ness of de. collection. Hereafter de collection is 
 ewine to be took up before de sermon, and the 
 smaller de collection, de longer de sermon.” The 
 tedium of the preaching in other churches than 
 the colored one may often be due to the dulness 
 of the congregation. If the people responded in 
 a livelier fashion to the preacher’s efforts, he 
 would have a livelier spirit to carry into next day’s 
 work; but the trouble with our Christianity in the 
 pews, and among the people who go out from the 
 pews to create the atmosphere in the everyday 
 
 193 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 places, is that so often there is no joy of holiness 
 about them. They are conscientious and honest, 
 but somehow the Spirit has never touched their 
 religion into flame. A great deal of the knowl- 
 edge that people acquire in Churches seems to lie 
 in their minds as a dusty theory rather than ever 
 to come as a fire to the heart. “Chere was uncon- 
 scious but most sure judgment in the wonder of 
 a little girl who lay in a hospital one Easter-day 
 and said to her nurse as she entered the room, 
 “Did you know that this was Easter morning?” 
 “Yes,”? said the nurse. ‘But did you know that 
 this was the day on which Jesus rose again?” the 
 little girl persisted. ‘‘Yes,” said the nurse a little 
 impatiently. ‘“‘Why did you think I didn’t know?” 
 “But how could you know,” said the child, “and 
 look so dull?” 
 
 That is what the unconvinced world often says 
 as it looks upon the Church. How can it be in 
 possession of any truth which has a thrilling mes- 
 sage when the lives of so many members are un- 
 inspired and dull? Is there anything in the Church 
 to make it lastingly more congenial than the com- 
 pany which is outside? 
 
 Yes. Thereis. Not, it is true, to the man who 
 has no moral earnestness in him and is only trying 
 to find a flippant excuse for plausible indifference. 
 Not to the man who has no desire for excellence. 
 Not to the idler and the wastrel. But to the 
 
 194 
 
Wily SBELONG LO! THE» CHURCH? 
 
 thoughtful man who loves the best and believes in 
 it and wants to find it, the Church does have con- 
 genial company. In spite of its exceptions, in 
 spite of its unpleasant temperaments, it does fur- 
 nish a fellowship where clean joys and sound 
 friendships and wholesome living are at a pre- 
 mium. In the long run it does show life, not in its 
 least, but in its most attractive aspect. 
 
 Begin with the ministry. It is perfectly possible 
 for a man to come into contact with some indi- 
 vidual minister whose acid theology and stiff un- 
 humanness disgust him with the whole idea of 
 ecclesiastical leadership; but any man who holds 
 one example of this kind as a sort of obsession 
 before his thought is simply blinding himself to 
 truth. When he lifts his eyes and sees the long 
 perspective of the Church’s history, he sees it 
 crowded with the glorious figures of those who 
 have been the priests and prophets of God. There 
 is no nobler fellowship than that of those who 
 through the ages have been the spokesmen of the 
 Christian Church, and the peoples of Western 
 Europe were leavened with those ideals out of 
 which their civilization came by such heroic mes- 
 sengers as Columba, and Boniface, and Anskar, 
 and Augustine. The whole level of human 
 thought and aspiration was lifted by the creative 
 spiritual power of such intrepid prophets of the 
 truth as John Huss and Savonarola, Calvin and 
 
 195 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 John Knox, George Whitefield and John Wes- 
 ley. With all the shortcomings of many of its 
 representatives admitted, nevertheless the Chris- 
 tian Church can measure its ministry against any 
 other rank of men who have played creative parts 
 in the building of our society and have reason for 
 honor in that comparison. In many climactic mo- 
 ments of human affairs it has been true, as Charles 
 Silvester Horne eloquently wrote in his Romance 
 of Preaching, of the ambassador of the Church, 
 “When he takes the stage, all other actors are 
 dwarfed. If he is not there, time itself seems to 
 wait for his appearance. Prince and priest alike 
 are insignificant in his majestic presence. Both 
 his words and deeds are memorable. His inter- 
 ventions, his appearances, mark the crises of his- 
 tory.” In one of the tragic hours of the subjection 
 of Belgium, on January 31, 1917, Cardinal Mer- 
 cier wrote to the German Governor General: 
 “There is a barrier before which military force is 
 held up and behind which is entrenched inviolate 
 right. On this side of the barrier it is we, the 
 representatives of moral authority, who speak as 
 masters. We cannot and will not let the word of 
 God be shackled.” Because of the work in this 
 our world of that Christian brotherhood, greater 
 than any one communion, which at that time Car- 
 dinal Mercier represented, the spiritual dignity of 
 196 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 mankind does move out in every generation into 
 an unshackled and more spacious freedom. 
 
 Words like those are, of course, not always 
 applicable. The average man does not rise to the 
 level of the great. Else there would be no dif- 
 ference in greatness. ‘The ordinary minister of 
 the Christian Church, the ordinary priest, carry- 
 ing on his humble responsibilities at some small 
 post of routine duty, may not captivate the imag- 
 ination; but the thoughtful man would admit that 
 every community is better for the presence in it 
 of a group of Christian leaders who by the high 
 expectation of their office must hold themselves 
 accountable, and try to win their people, to ideals 
 of honor, of truth, and of unselfishness, and to a 
 recognition of those unseen and spiritual values 
 which are more important than any material gain. 
 In the fine words of Van Vogt in his 4rt and Re- 
 ligion: 
 
 ‘‘A dmonition and exhortation, comfort, the reso- 
 lution of doubt, the healing of the inly blind, these 
 all are the uses of a good priest and true. He ts 
 friend and fatherly confessor, counselor, guide, 
 and man of God, bringing near the fresh peace 
 and joy of the timeless and eternal world. He 
 invites the strong to bear the infirmities of the 
 weak, and in his church provides them a definite 
 and ever ready medium for that ministry, varied, 
 adaptable, and permanent. He carries to lonely, 
 sick, and sorrowing persons the assurances of the 
 
 197 
 
S'O.M'ti) ORIEN, WrA YS Oa G ae 
 
 faith, assurances, . . . more than doubly strong 
 because not merely his own and personal but rather 
 of his office, representing the strong body of be- 
 lievers and loyal workers behind him and around 
 him in the church, whose servant he is, of whose 
 word and faith he is but the mouthpiece: assur- 
 ances received also because conveyed by one set 
 apart to ponder holy things and pray for all souls.” 
 
 Nor is it difficult to find here and there, in every 
 time, some minister of such conspicuous quality 
 that the whole life of a community may more and 
 more take its tone from him. He may be in some 
 little country church, quietly ministering all his life 
 with simple devotion to simple folk. He may be 
 the preacher in some great pulpit to which the 
 multitudes look up. But equally it may be true 
 that, when men come to look back upon the in- 
 fluences which have laid hold of their lives, sweet- 
 ened their thinking, given them a greater and stur- 
 dier sense of duty for every day, lifted their hope 
 and helped them to keep the perspective of their 
 ambition true, they confess their gratitude, not 
 to some statesman, not to the manipulator of 
 business, not to the man who has made most 
 money, but to the minister who has been to them 
 the messenger of God. ‘The best spirits in every 
 generation will always find the presence of such 
 men congenial. They will thank God that the 
 ministry does exist to hold up insistently the 
 torch of the eternal things. 
 
 198 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 Nor can the objection be made good that a man 
 has good reason to stay out of the Church be- 
 cause he holds that,—not the ministers now,—but 
 the lay people, in the Church are unattractive. 
 Rare is the man who would say that the spirit of his 
 own mother is uncongenial to him; yet, as a matter 
 of fact, most of the men in countries like ours 
 who have had good mothers, have had mothers 
 whose natures were sweetened and refined by the 
 constant influence of the Christian Church. 
 Through its worship and its fellowship, the 
 Church has helped to create and sustain the de- 
 votion of those who as builders of homes have 
 given to their children the richest legacy of ideals 
 and of character. If integrity and kindness and 
 reverence and humility be the qualities that make 
 people attractive, then the Church does fashion 
 attractive people. It does not make them perfect. 
 It does not lift all its members to a level which 
 may not be reached and surpassed by individuals 
 outside its ranks, for it starts with very various 
 and unequal human material; but it does put into 
 its people those elements of character and con- 
 duct which make them more congenial to live with 
 than they otherwise would have been, and more 
 attractive than any other group which one is likely 
 to find outside. 
 
 In short, the talk which is sometimes heard to 
 the effect that good fellowship and the real joy 
 
 199 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 of living are found outside the Church rather 
 than in it, is mere shallow ignorance. It is only 
 a false estimate of reality which could ever say 
 so, for the friendships which are formed within 
 the Church lay hold, not merely of a part of a 
 man, but of the whole of him, not of his trivial 
 preference and of his passing moods, but of his 
 deepest desires. As I look back over my own ex- 
 perience, I believe the conviction which it has bred 
 in me is typical of all who have been blessed with 
 the privilege of the best the Church can give. I 
 think of the friendships of school, and then of 
 those of college, and some of them were fine and 
 lasting; and then I think of the friendships which 
 I formed among the men who were studying to- 
 gether in the theological seminary; and then of 
 the friendships of a parish, where the minister is 
 thrown into constant association with men and 
 women in loyalties which call out, not only the 
 best which is already in them, but something bet- 
 ter than their best. I do not believe that any 
 imaginable other association could develop friend- 
 ships so deep, so true, so altogether satisfying as 
 those which are possible under the inspiration of 
 the Church. The world is full, of course, of all 
 sorts of so-called friendships. A man may call 
 his best friends those with whom he likes to sit 
 down and gamble, because gambling is for the 
 moment the thing he most enjoys doing. He may 
 200 
 
/ 
 
 WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 count as his friends the men with whom he is asso- 
 ciated in some hard-driving business, where he and 
 they are tied together in the pursuit of their own 
 profit. He may count as his friends the crowd 
 with whom he mixes in some secret political deal. 
 Or his friends may be that more or less floating 
 group with whom he comes in pleasant but casual 
 contact, the people he dines with, the men he talks 
 with in his club, the ones he plays with on his holi- 
 days. Out of all these friendships, of course, 
 something beautiful may emerge, and will emerge 
 if they arouse the actual human loyalty which 
 makes people hold together because of their gen- 
 uine regard for one another; but the trouble with 
 most of the friendships formed on the basis of 
 mere tastes or material interests is that they re- 
 present no real coalescence of human personalities 
 at all. They merely represent individuals linked 
 together by certain artificial conjunctions at one 
 small point of what ought to be their whole life; 
 and if the whole life develops into nobler and 
 larger interests, then the little thing that formerly 
 represented the friendship becomes relatively in- 
 significant and unsatisfying. But the friendships 
 which are formed between men and women in the 
 Christian Church do lay hold of the heights and 
 depths and widenesses of their spirits. They draw 
 them together by the compulsion of a loyalty so 
 powerful and so transfusing that it melts them 
 201 
 
SOM EnO PENG WAY Soa OrG Os 
 
 with the glow of its high understanding. Such 
 friendships have in them nothing to be grown 
 away from, nothing unworthy or belittling at 
 which developing experience could be ashamed; 
 but, on the contrary, they bring a clean thorough- 
 ness of regard and a confidence of expectation 
 which lifts up and draws out the utmost that each 
 has to give. There are few things so beautiful 
 in the Bible as the story of the friendship of 
 David and Jonathan, and that same sort of friend- 
 ship, faithful, stimulating, free from any shadow 
 of turning, is possible to men who learn to love 
 each other in the Christian Church. 
 
 2. [he second objection made to the Church by 
 the man outside is that the Church has hypocrites 
 in it. The fact that it seems so is the highest 
 recommendation of the Church. 
 
 For what makes some people in the Church 
 seem to be hypocrites? It is because they are in 
 an organiaztion which recognizedly has such high 
 standards that the person who does not measure 
 up to them is condemned even by the disinterested 
 observer as no fit representative of the Church. 
 The very act of judging the poor Church member 
 for what he is involves the recognition of what 
 he ought to be. 
 
 Now manifestly no one wants the Church to be 
 an institution for manufacturing hypocrites. But 
 also it is clear that if the man who is now in the 
 
 202 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 Church is called a hypocrite when he is no worse 
 than a thousand outside who escape any singling 
 out for blame, at least a standard has been set up 
 by which men are measured by a more challenging 
 insistence. Furthermore, the charge that such 
 and such a member of the Church is a hypocrite 
 may often come more from the ill-nature of the 
 critic than from any genuine liability on the part 
 of the person so criticized. A hypocrite, in that 
 word’s real meaning of a conscious impostor, is 
 a very rare person in the Church, as everybody 
 knows. What the objector to the Church has in 
 mind when he talks of hypocrites is people who 
 blunder and come short, and whose shortcomings 
 are the more evident because of the measuring- 
 rod of the Church’s ideal against which they have 
 had the courage to try to range themselves. In 
 more cases than not, the critic himself is troubled 
 by his own bad conscience. He knows that the 
 Church represents an ideal which is difficult to 
 live up to. He does not want himself to espouse 
 that difficulty, and he plausibly confirms himself 
 in his own decision to do nothing by mocking the 
 failure of the man who has tried to do something 
 and who has stumbled in his attempt. The real 
 hypocrite is the critic himself, because he is trying 
 so to manipulate ideas that he shall make a virtue 
 out of his own moral inertia, and an excellence 
 out of his own lazy refusal to try to be excellent 
 203 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 at all. Fairly considered, this alleged objection 
 to the Church on the ground that there are hypo- 
 crites in it, does not deserve prolonged discussion. 
 Nobody who is himself tremendously concerned 
 about the moral or spiritual issues of life and sin- 
 cerely desirous of- throwing his weight in with 
 those forces which uphold the best, ever held aloof 
 from the Church because of this drawback of the 
 idea of hypocrites being in it. He is too busy 
 trying to wield his own sword against what he 
 knows to be the terribly real weapons of evil to 
 stop superciliously to count some other man’s 
 scars. The criticism of the shortcomings of the 
 man who has enlisted as a soldier in the Church’s 
 army, poor soldier though he be, generally comes 
 from the man who does not want to enlist at all, 
 but prefers the safe distance of a spectator to the 
 melee of the spiritual combat; but the truth 1s that 
 there may be more heroism in the man who, know- 
 ing his weakness and unfitness, and knowing his 
 liability to flinch before temptation and to be 
 beaten to his knees by his besetting sin, yet goes 
 on because God’s voice in his conscience will not 
 let him utterly play the part of a coward or de- 
 serter, than in all the complacent unwounded wit- 
 nesses who hang upon the fringes of the battle to 
 mark his fall. 
 
 There is no need, then, of taking over-serious- 
 ly the argument that there are hypocrites in the 
 
 204. 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 Church. If the assertion that hypocrites are 
 there is understood to mean,-—and this is the ut- 
 most which usually the truth permits to be meant, 
 —that the Church has in it many very imperfect 
 warriors; if it means that people are called hypo- 
 crites because they have deliberately adopted for 
 their lives a high standard which will bring their 
 failures into the light, instead of adopting no 
 standard at all and so keeping their whole stand- 
 ard indifferently in the dark; if it means that 
 people are hypocrites because they aim higher 
 than they can yet attain and follow a conscience 
 that bids them do their best at moral tasks which 
 they have not yet learned how to master;—then 
 the more hypocrites we have the better. And a 
 man might well choose to be called one as the 
 price of trying blunderingly to climb higher, than 
 very successfully to avoid being called one by stay- 
 ing in the meanness in which he now is. 
 
 3. A third objection made against the Church is 
 that it does not accomplish anything. Someone 
 may say, “Yes, I grant all that has just been said. 
 I have no objection in the main against the kind 
 of people who are in the Church. I admit that 
 the talk about Church-members being unattractive 
 and hypocritical is mostly fraud. The Church 
 people are well-meaning enough. But what do 
 they do? What is the actual value of the Church 
 when it comes to accomplishment ?” 
 
 205 
 
SO MEV OREN. WA YS 1 OmGages 
 
 The answer to that depends upon what one is 
 looking for? If by accomplishment one has in 
 mind explosions of energy, blowing up like a vol- 
 cano or rending like an earthquake, which break 
 up the whole basis of our present life, shattering 
 existing institutions and starting men rebuilding 
 on a new plan, then it is obvious that the Church 
 is not signalizing every day by some accomplish- 
 ment. But it is also obvious that human life, if 
 it had to be made over only by a process of vol- 
 cano and earthquake, would hold out a wholly un- 
 inviting prospect. 
 
 Sometimes the Church, through its great re- 
 presentatives, does lay hold of human affairs with 
 sudden and drastic power. The mob in Thessa- 
 lonica said of Paul and his companions, ‘These 
 that have turned the world upside down are come 
 hither also.’ But the real accomplishment of the 
 Church is, as a rule, more like the accomplishment 
 of climate. A change of climate will change the 
 face of the earth. Geologists tell us that a very 
 slight average decrease in the annual temperature 
 over the northern part of the globe, perhaps not 
 more than eight or ten degrees Fahrenheit, would 
 suffice to bring on another glacial age. Little by 
 little every winter the ice cap in the polar regions 
 would accumulate. Little by little the snows 
 would deepen and the glaciers form on the high 
 mountains. Less and less would the warmth of the 
 
 206 
 
WHY: BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 summer be sufficient to melt the ice and snow 
 which the winters had left, and so by scarcely per- 
 ceptible but sure degrees the relentless march of 
 the glaciers would begin again until vast regions 
 of the earth now fertile and inhabited would be 
 locked as once they were in the frozen embrace of 
 cold and death. In the same way, if the Church 
 should vanish from the earth, the spiritual climate 
 would begin to change. Men would not notice it 
 at first. They would think that the sun shone 
 and that life went upon its way quite as it had 
 done yeserday. But little by little the glow of 
 those finer human emotions under which the most 
 fragrant thoughts and actions of our race develop 
 would begin to wane before the increasing pre- 
 ponderance of the cruelty, the selfishness, and the 
 hard materialism which always gather round the 
 arctic fringes of our human nature. Slowly these 
 things would begin their march across the prov- 
 inces of life, and all the fields of human activity 
 would begin to grow bleak and desolate in the 
 deepening spiritual cold. 
 
 It is often only the lack of the most precious 
 elements of life which bring men to the acute con- 
 sciousness of their value. As the days go on with 
 their familiar warmth of the sun, with their tem- 
 perate seasons and the long months of bright skies 
 and fertile earth, it is easy to take for granted 
 and to estimate indifferently the priceless boon of 
 
 207 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 genial weather. So a civilization accustomed to 
 the presence in its midst of the Christian Church, 
 with the steady warmth of its constant influence, 
 and with its power to ameliorate the tempers of 
 men and to quicken into fruitfulness the seeds of 
 nobler thought, takes for granted the conditions 
 to which it is accustomed, and does not always 
 specifically recognize that it is to the Church in 
 large measure that it owes them. Yet it would 
 be a grievous fault that men should have to lose 
 the thing they prize before they should know how 
 much they prize it. A short while ago, in this 
 spring of 1924, a cable dispatch from England 
 carried the report that in England this year there 
 had been an extraordinary number of suicides, 
 which by many observers was attributed to the 
 fact that it had been a winter of singular cloudi- 
 ness and gloom, with long successions of days in 
 which there had been no glimpse of the sun. The 
 wretched drabness of the grey weather weighed 
 with its intolerable depression upon men’s spirits, 
 and for some of them actually made life seem 
 no longer worth living. If the Church should 
 pass out of the life of our civilization, the spirit- 
 ual effect would be similar. Then, when perhaps 
 it was too late, multitudes of people would realize 
 that life had lost its warmth and light and color, 
 which alone can make it desirable for any sensi- 
 tive soul. 
 208 
 
 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 And as we take this metaphor of climate to 
 illustrate the influence of the Church, it needs to 
 be remembered that that influence is exerted not 
 only upon individuals but upon that group mind 
 and will out of which the destinies of nations may 
 be fashioned. Nothing is being more clearly re- 
 cognized by thoughtful men than that something 
 more than machinery of political plans and treat- 
 ies and formal negotiations will be needed to save 
 the world from the forces of war and disruption 
 which threaten. There must be a new spirit in the 
 hearts of the peoples. There must be some great 
 power of good-will, shining as steadily as the sun, 
 which can break through the fogs of hate and 
 suspicion, lift men out of their depression and en- 
 courage them for braver constructive tasks to- 
 gether. Ina recent volume entitled ‘Realities and 
 Shams,” Professor L. P. Jacks, the Editor of the 
 Hibbert Journal, has said of those plans such as 
 the League of Nations which have of late been 
 fashioned to try to secure order and peace in our 
 world: 
 
 “At first sight the problem appears to consist in 
 finding the right scheme, or the right idea, by the 
 application of which this or that is to be mended. 
 The importance of that I do not belittle—-nobody 
 in his senses would dream of belittling it; but be- 
 hind it lies the far greater problem of finding the 
 power to carry out the scheme you have devised, 
 
 209 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 to give effect to the idea you have propounded. I 
 am not referring to political power as it is repre- 
 sented by masses of voters, by measures passed 
 into law, by armies, and by policemen. I mean 
 moral power, as it is represented by the steadiness 
 of the public in the pursuit of its aims, by contin- 
 uity of effort, by belief in principles, by mutual 
 loyalty, by strict adhesion both to the form and 
 the spirit of a pledge, and by the refusal to be led 
 away by cant. This is the kind of power you 
 want, and without which your scheme of recon- 
 struction will never be carried out.” 
 
 And further he wrote: 
 
 “The likelihood that a good idea will take root 
 and fructify as a social force is ultimately depend- 
 ent on the good temper of the community to which 
 it is addressed. Jn human society, improvement 
 that is worth the name is never effected by one set 
 of people forcing their ideas down the throats of 
 another set. All improvement takes place by con- 
 sent, by men seeing eye to eye, believing in com- 
 mon and acting together in good faith and mutual 
 loyalty for the given end. This loyal and con- 
 tinuous consent can never be obtained, on a scale 
 large enough to be effective, except in communities 
 whose members, as human beings, are on good 
 terms with one another, respect one another, trust 
 one another, believe in each other’s good inten- 
 tions, and take a generous view of each other’s 
 merits and demerits.” 
 
 It is quite true that the Christian Church, as it 
 210 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 now appears in the world, does not obviously pre- 
 sent a power able to create that human good-will 
 which Principal Jacks has pointed out to be our 
 sorest need. The divisions within the Church it- 
 self, the slow imagination of some of her leaders, 
 and the failure of many of her people to interpret 
 her opportunity in terms of world regeneration, 
 wound the power which the Church ought to pos- 
 sess; but notwithstanding that, what other force 
 in society has potentialities comparable to the 
 Church in this matter? If the Church cannot fur- 
 nish the good-will which our society needs, we 
 shall look far to discover any other institution 
 which can furnish it. 
 
 And if we consider the facts, we shall recognize 
 that the Church, when men turn to it with an ex- 
 pectant challenge, does already furnish the most 
 hopeful influence which at this moment is in opera- 
 tion. Men who try to reach the public opinion of 
 the American people for a larger measure of inter- 
 national cooperation—the men, for example, who 
 go out to interpret the World Court or the League 
 of Nations—repeatedly discover that the most 
 effective influences for bringing together the rep- 
 resentative groups of citizens, through which a 
 message can be given to the people who count 
 most, and by which the public opinion can be regis- 
 tered, are the groups of local ministers. Cham- 
 bers of Commerce and other business organiza- 
 
 211 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 tions may be mildly interested; but usually they 
 have no aptitude for bringing people together ex- 
 cept for more or less technical matters of business 
 concern. It is through the representatives of the 
 Church that the mind and conscience of the people 
 can be reached> The growing activity in the 
 United States of the Federal Council of Churches 
 is the brightest example of what the Church as a 
 whole can do. The calling of the Conference on 
 Limitation of Armaments in Washington in 1921 
 was due in no small measure to the insistent desire 
 of Church people which the Federal Council 
 brought to a focus of expression in this matter. 
 It is significant that Church bodies of every sort 
 “1 the United States have been almost overwhelm- 
 ingly in favor of constructive efforts for world 
 peace, and the hope that we may move forward 
 to success rests in large measure upon the driving 
 power of that idealism which the Church repre- 
 sents. 
 
 Therefore it is time that we should turn from 
 the negative aspect of the subject of this chapter 
 to the positive one. The objections to the Church 
 may be recognized, but for the thoughtful spirit 
 they can also be removed. Notwithstanding its 
 imperfect members and notwithstanding the weak- 
 ening caused by its divisions, the Christian Church 
 represents the ‘nstrumentality in the world today 
 through which the Holy Spirit of God may work 
 
 212 
 
 
 
 y 
 4 
 A 
 \ 
 
WHY BELONGS TO THE: CHURCH ¢ 
 
 for the nobler development of our human life, and 
 as such it challenges the allegiance of men and 
 women of high purpose and good-will. 
 
 Iil 
 
 The Church can become this instrumentality for 
 the operation of the Holy Spirit because of such 
 facts as these. 
 
 1. In the first place, because the Church assures 
 the nurture of the ideal. It accustoms, not only 
 adults, but what is even more important, boys and 
 girls, to the thought of God’s purpose in Jesus 
 Christ as the standard against which their lives 
 must be measured. It surrounds them with the 
 atmosphere of moral and spiritual expectation, by 
 the unconscious breathing of which their whole 
 growth will be affected. 
 
 What this means, and what the reverse of it 
 may mean, can be readily apparent to any observer 
 of contemporary life. There is at the present time 
 an appalling amount of juvenile delinquency. ‘The 
 overwhelming majority of the criminals who are 
 sent to prison from our great American cities are 
 very young men. That on the face of it is a con- 
 demnation of the Church. As a matter of fact, 
 it does not represent a failure of the Church except 
 as it represents the very imperfect extension of 
 that influence which is of priceless value whenever 
 
 213 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 it is brought to bear,—for it has been repeatedly 
 testified by judges of courts, by social workers, and 
 others who have investigated the facts as to moral 
 delinquency, especially among American youth, 
 that practically always the boys and girls and 
 young men and women who come into the courts 
 are discovered to have been those who have never 
 been brought up in any Church or Sunday-school. 
 They have passed through no nursery of charac- 
 ter. They have grown up without any knowledge 
 of those religious expectations which develop high 
 self-respect. On the other hand, those boys and 
 girls who have been taught under religious influ- 
 ences have learned that there is such a thing as a 
 moral code to which they are expected to be true. 
 They have been given the sense of accountability 
 to something high and steadying, and best of all, 
 in Christian Sunday-schools and Churches they 
 have been made familiar with the personality of 
 Jesus Christ, so that for them it is never again 
 quite possible to have a mean, unclean, and selfish 
 life go unrebuked by the ideal which He repre- 
 sents. 
 
 ‘It is easy to recognize also that the instinctive 
 judgment of the world perceives in the Christian 
 Church a sensitiveness to high responsibilities 
 which makes the forces working for betterment in 
 society always turn to the Church for help. Much 
 is said in our day of the fact that many of the lead- 
 
 214 
 
 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 ers in social work seem to have broken their con- 
 tact with the Church; but it is equally true that 
 when the personal history of those same social 
 workers can be traced, it is repeatedly made evi- 
 dent that the source of their practical idealism 
 leads back to the inspiration which they received, 
 either personally or through inheritance, from the 
 Church; and it is further a fact that whenever an 
 unselfish cause is to be set forward, it is to the 
 Church that people turn for its encouragement. 
 The Christian minister immediately looms as a 
 likely ally before the hopeful imagination of every 
 promoter of a new crusade. There is scarcely a 
 Sunday in the year which he is not solemnly im- 
 portuned to dedicate to some particular cause, un- 
 til—if he adopt them all—the entire church cal- 
 endar would appear as one continuous propaganda 
 of specific social ameliorations. According to the 
 requests which come, there would be a ‘“Tubercu- 
 losis Sunday,” a “Child Labor Sunday,” a “Red 
 Cross Sunday,” a ‘Near East Relief Sunday,” a 
 “Disabled Veterans Sunday,’ a ‘World Court 
 Sunday,” and all sorts of others, as variegated as 
 the colors in Joseph’s coat. Why do all these 
 causes and a host of others backed by earnest 
 people turn to the Church and ask the Church to 
 help them by the message of its pulpit and the 
 money of its people? It is because they know 
 that there is a natural kinship between the spirit 
 215 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 of the Church and the spirit of any and every sort 
 of selfish endeavor, and though their particular 
 suggestion as to the way in which the Church can 
 help may often be crude and impractical, their 
 sense that the people who make up the Church are 
 the ones from whom help will most surely come is 
 profoundly true. If any one questions that fact, 
 all he needs to do is to take the list of contributors 
 to the great charities and the outstanding agencies 
 for social betterment, whether these involve the 
 special and dramatic appeals such as were made 
 in the time of war, or the steady and routine inter- 
 est of ordinary days, and compare the list of giv- 
 ers with a list of members of the Church. He 
 will find that any organization which had to do 
 without that part of its support which traces back 
 to the inspiration of the Church would very soon 
 be dead and buried. 
 
 Furthermore, there is a notable fact concerning 
 the Church which superficial appearances may dis- 
 guise. According to these appearances, the Church 
 often seems to have very little movement in its 
 thought. With the slow passing of the years, there 
 drifts into the channels of the Church’s life the 
 impalpable but slowly stifling dust from the com- 
 mon and familiar influences of its world. ‘The 
 waters of that quickening spirit which should flow 
 through the Church may become blocked into little 
 pools, shallow, stale, and even corrupt; but the 
 
 216 
 
 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 mighty fact is that, though the Church in tem- 
 porary and superficial aspect may thus often seem 
 to represent the spent forces of conservatism and 
 stagnation, nevertheless it is forever within the 
 ground which the Church possesses that those great 
 fountains lie out of which the flooding waters 
 again and again will break. Far down beneath 
 even the most dusty and arid forgetfulness of any 
 generation, still within the Church’s profounder 
 consciousness are the wells of the remembrance of 
 the words of Jesus,—and the mystic well of the 
 sacrament of remembrance of His death. In those 
 mighty moments of history, when the great souls 
 come with that intuition which goes back to the 
 eternal springs of the thought of Jesus, they strike 
 the ground of the Church’s life, as Moses struck 
 the rock in the wilderness, and the waters of the 
 recovered meaning of the Lord leap again into the 
 sunlight and flow in streams that refresh all the 
 parched provinces of men’s life. That was true, 
 for example, when in the midst of the corruption 
 of the later Renaissance, Savonarola arose in 
 Florence. At the time when the Church was being 
 conformed to the paganism of his world, he 
 brought back to it the transforming thought of the 
 moral imperatives of Christ. In the next century 
 Martin Luther did the same thing with an even 
 surer power. It mattered not that all the organ- 
 ized authority of the Church and Empire too were 
 
 2177 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 set against him. Standing before Charles the 
 Fifth, the princes, the cardinals, and the legate 
 of the Pope, he concluded his statement with those 
 greatly simple words: “Here I stand. I can do 
 no otherwise. God help me. Amen.’ What he 
 accomplished for the Reformation, no power of 
 any single man could have accomplished. His 
 work was possible because through him there 
 issued again the living waters of the power of 
 Christ, the channels of which may be impeded, but 
 can never be destroyed. 
 
 In those two problems which most concern the 
 social conscience of our day, the consensus of 
 thoughtful men more and more points out this 
 power of the resurgent ideals of Jesus as the indis- 
 pensable influence by which good men can be in- 
 spired to accomplish what they desire. I mean, 
 on the one hand, the problem of working out some 
 genuine principle of codperation in our economic 
 order, and, in the second place, the development 
 of a new spirit as between the nations which may 
 deliver civilization from the threatening annihila- 
 tion of war. In his notable book on The Recon- 
 struction of Religion: A Sociological View, Pro- 
 fessor Ellwood has written: “There is no hope of 
 the realization of a social life dominated by love 
 without Jesus, for there is no one to whom the 
 world would turn for such a vision if his leader- 
 ship were denied. And in making himself the 
 
 218 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 moral and social leader of mankind he has surely 
 become the redeemer and savior of his fellow- 
 men.” And again he says, “The world is perish- 
 ing for lack of knowledge of the way in which 
 human beings should live together. The Church 
 holds one key to this knowledge, the social ideals 
 of Jesus; and social science the other.’ That is 
 to say, he recognizes, as other profound thinkers 
 of the day are doing, that the whole question of 
 our economic readjustment in the way which shall 
 make for real satisfaction of human spirits comes 
 back in the last analysis to religion. There can 
 be no adequate transformation of the machinery 
 of our social order without a sufficient motive, and 
 the only motive powerful enough to fire men’s im- 
 aginations and to claim their will is the strength 
 of that consecration which Jesus commands. 
 
 That “the world is perishing for lack of knowl- 
 edge of the way in which human beings should live 
 together” all earnestly thoughtful people would 
 agree. And if there are some who believe very 
 readily that “‘social science” holds one key to this 
 knowledge but are slow to believe that the organ- 
 ized Church holds another indispensable key, the 
 representation of the truth may well rest in these 
 fine words which Jane Addams has written in her 
 “Twenty Years at Hull House”: 
 
 “One Sunday morning I received the rite of 
 219 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS /1D0 GOwm 
 
 baptism and became a member of the Presbyterian 
 church in the village. At this time there was cer- 
 tainly no outside pressure pushing me towards 
 such a decision, and at twenty-five one does not 
 ordinarily take such a step from a mere desire to 
 conform. While I was not conscious of any emo- 
 tional ‘conversion,’ I took upon myself the outward 
 expressions of the religious life with all humility 
 and sincerity. It was doubtless true that I was 
 
 “Weary of myself and sick of asking 
 What I am and what I ought to be,’” 
 
 and that various cherished safeguards and claims 
 to self-dependence had been broken into by many 
 piteous failures. But certainly I had been brought 
 to the conclusion that ‘sincerely to give up one’s 
 conceit or hope of being good in one’s own right 
 is the only door to the Universe’s deeper reaches.’ 
 
 There was also growing within me an al- 
 most passionate devotion to the ideals of democ- 
 racy, and when in all history had these ideals been 
 so thrillingly expressed as when the faith of the 
 fisherman and the slave had been boldly opposed 
 to the accepted moral belief that the well-being 
 of a privileged few might justly be built upon the 
 ignorance and sacrifice of the many? Who was I, 
 with my dreams of universal fellowship, that I did 
 not identify myself with the institutional state- 
 ment of this belief, as it stood in the little village 
 in which I was born, and without which testimony 
 in each remote hamlet of Christendom it would be 
 so easy for the world to slip back into the doctrines 
 of selection and aristocracy?’ 
 
 220 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 And if the Church is needed for its nurture of 
 those ideals which may redeem our economic or- 
 der, so it is needed also to nurture those ideals 
 which alone can deliver our world from interna- 
 tional strife. To my own memory the truth is 
 symbolized by a scene to which my thoughts go 
 back in Northern France. There outside a broken 
 wall at the beginning of a long plain which 
 stretched away to hills on the western horizon, 
 day by day the broken bodies of men killed at the 
 front or dying in hospitals were brought to be 
 buried. Not far from the wall was a garden 
 which some French peasant had planted in the 
 spring. Between the wall and the garden grew 
 the increasing files of hasty graves. Day by day 
 as the bodies were brought, new graves were dug, 
 and the newest of them reached out nearer and 
 nearer to the garden. At last they invaded it and 
 slowly swallowed it up. It was as though death 
 itself were creeping on, drawing down into its in- 
 exorable maw, not only the life of today but the 
 very sustenance and promise of the life of tomor- 
 row. And then from that place with its raw earth 
 and the lengthening graves and the sombre twilight 
 falling across the plain, I would turn my eyes and 
 look where to the east, over the walls and roofs 
 of the ancient town, rose the grey facade of the 
 old cathedral which was builded before some of 
 the nations that were in the war were born. On 
 
 221 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 the stone front of it was carved a great crucifix. 
 Silently there, where the dawn would rise behind 
 it, it brooded over the long tragedy of the war. 
 In that figure, with its infinite compassion, with its 
 ideals of life undefeated by death and by the cross 
 of human sin, is the promise of the ultimate tri- 
 umph. And through men and women nurtured 
 by the Church in His ideals, there must come the 
 strength for the better world that is to be. 
 
 2. In the second place, the Church adds to the 
 nurture of the ideal the power of a proven confi- 
 dence. 
 
 The trouble with many of the efforts at reform 
 in our day is that they rest on no deep foundation. 
 They depend upon the personal enthusiasm of 
 little groups of people who have conceived some 
 new idea and set out self-sufficiently to realize it. 
 When discouragements thicken and their own best 
 energies seem to be set at naught, they have noth- 
 ing to fall back upon. They have not linked their 
 staccato efforts with that mightier movement of 
 the long purposes of God, in relation to which our 
 individual postponements are relieved of their dis- 
 may. 
 
 The mind which has been tutored by Christian- 
 ity reads history with a perspective which finds 
 in it the evidence of something stronger and 
 sturdier than our own human efforts. It sees that 
 one increasing purpose through the ages runs. It 
 
 222 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 believes that there is a power of God with which 
 one day may be as a thousand years and a thou- 
 sand years as one day. It perceives that the 
 supreme successes have not always been those 
 which were marked by hasty effects. It perceives 
 that the sufferings and martyrdoms of heroes have 
 often been more potent than the acts of conquer- 
 ors in bringing about the triumph of the ideals by 
 which they live and for which they are willing to 
 die. In Jesus Christ Himself many generations 
 of Christians have found, not only their thought 
 of what might be an ideal for life, but their brave 
 confidence that despite all temporary disaster and 
 loss, the real forces of the universe are on the side 
 of that faith and devotion which He lifted up. 
 When John Huss was being led to his death at the 
 stake by the judgment of the Council of Constance, 
 he said, addressing his executioners, “The Lord 
 Jesus Christ, my Redeemer, was bound with a 
 harder chain, and I, a miserable sinner, am not 
 afraid to bear this one, bound as I am for His 
 Name’s sake.’ Then he repeated, “In the same 
 truth of the Gospel which I have written, taught, 
 and preached, drawing upon the sayings and posi- 
 tions of the holy doctors, I am ready to die to- 
 day.” And he wrote in one of his letters that 
 after his death God would raise up braver men to 
 ‘Jose their lives for the truth of the Lord Jesus.” 
 The world today does not have its stake and fagot 
 223 
 
SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
 
 and fire for the prophet of spiritual truth. Never- 
 theless, even now it has its ordeal of ridicule for 
 the idealist, of scorn and rejection for the man 
 who goes ahead of his time; and if today, as in 
 other generations, the creative and pioneering 
 spirits are to be brave to carry out their lonely 
 task, they will need exactly what John Huss found, 
 and what the real genius of the Church can give,— 
 namely, the sense of the present as still in the 
 hands of God because the past is seen to have been 
 directed by His unhurrying yet most sure will. 
 As we look upon our contemporary existence, 
 we find in it much of which no one can be proud. 
 Yet as we compare it with the past, we know that 
 human life has moved on and up out of the valley 
 of one old iniquity after another toward the higher 
 levels which rose ahead. In that progress we have 
 left human sacrifice behind. We have left slavery 
 behind; and the conscience at least of the vanguard 
 is beginning to leave behind and to repudiate the 
 ‘dea that war is an inevitable and necessary thing. 
 The life of the common man, in the freedom of 
 his body and in the liberty of his mind, in his 
 chance to hope for his share of opportunity for 
 himself and for his children, is an infinitely fairer 
 thing than it was in the centuries gone. The ad- 
 mitted injustices and inequalities of our modern 
 social order cannot obscure the greater fact that 
 the lot of the average citizen in the free nations 
 224. 
 
 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 of the world today represents, if not Paradise, at 
 least a very high and hopeful circle of Purgatory 
 in comparison with the Hell of wretchedness and 
 subjection in which the unregarded multitudes once 
 were kept. 
 
 “Some call it Evolution, 
 
 And others call it God.”’ 
 
 The Christian Church does call it God. It believes 
 that the Holy Purpose, slowly controlling the un- 
 ruly wills and affections of sinful men, has been 
 leading the human family on to better things, and 
 because it thus believes that the progress made in 
 the past has been, not blundering chance, but the 
 result of the working of a Spirit whom the spirit 
 of man can trust, it has the braver confidence to 
 lay hold of the future because the foundation of 
 that faith is strong beneath its feet. 
 
 3. In the third place, the Church can be the in- 
 strumentality for the Holy Spirit because it gives a 
 solidarity to strength. “A solidarity!’ some may 
 exclaim incredulously. “Where is any solidarity 
 in the Church, divided as it now is? Is not that 
 the very thing which the actual facts of organized 
 Christianity make a mock of ?” 
 
 If we look at certain appearances and only at 
 these, then the answer is Yes; but there is a deeper 
 fact beneath the appearances. As a group made 
 
 225 
 
SiO. MOE O-RsEING Wi ALY Sot OG ae 
 
 up of representatives of the Church of England 
 on the one hand and of represéntatives of the 
 Free Churches on the other, meeting together in 
 England with reference to the proposed World 
 Conference on Faith and Order, said recently in a 
 statement which they jointly subscribed: 
 
 “As there is but one Christ, and one Life in 
 Him, so there is and can be but one Church. 
 
 “This one Church consists of all those who 
 have been, or are being, redeemed by and in 
 Christ, whether in this world or in the world be- 
 yond our sight, but it has its expression in this 
 world in a visible form. Yet the Church, as in- 
 visible and as visible, is, by virtue of its one life in 
 Christ, one. 
 
 “The true relation of the Church and local 
 Churches is that which is described in the New 
 Testament——namely, that the Churches are the 
 local representatives of the One Church. The 
 actual situation brought about in the course of his- 
 tory in which there are different and even rival 
 denominational Churches independent of each 
 other and existing together in the same locality, 
 whatever justification arising out of historical cir- 
 cumstances may be claimed for these temporary 
 separations, cannot be regarded as in accordance 
 with the Purpose of Christ, and every endeavor 
 ought to be made to restore the true position as 
 set forth in the New Testament.” 
 
 These words express a realization, now wide- 
 spread among thoughtful Christian people, that 
 226 
 
Wirt bo OUN Gun LO Cr He CEURCE ¢ 
 
 the present discordant division of the ideal Church 
 into many rival denominations represents a grave 
 forfeiture of the Church’s highest life and power. 
 Earnest efforts are being made in several quarters 
 to draw together bodies of sundered Christians 
 into larger fellowships. The recent movement 
 towards union of the Methodist and Presbyterian 
 Churches in Canada, now nearly consummated, is 
 one example. The proposed World Conference 
 on Faith and Order is a far more ambitious ef- 
 fort toward the same ideal of Christian solidarity. 
 Through slow and patient preparation, it has now 
 come to pass that many Christian communions, all 
 over the world, have appointed commissions who 
 are definitely arranging the details of the Confer- 
 ence to be held within the next two or three years, 
 at which representatives from almost all the im- 
 portant bodies of the Christian world will meet 
 together frankly to face their differences and to 
 try to find the way toward an effective reunion of 
 Christendom. 
 
 But meanwhile, even with the many Christian 
 divisions, there is already a rapidly developing 
 coéperation of strength between Christian com- 
 munions in actual service. Here in America par- 
 ticularly, there have been notable instances of the 
 way in which a common Christian conscience and 
 will, overpassing all denominational bounds, can 
 be mobilized with great power in issues which af- 
 
 227 
 
SOME 0 PAB -Witol STO G Gao 
 
 ' 
 
 fect the moral ideals of the whole people. Un- 
 questionably, the fight against the commercialized 
 liguor traffic would never have gone forward in 
 any such formidable fashion as has been the case 
 except for the strength which was recruited from 
 numberless congregations of Christian people who, 
 notwithstanding the fact that they had denomina- 
 tional differences, were united in one resolution to 
 strike down the organized evil which was respon- 
 sible for so much degradation and misery in the 
 nation. ‘The issue of the very vast social experi- 
 ment which has culminated in the enactment of 
 constitutional prohibition in the United States is 
 not yet fully determined; but it is true that if at 
 last the elimination of alcoholic drink as a cause 
 of social misery does plainly result, it will have 
 been through the steady pressure of a sentiment 
 aroused in the Churches that the achievement thus 
 is reached. 
 
 In those matters of industrial reorganization 
 which lead to a larger human justice, the influence 
 of the Church has also made itself weightily felt. 
 The Interchurch World Movement, in the years 
 
 after the war, was promoted with an enthusiasm _ 
 
 which outran its practical ways and means, and its 
 
 far-flung effort to rouse simultaneously the thought 
 
 and coGrdinated energies of all the Protestant 
 
 Churches of America failed to do what it had 
 
 planned to do. Nevertheless, in such fragmentary 
 228 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 accomplishment at least as its report on the Steel 
 Strike, it brought Christian industrial demands 
 into expression, and, like old Bishop Latimer, it 
 lit a candle which is not easily put out. Early in 
 1923, Judge Gary, the head of the United States 
 Steel Corporation, declared the eight-hour day in 
 the steel industry to be economically impossible. 
 The reply published throughout the country by 
 the Federal Council of Churches had a large part 
 in summoning up a public opinion which insisted 
 that the thing which Judge Gary had said to be 
 impossible must, nevertheless, be attempted; and 
 in response to the public opinion in which the 
 Church’s voice had a major share, the United 
 States Steel Corporation did adopt the eight-hour 
 day, which it had already admitted to be humanly 
 desirable, and has since admitted to have proved 
 economically practicable also. | 
 
 In 1921, when the question was first broached 
 in the United States Congress of having an inter- 
 national conference on disarmament convened by 
 the President of the United States, the first indi- 
 cations were that there was by no means a fervent 
 and preponderant interest in this suggestion either 
 in Congress or in the administration. There was 
 needed the aroused opinion of the nation, and this 
 opinion the Churches did proceed to arouse and 
 to focus into expression. As Dr. John H. Finley 
 wrote at that time, ‘‘This far-reaching proposal 
 
 229 
 
S OMEWOIRITE IN: SW ASE Oi Gaone 
 
 was made possible by the nation-wide tide of pub- 
 lic opinion which has supported the calling of the 
 Conference and which has made it as clear as day- 
 light that the people everywhere are not only ready 
 for a thorough-going reduction of armament, but 
 insistent that it should no longer be delayed. In 
 developing and expressing this public sentiment, 
 the churches have played a memorable part. Even 
 the most critical could not declare that on this 
 issue they have been either indifferent or ineffec- 
 tive. In fact, it is not too much to say that they 
 have been one of the decisive factors in setting 
 our nation before the world as the outspoken ad- 
 vocate of the abandonment of the policy of com- 
 petitive armament.” And as an evidence that Dr. 
 Finley did not overstate the facts, consider these 
 letters, written in answer to an inquiry, by Senator 
 Hitchcock, and by Senator Borah, the author of 
 the original resolution in the Senate which first 
 suggested the Conference. They wrote: 
 
 “IT have no hesitation in saying that the out- 
 spoken attitude of the churches of the United 
 States on the subject of disarmament has been an 
 important influence in bringing the matter to a 
 head. I have no means of measuring the force of 
 this church influence, and I cannot even tell you 
 how many churches accepted the suggestion of 
 those who originated the idea for action, but inas- 
 much as all the expressions from churches were of 
 the same purport and there was no disagreement 
 
 230 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 in church organizations, I am inclined to think 
 that there has been a general assumption that all 
 religious organizations favored disarmament, and 
 this fact has had an important influence. 
 
 “GM. Hitchcock.’ 
 
 “T have no doubt that the expression of opinion 
 of the Christian congregations in America and the 
 Jewish synagogues upon this important subject re- 
 sulted in great good and helped most substantially 
 to advance the cause. 
 
 “T was greatly pleased when this action was 
 taken, and too much credit cannot be given the 
 churches for the part which they took. 
 
 “William E. Borah.” 
 
 The Conference on Limitation of Armament 
 was, of course, only one step in the direction 
 of international conciliation. Far greater ques- 
 tions than any which that Conference grappled 
 with need to be settled if the world is to have done 
 with war. Those questions are still before us— 
 questions involving for America decision as to 
 whether this nation shall enter the World Court, 
 whether it shall associate itself with the League of 
 Nations, and whether it shall find and follow other 
 deliberate and constructive policies for the crea- 
 tion of world conditions on which peace can be 
 reasonably built. To face these questions effec- 
 tively will require both imagination and conscience. 
 No thoughtful observer of American conditions 
 
 231 
 
SOME); OREN WAYS: TO°> GO) 
 
 can fail to see that the source from which this im- 
 agination and conscience is most apt to come is 
 the opinion of the Church. 
 
 It has often been charged against Protestantism 
 particularly that it is so essentially divisive that 
 it can never act as‘an effective and coherent Chris- 
 tian force; but in recent years the Federal Coun- 
 cil of the Churches has gone far to reverse that 
 belief. It has become the increasingly dependable 
 and effective medium through which the Churches 
 can reach a common consciousness and express a 
 common will. Its research department has been 
 of extraordinary value in gathering with swift au- 
 thority and making public through its widespread 
 channels information about great public issues in 
 relation to which individual ministers and congre- 
 gations would have had great difficulty in finding 
 the truth. Through its various commissions, it has 
 given the progressively educated Christian opinion 
 representative agencies through which to express 
 itself with regard to industrial justice, law enforce- 
 ment, Christian race relationships, and world 
 peace. Furthermore, it has had extraordinary 
 success in certain instances in relating the moral 
 opinion of Protestantism to that of the Roman 
 Catholic Church and in bringing these unitedly to 
 bear upon the great issues of public concern in 
 which the Christian conscience was agreed. 
 
 Thus, though it is true that the divisions in 
 
 232 
 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 
 
 Christianity do sadly hamper its effectiveness in 
 service and do sometimes poison its spirit, yet it 
 is not true that there lack the signs of a growing 
 codperation which men of good-will can foster. 
 There may be enough, on the one hand, to give a 
 specious plausibility to the man who seizes upon 
 the divisions in the Church as an excuse why he 
 will not work within the Christian organization; 
 but there is plenty of fact, on the other hand, to 
 hold out its invitation to the man of genuine pur- 
 pose who wants to find the way in which he can 
 make his strength count in an increasing power of 
 human association for the ideals of Jesus. 
 
 From such men, the Church by what it is today, 
 and for the sake of what it can be made tomor- 
 row, has a right to claim a loyalty, discriminating 
 yet positive, which might well express its desire for 
 the Church in these words of the Book of Common 
 Prayer, “Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it 
 is in error, direct it; where in anything it is amiss, 
 reform it; where it is right, establish it; where it is 
 divided, reunite it... . For the sake of Jesus 
 Christ.” 
 
 IV 
 
 “For the sake of Jesus Christ.” That is why 
 the Church has the right to call the best of human 
 emotion and human will into its ranks. ‘There 
 
 233 
 
SOME VO REIN Wels ORG Oa 
 
 are multitudes of people today, not yet in any 
 ecclesiastical organization, who feel an instinctive 
 reverence for Jesus Christ. They would like to 
 have His Spirit prevail in our world. They be- 
 lieve that if He could go about among us, with 
 His great sense of-eternal values, with His inter- 
 pretation of all life in terms of the growth of 
 human souls toward their sonship in the family of 
 God, with His holiness, His gentleness, His king- 
 liness of service, this business of our daily living, 
 so often poor and mean, would become a higher, 
 holier, and infinitely more happy thing. Yet Jesus 
 Christ as a visible presence is no longer here. Is | 
 He therefore to be only a wistful memory of what 
 was long ago, and effectively is no more? If the 
 Church had no glorious meaning, that sorry con- 
 clusion might be true: but the loyalty of men and 
 women now can fill the Christian Church with that 
 meaning which makes it the Body of Christ, as 
 from the beginning it has been meant to be. Back 
 of all the little divisions, higher than all temporary 
 misunderstandings, rises the imperishable beauty 
 of that true Church into which all strong souls can 
 enter. It is the fellowship of those, whatever be 
 their name, who are trying with increasing codper- 
 ation to bring the Spirit of Jesus to bear upon 
 their world. It is the mystic body, made up of a 
 unity of innumerable lives, which shall be today the 
 lips to speak the truth of Christ, the feet to go 
 
 234 
 
Witty BE LONGO PHESCHUORCE!: 
 
 upon His ways of service, the hands to build His 
 ideals into fact. To lift one’s own life and to lift 
 the life of congregations into that high conscious- 
 ness of the Church, is the noblest task which faces 
 all aspiring souls in our world today. 
 
 235 
 

 
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