a Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/whyibelieveinjesOOpell_ 0 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS WSO TER MOIS ie dea Edward Leigh Pell Why I Believe in Jesus. A personal ex- perience! ie. ote GSR es SE DD What Did Jesus "Really Teach—A bout Prayer? hrs By y EDWARD LEIGH PELL Author of ‘ rei emery) us Really Teach out Prayer,’ etc. New York CHICAGO Fleming H. Revell Company LonDON AND EDINBURGH Copyright, 1926, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY New York! 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 99 George Street An Attempt to Make Plain and Real the Jesus of the Gospels and of Experience. “That Christ may dwell m your hearts through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what 1s the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.’’ HPHESIANS 3; 17-19. FOREWORD N this book I have tried to reproduce a series | of lectures or addresses which I am now giv- ing in American cities and towns on Why I Believe in Jesus: A Personal Experience, omit- ting some things which could not be effectively presented in print, and adding some things which could not be effectively presented to an audience under the limitations of a popular address. In rearranging the matter in chapters for the convenience of the reader, I have found it neces- sary to change the order of treatment, and this has required much re-writing; but I hope that those who have heard the lectures as I have given them from the platform or pulpit, will find that the message itself remains unchanged. He Richmond, Virginia. CONTENTS Ir WE WouupD REALLY BELIEVE. . . «© « . tf II. Hil. IV. EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS . . . Seeing Him in people I knew—My first reason for believing in Him—A tragedy that yields more than it cost—A new view of life—Ap- proaching the Bible from a different point of view—A discovery that has helped me. CLEARING THE WAY FOR A VIEW OF JESUS IN THE GOSPELS . . What we want to find Onaiaclne iol bel Ree aside—Agreeing upon a working theory about the Bible—Danger of thinking of Jesus as a “book character’—Our business not to find Jesus through a certain channel, but to find Jesus—I get a bit of advice which I would not part with for the world. EL GUD TEES WLAN IO citicoaint fuze Meus Gazing upon Him from the Poadeetne man I see: a physician with a gentle hand; a teacher who awakens a new hope; a friend who goes the limit—A close-up view: conceptions of His ap- pearance; His eyes; His touch; His winsome way of speaking; His magnetism; His bound- less sympathy—Another reason for believing in Him. AN UNINTENTIONAL CARICATURE OF JESUS The modern conception of an “athletic Christ” —A picture that attracts some to the human in Jesus but blinds them to the divine in Him— An impossible conception in the light of the Gospels. Wuat WE See 1x Hm Tuat Draws Us Glimpses of a character that is human but more than human—His unique love—-What His sac- 9 12 13 27 AT 63 78 10 VI. Waid Vill. 1B.G CONTENTS rificial love does for men—lI find a third reason for believing in Him. Otner IMPRESSIONS OF THE Man HIMSELF His immaculateness—A gentle trait of strong characters—His tender feeling for the ostra- cised—His heroism—‘‘Meekness” not weakness but gentlemanliness of spirit—Jesus not a non- resister—The Power of His character to make us see ourselves. DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF UNDERSTAND- ING His TEACHINGS . .. +; ES Why Jesus is still the most Pi aely misunder- stood teacher the world has ever known—Our insistence upon interpreting His words either literally or from our own point of view—Intel- lectual difficulties—Spiritual difficulties—Our selfish point of view—Our exaggerated ideas of the value of physical comfort. A Wispom THat Is From ABovE. . ., A vision that sweeps both worlds at once—The only teacher who shows familiarity with the unseen—His ideas of the other world compared with those of Socrates—His ideas of life and its problems compared with the best specimens of human wisdom—How he would solve the problems of war and marriage—I find a fourth reason for believing in Him. His SuPERHUMAN KNOWLEDGE OF HUMAN NEEDS fo iniis OU hewn, ; His ideas of religion cortbare ea ident popular ideas of what His religion is—The idea of saving men by attaching them to a thing compared with His idea of saving them by attaching them to a Person. His Intimate KNOWLEDGE OF GoD. . . Why he would have us believe in God’s prov- idential care—His plan to help us find the way to God—His Father is our Father—His knowl- edge of Himself—His consciousness of being absolutely untouched by sin. 92 110 123 140 149 CONTENTS 11 XI. THe Greatest Reason or Abu. . . . 162 People of to-day listen to preachers with inter- rogation points in their eyes—“Do you know that of yourself or did you get it out of a book?”—The modern attitude toward personal testimony to the power of Christ—Nothing un- canny about knowing Christ—Medizval mysti- cism out of date, but not true mysticism—The most satisfying reason I have for believing in Jesus—What is our deepest need?—How do I know that Jesus has met my deepest need? XII. How Can WE PRESERVE OvuR SENSE OF THE REALITY OF JESUS. . . Vint The daily programme of our iédern life ieee no room for the cultivation of our sense of the realities of the unseen—How strong Christians in all ages have preserved their sense of the reality of Jesus—Comradeship as necessary to the preservation of our relationship with Christ as it is to the preservation of a vital relation- ship with our loved ones—How I feel toward Jesus. IF WE WOULD REALLY BELIEVE ‘“How 18 ut that you have managed to hold on to your faith through all the staggering develop- ments and wearing stran of our trying tume?’’ ‘‘Do you remember the answer which Phillips — Brooks gave to the young man who wanted to know whether a vital union with Christ rs essen- tial to Christiamty? ‘Son,’ said the bishon, ‘vital union with Christ is Chrishiamty!’ ”’ ‘You mean that rt 1s because you have been a Christian in that sense that you have managed to go on your way undisturbed? But that means that you have preserved your sense of the reality of the divine Christ, and that’s my trouble. Our present ciwilization 1s a blinding whirlpool that is utterly destructwe of one’s sense of the reality of spirit, and I have lost my sense of the divine Christ in Jesus. What can I do?’’ “Pull yourself out of the whirlpool, and let us seek a quiet spot where we can think this matter over together.’’ I EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS I DID not get my first impressions of Jesus | from a man’s Bible. I got them from a little child’s Bible—my mother’s face. My little mother was saturated through and through with the mind and spirit of Jesus, and it must have been at a very tender age that I caught my first glimpse of Him in her beautiful eyes; that I first heard Him in her gentle voice; that I first felt Him in her tender touch. It is impossible at this distance to distinguish with certainty between the things I have imagined about my childhood and the actual experiences of those early days; but at this moment it seems to me that my first impression of Jesus was of one who was in some way intimately associated with my mother, that His heart was like her heart, that He was in some sense the secret of all that made her so beautiful and precious to me—that her love was a part of His love, her gentleness a part of His gentleness, her patience a part of His patience. A part of this picture may have developed in later years, but I am sure that, from the beginning, 13 14 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS Jesus and the things that made my mother beau- tiful were somehow bound up together. He was the Good One and my mother was good, and they loved each other. When I began to hear of bad people I distinguished them as people who did not love Jesus like my mother, and who were bad because they didn’t. Then there was the Quiet Lady across the street. She was a Quaker, whose life, by reason of an unfortunate marriage, was full of trouble; but something held her, and her sweet face was as calm as the silvery moon that used to look down upon me through my window at night. She was an in- effably beautiful spirit like my mother, who loved the same Jesus my mother loved, and she had a habit of going to her room every morning when her housework was over, and locking the door and spending an hour with that same Jesus. She did not tell me it was Jesus, but she always carried her Bible with her and I understood. I must have understood for I never dared to peek through the keyhole. And always when she came out she looked as if she had seen Him. Doubtless it was what I saw of Him in her that enlarged my view of Jesus, from one who was associated with my mother, to One who loved everybody and who made everybody good that loved Him. As I grew older I came in contact with other beautiful spirits whose faces and lives confirmed these first impressions, and in some cases no doubt added something to them. EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 15 And then came, in my university days, a man who, to my mind, was one of the most Christlike spirits I have ever known. He was so thoroughly saturated with the mind and spirit of Jesus that one could hardly look at him without thinking of Jesus. He was known in the classroom as our professor of English Literature, but on the campus as the boys’ friend; and when a boy’s bad- ness got him into trouble, going to ‘‘Old Mang,’’ as he was affectionately called, was like going to God. Buta very friendly, fatherly God. He was the only argument for religion we had on the campus that every boy could understand. Some- times a sophomore would come to me to make fun of religion, and he would say: ‘‘Look at Old Blank. He has a head as big as a barrel, and he doesn’t see anything in your religious stuff.’’ And I would stand before him as helpless as a dummy—until I thought of ‘‘Old Mang.’’ And then it would occur to me that there was not a boy on the campus who, if he got into trouble, could be persuaded to go to ‘‘Old Blank,’’ and not one who would hesitate to go to ‘‘Old Mang.’’ Even a sophomore could understand that argu- ment. And sometimes I could go further. I could say, mentally if not vocally: ‘‘ John, religion has made ‘Old Mang’ what he is. No religion has made you what you are. Which has done the better job? ‘¢ ‘Old Mang’ has enough moral courage to face the world, the flesh and the devil for God and 16 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS right and truth and humanity. How much have you? ‘“¢‘Old Mang,’ brought up from childhood in comradeship with the immaculate Christ, has been all his life as pure as his own mother. How pure are you?’’ These, and similar recollections of early im- pressions, leave me no room to doubt that I first began to believe in Jesus because of what I saw of Him in the faces and lives of those in whom He lived. And this is one of the reasons I have for believing in Him to-day. All through my life I have been looking for Him in the lives of others, and in this quest I have seen things which have helped to hold me to my faith when almost every- thing else seemed to fail. I have seen His mind and spirit come into the minds and spirits of men in ways which could not be accounted for on nat- ural grounds. I have seen Him perform miracles upon the souls of men that were far more wonder- ful than anything He ever did for the bodies of men when he was here in the flesh. I have seen Him pick-up poor wrecks of humanity—pick them up out of the ditch, wash them off, break the chains of sin that bound them, quicken their spirits, open their eyes, start them off to live the life of the spirit, and by daily comradeship with them help them on up toward the heights of the kingdom of God, developing them day after day until they stood before God, His full- Brae sons, the image of Christ in there faces. EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 17 How I wish you could see the faces that are passing before my mind’s eye at this moment! Yonder is an editor of a daily paper. A few years ago that man was a mere make-believe of a man. He did not count at all. To-day he is the greatest moral force in his community—a man with more spiritual power than a thousand ordi- nary men. There goes a girl who started in life without a chance. Jesus came into her life and gave her a chance. She is a perfectly normal, happy-hearted girl; loves boyish sports; plays baseball with an enthusiasm that fairly takes your breath. But you may call that girl from her game to-day and offer her the hardest job for Christ a girl was ever given to do, and she will spring to it as zealously and with as much enthusiasm as she would spring to her baseball. Here comes an old man—a physician. That man has given his life so unreservedly to the service of Christ among the poor, that after fifty years of heavy practice he is still compelled to live in a rented house. No, that is a mistake; he has passed away and he no longer needs a shelter. But I can see him still; and I can see a vast throng of men and women who, if he should pass by, could barely refrain from kissing his shadow on the pavement. You can hardly mention his name among the poor without bringing tears of grati- tude and love to their eyes. Yonder is a girl, one of the most beautiful 18 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS spirits I have ever known. She is the only child of worshipping parents; she is beautiful; she has all the money a girl could want; and yet such is her devotion to Christ that I verily believe she could lay her little body down upon the cross and stretch out her hands to receive the nails for Him. Just over there is the face of a man who for many years was an employer of thousands of working men. That man went among his em- ployees as Jesus would have gone; entered into their lives, not only with a boundless sympathy, but with a brotherly appreciation of them; stood by them; stood up for them; continued faithful to them unto the end. The end came a year or two ago; and, to-day, if you should mention his name in an audience of working men anywhere in the state in which he lived, a great silence would fall upon them like the silence of men who in a lumi- nous moment of life have become conscious of God. Yonder go two women. One of them is a high- born girl of one of the finest families in the land. The other was for twenty years a poor woman of the streets. That high-born girl went down into the slums and picked her up and brought her to Christ. And then she stood by her, and through her comradeship and care that poor woman came to be, next to that girl, the greatest power for Christ in the community. Has everything gone wrong? Is there a cloud over the sun? Have you lost your grip? Has EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 19 God become a mere shadow? Do you feel as if the very foundations of life have given way beneath your feet? Is your spirit so desolate that you eannot read your Bible, cannot pray, cannot in- terest yourself in any service for Christ or hu- manity? Do you feel as if you were almost ready to doubt your own existence? Put on your hat and go out and look for Him in the faces and lives of people in whom he lives. If you could see the faces that are passing before me now you would see the handiwork of One who is beyond human; you would see a life which you could not account for on natural grounds. You would see a spirit which could not have come from anyone but Him. And you would go back to your work saying in your heart: “Doubt Him? How can I doubt Him? I have seen Him.”’ II But I must be frank. While I have what I be- lieve to be the best of reasons for believing in Jesus, [am not sure that any one of them, or all of them together, would count for much with me to- day if I knew no more about Him or about life and the life of the spirit which we call religion than I knew in those early days when I was able to be- lieve in Him simply because of what I saw of Him in the lives of others. For in spite of my early Christian training I was hardly out of sight of my mother’s home before I began to look at life 20 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS from the world’s everyday point of view—a point from which it is practically impossible to see any- thing that is of the spirit with sufficient clearness to be sure of its existence. I did not call myself a materialist—I had a horror of materialism. And the spiritual ideals my mother gave me were still lingering about my head like beautiful butterflies trying to entice me to follow them. But even while I was conscious of them I began to absorb from my environment the popular view, that while the spiritual side of life was beautiful and quite im- portant for the brief poetic or emotional periods of life—for childhood and protracted iulness and the dark nights of bereavement and the hour of death,—in everyday life it was matter, not spirit, that counted, and one must plan one’s life in the main from that point of view. If I had continued to look at life from that point of view—the point from which we see the material side of life as a mountain and the spiritual side as a molehill—I should to-day be able to believe in the human Jesus, but so far as I can now see I should have no grounds whatever for a real faith in the divine Christ in Jesus. Fortunately for me something happened. One day—it was a strangely warm day in November—I stood at my window feasting my eyes upon a beautiful tree nearby that was all cov- ered with a glory of golden autumn leaves. Sud- denly a shadow came over the sky, and turning my eyes, I saw that a great storm-cloud had come EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 21 out of the West and now seemed to be making its way like a terrible monster directly toward my tree. There was a moment of ominous silence and then the monster blew a frightful blast which struck my tree, shook it, tore it, stripped it of all its golden glory, and left it as bare and poor and ugly as a skeleton. I turned away with a shudder, and soon after- wards, something like that happened to me. A wild storm of life suddenly swept down upon me, gave me a staggering blow, shook me, tore me, stripped me of all the little golden glory I had gathered about me, and then picked me up and tossed me against the thin partition that sepa- rates this life from the unseen. And there it left me, as bare and empty-handed as a babe newly- born. And there I lay hovering between life and death and too weak to think of either. One day I opened my eyes, and there came to me what I have come to believe to be the most wonderful experience that ever comes to a human being next to his discovery of God. The tragedy that had overtaken me had swept out of my way all the material interests which blind men to the truth, and for the first time in my life I looked out upon life with an unobstructed vision. I saw things as they were. I could distinguish moun- tains from molehills, substance from shadow, gold from tinsel. I could see how small were the tran- sient things that had appeared so great and how great were the eternal things that had appeared 22 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS so small. And everything was turned round. For years the material side of life had been practi- cally everything and the spiritual side only incidental; now I saw that the spiritual side was everything and the material side only incidental. And with this new view of life came a new view of God, a new view of His truth, a new view of my Bible. Everything was different. And when I looked upon Jesus the divine Christ in Him was as real as my own mother. Everything about - Him that had seemed strange now appeared nat- ural. Many things in His teachings, which had always appeared unreasonable or impracticable, now appeared to me as the teachings of the high- est wisdom.. Everything about him had become so natural that believing in him seemed the most natural thing in the world. From that day I have never lost a moment’s sleep over the religious difficulties which are giv- ing trouble to so many thoughtful people of our day. I have not ignored them, but they have ceased to frighten me. When a man reaches the point from which the spiritual side of life is every- thing and the material side is only ineidental, there is nothing in sight to frighten him. It did not occur to me at the time just what had happened to me. Not until several years after- wards did the truth dawn upon me that, when the blinding materialities of life were swept from before my eyes, I was almost where Jesus had placed Himself when He came into the world. EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 23 That is, so far as my point of view was concerned. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that I was given the vision of the Son of Man who had not where to lay His head. I only mean that I had come to the point of view to which all men come when they take their stand irrevocably with Him. I was where I could see things, not with His eyes, but from His point of view, and so far as my vision extended I could see that what He had taught was true. Tit And yet I am not sure that even this discovery would have made my reasons for believing in Him sufficiently strong for the trials of faith which we are passing through to-day. There are times when we need something more than an appeal to reason or even to our spiritual vision—times when nothing is strong enough to steady our faith un- less it is accompanied by an appeal to our hearts. Convinced as I am of the sufficiency of the reasons I have for believing in Jesus, I am not sure that I would believe in Him to-day if I had not discov- ered a truth that appeals to my heart—if I had not discovered that He believes in me. The faith which Jesus had in humanity is one of the greatest marvels of history. When He came into the world humanity was a drug on the market. In my boyhood there were times when watermelons were so plentiful that a farmer, after 24 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS trying all through the day to dispose of his stock, would offer his entire wagon-load for a dollar bill. That is what we mean by a drug on the market. It was difficult to dispose of human beings at any price. People went to war, not for the men they could catch, but for land and fine robes and blazing jewels. They got so many prisoners that when they came back they would dump them into the slave-market to be sold for anything they might bring. If there were a poet among them, or a sculptor, or a philosopher, or a prophet, they would sell him for a sum that would not be sufficient to-day to buy a hat that a self- respecting woman would wear. Their only value lay in what could be got out of them at once. No- body seemed to think anything of what a man might become. Nobody had any faith in human possibilities. What a strange Being this was who came to tell people that they were worth while; who assured them that they were not animals (‘‘How much better is a man than a sheep?’’); that they were immortal spirits; that God was their Father; that they had a divine destiny; that the Father thought enough of them to send His Son to save them; that the Son thought enough of them to devote His life to them and then lay down His life for them. No wonder they looked at one another with amazement and ex- claimed, ‘‘Never man spake like this man.’’ Note how sane He was in His attitude toward them. He EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 25 had no illusions about humanity. He did not be- lieve that humanity was incurably good. He knew it was not incurably good. He was not impressed with people’s achievements, or with the way they lived or with the state of their hearts. Yet He believed in them. He believed in their possibili- ties. In other words, He believed in men as a> mother believes in her poor little freckled-faced, snub-nosed, knock-kneed boy. ‘‘They said he would never amount to much, But his mother said he would.’’ Mother has no illusions about her boy. People say that love is blind, but it is not; only romance is blind. Mother believes in her boy, not because she is blind, but because love has opened her eyes to see what others fail to see. Others see the boy’s achievements or his failure to achieve; Mother sees his possibilities. She knows that her boy is freckle-faced and snub-nosed and knock-kneed, but she looks down beneath all these surface-ugli- nesses, deep down to his tiny, undeveloped spirit, and catches a vision of the Divine Finger touch- ing it. She sees it starting into life, sees it grow- ing on up, up, up, and looking up, herself, into the invisible she sees the child of her faith standing upon the heights of the Kingdom of God, a full- grown son of God, the Master’s image in his face. So Jesus looks upon us. He is not impressed with what we have come to be, but He is profoundly im- pressed with what we may come to be by and by. 26 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS Not long ago I received a letter from a precious girl who was being tried in the fire as gold is tried. ‘‘T am so glad,’’ she wrote, ‘‘that you found me when you did. I had lost my grip. And you came to me and said that you believed in me. And when you went away I said to myself, ‘There’s a man who believes in me, and I am going to make myself worthy of his faith in me.’ ”’ As I thought over that letter a sense of shame came over me. I had told that girl that I believed in her because she was a wonderful spirit who had already proved herself to be worthy of the faith of those who knew her. It was nothing for me to believe in her. And she was thanking me for it! And I thought, how different is the Master’s faith in us! We believe in people because of what they are, and when they fail, our ground of faith is gone, and we believe in them no more. Jesus believes in us for what we may become, and when we fail, the ground of His faith is still there, and He goes on believing in us still. When our hearts catch this appeal we are no longer concerned over the difficulties of faith which we encounter to-day. Difficulties or no dif- ficulties, when we realise that He believes in us we are going to believe in Him. And we are not going to stop with mere believing; we are going back to our work with a great passion-awakening ambition. We are going to say: ‘‘There is One who believes in me, and by His help I am going to be worthy of His faith in me.”’ IT CLEARING THE WAY FOR A VIEW OF JESUS IN THE GOSPELS I \ N 7 shall get other glimpses of Jesus in real life, but let us now turn to the pic- ture we have of Him in the Gospels. Before we open the Bible, however, it is important that we should come to an understanding. This is always essential where two or more persons approach the Bible together, for without a com- mon aim and, in some degree, a common point of view, we shall find little but confusion and diffi- culties for our pains. Let us agree at the outset that we will not con- cern ourselves about any question that is not bound up with our general aim. We want to get a clear, satisfying vision of the real Jesus—a vision that will enable us to cast ourselves upon him as our divine Lord and Saviour and Life-giver and Guide in perfect trust for to-day, for to-mor- row and forever. If we would keep this aim in view, we must rid our minds of most of the re- ligious questions which Christians have been thinking about for the last ten years. For exam- ple, we must dismiss this widespread notion that 27 28 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS we must do something to check the present decline of faith in Christianity. We are not concerned just now about Christianity; we are concerned about Christ. To be perfectly frank, I am not sure that there has been any decline of faith in Christianity. I see many evidences of a decline of faith in some things which have been mistaken for Christianity, and for these evidences I am pro- foundly grateful. But I am not sure that there is any less faith, to-day, among people who know what real Christianity is when they see it, than there was, let us say, twenty years ago. As for the supposed change in the attitude of the outside world toward our religion, I think we Christians have been taking our critics too seri- ously. We have accepted without question and have repeated with them ever since the war, the solemn assurance they gave us during the war, that the world has lost faith in Christianity, when, as a matter of fact, we know that the world did not have any to lose. As I have said, there is among church people a decline of faith in some things we have mistaken for Christianity, but neither in the Church nor in the outside world do I find any evidence of the often-reported growing disappointment in real Christianity. People who have never come in actual touch with real Christianity have never expected anything of it, while those who have come in actual touch with it still believe as earnestly as ever in the real thing they came in touch with. For instance, the CLEARING THE WAY 29 man of the world who professes to have lost faith in Christianity still admits, when you question him, that he has faith in the Christianity he saw in his mother, or in a certain neighbour who so bravely stood by him in his greatest trouble. What we are concerned about just now is not the reported loss of faith in Christianity either in the Church or in the outside world, but the actual decline of faith in the Person who is the only source of the life that makes real Christianity pos- sible. Learned agnostics assure us that this loss of faith in the deity of Jesus is but the natural and necessary result of the progress of modern intel- ligence. Science, we are informed, will let us hold on to a human Jesus, but it will not allow us to believe in a divine Christ. (A professor in a Christian college was recently reported as say- ing to his class that at the present rate of prog- ress in scientific intelligence, nobody in America will believe that Jesus is divine, twenty years from now.) On the other hand, we have learned believers who are equally sure that the decline is due to the lack of scientific intelligence among Christians. The modern Christian, they tell us, is losing his faith in Jesus because both the pulpit and the pew lack the scholarship that is necessary to formulate a belief about Him that will har- monise with the demands of science. I confess I have been unable to find any evidence that either is right. It is easy to hold such theories in one’s 30 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS library, but if you attempt to take them out into Jife you will experience some rude shocks. When I talk with an intelligent man who imagines that he has been compelled to give up his faith in Jesus because of the developments of modern intelligence, I usually find that he did not give it up at all, but that it gradually passed away under influences of which he was not conscious. And when I talk with an unlearned man who has lost his faith in Jesus I usually find that he has had a similar experience. The modern man may keep away from Jesus for intellectual reasons, but he does not turn away from Him for intellectual reasons. Aside from the blinding power of sin, the greatest enemy to faith to-day is to be found in our modern civilisation. People are losing their faith in Jesus mainly because they have been losing their sense of His reality, and they have been losing their sense of His reality because modern science (quite unintentionally) has pro- duced a civilisation in which it is difficult to pre- serve a sense of the reality of anything that is beyond matter. Science has done so much to de- velop the material side of civilisation and the spiritual forces of the world have done so little to develop its spiritual side, that matter has reached a height where it practically overwhelms spirit. If this seems an exaggeration, start out to-day to lead a purely materialistic life and see how our civilisation will rally its forces to help you. And CLEARING THE WAY 31 then—say, to-morrow morning—start out to lead a spiritual life, or simply to get at the truth about a thing of the spirit, and see how it will rally its forces to hinder you. You may reply that our present civilisation is providing us with more means to do good than the race ever had before. This is true. Never were the means to help pro- vided with such a lavish hand. Our civilisation builds a railway track to the needy, builds a mod- ern freight train on it, and fills forty cars with supplies. But it puts no fire in the locomotive, no steam in the boiler. On the contrary, if you strike a match to start a fire, ten to one it will blow it out. Civilisation’s supply train is like a man who has enough wealth to feed a million human beings, but is without enough passion for human- ity in his heart to feed one. Not until the spark of heavenly fire finds its way into his heart will anything happen. Our civilisation deals only in things. It puts the means in our hands, but it puts no motive in our hearts—no divine passion, no Good Samaritan. At best it gives us a chance to play now and then at being Good Samaritans; but it doesn’t make us Good Samaritans. Indeed, it begins to put obstacles in our way the moment we betray a desire to become Good Samaritans. Ir A hundred years ago the world was far more selfish than it is now, but it was nothing like as 32 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS greedy. We are never greedy for the things we know we can never get, and in those days the luxuries and comforts of life were so far beyond the reach of the average man that he hardly gave them a thought. He left them to kings and the few rich men who owned the kings, and his mind and heart were free for other things. But soon modern science began to make luxuries and com- forts which far excelled anything that kings had ever dreamed of, and at a cost which made it pos- sible for the average man to hope to get them, and soon the whole civilised world started off on a mad rush for them. And this frenzy for things, things, things, turned our civilisation into a wild, furious, blinding, deafening maelstrom of ma- terial activities, material pleasures, material pos- sessions, and in this maelstrom the average man of to-day spends all his days and half of his nights so completely submerged in matter that the eyes of his soul never have a chance. No wonder he loses his sense of the reality of spirit. Our modern civilisation not only magnifies mat- ter at the expense of spirit, but it has made so many things to make the world go faster that it is now going at a rate which destroys the sense of proportion of all who yield to its demand and go along with it. And when a man loses his sense of proportion he loses all sense of spiritual values, for the reason that he takes the light things of life seriously and the serious things of life lightly. If I were asked what has impressed me most, in CLEARING THE WAY 33 my travels over this continent, I should say that it is the fact that the average American, whatever he may really feel, does not show half as much concern over keeping his home full of love as he does over keeping his automobile tank full of gas. Since he became a victim of hurry, or the illusion of hurry, he has lost his sense of proportion, and now takes the light things of life seriously and the serious things of life lightly. When we realise how large a proportion of the American people is in this state of mind we do not wonder that the name that is oftenest upon the lips of the average Christian is not the name of Him who for nearly two thousand years we have declared to be our only hope, but the name of our most famous foot- ball player. Moreover, the hurry that has been brought about by the over-development of the material side of our civilisation is a deadly enemy to spiritual comradeship, without which we never come in touch with anything that is of the spirit, whether the Great Spirit or the spirits of the loved ones He has given us. Just what this means I shall try to bring out in one of the following chapters. But this is not all. Our civilisation has turned its back upon the only kind of thinking in which it is possible to use our spiritual vision and, there- fore, to grasp anything that is of the spirit. Our fathers, whose wisdom we moderns have taken for our best joke, had two kinds of thinking—the kind they did when they were trying to get at the 34 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS facts about matter, which we call scientific or laboratory thinking, and the kind they did when they were trying to get at the truths of the spirit, which our fathers knew as quiet-hour thinking or meditation. In scientific thinking one makes use of one’s physical and intellectual eyes only; in quiet-hour thinking or meditation one depends largely upon his spiritual vision. It would seem that common sense would demand that when we are trying to get at the facts about matter we should use the scientific method, and that when we are trying to get at the truth about things of the spirit we should use the quiet-hour method, and this used to be a commonly-accepted rule. But a generation ago, the achievements of sci- ence through the laboratory method grew to such startling proportions that the world lost its head over them and jumped to the conclusion that labo- ratory or scientific thinking was the only true thinking; and many scholars of the church, falling into this illusion, dropped the quiet hour out of their lives and undertook to think their way through the Bible and the religious problems of the time by the laboratory method. In other words they turned their backs upon the only thinking in which the spirit is given a chance to grasp the things of the spirit and undertook to study religion, which is a thing of the spirit, by a method which was designed only for the investi- gation of ite and makes no use of the spiritual vision whatever. CLEARING THE WAY 35 Here, then, are three gigantic obstacles which our modern civilisation has unwittingly thrown in the way of the man who would like to get at the truth about anything that is of the spirit—about the Great Spirit, about the divine spirit of Jesus, about the spirits of our fellow men, about any- thing that is beyond matter: First, the overwhelming materialism of our everyday life, which gives us a chance to use our physical and intellectual vision, but no chance to use our spiritual vision. Second, the frightful speed developed by fast machinery and the ever-growing greed for things —a speed which not only destroys our sense of proportion and leaves us to take the serious things of life lightly and the light things of life seriously, but cheats us out of the quiet moments of life—the only moments which we can devote to spiritual comradeship and thus keep us in vital touch with the Spirit of God on the one hand and the spirits of our fellow-men on the other. Third, the illusion developed by the wonderful achievements of science that it is only by scientific thinking that we can hope to get at the truth of anything that exists, whether matter or spirit. Any one of these obstacles is big enough to shut out our vision of God, our vision of the divine in Jesus, our vision of anything that is of the spirit, and with all three in the way, I can see but one chance for the modern man who really wants to 36 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS know the truth about anything that is eternally worth while. Here and there one comes upon a man of re- markable spiritual power and vision. He is strong enough for his job and his vision seems to sweep the horizon of the universe. You instine- tively feel that he knows God; that he is in vital touch with the God we have been seeking in the face of Jesus Christ; that he is also in touch with the spirits of his fellow-men; that it is through his vital touch with God in Christ on the one hand that he receives the strength which he is so ef- fectively using in ministering to the follow-men with whom he is in touch on the other. Talk with these rare men and you will find that every one of them has the same secret. Every one of them regularly pulls himself out of this wild, blinding whirlpool we call our everyday life and seeks a quiet spot where he can empty his mind and heart of every material thing, take his bearings, restore his mental and spiritual balance, give his spiritual vision the same chance in the world of spirit that he has been giving his physical and intellectual vision in the world of matter, and stays there un- til Christ has become real to him, until his sense of the reality of spirit has again become as strong as his sense of the reality of matter. These men have found the only way known by which the modern man can give his soul a chance. This suggests the method I wish to follow in our present quest. I simply ask you to seek with CLEARING THE WAY 37 me a quiet place apart from the blinding and deafening materialities of our everyday life, where our spiritual vision will have as good a chance as our physical and intellectual vision, and think with me about Jesus, not in the way we would think to get at the material facts about the human Jesus, but in the only way in which we ean hope to get at the truth about the real Jesus —the only way in which we can become conscious of the divine Christ in Jesus. Let me add that it is useless for us to seek a quiet place for this task if we are not going to leave behind us the things which make quiet think- ing impossible. Above all, we must leave behind us the spirit of controversy and the critical habit that is usually associated with it. I am aware that there are still good people in the world who believe that controversy is a good thing. They tell us that it clears the atmosphere so that we can see better. But I have been out in the Southwest where they have tornadoes, and I have found that a tornado clears the atmosphere wonderfully, so that we can see better, but—it doesn’t leave us much to see! Tit Another matter about which we need to have at least a working agreement is the Bible itself. Ido not mean to intimate that Christian students can, or ever will come to an agreement about the Bible. But they can come to a working agreement. If 38 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS we are going to get a clear conception of the real Jesus of the Gospels we must at least agree that when we.study Jesus in the Gospels, it should be in full view of the fact that He exists outside of the Gospels. We can hardly imagine that even Paul could have seen Jesus very clearly, what- ever he might have learned in a book, if he had never come upon Him in his experience. Fifty years ago, our poverty-stricken schools made a desperate effort to teach science apart from ex- periment. The result was pathetic: the average boy grew up with the idea that chemistry was a book. The only pupils who got a real vision of chemistry were the pupils of a few zealous teach- ers who managed, with the aid of a crude bit of home-made apparatus, to do a little experiment- ing on their own account. We have had the same experience in our religious teaching. All through the history of the Church the teachers of religion who succeeded in giving men a real vision of Jesus were those who taught what they learned of Him in the Gospels along with what they learned of Him in experiment or experience. If we attempt to learn the Jesus of the Gospels by studying them apart from experience, we are not likely to get a much better vision of Him than the pupils of fifty years ago, who were taught chemistry apart from experiment, got of chemistry. Jesus is in the Gos- / pels, but He is something more, infinitely more, than the contents of a book. If we would get a clear picture of him in the Gospels we must re- CLEARING THE WAY 39 mind ourselves that He is bigger than the Gospels, that His existence does not depend upon the Gospels, and that however highly we may think of the story of Jesus—and we cannot think too highly of it—the fate of Jesus is in no sense bound up with it. Let us not forget, that if we exalt the story of Jesus above Jesus, we shall have to give up His deity or divinity, for to be divine is to be self-existent, and it is impossible to conceive of Him as self-existent and at the same time make Him dependent upon something that is not self- existent. It is also important to bear in mind that we cannot help those who join us in this quest, to get a clear conception of the Jesus of the Gospels if we insist upon foreing their minds through the same channel by which we have found Him. It is so easy to feel that our way is the logical way and that the logical way is the only right way. But neither is true. I shall probably be called illogical because I shall ask you to consider my reasons for believing in the Jesus of the Bible without first giving you my reasons for believing in the Bible. But we humans are not logical. When we are bent on finding the truth, we don’t confine our- selves to the logical channel; if we don’t find it by that route we try to reach it the other way round. I realise that we are living in a day in which it is much easier to get a man to believe in Jesus first and in the Bible afterwards, than it is to get him to believe in the Bible first and in Jesus after- 40 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS wards; and if I find an earnest inquirer who is not sure about the Bible I say nothing to him about the logical way. I know that many men who could not find their way to Him by that route have found it the other way round, and so I say to him: ‘‘You have a sufficiently good opinion of the Bible to try to find out about Jesus in the Gospels. Drop the problem of believing in the Bible for the present and fix your mind upon the problem of believing in Jesus. Learn of Him in the Gospels, and when you come to believe in Him you will say, ‘I don’t believe in Jesus because I believe in the Bible; I believe in the Bible because I believe in Jesus.’ ”’ After all, does anyone ever believe very deeply in the Bible until he comes to believe in the Jesus of the Bible? Here is a book which claims to be an authority on bread. You and I, let us say, were brought up in a tropical country where people use bananas for bread. We don’t know bread. Now we may read this book a hundred times, and how- ever strongly it may appeal to our reason, if we never use bread we shall never be sure whether it is an authority or not. Not until we make a faith- ful use of bread and study its effects sufficiently to know just what it does for us, and then turn to this book and discover that it confirms our ex- perience, shall we be sure that it is the authority it claims to be. So it is with the Bible, which we accept as an authority on Him who is the Bread of Life. We may persuade ourselves that we be- lieve in it, but the question of its authority is CLEARING THE WAY 41 never really settled in our minds until we have made a faithful use of the Bread of Life which it offers us and then turn to the Book to find that it agrees with our experience. Many a man who has never been able to satisfy himself with the usual arguments for the truth or inspiration of the Bible has been amazed to find, when he came to believe in Jesus, that he needed no argument. It needs no logic to prove that a human being, unaided by Heaven, could never have given us a picture of the divine Christ. After all, the real problem ag to the Bible to- day, is not the problem of getting men to believe in it, but the problem of getting them to approach it from a point of view that will enable them to see that it is worthy of belief. IV For years I accepted the Bible not for what I saw in it, but for what I thought I ought to see in it. What I actually saw I would hardly admit, even to myself. To this day it is humiliating to me to confess, even to myself, that while the great and the good of all the Christian ages had seen wonderful things in it, I had seen little but trou- ble. Fortunately for me there came a brighter day. T did not learn much in my university days, but I learned two things which I would not part with for the world. And I did not get them out of a 42 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS book: they were only two bits of practical advice picked uv in the classroom. One of them came from that dear old professor of English literature whom I have referred to as the best man I have ever known—‘‘Old Mang.’’ For several weeks we had been studying Shakespeare’s Hamlet—that is to say, we had been analysing it. We had analysed it down to the last line, the last phrase, the last word. We had analysed it to death. In all this ‘‘Old Mang’’ had followed the rules; but when he closed the book he gave us a word of his own. ‘“‘Now, young gentlemen,’’ he said, ‘‘you are prepared to read Hamlet.’’ We boys sighed. It was a very audible sigh. ‘“‘Old Mang’’ smiled and went on: ‘‘Some fine afternoon, put your Hamlet in your pocket and go out mto the country for a walk. Stroll around through the woods and fields until your mind has emptied itself of every material interest and thought; then lie down under a tree on the edge of the wood where you can look up at the sky. Now be still. Be still until you have fallen under the spell of the stillness. Then take your Hamlet out of your pocket and read it. Don’t study it, don’t analyse it, don’t pause over a difficult word; just read it; read it rapidly; drink it down in great gulps, with no purpose whatever but just to get at the soul of it. And then you will begin to know Hamlet.’’ I did not try ‘‘Old Mang’s”’ advice with Hamlet CLEARING THE WAY 43 —I was tired of Hamlet; but some years after- wards, I began to try it with my Bible, and I made what was to me a wonderful discovery. I found that a book—not a mere mass of information, but a message to men—is like a man, in that it has a soul as well as a body; and that just as you can dissect a man’s body down to the last atom and miss his soul, so you can analyse a book down to the last word and utterly miss its soul—its mes- sage to your own soul. Also I found that if one approaches the story of Jesus with his intellect - alone, he may get at all the material facts about the human Jesus, but he will never get at the truth about the spirit of Jesus; he will never come to know the divine Christ. This of course was nothing new. Science teaches us to-day that we can only grasp like with hke, matter with matter, mind with mind. The brilliant scientific philosopher Bergson has gone so far as to assert that pure intellect, being ma- terial, is unable to grasp anything that is beyond matter, and if there is anything beyond matter we shall have to find something else with which to grasp it. I cannot pull a thought out of my mind with a pair of dentist’s forceps; neither can I pick up a pair of dentist’s forceps with my mind. I cannot get at a scientific fact, which is a ma- terial thing, with the means which I use to get at a spiritual truth; neither can a scientist get at a 44 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS spiritual truth by the means which he uses to get at a material fact. And long before the days of science Jesus taught us the very same thing. He said to the Samaritan woman: ‘‘You think that to worship God—to get in touch with God—you must go to that material temple on the hill yonder and use certain material forms. You are mistaken: God is a spirit, and they that worship Him, must wor- ship Him in spirit—with their spirits.’’ Later, when Peter fervently declared that Jesus was the Son of God, the Master said to him: ‘‘Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven.’’ The truth had not come to Peter as a material fact would have come, from a material source, by material means. It was a spiritual truth and it had come to his spirit from spirit, from the Great Spirit himself. And Paul, following Jesus, taught the same truth. ‘““These things,’’ he said in writing about the things of the spirit, ‘‘are spiritually discerned, or measured, or grasped; you see them with the eyes of your spirit.’’ Here was a great fundamental truth as old as the hills—a truth taught by religion and con- firmed by science so far as it relates to its own sphere. Yet I, who had been taught by both re- | ligious and scientific teachers, had never so much as caught a hint of it. But I did not fully realise its significance, and as a consequence I did not fully realise the value CLEARING THE WAY 45 of ‘‘Old Mang’s’’ advice until I had that tragical experience of which I have spoken, which gave me a new view of life and as a consequence gave me anew Bible. When I realised that the real values of life are spiritual and that the material side is only incidental, it dawned upon me that just as I had been magnifying the material side of life above the spiritual I had been magnifying the material side of the Bible above the spiritual. The next moment it occurred to me that practi- cally all the difficulties about the Bible which had troubled me were about its material side—the in- cidental side—and that because I had habitually magnified the material side of life I had been magnifying the material difficulties of the Bible. I had done this so much that when I went to the Old Testament, where most of them are to be found, they would immediately begin to crowd around me, and soon they would shut out every- thing else from my vision. That horrible story of the two bears that ate up the forty-two children would loom up so big before me that I could not get a glimpse of God or His truth anywhere. When I opened the little Book of Jonah I could see nothing but that big fish. And the longer I looked at it the bigger it grew; it grew so big that it completely hid the whole message of the book from my eyes. For years that book was nothing to me but a fish story. But when my eyes were opened to a new vision of life and I came to the book realising that all real values are spiritual 46 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS and that the material is only incidental—when I was no longer obsessed with exaggerated ideas of the importance of material facts, but unspeakably hungry for spiritual truth—for God’s message to my soul—in a word, when I opened this Book of Jonah looking for-the eternal verities of God, by the side of which the biggest fish is but a micro- scopic germ, the fish I saw didn’t frighten me a bit. I simply said: ‘‘Get out of my way; you are not half as frightful as I thought you were. I am not interested in you, anyway; I am interested in God. I[ want to know how God feels toward a poor fellow who forsakes Him and gets into a whale of a trouble and then repents. J want to know how God feels toward poor benighted heathen when their sins bring them to the verge of destruction and they wake up and become sorry.”’ And when I had ‘‘shooed’’ the big fish away I picked up the little book and simply drank it in, just to get at the soul of it, just to get at the mind and spirit of God; and soon there came to me that wonderful vision of the infinite compassion of God for poor sinners—that wonderful vision which sets our hearts to singing— ‘