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AY fl Pe OTT p iim J ; = : ie } , be ? i. -) tia Ane rit Fa 7 Fh P ' Nee che Oe | it bad: tied VANS apie ie Mt § Pav iighe. pict - j Hi Sin k ah bee te A tore ci 1, WS feet i a r i Pe hay } i? iy’ a pi me es y r p ; i ef TAs See . » ye ig ) ays i) Mod 4 418 fifowils ite i ; & Ay)? i, x h 4 i F ely i ike high whe: ui Mi i ir a » i tea ret al M Ett ae En es hey F dN) ) Ce ‘ ; 1s / , : , ray h. iy 4; de Puy ie y ‘ wy Me Cy on a EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORE + BOSTON «: CHICAGO - DALLAS ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CoO., Liantep LONDON * BOMBAY * CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lop. TORONTO , y \: EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN BY PHILIP CABOT New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1925 All rights reserved CopyRIGHT, 1924, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. ’ Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1924. Reprinted March, September, 1925. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE BERWICK & SMITH CO, PREFACE In the days of my hasty youth I was often admonished by my elders to “say it again, say it slow, and then whistle it’’—a gem of concentrated wisdom which I then characteristically classified with the other follies of old age and _ studi- ously disregarded. But now that I am myself grown old, I have fallen into line, as in the course of nature, and have adopted the advice which I was then too callow to understand. Repetition I now see is not always tiresome. The composer for example, develops his musical theme in the first movement and then proceeds in those that follow, to describe by means of vari- ations the full scope and significance of the theme with which he began. Far ivi] PREFACE from being bored by repetition of this kind, we are pleased and enlightened by it And so if the reader of these papers will take them in this fashion and assume that the experience described in the first chapter is the main theme, and the chap- ters which follow are the variations, or different aspects of one spiritual phe- nomenon, he may not find the repetitions intolerably boresome. It is doubtless true, that few men who had read all that had been previously written upon the subject would venture to write a book, for they would recognize that it had been exhausted by their pred- ecessors. But this piece of wisdom does not, I think, put a ban on the recording of personal experience. This is forever new. ‘Try he ever so earnestly, no man could possibly duplicate exactly the spir- itual experience of another, and there- Cvi J PREFACE fore there is one exception to the saying that, “there is nothing new under the sun’’—namely the soul of man, for this is ever a new marvel. The man who struggles to describe some aspect of this endless miracle is exempt from the ban, and he need have no fears of committing the sin of literary larceny; for he could not if he would. E vii J Bish eg ry arian ay Bis * Ma aad , a a by lei oe a wv ; vi my e. y oe j Phe) ay , wn tr hi. a hy a o 1s $i a a ' ve MU TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Tur CONVERSION OF A SINNER...... 1 II. A Votcr CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS. 51 Til, Answae or Ecuo. . 5). 00.00. a. 64 IV. THe SLAVE oF FREEDOM............ 90 V. Tur FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE........ 109 Vit Ae SKILL, TO USB Soe iis oe. eme uh 126 Vite DROKEN STRINGS Hi). ..).2 sds da er tae 143 VIIL Tus Battie or Farm. :. 22... 3. 2.. 153 IX. Mrractes AND MytTus............. 177 X. Excerpt Ye Be Born AGaINn........ 190 XI. Tur RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX......... 197 EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN with ’ ye Ant CHAPTER I THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER This is a record of personal experience. It is not a system of philosophy nor a theological creed. I make no pretense of proof of the beliefs I state because they are not conclusions reached by conscious logical mental processes. I think them true for me because they produce certain results; they give me more vitality and | power and a keener zest for life. They may not be true for any other man, but, unless I am wholly different from all other men, they must contain some truth or light for them. I begin with the story of another man.! 1In order to make the story more typical, and also to avoid offense to any individual, I have made this a composite photograph of four men, taking character- istic incidents of my intercourse with them all. Cid EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN I knew him for several years only as we know our business associates, the men whom we see often at Directors’ and Ex- ecutive Committee meetings; a thin-faced, alert, courteous gentleman, with a deep wrinkle between the eyes and dark circles ainder them; a mind keen as a rapier, stored with knowledge of life and men, and illuminated with flashes of cynical humor. But it was not until I crossed the continent with him on a tour of corporation inspection that I saw the real man. KRevelation began on the train with his humorous side-thrust at my third volume of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” which struck him, an up- state New Yorker, as typical of my Pu- ritan descent, and for long thereafter he used to greet me daily with the ques- tion, “Still Declining and Falling?” To which I had no apt repartee in view of the undoubted fact that I found the C2] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER volume of The Devil’s Paw, by E. Phillips Oppenheim, to which he was wedded, far more amusing. And then his game of bridge! It was of the fierce predatory type, for a high stake, which sent me “‘to the mat” in the second round, hopelessly out- classed. To miss a possible trick caused him a sharp pang, and he rarely did it. But I first caught him without his mask on a morning when, after a night in a small country hotel of Western Oregon, I saw him get out of bed — or, rather, the ghost of him. MHollow-eyed, with cheeks fallen in and a temper about as genial as that of a bald hornet, he offered no vestige of a salutation until, after bolting three cups of black coffee and cursing the bellboy because it was not strong enough, he was moved to say, “Cabot, I can remember the time when one cup of coffee with my breakfast C31] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN would set me up for the day. Now three on an empty stomach just bring my head above water.” That was the man without his mask, and I was shocked but hardly surprised to hear, three years later, that he was dead, having been killed by the overturning of his motor while running at the high speed. habitual to him. The incident was shocking but sur- prise was unwarranted, for the thing was not really an accident: it was im- plicit in his life. But ten years had elapsed before its full significance dawned upon me. Then, in that incident I saw myself and some millions of my fellow. countrymen mirrored to the life. It was really the picture of a man whose world was not “‘God’s perfect Universe,”’ but in sober fact, a Hell from which his craving to escape drove him to excitement in various forms, of which three cups of [4] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER black coffee before breakfast were per- haps the most effective and the least harmful. As with most powerful bus- iness men in America today, his busi- ness was not a trade nor an intellectual pursuit, but a game of wild excitement, played day and night, not for money or the advancement of knowledge or the benefit of mankind, but for the ex- citement of the game itself; and his so- called amusements — bridge, literature, and motoring — were mere variations | of the same thing. His whole life was one huge gamble — which he ultimately lost. The class to which he belonged is lim- ited but the morbid craving which drove him on can be seen onevery hand. Take, for example, the industrial worker. A large fraction of his time and all his sav- ings are spent on strikes which, in the last analysis, amount to a declaration C51 EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN that his life, also, is in Hell and that he won’t stand it any longer. And this_ in the face of the fact that his material condition or “standard of living”’ is un- equaled in the world’s history. Nor is this condition confined to men. Their women folk, whose natural life is housekeeping, homemaking, and the care of their children, are on strike, too, de- claring such work to be “sordid and de- and seeking escape from it by > grading,’ every means in their power. All these human souls exhibit the same craving to escape from the slavery of their lives, and they have tried every form of excitement to satisfy their erav- ing, only to find that like all stimulants they make the craving worse. No one will deny that relaxation and amusement are necessary for us all; but, in order to see clearly the change which has taken place, compare our forms of C6] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER amusement with those of fifty years ago. In literature, painting, and music, the classics of our grandfathers are pro- nounced dull and slow today and things with “‘more snap to them” as we phrase it, have taken their place. Not beauty but excitement is what we crave, and this not alone in our sedentary relaxa- tions. In the out-of-doors world our grandfathers, of a Sunday afternoon or on week days, as opportunity offered, strolling in the woods and fields, acquired an intimacy with the trees, birds, and flowers, which they prized; or they hitched the fat old horse into the carryall, loaded in their children and women folk, and jogged along the quiet roads at an average of four miles an hour. Today the woods and fields are deserted, except for the hunter, strung with the thirst to kill, while ten million motor-cars whirl us at blinding speed, over crowded thorough- [7 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN fares on which we dodge our neighbors with incredible agility and fierce irrita- tion, returning home dazed and ex- hausted with a record of one hundred miles or so between luncheon and dinner. If these things be relaxing to the nerves and elevating to the spirit, human nature has changed indeed! They have the ear- marks of stimulants, not sedatives; of the fear of life rather than the love of it. Foreign observers have often remarked with a touch of humor that Americans work hard and hurry over their play. But this is not hurry; it is hysteria — a sort of spiritual madness. This is the condition of our world which all men recognized — all men, it seemed, except myself. Slower than most to see the obvious, I am, however, more impatient of a mystery. Most social phenomena have ascertainable cause or C81 THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER origin. What is the origin of this uni- versal madness? Physicians and public-health author- ities do, it is true, report an increase in diseases of the nervous system, and deaths from heart disease. But the in- crease is not very great and is wholly in- sufficient to account for such a condition of mind as we see aboutus. For this con- dition is nation-wide; a large fraction of our population is affected; clearly this is not exactly a case for the doctors of med- icine. We must look elsewhere. Here are some straws that may show where the wind is. II A profound political observer is said to have remarked, many centuries ago, “He who believeth doth not make haste’; which, being interpreted, means that the man who has a clear purpose in [9 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN his life, and a firm grasp upon his work, is the master of it, not the sport of cirecum- stance, driven hither and yon by every change of wind. The man who is al- ways in a hurry is the slave of his work. A recent article by an eminent econ- omist in a well-known quarterly has de- veloped at some length the proposition that the mechanical devices which man has produced have now become so power- ful that they have taken command of his material world and made him their ser- vant and their slave. And this is true. Our machines do govern us; the material has overwhelmed the spiritual. The me- chanical genius of America has evolved the marvel of “quantity production,” by which wonderful combinations of ma- chines turn out their product with in- credible volume and cheapness. But the men who feed the machines do so at the [10] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER price of body and soul. The destruc- tion of these things which we cannot re- place is not included in the cost of pro- duction. Our captains of industry figure depreciation on their machines, but not on their men. If the depreciation on human souls were included in the cost, “quantity production”? would lose its charm for them, because it would not be cheap. Quantity production and “the do- minion of machines” are not, however, inventions of our Western world; they are expedients to which we have been forced by the drying up of the springs of our spiritual life. The workingman from whom the “joy of labor” has taken flight, has sought refuge in high living — which he miscalls a high standard of liv- ing and which involves high wages to support it. It is in the struggle to avoid a “labor cost”? so high that it would stop [11] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN production and reduce us to beggary that our complex mechanical and indus- trial system originated. The root cause is our spiritual poverty, and if Labor now suffers from the ‘“‘dominion of machines,” the fault lies at its own door. But, unless some remedy for this can be devised, our machines will wreck our civilization by destroying the race. And moreover it is clear that this pov- erty of spiritual life, or loss of Faith, is not confined to America. All Christen- dom is affected. For note well that the World War was not the special crime of any group of individuals, or of any one nation. Europe drifted into that war be- ~ eause of lack of leadership among nations whose material resources and power had wholly outgrown their spiritual control. And the civilization of Europe today, | four years after the Armistice, is, accord- ing to the most competent observers, [12 J] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER upon the verge of collapse. Without Faith the nations perish. Here then perhaps we have our clue. The conditions which we see_around us are conditions of disease, and it is dis- ease of the soul rather than of the body. Look now at a concrete example. The conditions, material and spiritual, in our American world which drove my friend to his death, had driven me, after twenty- five years of battle, to the verge of it. My soul, like his, had for many years © been fed on stimulants and sawdust, and in a final revolt it wreaked its ven- geance upon my body, which soon went down in defeat. For eight years more, however, I refused to see it so; fought stubbornly against disease with all the weapons which medical science could provide, but without any real success. I contrived, it is true, to keep myself [13 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN alive by a system of fierce repression which required me to give up all the normal pleasures of life and almost all human society. But the achieve- ment was of more than doubtful value, so far as I can see, and was due more to the instinct to cling to mere life than to an intelligible purpose. In the summer of 1922 I became in- terested in considering the power and op- eration of the subconscious mind, and perceived how much more active, power- ful, and important its processes are than those of which we are conscious, known as intellect and will. The examples of the stone and the bicycle and of the six-inch plank in the floor vs. the six- inch girder on the skyscraper as foot- paths showed the superiority of the subconsciousness to the will; while the quest for the forgotten word demon- strated its faultless memory. The su- C14] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER perior quality in some persons of the thinking processes during sleep interested me because it was not true appar- ently of every one. Then I learned that some healers made their “‘sugges- tions” at night, and remembered that hypnotic influence was based upon a condition resembling sleep in the pa- tient. I read that M. Coué affirmed that cure by autosuggestion was highly effective; and that the suggestions should be made night and morning, and with- out effort of will. Of course, the reaction of the soul on the body (malignant or beneficent) had been observed and preached for two thousand years or more. In my own case, I found that if I instructed myself in spoken words, at night, just before go- ing to sleep, as to the problems to be dealt with and the pitfalls to be avoided on the next day, great improvement in [15 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN conduct and achievement could be pro- duced. After following this procedure for a short time, it came to me that what I was saying was tending to “degenerate”’ into prayer, a form of begging to which I had never fallen; and then, with a real shock, that the times of prayer from time immemorial had been morning and evening, the very times fixed by Coué for autosuggestion. Moreover, the method of Coué and the method of prayer taught by the Church were strikingly similar. Both rested their healing power on be- lief, conviction, faith—the surrender or subordination of the will being a first essential. It then came to me that from the time of Zeno, at least, men of spiritual insight had perceived and declared that God was within us; that the human soul was a part of God; and that it should be sought [16 J THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER and would be found within and not without. With these notions in my head, I looked curiously about me for evidence which would refute or support these assumptions, and this struck me as sig- nificant. As a whole, the American people appear to fair-minded outsiders to be remarkably unspiritual, material, practical — far more so than their an- cestors. In other words, the tendency of the nation — or, at least, of the upper classes — seemed to be toward mate- rialism, toward building up the mind at the expense of the soul. Such a process would result from starving the soul and feeding the mind, and if, as it seemed to me, the soul and the so-called subconsciousness were closely allied, or were one, it was of vital importance how men spent the last hours before sleep. Then the remarkable development and [17] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN spread of the American newspaper hit me, and I realized that although, a hun- dred years ago, good men read their Bi- bles before going to bed, today they read the newspaper, play bridge or billiards at the Club or after overeating at a friend’s house, and, in the morning, get up tired and cross and go to their city business. Obviously, if the soul is noc- turnal and has to be fed night and morn- ing, it is being fed on chaff, and the starvation or atrophy which our critics discern is exactly what we should ex- pect. | This idea was supported in my own case by great increase in calmness and poise following a change of routine which put the evening paper before supper and the Bible or its spiritual equivalent after. Toward the end of August, upon the verge of despair, I went up to my camp [18 J THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER in the Connecticut Valley for two weeks of so-called rest, taking along a liberal supply of the “very light” novels on which I was accustomed to feed, and, by accident, a little book on The Meaning of Prayer: which a dear friend had given me to read. It was August, the weather was rather hot and muggy, life looked very bleak, though fortunately not very long, for me, and the novels for a space went well. But after a few days even E. Phillips Oppenheim could not hold my attention, and one hot morning, throwing down the book in despair, my eye fell on The Meaning of Prayer. I began to browse on it with a vacant mind which rapidly changed to an absorption so complete that I was keenly annoyed by the arrival of lunch-time, three hours later. That afternoon I went back to Oppenheim 1 By Harry Emerson Fosdick. [19 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN but, finding him intolerable, took up agam The Meaning of Prayer with a rather sheepish feeling to be reading such a book. The hours of the afternoon, how- ever, vanished as those of the morning, and supper was another unwelcome in- terruption — a remarkable fact for a man living on a starvation diet, in whom the pangs of hunger were never quenched. After supper I sat down to think. This thing looked serious. Here was I for the first time in my life bored with novels and absorbed in worship. Was this the first stage of conversion or the madness which precedes death? Ill After a few days of this sort, during which I experimented and examined my sensations with scientific coldness, I was convinced that I was not mad. Something different was in process. It [ 20] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER seemed that in worship, or prayer, and in my Bible, the solution to the riddle of my universe had been revealed to me; for I was living in a new world of peace, beauty, and gladness, such as I had never conceived. I was devouring the Sacred Books with the hunger of a starving man; the material world with its harassing duties, dangers, and excitements had faded on the horizon, and my wreck of a body (to maintain which in operation at all had been taking most of my time and all of my will power) seemed a wholly secondary matter which was look- ing after itself very well. That condition has continued except that I have returned to the world of men, taken up again my daily chores with the keenest interest and with a sureness of touch and an. absence of worry and ex- citement to which all my associates can testify, and my health has continued to [21] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN improve in a remarkable way. My ex- perience was, I think, a sort of “con- version,’ though not of the usual type; for subsequent reading has taught me that the sensations of genuine conver- sion of the explosive type, such as often occurs to those in middle life, are so ec- static and ineffable as to be beyond the power of man to describe. Certainly it has never been done. Adjective is piled on adjective, as Ossa on Pelion, but no clear picture results; and as to what might be called normal conversion, of the sort which comes to thousands during adolescence, it 1s apparently such an easy and painless process as to escape observation, and so descriptive analysis, in most cases. I conclude, therefore, that mine was not a genuine conversion, for the process was perfectly conscious and easily described. Sitting in my great cool living-room, [ 22 J THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER with the humming of the bees and the sound of the river in my ears; rowing on the river at sunrise; mowing my grass or weeding my garden, or even while put- ting on my boots, ideas would pop into my mind and automatically fit them- selves in with other ideas like the pieces of a picture puzzle. Sometimes they took places apparently without refer- ence to the ideas already there, and for days would hang in space, so to speak. But gradually the gaps were filled in and the picture became complete. At the time, the process seemed mi- raculous and J had the feeling of being controlled by an external power; but, as I was spending much time in reading the Bible, The Meaning of Prayer, Varieties of Religious Expertence, and other books on philosophy, I now see that the ideas gleaned from these books and sinking into my subconscious mind were simply [ 23 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN reappearing after the process of assimi- lation had reached a certain stage. My mind wandered very much, concentra- tion was never achieved, and it is cer- tain that no reasoning process produced the final result. It was mainly subcon- scious, but, by a gradual process extend- ing over some weeks, a clear picture was produced, the picture of the relation of my soul to all other souls, and thus to the Whole, the Infinite, or God — Who is the sum of all. I use the word picture and refer to it as “‘seen,”’ but it 1s a thing of feeling and not of a vision, a synthesis or harmony of the universe, which belongs rather in the realm of music. Life is like a great chorus in which each soul has its certain place. If it finds that place and fills it, it is happy and successful — it lives in Heaven; otherwise it is unhappy and lives in Hell. [24 1] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER ~ Our modern world has its gains as well as its losses, and one of the gains is that it has accustomed us to miracles and we see them for what they are — merely as effects, of which we do not know the cause, but which produce results on which we can rely. My conversion, therefore, while miraculous, did not excite me, for even at first it seemed far more credible and normal than the atomic theory, for example, or electrical phenomena, such as alternating currents, telephones, and wireless; and, as I have examined at more leisure and with more thoroughness what took place, I think I see in it the normal working of cause and effect, based upon laws which are of twin birth with man; a part of the Law of the universe, but one which each of us must painfully rediscover for himself. The truth which has always been known had just dawned upon me, namely, that there is a material [25 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN body and a spiritual body; that the spirit- “ual body, in other words the soul, must be tended and fed as well as the material body, and that worship of God by prayer is the method by which it is fed. With- out such feeding it will die, and in my case a starved or ill-nourished soul had produced almost fatal reactions upon my body. The results, therefore, which we see on every hand, of feeding our souls on stimulants and sawdust, — namely, disease and death, — seem to me exactly what we should expect, and the miracles of healing by Christian faith are the normal working of cause and effect. For I take the heart of that faith to be that belief in God, shown by love and obedience to his will, gives men the power to draw strength and life from God. And there is another way of stating the same thing which I find useful. If I assume that God is Love, Goodness, [ 26 J] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER and Truth,— or, if you prefer, the Harmony of the universe, — I find that He is also Life. For Love, Goodness, and true ideas in the mind do, I find, give me vitality and working power. I find, for example, — and so do other men, — that worship revives and invigorates me, while anger, hatred, and jealousy ex- haust and depress. In short, God is Truth and Truth is Life, while sin and error are untruth and so “not Life.” So far as action is governed by fear or sin it tends to become automatic, a reflex from a false premise in the subconscious, and to that extent the soul has atrophied and died; while action based on true spiritual motives makes the soul more alert, that 1s, more alive. Sin is a per- version of the soul, like cancer in the cells of the body, and if not eradicated it will slowly eat its way through the whole structure and kill it. [27 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN The Christian faith, put at its very lowest, is a working-hypothesis like the Law of Gravity, the theories of elec- tricity, astronomy, and physics. In all these cases, if the hypothesis works, by explaining the facts we observe, we adopt and use it. These are acts of faith and appear to me more ques- tionable, far less supported by evidence and far more difficult to believe than the Christian’s faith in God. Our faith in God, in the power of His love, and in the life-giving results of obedience and surrender to His will, is supported by the whole history and experience of man. It has been tested and proved, not hundreds but literally millions of times. If evi- dence from experience can prove any- thing, it has proved this. It is really amazing what hard work we make of it. Men are skeptical about God, because they cannot see him. It is quite respect- [ 28 J THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER able to be so. But are they skeptical about an “alternating current,” or a telephone message, or an atom, because they cannot see it? They would not dare to say so. Times have changed. Five hundred years ago the position was ex- actly reversed. To confess skepticism about God would send a man to the stake, while all respectable persons thought Columbus was crazy and that of course the world was flat. Now we seem to be ruled by science and machinery. A man may be as skeptical as he will about the power of God, or what is far worse, may not bother his head about it in any least degree; but to question the atomic theory or the law of gravity or the justice of the prevailing industrial system will cause his neighbors to shake their heads. Today we deify the intellect and are skeptical about God; but the mystic of the Middle Ages was an example of [ 29 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN skepticism of another sort. We usually class as skeptics the men of high intel- ligence and learning who worship the ‘mind and doubt the existence of God be- | cause the mind cannot grasp and express Him; while the mystic, seeing the proof of God in the whole universe about him, and the wisdom of yesterday proved the folly of today, was skeptical about the power of the intellect to grasp and de- scribe the Infinite, but believed in God because he saw His works. And, therefore, it is clear to me that the true remedy —in fact, the only one — for the ills from which we suffer is a revival of our faith in God. Our lives are torn to rags and tatters by the whirling nebule of disconnected ac- tivies which fill our days, resulting so often in a final explosion from the cen- trifugal forces generated by such rapid rotation. Vivid faith will centralize or [ 30 J THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER polarize our lives, giving them a central motive — the service of God — which will unify our efforts, making them more effective and relieving us of the killing strain of heterogeneous action. Faith | will construct for each of us the great | girders binding the rim of the wheel to its center, which will be strong enough to resist the pull of centrifugal forces and enable the machine to do its work. The miracles of science are “seen”’ by their results, which we accept with- out question. We believe them, we say, because they work. But does not our belief in God “‘work’’? I believe it to be the most dynamic thing in the world! It works more, and more powerfully, than all the works of man. Miaillions have put it to the test of experience and their lives testify to its truth. What more could be asked in God’s name or the Devil’s? No law of which we have any [31 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN conception is so completely and con- vineingly proved. No rational man, therefore, it seems to me, who will give his mind to it and will examine the evi- dence, can remain in doubt that God is the source of life and that by faith — that is, love and obedience to His will — man can draw life from that source. The reason that so many men doubt is because they have never looked at the evidence. It is time they did. IV But how shall we achieve and hold to our faith? Discussions of this problem are as old as man, being discoverable in the oldest books of the Bible, in the teach- ings of the Greek philosophers, in the Neo-Platonists, in the writings of the Fathers of the Church, and of all the mystics. But each generation prefers to restate its truths, and the discussion [32 J THE CONVERSOIN OF A SINNER best suited to the need of our times, as I see it, is in Hocking’s book, The Mean- ang of God in Human Experience. Briefly stated, what Hocking says is this. There is in this universe a God all-powerful and all-wise, and the ex- istence of man depends upon so regu- lating or tuning the individual life as to act in harmony with the divine plan. It is the will of God that man should devote much of his time in this world to accomplishing material work; but God’s universe is so devised that too great absorption in material ideas, as the result of which they come to be re- garded as ends in themselves, produces a subtle poison, or toxin, which saps man’s energy, makes these ends appear worth- less and thus deprives life of its zest. This is a necessary result of the fact that, man being human, all his efforts must contain a certain coefficient of [ 33 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN error which, if allowed to continue for too long a time without correction, will make his course wholly wrong and all his efforts futile. The way to correct the error, the antidote or antitoxin for the poison, is to set aside for a time all material work, and to concentrate at- tention on God, the spiritual center of the universe. Just as the sea captain; corrects his course by daily observations of the sun, the center of the solar system, sO man must correct his course at fre- quent intervals by transferring his at- tention to God by means of worship or prayer. After the corrections have been made — that is, after God has indicated to him his true course — man’s attention must be retransferred to the temporal world and its material duties. This transfer and retransfer is the principle of alternation so illumi- natingly stated in Hocking’s book. [34] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER It seems to me, therefore, that the method or technique by which this is accomplished must be the most impor- tant study of man; for in proportion to the completeness of his success in de- vising a method for real communion with God will be his power to tune his life in harmony with the Law of God, with the consequent ability to draw that vitality and power to make himself a useful servant, which is the purpose of life and the only source of happiness and success. Unfortunately, the human soul is the most lonely thing of which we can con- ceive. No “communion of souls” is possible in the deepest sense — only communion with God. No human soul can touch any other soul except through the medium of God, so that the method of communion or worship must be unique for each individual and he must discover [365 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN it for himself. -But there are certain general principles which are of universal validity and which are the foundation on which the individual may build. All are as old as man and antiquity is the proof of their validity. But mod- ern science has done much to explain their origin and force and should be ac- cepted for what it can give. The fact that. our material and mechanical dis- coveries may for the moment have over- whelmed us should not blind us to their value. An all-wise God has not willed these developments without a purpose. Our spiritual progress is tem- porarily in arrears, but the day will dawn when we shall have regained such spirit- ual mastery as will put these machines in their proper place. Now the practice of worship by prayer can be approached in many ways, and nothing is more striking, or at first [ 36 J THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER more baffling, than the different ways in which praying men approach it. One of the hindrances most often met with is the argument of those who think of prayer as asking for things, that a wise and loving God knows what we need before we ask for it, and will give us what is good for us. But we must re- ‘ member that in communion with God, as with individuals, “the question which has not been asked cannot be answered.”’ Until we are prepared to receive God’s gift, that is, until the thing we ask for has become a dominant desire of our lives, our prayer for it cannot be answered. We may pray for an understanding of God’s love, but until we have firmly grasped the meaning of the Command- ment “‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” and have an earnest desire to obey it, our prayer for the needful strength must go unanswered. [37 J] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN It is in this aspect of prayer that modern psychology can help us. From time immemorial men have prayed morn- ing and evening, and now we know the reason why. Most of our actions and all of the internal functions of our bodies _ are controlled, not by the intellect and the will, but by the subconscious. The ' spring of action, whether in our daily judgments or in our digestive metabo- lism, is inaccessible to the intellect and the will except through the subconscious. The subconscious holds the key. We can, in fact we must, communicate with the subconscious through the in- tellect controlled by will; all action by the subconscious must originate in the conscious mind, but the conscious mind cannot control the act. It is to the ap- plication of this law that the miracles of healing by suggestion and faith are due, and moreover it has recently been [ 38 1] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER proved that there are what might be called tides in the subconscious; that is, that there are times at which it is nearer to the surface or more accessible than at others, and that for most people these times are morning and evening — the ancient times of prayer. The value of this principle in its ap- plication to prayer is this: in order to get our dominant desire made effective in our lives, we must use the subconscious; an important aspect of prayer is the clear and explicit instruction of the subconscious as to what we intend to be our dominant desire in order that it may be accomplished. I find, therefore, that for me an important part of the preparation for worship is the soliloquy, night and morning, in which I definitely instruct my subconscious as to the re- sults of my conscious thinking about my daily life. Before praying for grace to [ 39 1 EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN love our neighbors we must first grasp what we mean by that, wherein we fail, and what is in fact our dominant desire about it. This desire we must clearly communicate to the subconscious to be made effective. Then our prayer for the needed grace can be and will be answered — but not before. And there is another way in which the new psychology has enlightened me. The great class of mental disorders from which men suffer, known as the phobias, can often, we are now told, be attacked successfully if the cause of the fear can be discovered. The destructive power of fear seems to be due to the fact that it originates in instinct and is not grasped by the mind. If the origin of the phobia can be dragged out into the sunlight of the mind, it loses its power and dies like the disease-germ when ex- posed to the sun. And this same prin- [ 40 J THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER ciple can be applied, I think, to our sins and false ideas, by soliloquy or prayer. Self-examination and confession are in fact the ancient application and use of this principle which we have just dis- covered. This is supported by what we know of the practice of the men who have made prayer the most powerful agent or work- ing force in their lives. ‘‘Chinese” Gordon, for example, writes, “‘ This morn- ing I dragged Agag out into the presence of the Lord and hacked him to pieces”? — Agag being used by him for a symbol of his own worldly ambitions. Of course, soliloquy of this sort is not exactly prayer; it is rather the prepa- ration for prayer by laying the founda- tion for a dominant desire, but such a dominant desire, expressed in the con- stant work of our lives, is a prerequi- site of worship and effective prayer. [41] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN I think we must admit that the ver- bal prayers of confession, humiliation, and self-abasement resemble soliloquy more than prayer, and they must be practised with discretion. For the sick soul to dwell upon its sickness is likely to make the sickness worse by concen- trating too much attention on it. Mind cure, or the religion of healthy-minded- ness, 1s most vital for the sick — which explains the well-known fact that only the very saintly should dwell upon their sins. But that such prayers may be very helpful and profoundly important is proved by the calming and cleansing reaction which they certainly produce, so that perhaps we ought not to be too critical in making an exact distinction. The miraculous cures that have been accomplished by the disciples of mind cure, Christian Science, and autosug- gestion seem to me to result from a [ 42 J] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER method which is in fact common to all of them, although it has been obscured by superficial differences which have been overemphasized. Each of them has de- veloped a formula or method by which the mind of the patient is concentrated on the conception of health, at times and in ways which successfully trans- fer this image to the seat of action in the subconscious. This concentration is the secret of their success, and I am tempted to believe that the miracles of healing of all times rest upon the same foundation. The simplest and perhaps most effective example is the formula of M. Coué repeated twenty times night and morning. Now it is impossible for me to doubt that if the same concentration can be achieved in Christian prayer, similar but more far-reaching curative results will be produced. I hold that the great [43 |] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN problem for each of us in developing the technique of prayer is to ascertain exactly by what method such concen- tration upon the symbols of his faith can be produced in his individual soul. Vv Our daily prayer, however, and the method of preparation for it, is not, I think, the most important form of worship by means of prayer. The deep- est form of worship is communion with God in order that our souls may be fed and the course of our lives directed in true accord with His will. For this the “seeing eye”’ and the “listening ear” must be developed by an utter con- centration of all our spiritual powers — which requires time. Silent attention, with every spiritual sense alert, is the attitude of the worshiper who would hear the word of God. [ 44] THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER In developing individual technique, the practice of the great mystics in their preparation for revelation furnishes some guidance. It was a process, occupying days or even weeks, by which the wor- shiper divested himself one by one of all his bodily and material desires and in- terests, using the intellect and the will to their uttermost limits, until, having eliminated every thought but the love of God, and with his whole personality con- centrated on that conception, he made the final leap, surrendering absolutely to the will of God and becoming merged in complete communion. Something of this sort must take place, I think, in every individual when, turning away from his material work, he seeks that alterna- tion, or communion with his God, which is necessary for his soul’s life. The method of preparation for this must be unique in every case. Some will find [45 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN the best environment in their church, as the greatest symbol of their spiritual life; some in the star-lit heavens; some in gazing at the blue or snow-capped mountain, outlined against the sky, or the lonely desert, or the endless sea. It was the habit of Jesus, when he prayed, to go into the wilderness. In the course of years, each man must learn, at the peril of his spiritual life, where and how best to develop the see- ing eye and the listening ear and, hav- ing done so, he must frequently sub- merge himself in these conditions and surrender himself to silent worship. Ob- viously, however, this is not a condi- tion of body and mind which can be at- tained by the worshiper in a few mo- ments or a few hours. It is on a wholly different plane from the level of our daily lives. This process of “alterna- tion,”’ vital as it is, takes so long a time [ 46 J THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER that it can be accomplished only at con- siderable intervals, and, for most men, can never become a part of their daily lives. The periods when we turn to God to adjust our spiritual courses must be systematic and periodic, but can hardly be daily. Such of us as are intended to do material rather than spiritual work must do it with such insight as our daily praying can afford, sustained and cor- rected at intervals more or less widely separated by periods of retirement and complete concentration on worship. Two things, therefore, become of vital import: that the technique of our daily prayer should be developed with such earnest- ness and intelligence as to make it as powerful as possible in the support and guidance of our daily work; and that _ the periodic “alternations” should be sacredly observed, adequately protected, and, by the use of the highest skill pos- [47 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN sible to us, rendered as fruitful as our spiritual power will permit. Special pe- riods must be set aside for them, with which nothing, not even illness, should interfere. In fact, if we fall ill such an alternation may prove to be the proper cure. As a nation we surely have the va- cation habit; men in all walks of life, even to the lowest, now take vacations liberally. But how do we spend them? Some of us alternate our city lives with a few weeks at a “summer resort,” where jazzing and the movies, with fireworks and violent exercise, consti- tute our “‘relaxations.”’ Others pack their wives and children into a motor- car, grasp the wheel, and proceed to tear off more miles per hour for more hours per day than any normal being ever before imagined. There are a fa- vored few who can retire to great and [ 48 J THE CONVERSION OF A SINNER beautiful country estates, and who do so for months on end. But even then they do not seek a revival and reorien- tation of the soul. The same round of material occupation goes on. We live in a burdensome luxury and in a whirl of social dissipation. The great Ameri- can country houses are as_ laborious to manage as a summer hotel. Such an environment is not the atmosphere of high spiritual life. | Something far removed from this must be devised. The wise old Roman Catho- lic Church has offered one solution. For laymen as well as for priests it pro- vides places of retreat: places of dig- nified and spiritual symbolism, to which the spiritually exhausted man may re- tire for a period of fasting and prayer, to cleanse and call home his spirit and prepare himself to serve again his God in the material world. Something of [ 49 J Panne. EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN this sort is obviously necessary for us all as a beginning, and from this each soul must build up for itself, with its highest skill and will-power, a method of cleansing and purification which shall make possible a true communion with God. Such a method of developing and feed- ing the spiritual body seems to me to be the cure for that disease of the soul from which I and many of my fellow men are suffering. It will, I think, cure the spiritual madness which IJ tried at the be- ginning to describe, and may enable us to save our tottering civilization by re- gaining control of the great scientific, mechanical, and industrial processes which have deprived us of liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and, almost, of life itself. [ 50] CHAPTER II A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS Fifteen or twenty years ago, three men, two Indians and a white man, sat on the steps of one of the Hudson Bay Company’s posts discussing the merits of a river in eastern Labrador as a route by which to reach the in- terior of the peninsula and the head waters of one of the great rivers which flow north into the Arctic Sea. The river was unmapped and little known except to the hunting Indians of the locality; none of these men had ever been there, but one of the Indians, an adventurous, voyageur type, had been with Low on some of his exploring and map-making expeditions and had heard of the river in question from other Indians. [51 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN The fact that it was unmapped and had its rise in the unmapped interior had a certain fascination for the white man, who played with the notion of exploring it, and probably talked about it on other occasions, so that it was not remarkable that a young and alert reporter for a New York magazine with sporting proclivities should have picked up the gossip. That done, it was only the natural working of cause and effect which sent him back to his boss in New York with a proposal to organize and equip an “expedition”’ to explore this river and win advertising and fame. The thing was done, and early the next summer the young journalist with two companions boarded the coasting steamer at St. Johns, N. F., bound for the starting point of the venture. Neither the journalist nor either of his compan- ions was peculiarly fitted for the task. [ 52 J A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS He had only the most amateurish know]l- edge of woodcraft gained in short hunting trip in “the States,’ and no skill what- ever in northern travel. His white com- panion was even less trained than he, and while the other was an Indian with some knowledge of northern hunting and travel, he came from the opposite side of the peninsula and the country to be explored was wholly strange to him. As if this were not handicap enough, the white men were both loaded with such unreasoning courage and such con- ceit of their own powers that they were impervious to all manner of advice. This appeared at the very outset, for as luck would have it, the white man who had first conceived the venture was on board the same steamer from St. Johns on his way to a more northern port. In con- versation with our adventurers he soon discovered the fact that while their [ 53 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN equipment was elaborate, heavy and expensive they lacked the most essential things and that their self-confidence was such that they would take no advice. They parted, with the deepest mis- givings on his part and none at all on theirs, and in the course of three months his worst misgivings were justified, for these self-confident men, disregarding the advice of the local people at the point where they left the steamer and failing to take any local guide, literally lost their way before they were out of sight of their point of departure. For weeks they proceeded to tear their way up streams of the most difficult character, staggering under inhuman loads of useless provision and equipment (much of which they eventually threw away) until they were caught and windbound on a lake in the interior by one of the autumn gales which are chronic in that [| 54 J] A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS latitude. The delay thus caused cost the leader of the expedition his life, for when the gale eventually released them and they sought safety from the oncoming winter in flight it was too late. They were trapped. The provisions ran low and, lacking the equipment necessary to deal with these conditions, they could not replenish them. Starva- tion and exhaustion followed, and the leader died in his tent a few miles from the place where he had left the shore. The incident was too common in the country where it occurred to excite more than a passing interest, and even I can easily imagine a manner of death, or even of life, far more terrible than death from exhaustion and _ starvation. But I tell the story because I think it may serve to startle from their sleep a class of city bred folk so habituated to [ 55 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN four meals a day and steam heated houses that they have forgotten that other conditions of life do really exist. Many similar examples could be found, but this one will serve as well as an- other to show what may happen toa bold but inexperienced young man whose overconfidence in himself leads him to fly in the face of the laws of nature. How bitterly this man must have repented, when it was too late, his disregard of the experiences of others! How deeply he must have longed for some man or God to save him from himself! Butt the event was in a world where no human help was available and where God does not violate His own laws to save man’s body from destruction. The significance of the incident for me is the way in which it illustrates and illuminates events of a similar char- acter in the spiritual world. I have [ 56 J A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS known other young men (myself among the rest) who set out upon life without « spiritual guide or compass and came to grief. But perhaps an even more common experience is iUlustrated by this inci- dent in my own early life. I was wan- dering and hunting in the Adirondacks one summer before I was twenty in a district unknown to me and without a guide. Leaving my camp to still-hunt one rainy morning I lost my way (which is an easy matter under those condi- tions) and became so thoroughly snarled up that although I had a perfectly good compass I refused to follow it, took a course opposite to what it indicated and as a result spent many hours in semi- hysterical bush-whacking which landed me at last at a point known to me but far distant from my camp, where I ‘finally arrived in a sorry plight. [57 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN Many young men, I believe, start life with a sound spiritual compass, which they disobey as I did mine. Both those who have no compass and those who refuse to follow it come to grief, but there is this difference between the spiritual and the material world. The explorer in the snows of Labrador prayed for rescue and none came to him, while I in the wil- derness of my spiritual anarchy, prayed to an unseen God whom I had wantonly defied, and He came and saved my soul. Our schools and colleges are turning out every year many adventurous young men and women in whom intellectual overconfidence has bred a spiritual skep- ticism and a revolt against authority which will prove costly to them and to the nation. This crop of youthful skep- tics is in part the result of the failure of our methods of religious teaching. © [ 58 J A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS The scientist and the philosopher strive manfully to take the place of the priest, but they are doomed to fail. I turn aside to remark that these men, cool and perhaps a little inhuman by nature, but whose profession it is to teach very human boys, proceed by discipline and will power to dehumanize themselves still further; to divest them- selves of every stitch of humanity which they can peel off until they are as nearly as possible a bare idea or ideal. They live in the cold of space from which the heat of life has been removed and there they endeavor to teach the theory and practice of life to common men of flesh and blood who think not with their brain alone, but with hands, feet, stomach and heart—with their whole body, in fact. Such men cannot breathe the atmosphere in which the philosopher lives, and under such conditions it need [59 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN cause no surprise if they show signs of exhaustion as a result. The philosopher, for example, can deduce the idea of God as a “First Cause”’ from the recorded laws of the material universe. He can prove the necessity of such thing, but when he is done it is an zdea of God, a lifeless conception, which he has evoked, and not the Living God. There is no heat or motive power in it. No man can wor- ship a conception; your graven image is more inspiring. God the Father, the God of Love—this is the God to whom men pray in the watches of the night and the God who brings help to the wandering soul which yearns for Him. Such a God philosophy and science can- not find or create. He must be sought by another road. Agnosticism and skepticism are like infectious germ diseases, which seem to [ 60 J A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS thrive in the rarefied air of philosophy and science, but which are destroyed by the sun and wind of vital living. Overprotected and _ overintellectualized men are most subject to them. The road from. skepticism to Faith is the road of life and experience. That must be your teacher; as in the case of the ex- plorer, to learn the secret of northern travel he must travel in the north. But let him not be overbold until he has learned his business. To face bare- handed an arctic winter armed to the teeth is a folly which may cost you your life and you will do well not to despise the wisdom of the Indians grown old in the locality. The human soul turned loose in the spiritual world with highly developed — intellectual powers and the confidence of youth very commonly finds itself lost in the wilderness, as our explorer [611 EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN was, without guide, compass or adequate spiritual food, and after beating itself, as he did, against the eternal universal law, it falls exhausted and cries or prays for help—for some compass to guide it and some arm to protect. That is the road by which God must be sought and which will lead to Him. The knowledge of God, or Faith, begins with the yearning, the hunger, for Faith, which comes to the man who has tried to live without it and met defeat. Sooner or later every man above the level of the brute who has tried to live by his own unaided wisdom or even by the precepts of philosophy will be beaten to his knees in the struggle of life. Then and there his soul must either find a Living God or die. But in this world of the spirit, if he will cry aloud and admit his weakness he will find a res- cuing hand. God will not abandon [ 62 J A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS him to his fate. Let him throw away his intellectual conceits and his critical sharpness and search with body, heart and soul. It is never so dark that, if he be earnest and patient, he will not at last hear the answering voice of his Father and feel his sustaining hand. [ 63 ] CHAPTER III ANSWER OR ECHO The human soul which has lost its way is in the same sort of predicament as a man groping in the dark or as one lost in the wilderness. He must be patient and expect hard knocks and many disap- pointments if he would win through; it is so also with the wandering soul. I realize, of course, that all souls do not go astray; some do not need to be rescued, and of those that do many will doubtless find salvation in ways which are unknown to me. All that I know is my own ex- perience which I shall try to report ac- curately and clearly in the humble faith that if I succeed others in similar case may profit. To most men in the modern world the [ 64] ANSWER OR ECHO experience of being lost in the woods or in the desert has never come, and I trust it never will, for it is a fearful thing—The terror that grips the heart when you have lost your way in some vast wilder- ness and stand face to face with death for the first time is a savage thing. Panic will then overwhelm you like a flood; you will know desperation and a wild unreasoning fear. Most of you, I repeat, in your protected lives, will never know it in the material world. But in the spiritual world most, perhaps all, of | you will know it, for if in your inexperience you try to guide your lives by your own unaided wisdom without some spiritual compass you will inevitably lose your way. No parental care and no human guidance can protect you from it, and the day will come, per- haps as the result of some accident or some great personal loss when you will [ 65 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN be “knocked endwise,” as the slang phrase goes. When you try to pick up the pieces and start life again you will find that you can’t. You are lost in the wilderness! terror will seize you by the throat, and you will fall upon your knees and cry desperately for help. If your cry is heartfelt; if you have been thoroughly beaten and sufficiently humbled to make your surrender com- plete, your cry will be answered. No human soul ever uttered the genuine call to God for help and went unanswered. Be sure of that! An answer will come if your call is earnest. “‘Seek and ye shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you.” But what will be the nature of the answer? The only reply I can give you, out of my own experience, will be to ap- peal again to the world of nature which I know. Most of you are city folk, to [ 66 | ANSWER OR ECHO whom the silence and the wonder of the wilderness at night are strange. But I know that world well. I have spent many a night on the lakes and barrens of the north listening for the faintest sound that the ear can catch. I prac- tised often and acquired skill in the art of “‘calling” moose at night. The “call” is made on a birchbark horn (like a megaphone) in imitation of the lowing of the cow moose. It can only succeed when no breath of wind is stirring and only in the autumn months. In order that the “call”’ may carry far, it is usual to take your canoe to the middle of a lake (after the sun and wind have gone to bed) and spend the night there. The hunter “calls”? about twice an hour and then listens with intense alertness to every sound. He will hear an owl hoot miles away, and a deer walking on the game trail, or a dead tree fall with a [ 67 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN crash; perhaps a bear may wander across the hillside or a wolf howl to his friend; and strange little puffs of wind will arise suddenly on the mountain side and as suddenly die away. All these sounds he notes but disregards. ‘They are not the sound he seeks. And then, if you are fortunate, after hours of listening you may hear the answer to your call. It will be very faint at first and you will often doubt its reality; for it is like the faintest echo of your call, and only by intense concentration can you be sure of it. An owl or a wolf at a great distance, or a porcupine on the shore very near you grunting like a meditative pig, will be almost indistinguishable. Almost— but not quite. The trained ear can de- tect the difference. I would gladly elaborate this theme but lest I wander too far afield, I must trust you to understand from these few [ 68 J ANSWER OR ECHO hints the symbol which makes most vivid to me the answer which God will give to the lost soul that cries to Him for help. You have often heard the phrase, “the still small voice.” That is the sort of answer which I am trying to describe to you. But how shall you know that the thing you hear is the voice of God and not of some demon? ‘This is how you will know! If you mean business and if you listen and observe intelligently, you will feel a sympathetic vibration in your own soul to the voice of its Father. It is like the musical harmonic or overtone; a string in your own soul will vibrate in response to the answer of your God. It will be faint but unmistakable. No true pen- itent will long remain in doubt. You will know you have been answered be- cause the whole framework of you will be set a-vibrating. [ 69 |] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN You can not doubt this if you are a Christian or believe in God at all, for you can form no image of your own soul except as a part of God. It is of the same essence. You have the clear statement of Jesus that each of us is the son of God. That is why the voice of God will set up a sympathetic vibration within you. Your soul is like one string of the mighty harp, the whole of which is God. But the harmonic will sound faintly at first and will always remain a mys- terious, fairy thing, which will easily elude you. Desperately you will long to bring it nearer—you will yearn to “see the face of God.”’ There you come to grips with the most important and the most difficult task in life. It is one which you must achieve or die and yet it is a battle in which man can give you little aid. You must win through alone, but these suggestions may [70 J ANSWER OR ECHO help you. Follow your feeling or instinct, more than your reason. For example, we all know that when we get up at night in a dark room and try to find our way to the door we can go straight to it if we don’t think. Just follow your im- pulse and you will get there all right. But if you stop to reason you'll run into a table or an armchair or hit the fire- place instead of the door. Remember that in your search for God; your instinct is older than your reason and wiser. “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not on thine own understand- ing.”’ Proverbs i: 5. Another suggestion about your method, or listening technique, is to relax. Throw yourself into the arms of God. Rigidness or nervous tension will stop your ears. Returning to my former simile, any hunter can tell you that in listening for game sounds by day or night you must C711 EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN be at once relaxed and concentrated. Overanxiety will fill your ears with imaginary noises; lack of concentration will degenerate into drowsiness. To the hunter listening for moose both are alike fatal to suecess.! So also with the soul, when listening for the “still small voice.” You must be completely relaxed but not drowsy, perfectly intent, but with an open, almost vacant mind. Lying flat upon your bed without a pillow in the early dawn is a method in common use; and many of us find help in a “listening place”? or sanctuary consecrated to the practices of worship. In preparing the soul for worship, the beauty of the natural world is priceless. All of you have seen the face of a friend lit up by the scent of a flower or felt the 1 Tt is the same with the eye strained to distinguish a distant object. If the eye muscles become rigid the eye will not focus. [724 ANSWER OR ECHO inspiration of a sunset or of the star-lit sky. It is not an accident that prophetic inspiration has been most common in desert lands where men lived much under the open heavens, for such conditions unquestionably help to tune the soul to the voice of its Father. These suggestions may help you to hear the voice of God answering your prayer. But it will remain faint and dis- tant, your yearning “‘to see the face of God’’ will be unappeased and many of you will long as I do to bring nearer the God whose answer you have heard, so that your worship may burn like a cen- tral fire from which you can draw the powers to joy and service. As I have said, I believe that our faith in God grows out of the craving for Him which men feel most keenly after they have tried to manage their lives without Him and have failed. When beaten [73 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN down by anxiety, surrounded by the ghosts of fear, and unable to see through the clouds that hide the future, the con- viction of his own feebleness comes to a man he then begins to feel a hunger for God which will at last crystalize into belief in Him. Just how to distinguish this yearning and this faith from what is called the Love of God, or perhaps more properly how to connect it with the Love of God, is not easily discernible for me. But I find in the writings of a modern Spaniard much that is illuminating to my igno- rance. According to his view, pity and charity towards other men begin with the experience of pain in ourselves. When this reaches the point of “anguish of the spirit”’ it overflows towards others and there starts a process of growth by which at last we learn to know the love of God. From suffering agony ourselves [74 J ANSWER OR ECHO we gain the power to suffer with others— that 1s, to sympathize with them—whence we move up to a true vision of the hard- ships in other lives, which leads to charity in thought and act, and so on to love of humanity and the sense of God’s love for us. This process of growth is clear and normal, and the man who has thus attained the power to love his fellow men will have more than a clue to the Love of God for man. A man who can love mankind can surely grasp the fact of God’s love, for what is possible for man must be possible for God. This explanation may throw light for some of you, as it has for me, on the way in which our longing for God grows into love of Him, but it is a mystic process which we can more easily feel than de- scribe. This, however, is clear to me. When you have felt the need of a God and have cried out or prayed to Him for C75 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN help you will hear an answering voice. At first it will be faint, and there will be moments when you feel that it is only the echo of your own cry; a mocking echo in a desolate world. But such moods pass. You will hear the voice again, if you listen for it. You will want to “see the face of God”’ and feel His arm around you; in other words, you will yearn to personalize your God. All men feel that they must do this, for human feeling is personal, and our Faith in God, which is our highest feeling, must be personal too. Our faith in God is of the same nature as our faith in our friends, raised to the “nth” power, so to speak. It is in this effort to personalize, or mersonify, God that most of us fail, and when we have failed our faith grows dim and cold. It no longer warms us and helps us to do our work. We sometimes suppose that there is [76 ANSWER OR ECHO more faith in the East than in the West, and look in that direction for help. But we shall not get it there, for if faith comes more easily to the Oriental, it is because the East does not want to personalize; it prefers to remain mystic. The men of the East lose interest and faith in a thing when you begin to make it clear to them. They distrust things that are clear; they prefer them misty or mystic. But for us, things must be clear! We must personalize God or lose the vision of Him. And surely it can be done, for even the philosopher endows his zdea of God with personality. It is, however, “‘a hard quicksand crossing,’ as the cow- boys say, at which many of us are lost; but in God’s name make a dash at it and either sink or swim. And make the dash while you are young; while you still have vitality and the spirit of adventure. Don’t wait until you are my age and too C77 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN feeble to win through. Faith in God is a great adventure and can only be attained by adventurous people; that is by those who are spiritually young. You can see the same craving which we all feel, in Philip’s demand of Jesus, “Lord show us the Father.” It is the craving of all mankind. But it is written, ““No man may see the face of God and live,” and this I believe in spite of the assertion of Job, “Now mine eye seeth Thee” (Job 42-5). For the book of Job is very ancient. We are not too sure of the accuracy of the translation; and I suspect that the God whose face Job thought he saw was not the God whom Jesus called the Father. When I try to see the face of my God I end in mere vagueness for God is a spirit embodying all the best qualities in man raised to infinity, and infinity I cannot grasp. I am told by the philoso- [78 J ANSWER OR ECHO phers that this distinction between finite and infinite is a false one; that we are all infinite. But the man in the street knows better. There is a distinction for him between the degrees of magnitude which his mind can grasp and those which are beyond it. That is the practical line of division between the finite and infinite. The point of division will vary with the individual, but the distinction is real. And so with God, he is infinite; I cannot see His face, but I must have some way to symbolize or personify it. Otherwise it will vanish. What am I to do? If this human craving must remain unsatisfied we should expect Jesus to have rebuked Philip for his curiosity. The ancient Prophets and wise men would have been forced to do so, because they could have given no satisfactory answer, and it is one of the proofs of the supremacy of Jesus as a prophet of God, [79 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN that he could meet that issue. You remember his answer? ‘“‘He who hath seen me hath seen the Father,” and again, “T am in the Father and the Father in me.” These and many similar sayings in the Gospels throw a flood of light upon this dark problem, and force.me to conclude that until we can honestly say that we know Jesus we have no right to complain that God has hidden his face from us. And yet it is incredible how little we know Jesus and how little we have tried to know Him. Many of us call ourselves Christians, but just what do we mean by that? What is it to be a Christian? Sometimes it is asserted that to be a Christian is to know and practice the teachings of Christ. If that be the test there are no Christians. It is too hard, for to do so would require that we be saints, and very saintly saints [ 80 J ANSWER OR ECHO at that. We must set the standard lower or abandon the Christian faith. Is it too much, however, to ask that we should know Christ, or at least make an effort to know Him? I say it is not, though very few of us have ever done it. I never have, and I find even among our ministers many who have not. I happened, not long ago, to meet a minister, highly placed in his church, with whom I had some acquaintance, and observing that he seemed nervous and harassed I asked him the cause. He admitted that he was harassed and pro- ceeded to unfold a world filled with worry and fear. It seemed that the preparation and delivery of his sermons exhausted him very much; that at home he had a crop of vigorous and noisy children who made it impossible for him to rest, and that although he had a salary which would have seemed princely a few years [81] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN ago he was constantly worried about money. ‘The natural varieties of feeling and opinion among the members of his congregation irritated and alarmed him; and if any member of the parish devel- oped strong and progressive views they frightened him. This man was a Chris- tian minister chosen to teach the Gospel according to Christ, but did he know it? Whence came his financial worries if he had mastered in their modern application the teachings of Jesus about property? Why should he have been worn out by preaching the word of God if he was permeated by His spirit? How could jealousy find any place in the heart of a true servant of Christ? I cannot answer these questions without arriving at the conclusion that this man did not know Christ or His teaching and that he had not mastered the practice of prayer. He is not an isolated example even [82 J ANSWER OR ECHO among the ministers and of the rest of us he can be taken almost as a type. Are we to be driven, then, to the terrible conclusion that to be Christians is im- possible for us; that we can never know Christ, and so can never see God? To this I say fiercely, No. We can know Christ and we can see God. But we haven’t tried. In fact, I go much farther, for I believe that we can know Christ better than we can know any living man. ‘Take yourself, for example. You know yourself better than you know (or ean know) any other human being, for what you know about others must always be deduced from what you know of yourself. You can only see in another man what you have first seen or felt in yourself. But sincerity will force you to admit that what you know about yourself is very limited. You may be able to say what you think today and [ 83 |] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN what you will do today. But about to- morrow or next year? You cannot tell. For you are in a state of continual growth or change. What you do today is the result of what you are today. What you will do next year will be the result of what you are next year, and that you do not know. Certainly, it will be some- thing different from what you are now. And if this is true of your knowledge of yourself, it is doubly true of your knowledge of others. The greatest men are those who grow and change the most, and of living men it is literally true that those of whom we want to know the most we do in fact know the least, so that I think we shall be forced to admit that our knowledge of all living men is very unstable and incomplete. And yet it is far greater than our knowledge of Jesus. In fact we hardly know Him at all, for we have made no effort to know Him. [ 84 J ANSWER OR ECHO But we should do well to make that effort, even if, for a time, we were forced to abandon all other work. We should do well to give up our pastimes and our busi- ness to it for there is no other knowledge which we require so urgently or which will benefit us more in the material world. Without any exaggeration, it may be said that for every one of us this would be the most profitable work that he could do. It is commonly assumed, I think, that to know Christ intimately is a difficult and (for all but a rare minority) an impos- sible thing; that only men with inspired vision can know the character of Christ so as to make Him a vivid personality; and so we study his teachings and not his character. But I challenge that assump- tion. I say it is not only erroneous but that the truth is exactly opposite. Using the phrase, “to know Christ” in the sense in which we say we know Bishop [85 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN Lawrence, I say that we can know Christ better than we can know any living man. For living men, as I have said, are grow- ing, changing men, about whom nothing absolute and final can be known; while it is one of the most miraculous things which Christ did—I think his greatest miracle—that he has left with us in this world a personality finished and perfect which, if we choose, we can know. Some among us are skeptical about many mir- acles which Christ is reported to have performed, but here is a miracle which no one can doubt. The true character of Jesus 7s a fact that each one of us can verify for himself; each one of us can read the record and can see this miracu- lous personality for ourselves. Christ is personalized and personified for us, and if we believe His words, ““He that hath seen me hath seen the Father,’ we must know His personality and see Him be- [86] ANSWER OR ECHO fore we can have any chance of seeing God. I am not unmindful of the difficulties which haunt the road, but they can be overcome. It is true that the records which remain to us of His life and teach- ing were written down many years after His death and are very incomplete. But in spite of that it is a miraculous picture which, if studied with the attention which men accord to any business problem, for example, will yield’ a rich reward. The record to be searched is not the record of the four Gospels, the Acts and the Epistles only, but the record left by in- spired men of later times who have known the personality of Christ. What they found in the record of the Gospels and the image or personality of Christ which they worked out are a part of the record for us. The number of Lives of Christ which l 87 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN have been written is staggering, but we are in urgent need of another; for each generation needs a new Life of Christ to bring the record down to date and state it in the language and symbolism of a new time. I pause to remark that the latest Life of Christ, the much ad- vertised Life by Papini, will not help you. This man did not know Christ. The book radiates hatred and passion instead of love. But before we can read any Life with profit each one of us must write one for himself. Each one of us must go back to the New Testament and master the rec- ord there set down. When we have done this, and only then, shall we be able to read a Life of Christ written in our own day and get much out of it. For in this, as in other affairs, we get out what we put in and we must put in the results of our own patient and penetrating study [88 J ANSWER OR ECHO ef the old record before we can take a profit out of the new. But if we have the will to do this we can, and we shall obtain a knowledge of the character of Christ more accurate and final than of any living man. We ean, I believe, attain such knowledge as will enable us to say what Christ would have done under any set of conditions which now confronts us. This we cannot do with any living man, but we can do it with Christ, and when we have we shall have seen the face of God. [89 J CHAPTER IV THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM In the previous chapters I have aimed to sketch how faith in God was, so to speak, forced upon me and made a vital and controlling force by the expe- riences of life. To state it in one sentence, I tried to live without it, was forced to admit my failure and learned by that painful process the vital principle of life. But if I look back thirty years, and ask myself whether I should have acted differ- ently if I had read then what I have written now, I am disposed to doubt it. If someone had told me in a rambling fashion how faith in God had come to him and how he had known that the answer to his cry for help was the voice of God and not the voice of the Devil; [90 J THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM and of his yearning to see the face of God, his inability to do it and how he had been able in part to appease that longing— what effect would it have produced on my mind? The only honest answer I can make to those questions is that I should have listened to his chatter, with such courtesy as I could command, and held my peace. But I should have been bored by it. Such talk would have been remote from the world in which I was living; I should not have felt any urgent need for the good advice which he was thrusting upon me; and [I should have forgotten his remarks as soon as I left the room. What possible use could such ideas have for me? Suppose I did acquire a faith in God such as he described, what should I do with it? What use was such a thing to me? Many of you must be consciously or subconsciously in just that state of mind. What good will a [91] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN belief in a liwing—personal—God do you? You are very comfortable as you are. You have all you want to eat, all the clothes you need and before you the prospect of an adventurous and happy life. Why then fuss about these vague, intangible and apparently difficult con- ceptions which promise to bring you more pain than pleasure? You feel very well satisfied with the life that you are living. Why not leave well enough alone? . That is what many of you must be feeling; it is the attitude of the people around you and of the society in which you live and it is just exactly what I felt when I was young. I acted on that con- viction and one of the things (perhaps the only thing) which I can now do for you is to tell you how that course of action worked in my case, and how it will work in yours. For in this instance it is not [ 92] THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM true, as you are told so often, that the experience of each individual will be different. The result of such a course of action will be the same in every case, for this is part of the law of the universe, a law of God; the same cause will always produce the same effect, and there is nothing in the world of which I am more sure than that every single person who takes the course which I took will reach the same result. I acted upon the theory that I could manage my own life; that free will had been given to me to use; and that the guiding hand of a living God which might be useful to weaker souls, was something which I could get along without. The result in my case was disease of the body and atrophy of the soul, and I say to you with profound conviction that if you take the same road you will reach the same destination. [93 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN I had to learn by bitter experience the simple and time honored truth that there is a distinction between freedom and license; that there is no such thing as absolute freedom, “Obedience to Law is Liberty.” Unrestrained freedom is anarchy; and anarchy is not freedom, but the worst form of slavery—the slav- ery to your own passions and whims. Until you have surrendered some free- dom you will have none, and in the spirit- ual world you will have no freedom and no happiness until you have subordinated your will to the will of God. That such a surrender does not deprive you of free will, I shall later try to show, but first I want to analyze the condition in which you will live if you refuse, and demand complete freedom. Any doctor or psychologist will tell you that a sick soul will often produce a sick body. That you can accept as [94 J THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM proved, and if you try to live without the guiding hand of God your soul will sooner or later be a sick soul. Your soul, which is the spiritual life in you, cannot live without food any better than your body can. If you starve your body or feed it on poisonous food your body will first become sick and then die. And it is the same with your soul. If you feed your soul on stimulants and sawdust, or starve it altogether, your soul will become sick and the symptoms of its sickness will be these. You will find yourself living in a world of hurry and fear. When you get up in the morning your first emotions will be those of anxi- ety. As you look forward on the day which opens before you it will seem filled with a chaos of disagreeable things, all of which must be done, but for which there is not time enough; you will re- member the remark attributed to the [95 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN chorus girl that “life is just one damned thing after another.”” And as you look back upon the day after it is closed, you will feel exhausted with your futile effort, like a man who has been beating the air. No achievement will give you satisfac- tion and you will often wonder what is the purpose of life. If you make a lot of money you will find that it merely adds to your worries; if you lose money or lose your job, you will face the terrors of jail or the poorhouse. If you live on the income of money which your grandfather earned by the sweat of his brow, you will not be better off. You will be surrounded with worries just the same. In your household you will live in terror of your servants; the cook will quarrel with the chambermaid and give notice; the chore- man will get drunk and let the furnace go out; the chauffeur will run into your neighbor’s car at the street corner, so [96 J THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM that your car is “out of business” and your neighbor clamoring for damages; your dressmaker will be late in fin- ishing your ball dress and drive you into panic lest you miss the Jones’ ball. But perhaps the worst fear of them all is men’s fear of each other. To the foreign observer this is very noticeable in America —our terror of public opinion. It is not that our gossips and scandal-mongers are more active or more malicious than their prototypes in Europe. It is that we fear them more. But what can we ex- pect? What armor has a man against the criticism of his neighbors if he has nothing but his own private judgment to protect him? If you have thrown away the armor of the righteous man who puts his trust in God, you must not complain if the lightest word of your neighbor cuts you to the quick and you live in [97] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN constant dread of him. It is the reward of your own choice. It would be easy to multiply such ex- amples for there is really no end to them. The air is full of terrors of one sort or another. And where is the joy of life? Where “the peace which passeth under- standing’? Nowhere! Money cannot buy these and no friend can give you them. Your friends you will find are as poverty-stricken as yourself. This is the world in which many of those live whose souls are fed on sawdust. Flesh and blood cannot endure the strain. Sooner or later you will “blow up” more or less completely; the explosion may take the form of a nervous breakdown, leaving you a neurasthenic wreck; or it may be some other disease of the nervous system of which the doctor can tell you the scientific name but cannot cure you; or it may result in reducing your vitality [98 J THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM so that you are an easy prey to the disease germs which always surround you, grad- ing all the way from a succession of colds in the head to broncho-pneumonia. Just what form your disease will take no one can know; there is an almost infinite variety of forms in which the reduced vitality of your body, caused by the strug- gle of the will torn between body and soul may wreak its revenge. You may be very ill or die or what is far worse, you may never be very sick but never very well. This is perhaps the worst condition because it is so unheroic; no one will pity you except yourself, and there will be no joy in life. Such a condition is one which a starved soul will produce in many cases. You can see thousands of them about you. But this will not always happen, nor in fact is it the commonest case. The commonest case is a far worse thing. [ 99 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN If you look around you, having in mind what I have just been saying, you will think it is not true to life, or at least that it is a gross exaggeration. Most of the people you see are not obviously sick and many of them seem happy. And you will be perfectly right; most of them seem happy and some of them really are. But I am forced to say to you that in the world of America as I have seen it during the last thirty years, true happiness is not too common. There are a blessed few who have it, but those men and women, without exception, have a living, vivid faith in a personal God. Of the rest many are not sick and seem contented enough, but this is true also of the cabbages. A good cabbage is healthy and contented. One might say the same of a granite boulder. But cab- bages and stones are not human. The quality which distinguishes man from the [100 7 THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM animal, the vegetable and the mineral, is his soul—the spiritual part of him— the capacity or self-consciousness which enables him to know pain and _ joy. When a man’s soul is dead (or even when it is torpid) he does not suffer. From that he is immune, like a stone, and if, as a result of poisoning or starvation, his soul is dead or comatose, he will not suffer pain or even disease. His bodily health may be excellent and he may enjoy his meals. But so does a dog, and the man who has purchased immunity from disease and pain at the price of his im- mortal soul, has paid a high price for it. That course is open to us all and many take it. But they know not what they do. Some day they will be faced with death. Then they will know the paralyz- ing terror of gazing into the Unknown. When the torpid soul of such a man be- gins to come to life again, the agony is [ 101 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN intense. This I know, for I have ex- perienced it. The man who, in trying to live without a faith in God, shall take refuge from the pain and terror that beset him in the spiritual drug habit (doping his soul), is a worse fool than the man who seeks to deaden his bodily suf- fering by taking opium. For if he be consistent in the latter course and take opium enough he will die without suf- fering. But it is not so with his soul. His soul is a part of God. He cannot kill it and however often or however much he may try to suppress it, the day will come when he can keep it down no longer. It will come quivering to life and inflict upon him the tortures of the damned. I have referred to the stopping of spiritual pain as a process of drugging the soul. This is what some of us do; drug it with the excitement of gambling in one form or another. Some do it [ 102 7] THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM with poker or bridge whist, some by gambling in their business, some by gambling with their lives in sports or hunting. But a more common method by which men seek to suppress or déaden their souls is by submerging or drowning © them in a sea of business matters and elaborate forms of society. Your busy man of affairs rushing from one director’s meeting to another from morning till midnight, and your society woman with her balls, teas, committee meetings and card parties, are all engaged in exactly that process. They are trying to sub- merge or drown their souls and deaden their spiritual pains; to thrust aside the questions about God, Immortality and the whole world of the Spirit which are ever springing up in the alert, self- conscious mind. And for a time they can and do suc- ceed. But ultimately, this defense will [ 103 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN collapse, and then the ruin is_ shat- tering. This phase of modern life is the exact opposite of the attitude of faith, breathing out of the past in the sayings: “Be still and remember that I am God” or “He who believeth doth not make haste.” It is the child of willfulness—the negation of faith. I have said before that the knowledge which we have of living men (the people about us) is not to be compared with the knowledge which we can have of Jesus. We think and speak of the men and women about us as real people, and to many of us the man Jesus is unreal. But if you will look your world squarely in the face, what could be more unreal (in the most literal meaning of the word) than the body of a live man from which the soul or spirit has fled, or in which it is asleep? ‘These are the mere ghosts -of [104 7] THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM men and women by whom you are sur- rounded. Their reality has disappeared. So do not be misled. All those whom you see about you living without faith in God, and living apparently happy lives will some day know a day of reckon- ing. They are the mere ghosts of men today. But some day the spirit will awake and will have to be reckoned with. It is sheer folly to desire to be immune from pain. Pain is essential to life. Our bodily pains are the safety valves of the body, and anguish of the spirit is a saving grace. When you have a cold in your head, a pain in your leg, or a stomach ache, you know that it is a warning that you have violated some hygienic law, and if you are wise you consult your doc- tor. If you disregard these warnings or deaden the pain with drugs, you will produce a worse condition, which may end in death. The last thing you desire [ 105 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN in the physical world is to miss such warnings. People who “go on their nerves,’ as we say, are doing exactly that and the result is an ultimate explo- sion or breakdown which shatters them for life. The world of the spirit is ruled by the same law. Anguish of the spirit is a sign of life. The more vividly we live the more we suffer, but the more also we en- joy. The sensations of pain and joy are the proof, and the only proof that we are spiritually alive. We must seek to be more alive (that is, to suffer more) in order that we may expand our spiritual nature and thereby gain a greater knowl- edge and a greater share of God. For the soul of each one of us is a part of God. Anguish of the spirit is the growing pain which proves that we are enlarging our own souls and making them larger parts of God. Such things are the very breath [ 106 7 THE SLAVE OF FREEDOM | of life and that man is worse than a fool, he is a lunatic, who seeks refuge in spirit- ual narcotics from spiritual pain. But to a man without a faith in God, that is, a man who has lost faith in his own soul, such a course may well be the path of least resistance. For if he does not believe in his own soul, why should he bear these pains? Deaden them with meat, drink and excitement! ‘“ Drink today for tomorrow we die” and “the Devil take the hindmost!” It is the gospel of despair and it will not work, but of the men and women whom you see around you, apparently happy, with- out a belief in God, many have adopted it. But I repeat, it will not work. The day of reckoning will come and it will be fearful beyond the power of words. I know whereof I speak, and I beg you in God’s name not to try it. Such a state [ 107 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN of mind and body is the result of spiritual anarchy; of adopting as your guiding principle your own willfulness; of refusing to surrender to the will of God. But it is better to live in a world of fears than drug yourself into a spiritual automaton; better still to nurture and build up your faith in God, surrender your will to His, and live in His world of joy and peace. I must next try to tell you how faith in God will banish fear and bring you peace. [ 108 7 CHAPTER V THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE My own experience has made it clear to me that spiritual anarchy—that is, the effort to guide my life by my own will uncontrolled and unaided by the will of God—is not freedom but a degrading slavery. Man becomes the servant of Passion and Whim; they are hard task- masters and even the cold discipline of Pure Reason is a life destroying thing. I have tried to describe my own ex- perience of the condition into which the soul will fall if man tries to live without the guiding hand of God; the sickness of his soul which will result from living in a chaotic and fear ridden world; or the torpor which will follow the attempt to drown the activities of his spirit. Cer- [109 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN tainly these are not conditions of free- dom and health. When the body is sick there are two classes of people who can describe the symptoms of the patient, the doctor (medical or spiritual) from whom he seeks advice, and the patient himself. Each will consider the symptoms from a different point of view, and their com- bined judgment may often be superior to that of either one alone. But of the symptoms of health this is less true. The doctors have no complete record of the symptoms of health for they rarely see it professionally, and from the nature of their profession they are only vaguely interested in it. We do not consider it the doctor’s business to keep us well; and they rarely see us when we are. Once our pains vanish, we vanish too, and our doctors see us no more until we have another pain. And, therefore, the [1107 THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE man who can best describe the symptoms of health is the man who has been sick but has recovered; the man who having known disease has fought his way out of it into a state of health and can compare the symptoms of these two states. This is part of the meaning of Christ’s saying, “Ye must be born again of water and of the spirit if ye would enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” and in this fact lies the power of Harold Begbie’s famous book “Twice Born Men.” 1 The man who seeks to be complete master of his own life—who tries to “go > it alone,” so to speak—finds that he is not free, and I have succeeded in con- vincing myself of the truth of the para- dox that true freedom of the soul can only be achieved by the utter surrender of the will to God. Not until you can say with perfect truth, “Not my will but thine be done,” will your will be free. Many of [111 ] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN us have presumed to reverse the words, saying in fact: “‘not thy will but mine be done.’ Slavery is the result. In order to explain what I mean I must ask you to leap out of the world of pain, fear, and unreality in which many of us have lived, into the real world—that is, God’s world—in which we might be living; the world of comparative spiritual health in which each one of us can, I believe, live if he chooses. I say compara- tive advisedly, because perfect health of body or soul is almost unknown to man. The vital principle—or life-giving air— of God’s world is faith in God—an un- questioning knowledge that there is a God; that He is wise and loving, and that we are His children and servants. Com- pare the man with such a faith with the man without it. The man without faith finds himself daily beset with questions as to what he ought to do which he can- [112 7] THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE. not answer. If he be conscientious he will want to work in the service of man- kind; he will, in short, want to be useful. But how shall he go about it? He will see a dozen, or a hundred, courses open to him, and a thousand things clamoring to be done, with no clear principle of guidance. All of the opportunities are worth considering and many of them look equally good, but whatever course he decides upon today will seem of doubt- ful wisdom tomorrow, and as a result, he will fall into one of two conditions, both of which are bad. Either he will be pulled hither and yon in a chaos, or whirling nebula, of conflicting claims, or else he will stop his ears to all of them and go plugging laboriously and mechanically away at one piece of work out of which all the life and possibility of vivid beauty has vanished. With no pole star or com- pass (no fundamental principle) to guide [ 113 | EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN him, his life will be a futile thing and he will know it for what it is; a thing not worth having. Such a vision is despair, and this very despair is the spur which may well prove his salvation. For if the man can attain a perfect faith in God the scene will shift as if by magic. ‘Then he knows that he is the servant of God; that the purpose of his life, and his only true happiness, lies in willing, loving service, and at once chaos becomes clear vision. The welter of conflicting claims and duties gives place to order, the child of law, and clear day- light drives away the murk. To every claim which presents itself he can put the question, Is this the will of God, whose servant I am? and whatever the nature of the claim, opportunity or service, he knows that no serious mistake of judg- ment is possible, for he who always tries to do the will of God cannot go far wrong. [114 7] THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE It is the spirit behind the work and not the job itself that is important. Any work done by a man with the spirit of joyful service is good work in accordance with the will of God. No work is too humble, and none too exhausting, if it be done in that spirit. When Jesus said, *“My yoke is easy,” that was a part of what he meant. No man who is con- sciously doing what he believes to be the will of God will feel burdened. This is partly due to the fact that fear is ban- ished; relieved of that killing strain, he will feel at once the sense of freedom. He will know peace, the phrase in the prayer book, “the peace which passeth under- standing.” The comfort which bathes the man whose life is unified or polarized by a firm and simple faith is a heavenly thing, and if faith did nothing more for him than thus to orient and unify his motives and [115 ] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN his efforts, it would amply justify the struggle to attain and hold it. For it is a battle, and often a hard one, which I shall try later to make clear. It is true that faith will give a man a clear standard of values by which to decide upon his course but that is only a small part of its power, for it will also banish fear, the greatest enemy of man; the Devil’s most powerful weapon. To the man of faith fear is literally unknown; it has been clean wiped out. Take, for instance, fears about money, a form of strain which saps the vitality of many a man. These commonly take the form of fears of unemployment for the man without capital (the workingman) and fear of loss of capital for the man who has it; fear of business depression or the fail- ure of some business venture. But the man who works in the service of God will never lack employment for it puts re- [ 116 |] THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE liability and power into any work to which he puts his hand, so that to an employer he is like treasure trove. The man who works for God first and for a dollar second will never lack the dollar. Good service to society is always well paid. The man animated with the spirit of service will be the last man dropped from the payroll by the shrewd employer. Business depressions may come and go but the hold of such a man upon his job is too strong for them to break. No de- pression is deep enough to reach and dis- lodge him. And what is true of the workingman is true also of his employer, the capitalist. ~ His troubles and his fears arise from the conditions of the markets. In times of depression some manufacturers’ output will go begging. But it will not be the output of the man animated with a spirit of service, for he will have woven his [117] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN faith into his goods. ‘To such a man cus- tomers will stick. Many business failures are the result of taking chances; of speculation or gambling, in some form. The man who works only for dollars wants to get them quick and is not too careful how he gets them. This spirit tends to promote shoddy work and gambling methods, which will sooner or later come home to roost. But the man who works for his own soul and who really feels that he is in the service of God, is exempt from these temptations and, therefore, protected from the fears which follow in their wake. Another group of fears by which men are harried are those of disease and death. From these the man of faith is wholly immune, for if he believes in God, he knows himself to be immortal, and he can honestly say that whether he live or whether he die it matters not. Of [ 118 ] THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE course faith will not protect a man against all the ups and downs of life, and it is better so, for variety is the spice of life and monotony an intolerable bur- den. But the man of faith will not worry about these ups and downs. The petty worries of the household, which bulk so large in these days, will have no terrors for him, for he lives in a world in which the squabblings of cooks, chambermaids and choremen are inaudible. What if the cook does give notice? He will not starve. A little inconvenience is no great misfortune, and if he is put to it, he can cook his dinner and tend the furnace himself. His equanimity will not be ruffied by such trifles. Whatever comes to him he will know that it is good, and will be content. Against the hounding fear of public opinion, he is protected also, for if he has done his best to serve his community [119 7 EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN and his God, he will fear no man’s opin- ion. In the phrase of a famous American public servant he “can look any man in the face and tell him to go to Hell.” Few men of middle age can look back upon their experience and deny the fact that most of the anxieties which have caused them so much worry were about things that never happened. In nine cases out of ten the worry was needless. It was a fear from which faith would have saved him. He will remember many days when he was harassed by a swarm of petty worries, each trivial in itself but — most burdensome in the aggregate, all of which would have vanished if he had been able to lift himself into the higher strata of consciousness from which they could be seen in true proportion. Faith will give a man just that power by pro- viding a new scale of values. C1207 THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE Faith in God will not only unify a man’s ~ efforts, and banish his fears, but it will endow him with eternal youth. That is perhaps its greatest blessing. The spirit of youth has many ingredients, but the most important of them are adventurous courage, and sympathetic alertness, which bestow the power to meet and to profit by changing conditions and which keep alive the romance of life. The spirit of youth is the spirit of action; and reflec- tion of high vitality and keen intelligence. The spirit of youth does not “srr in the seats of the scornful.’ It gets up and does something about it. Old age sits and criticizes. That is its trademark. These are normal qualities in young people which faith will not only keep alive, but will increase, so that the older a man grows the younger he is in spirit, paradoxical as that may seem. ‘The stodgy automatism of middle age,—that [ 121 ] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN lee shore upon which many of us drift as a result of a comatose or submerged soul will never wreck the man with faith. You will see in him the sensitive alert- ness and sympathy of a healthy child, unmixed with the sentimental softness to which older people are so prone. Sentimentality is a weakness which drugs the soul; it is the child of sloth—the father of sin—and it has nothing in common with the alert sympathy which is the child of faith. Such alertness, imaginativeness and courage make a favorable soil for spirit- ual growth. These are the children or the results of faith, and are a sure protection against the germs of spiritual old age, to which most of us fall such easy prey. Without faith a man will inevitably live in a fear ridden world or sink into a sod- den automaton; that is, he will grow old, which is partial death. [122] THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE These qualities, a true standard of value which puts power into his work; freedom from fear which relieves him from unnecessary strain, and the spirit of youth which enables him to expand and express his soul, characterize the man of perfect faith; in other words, the perfect man. But we need not despair if we find that we lack some wholly, all in part— and that at times we lose even those parts which we possess. Such is the fate of men. No man is perfect, and no man’s faith is always clear. Things bursting upon us suddenly may shake the equa- nimity of the most serene; ill health may cloud the vision and obscure the pole star of the most reverent, and the accidents of human life and the weaknesses of human beings may darken the mind of the most spiritual. But if we know the value of the powers which come to us through faith and have experienced the joy of [ 123 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN using them, we shall recover our balance after a shock and with the renewal of faith through prayer, we shall get back onto our course again and be all the better for the experience. To possess these powers full grown and always to be able to exercise them is a perfection which we can hardly hope for. There is only one example known to me of such a man—the man Jesus. Of Him this was true. These were some of His essential characteristics, and, as I have said before, intimate knowledge of the character of Jesus is essential to our faith, for thus we shall come to see the face of God, and there is nothing which will so quickly restore the vitality of a weakened faith as an earnest study of the teachings and of the life of Christ. When beset and beaten upon by the storms of life so that we seem to have lost our way, there is the guidance which will never fail [ 124 ] THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE to bring back the worshipper to his true course. Such is a dim and ill drawn picture of a soul in perfect health. It is an ideal state which men do not reach. Like the answer of the horse doctor to my ques- tion whether a horse was sound; “‘Sound! No! I never see a horse that was. But this one is sounder than most of ’em,”’ so it is with men. No man’s soul is in perfect health, but if we know what a healthy soul is like, it will be more pos- sible for us to imitate or approach it. [125 7] CHAPTER VI THE SKILL TO USE Tuning In “In the good old times” harps were an essential item in the furnishing of an orthodox Heaven, symbolizing, I sup- pose, the harmony of the soul of man with its Maker. But they have unfor- tunately become associated in our minds with clouds and dampness which the doctors have taught this generation to avoid, and as we now believe that Heaven may be entered from the ground, so to speak, I ask your permission to adopt the symbols of “‘ wireless” in this chapter. The souls of the faithful surrendered to the will of God must be kept constantly in tune so that they may receive His commands clear and unconfused by the [ 126 |] THE SKILL TO USE jangling discords of the natural world. No man can be an efficient servant who is unable to hear the word of command. It is not enough to say “Not my will but thine be done’; we must know what His will is. The soul is like a radio re- ceiving set which each man must learn how to adjust and must keep in perfect adjustment. The skill to do this is per- haps the only essential wisdom for man to seek. Without it the slave of God is not free; he is not even a useful slave. The healthy soul which I have tried to describe, the soul transfused with faith, must be maintained in health. In search- ing for the best way to do this I find the rules of medical hygiene useful. Assum- ing that you have a young and healthy soul, how are you to keep it so? In the case of your body the formula is good food, exercise in the fresh air and plenty of sleep. The formula for [ 127 |] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN the soul is akin to it. Your soul is young and healthy but it is not full grown; it needs food, exercise and rest to make it erow. The food of the spirit is comradeship with the great spirits who have gone before you, and with the spiritual beauty of the natural world which your God created to be part of your bread of life. The character of men of spiritual genius shines through their acts, for character speaks louder and more clearly than acts or words, and this source of sus- tenance is opened to us through the re- corded history of great men. There have been men of great spiritual power in every walk of life. We are not limited to the saints, the prophets and the mission- aries—Prophets of the Old Testament, Christ, St. Augustine and St. Francis, Livingston, Father Damien and _ the others. We may also feed on great char- [128 J THE SKILL TO USE acters like Washington, Chinese Gordon, Robert E. Lee and Lincoln, and great natures like Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Dante, and Shakespeare. Get ac- quainted with them and live with them. Comradeship with these men through their lives and writings will infuse your spirit with their power. But remember this, you are of the Christian faith, and whatever you choose and whatever you discard, frequent the society of Christ. If you do that you will have done well and you will know how to go on and do better. There is no form of spiritual food better than the intimate society of spirit- ual people. Such people radiate a life- giving influence which is priceless. Don’t miss your share of it. The great danger which we must guard against in selecting our spiritual food, is the temptation to eat candy and take [ 129 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN stimulants. We crave such things and people around us are rather prone to them too. In feeding their bodies they eat too much sugar, and too much fat, and they eat too often. Plain food and time enough between meals to digest it—that is the rule of health for the body. And it is the same with the soul. You can’t feed your soul on stimulants and sawdust and expect it to thrive. Don’t do it. A little candy, an occasional cocktail, or a cup of coffee, won’t hurt you. But don’t think you can live on them. And don’t eat too much or too often. Give your spirit time to digest what you feed to it; give yourself time to think. That is spiritual exercise. And it is important, also that your meals be regular and well timed. Don’t eat five meals a day or one, and don’t eat at two i the morning, when you ought to be asleep. The best spiritual [ 130 J THE SKILL TO USE mealtimes for the average person are morning and evening. These have been the times of prayer from time immemo- rial, and the psychoanalysts now come forward to inform us that these are the times at which the threshold of the sub- conscious mind is the lowest; that is, the times at which it is easiest to get things through to the subconscious mind’ which is in such close connection with the spirit. From very early times also it has been customary for religious people to pray at noon. “‘Morning, evening and at noon will I pray” says the Psalmist, and in my own case I have found that good advice. But the reason, I think, is dif- ferent from the reason for prayer morn- ing and evening. With most of us today the subconscious mind is hard to reach at noontime; the threshold is too high to step over, because at that time we are [131] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN immersed in the material and the busi- ness world. But that is the very reason for prayer or quiet thought at noontime. The spirit needs rest and food. If we feed it at that hour, we shall not be so ravenously hungry at night that we shall bolt our evening meal and get spiritual indigestion. I have spoken of morning, noon and night as the times to feed the spirit with prayer, and that is good, but when I feed it with reading or with human inter- course, the evening is the best time for me, because at that time my imagination is more alert and I remember better. It used to be my practice, as it is with most men, to read the newspapers in the evening and then go to bed, but the change in the condition of my mind which resulted from substituting the Testaments for the Transcript was mi- raculous. Your subconscious mind seems [132 7] i THE SKILL TO USE to spend the night in digesting what you put into your head in the evening. So don’t feed it newspaper chaff at that hour, or bridge whist. Feed it on fine literature, fine music, or the society of fine people. And take my word for it, you will detect the difference and so will your friends. There is another form of food for the body besides meat and drink, namely, the air we breathe—which we live on continuously—and cannot live without. It is so, also, with the soul. We must have good spiritual air to breathe; in other words, we must keep ourselves serene by the exercise of will power— avoiding anger, hurry and the petty worries of life, which pollute the air about us. It is a thing quite within our power to brush these states of mind aside, and to lift ourselves into the pure air of equanimity and benevolence. The [ 133 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN conscious exercise of the will for this purpose is what St. Paul meant, I think, when he said “‘Pray without ceasing.’’: So much for food. Now for exercise in the open air. Nothing is more essen- tial than to keep the spirit active and alert. Prayer, meditation and the prac- tice of your faith are the ways to do it. These are peculiarly individual things. They are different for every soul, just as different forms and amounts of exer- cise are required by each human body. But they cannot be neglected or fatty degeneration of the soul sets in. Each of us must have his sanctuary in which to pray, each of us must use the silent places of nature for quiet thought, and each of us must practice some form of common worship in a regular and systematic way. Such precepts are commonplaces in the rules of bodily hygiene, but they are far more important in the world of the spirit. [134 7] THE SKILL TO USE Now, what do we mean by spiritual fresh air? The body cannot do without it and neither can the soul. The door to it is opened by the immortal youth which your faith will give you. One of its qualities is the spirit of adventure; the joy of taking risks and seeking ad- ventures for your faith. Like the knight errant of old, going on a dragon. hunt for his best girl, so the soul must adven- ture and do battle for its faith. That is the fresh air on which the soul is fed. Faith is a great adventure! Never for- get that, but do not confuse it with wildness and undisciplined conduct. With those it has nothing in common. Your knight errant was no undisciplined fighter. His every act was governed by the sternest rules: the laws of the Round Table were like the etiquette of the Four Hundred. The distinction is so vital that you [135 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN must pardon me if I labor the point. Many young people see no distinction between adventure and gambling, but it is a vital one. Adventure in the spirit- ual world is taking risks for the sake of your faith; and not just for the fun of it. The latter is gambling, taking risks to satisfy an appetite or a passion. The instinct to take risks is one of the most deep rooted in the race. It is the result of having lived for some hundred thou- sand years ina world full of dangers to life and limb. The men who have survived, survived through the skill and courage with which they met them. Now the exercise of skill is always pleasant and so we who survive like danger; we would not part with it on any account; the monotony of perfect safety is a killing thing. This is what we sometimes call the sporting instinct, [136 7 THE SKILL TO USE or the spirit of sportsmanship. Whether we realize it or not it is there, deep bedded in our nature. If we do not put it to a good use, it will put itself to a bad one, for “The Devil always finds a job for idle hands to do.” It is perhaps the most important object in our lives to find a spiritual outlet for this craving be- fore it breaks from our control and gets into mischief. Very fortunately, spiritual adventure will satisfy it far better than gambling, and it is not for nothing that Christianity is the most adventurous religion in the world. It is founded on the sporting instinct; that is the secret of its power. And failure to grasp that fact is the reason why Christian Scientists so often fall a prey to sentimentality, for they have emasculated Christianity and greatly weakened it as a sportsman- like or knightly venture. They have abolished sin and pain—saying that such [ 137 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN things are unreal and do not exist. But as a matter of fact, pain and suffering are essential to life. They are the true signs that you are alive. Think for just one minute of the grand adventure of Christian immortality and then for another of the wild faith which enabled Jesus to announce that “‘he who loseth his life shall find it,’ or of his precept, ““take no heed for the morrow, what ye shall eat or what ye shall put on.”’ Give five minutes of concentrated im- aginative effort to picturing what these sayings imply and then deny, if you can, that our Christian faith provides all the opportunities for adventure that the most greedy can crave. The fact is that Christianity is such a sporting proposi- tion that it has daunted all but the bold- est, and only isolated individuals have ever tried to live by it. But I suggest to you quite seriously that it is worth trying; [188 7] THE SKILL TO USE that it is in fact the breath of life, for the lack of which we die. Let the young men of power in search of a profession turn away from business and go into the ministry, in spite of the fact that as a profession it 1s said to be poorly paid. You will find that it is not. The bread » of life is not all bought with dollars. The minister who is worthy of his job is a well-paid man. If he honestly serve society he will get dollars enough to buy his bread, and in addition he will get the bread of life thrown in for good measure; the amazing comfort born of the knowledge that he is one of God’s most useful servants. Or once clearly grasp what is meant by Christian immortality, by our belief that each of us is a son of God—that is a part of Him—and you will realize what a wild adventure it is to enlarge that part by driving forward into the unknown I 139 |] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN world which lies before every scientific adventurer. No one who sees the full beauty and power of these things will ever complain that life lacks excitement and resort to the dull business of ordinary gambling. Think of the possibilities of adventure in social service when it is illuminated and shot through with a romantic Chris- tian faith. And so I say to you that life viewed from this angle is the most excit- ing adventure which man can conceive, and that only the coward or the dunce will ask for any other. This is what is called the dream of the idealist and is alleged to be an unreal world. But that I do not believe. Whatever men may say to the contrary, I say the ideal or spiritual world is the only real world; the only world in which man can be truly alive. The last rule of spiritual hygiene is [ 140 J “THE SKILL TO USE plenty of sleep. This will be found the easiest of all the rules by those who have obeyed the others, for they will bring you serenity and peace; the sense of having played the game which will give you the sleep of the just. It will come without effort, a thing of nature. Of course I do not mean only the sleep of a sound and tired body, but the rest from labor of the soul conscious of having done its work; the complete relief from fear and worry of every sort and description. Aiquinimitas, a heaven on earth. And now like the well behaved smelt on your dinner table, served with his tail in his mouth, I end where I began. The souls of the faithful must often be tuned to the pitch of God’s universe. Worship is the way to do it and so the technique of worship is our most vital study. We have all seen the first violinist at [1417] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN a concert of the Symphony Orchestra tune his instrument on the fly. He can do in a second what might take a novice five minutes and do it better. Or com- pare the skill of the wireless expert ad- justing his receiving set with your own efforts in that direction. The tuning of the soul is like that, I think. Most of us boggle at it grossly, or throw up our hands and remain sin- fully out of tune. But it is a skill which we must acquire at peril of our spiritual life. We can’t begin too early or study it too hard. E 142 ‘J CHAPTER VII BROKEN STRINGS Those who frequent the Symphony Concerts have often heard a string on one of the first violins break with a whang, and must have been amazed at the steadiness of the player making shift to finish the phrase on the remain- ing three, and then repairing the damage swiftly and with skill. If he had jumped from his chair instead, thrown his in- strument at the audience, and bounced off the stage, he would have behaved in exactly the way many of us do when one of the heart-strings which we de- pend upon in the material world is broken by accident and leaves us crip- pled. The instrument of life has per- . haps four main strings, like the vio- [ 143 |] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN lin —our dearest, personal relations to husband, wife, child and friend; our health of body and mind; our material resources whether income or capital; and our love of our nation and our race. These are all temporal and temporary relations—short lived and subject to sud- den change — which are on a wholly dif- ferent level or strata from our life in the spiritual world. The shattering of any of them should leave that life untouched. But all men have seen in themselves or in others, such accidents in the material world shatter what men call their faith. I have known men, for example, who thought they believed in God, but who woke up to find that they didn’t when the death of wife, child or friend, sud- denly wrenched them from their moor- ings and cast them adrift in sleet and gale upon a lee-shore. ‘There comes back to me the story of a musician whose [ 144 7] BROKEN STRINGS life and livelihood depended upon his music, in whom faith was shattered when deafness fell upon him. Many cases occur where men put their work and their money into business with other men whom they trust, who betray them and leave them shattered and penni- less; and there were those to whom the American Civil War, or the World War, through which we have just passed, seemed a catastrophe wholly incompat- ible with the rule of a just and loving God. But stop long enough to consider what such an attitude means. The man whose faith in God is destroyed by any or all of these occurrences, never in fact, had a true faith. A faith which dies so easily was not a faith, but an intel- lectual conception, a precept, a philoso- phy, if you like, but not a life. Is man more just than his Maker or more wise? [ 145 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN His knowledge of the scheme of the uni- verse in which he lives, great as it has grown to be, is so minute in comparison with the wisdom of the God who made it, as to be almost negligible. What he knows, compared with what he does not know, is trivial. And yet men with their puny knowledge presume to judge God, and to declare that some catas- trophe which disturbs the smooth run- ning of their lives—the breaking of some string which binds them to life —is evidence that God does not know his business or that he does not rule the world. The violinist has pitched his instrument into the audience and fled from the stage. That such trials and such attitudes are not of modern origin is proved by the Book of Job. Read in the light of these experiences, it might have been written today. Man has ever been [146 7] BROKEN STRINGS prone, it seems, to think himself “‘more wise than his Maker.” To make it even clearer, take an example out of daily life. Suppose that any one of us were to walk into the assembling room of the great shops of the General Elec- tric Company in Schenectady, where me- chanics were putting together the parts of a 50,000 K.W. alternating current generator. These contrivances look com- plicated to the average man and _ it would never occur to him to stop the work and tell the workmen that the designer of that machine didn’t know his business. If he did such a thing, he would be locked up as a dangerous lunatic. But the plan of that generator is simplicity itself beside the scheme of the universe. The men therefore, who dare to criticize God’s handiwork can only be those who are so ignorant and so unimaginative that they have C1477] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN hardly realized that there is a plan and a God. Criticize Charles Steinmetz for his design of the generator by all means if you choose, but beware how you set yourself up to criticize the work of God. You will not be locked up in the prisons of men, but you will be locked in a far worse place — the dungeon of your mind in company with a torpid soul. Such incidents as “war, pestilence, famine or sudden death” are not acci- dents which can destroy true faith in the Almighty, but wise and _ benef- icent acts of grace designed to try man’s faith. If a man’s faith will not stand up to these blasts, the sooner he finds it out the better, for it merely proves that what he called his faith was not the real article. He is better off without it for then at least the space ~ is available for something better. [148 J BROKEN STRINGS Like the violinist when the string snaps in his face, a man may well be startled, and even dismayed momen- tarily by the accidents of life, but if he has a real faith, he will throw himself upon it all the more at such times in order that God may pull him through. The violinist, with three sound strings instead of four, uses the ones he has all the harder, and men of faith cling more desperately to it when washed overboard by the storms of life. Faith is the offspring of love which is unshakable; the faith which can be shaken is not faith, but a philosophy or creed — good things in their places, but poor substitutes for faith. They cannot pass the acid test. Faith as I feel it, is an inner heat welling up out of the heart and no event in the ma- terial world can stop the flow. Let me put this to you in the form of [149 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN a story. Years ago, before the automo- bile deluge, my business required me to travel a good deal in central Massa- chusetts, with an old-fashioned horse and buggy. At intervals along the country roads, some good Samaritan had placed watering troughs or barrels into which a hillside spring had been piped to quench the thirst of horse and man. Many of them came from shallow sources and dried up under the August sun, but one of them was known far and wide as a hardy perennial. It never dried up or froze up. Now it happened one hot forenoon, that I came to that spring a thirsty man with a thirsty horse, and behold the barrel was empty and dry. Sam, the driver, whose tongue was fairly hanging out of his mouth, cursed the luck with fluency and power and gathered up his reins. But I had a “real think.” [ 150 7] BROKEN STRINGS “Hold on, Sam,” I said, “that spring can’t be dry. It’s never been dry since this country was settled.”’ “‘Look at the d thing. It’s been dry for a week,”? was his only answer. But I wouldn’t have it. That sort of miracle doesn’t happen. Jumping out of the trap, I climbed the bank onto the wooded mountain side from which the spring bubbled and in five minutes the mystery was solved. When I reached the spring, there it was sure enough brimming its little pool. It was only the connecting pipe that was at fault. A wind storm some days before had blown a tree across it. The connection was broken but the spring was not dry. A few min- utes work cleared away the wreckage, readjusted the pipe and slaked the thirst of horse and man. That is for me a good symbol of the [151] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN results which follow so often on the ac- cidents of life. When a man’s wife, with whom he has lived in peace and joy for twenty years, is torn out of this world by an agonizing illness, through which he has nursed her, he would be less than human —a mere brute —if he were not shaken to the core. There will be months during which his world seems shattered and he will long for death. The falling tree has crushed him. But he is not dead and if he has within him the spring of faith in God, his life-long habit of worship wil ulti- mately repair the damage and he will proceed to serve and thank his God. [ 152] CHAPTER VIII THE BATTLE OF FAITH I When I was young I used to suppose that faith in God was like red hair, you either had it or you didn’t have it. I didn’t have it, but now that I have, I find that the thing is not so simple. Like everything worth having you must fight to keep it. At least that is the case with me. By the grace of God I have been given faith, but to retain and enlarge it I must fight the fiercest of all wars, a civil war, to which there seems no end, against my blindness and my folly. In that battle between body and soul — between the temptations of the carnal man and the will to serve God, I have gained some experience in regard to [ 153 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN weapons and the tactics of the enemy which may be of value to others. The prize fighter goes into the ring stripped to the buff — the rescuer leaping from the wharf to save a drowning man stops long enough to throw off coat and boots —the explorer battling with the barren north lightens his equipment to the limit —all men, in fact, who know their business, go out to fight the forces of nature in light marching order. I ask you to recall how in describing the adventures of the northern explorer, I noted the fact that his equipment was expensive and heavy. Bought ready made from Abercombie and Fitch, it contained among other things heavy rifles worth $50.00 apiece, which were of no use to him, because there was no game in that country on which they could be used. A single barreled 20-bore shotgun at a cost of $10.00, and 100 feet [ 154 ] THE BATTLE OF FAITH of gill net procurable at any Hudson Bay Company post for $2.00, would have been worth more to him than all his other baggage, for they would have enabled him to live on the country, and thus to save his life. But he didn’t have them. When he left the shore he took along food enough to have lasted an Indian family all winter. But he had to throw much of it away because of its weight, and he starved to death. Many years ago I learned by bitter experience not to load myself down with heavy baggage but to use the lightest possible equipment and the least amount of it. The lighter you travel the safer you are. And this is true, I think, not only of camping outfits, but also of religious creeds. Creeds are intellectual structures built by men, in which to house their faith. Until you have a faith to house you need [155] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN no creed. You can get a ready-made creed from the people who supply them, just as the explorer got ready-made equipment. You may find yourself, however, in the same dilemma that he was, with a creed too heavy for your faith or unsuited to the spiritual regions in which you want to travel. So I say again, travel light. But do not jump to the conclusion that I advise you to dis- card creeds or that I think men can get along without them. ‘They can’t. Creeds are necessary religious equip- ment. But they must be selected and designed with clear vision of the spiritual country in which they are to be used. and the spiritual strength of the explorer. Amid the controversies which rage around the creeds and which have driven many out of the Churches, we may easily fall into the error of supposing that the [ 156 J THE BATTLE OF FAITH average man does not feel the need of them. But that is not the fact. The most familiar accusation of the man in the street against the minister is that he is unpractical, and when you come to analyze that charge you find that what he objects to is not that the minister has too much creed but too little. All business men live by a creed; they could not do business without one, and there are few remarks more common among them than the saying, “I haven’t many principles but what I have I stick to.” Their whole method of business is controlled by creed; the time-honored “customs of the trade,” which represent the distilled experience of generations in adjusting theory to practice. When they say ministers are unprac- tical or ignorant of life, they mean that these men’s creeds are vague or that they don’t put them to practical use. And [ 157 J] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN the charge may be warranted, for creeds are the rules for applying faith to life, the efforts of men whose business it is to teach the relation of the soul to God, to rationalize, explain and apply to the daily life of man the great central truths of life itself. If the common man finds the creeds of the church incredible, and the ministers themselves fighting about what they mean, he is hardly to blame if he discards them and calls the ministers impractical dreamers. Frequently he finds that the minister who sets up to sell him religious faith lives in a world of fancy which has little or nothing to do with life. He won’t buy the goods be- cause he can’t use them. The tools and weapons offered him to fight the battle of faith are unsuited to his use and so he doesn’t use them. The dilemma is a real one to which I can offer no patent remedy. My suggestion is that each [ 158 7] THE BATTLE OF FAITH man must explore the spiritual world for himself, taking as his guide the best spiritual advisor available, and, starting with light equipment, modify, abandon or enlarge it from time to time as he discovers his personal powers and needs. He and his guide must work together, each learning what the other can teach—the minister learning prac- tical life and the business. man_ spirit- ual life. This is the way the great explorers have won success — the man of trained mind learning the lore of na- ture from the savage and the savage learning the use of the compass, for ex- ample, from the scientist. To put my suggestion in a sentence, don’t swallow your creed whole, for it may disagree with you. Eat a little of it at a time and live mostly on the country as the Indians do. Thus you will be able to fight for your faith with [ 159 | EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN both hands free instead of with a bundle under each arm. | Lest you should suppose that this is the idea of a modern skeptic I refer you to the Epistle to the Romans, III, V, X, passim. “‘Now I would not have you ignorant that apart from the cere- monies of the law, there hath been mani- fest a righteousness of God, being wit- nessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness through faith, as it is written, The just shall live by faith.” This was, perhaps, the most vital prin- ciple of Christ’s teaching, that faith must come before creed and be used to vitalize it. The Pharisees were those who sought to live by the law unlighted by faith and Christ called them hypo- crites. But He was not against the law. He upheld it. We must have both faith and creed, but faith must be first and must dominate. [ 160 7 THE BATTLE OF FAITH Il Permit me a short digression in which to tell you something of a particular one of my own battles of faith. It took hard knocks to teach me that I must subordinate my will to the will of God. That it was so hard for me to learn was due in part, I think, to the fear that such a surrender would take away free will and lead to fatalism, which I abhor. My fear seemed jus- tifiable; for how could I surrender my will to God and also keep it free? If God knows and rules all things where does the will of man get its exercise; how save it from degeneration in such a sedentary scheme? Now I am neither theologian nor philosopher enough to attempt to set forth for you the ar- guments upon this subject, and it is quite unnecessary, for some of the great- est minds in the world have set them- [1617 EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN selves to the task, with what success you can easily discover. All that I mean to attempt is to trace, if I can, the way in which my experience solved the riddle for itself. In the natural world men claim to have discovered a law which they call evolution, by which all living things are controlled. The plants and the ani- mals that have survived under the op- eration of this law are those which have obeyed the eternal, universal law. The. disobedient. have been annihi- lated. These have no conscious choice but’ man has a choice. He has the freedom to choose between obedience to the universal law and _ disobedi- ence. If he choose obedience he does nothing more than the prosperous member of the animal or vegetable -world. But he can choose to dis- obey, and in my previous chapters I [ 162 | THE BATTLE OF FAITH have tried to show what will be the result. If he have faith in God and the cour- age to throw himself upon it and leap into the unknown he will find to his amazement that his will is more free than before; that he can use it with more scope and power than before he gave it up. The surrender of his liberty has made him free. Here are some of the ways he can exercise his will. There are occasions when he must use all the will power he has in clinging fiercely to his faith when one of the storms of life has wrecked his ship and washed him overboard. To cling to that seemingly unsubstantial raft will exhaust his muscles and throw him back upon his nerves. But when once he has passed through that ex- perience and come safe to the shore, it will have no more terrors for him. [ 163 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN These are the great crises of life when the will is strained to the breaking point, but there are strains in every day life which are even more wearing because more subtle. Faith should abolish anx- iety and fear but these are such in- sidious enemies that when the body is fatigued, we fall an easy prey to them and a mighty effort of the will is de- manded to throw them off. It must be done or they will eat into the heart of faith. Another demand upon the will is in the practice of prayer. No faith can live without this food, administered daily and even hourly. The supply of spiritual food must be constant in order that the man may vitalize every act of the day with the will of God, his master. But it requires great will power to maintain the perfect disci- pline of worship in the whirl and hurry [ 164 7] THE BATTLE OF FAITH of modern life. Nothing is easier than to allow this necessary practice to be pushed aside by the petty, but insist- ent, demands of a busy day. While nothing is more indispensable than the power which prayer alone can give, few things are easier than to forget it. Prayer is the only daily duty which the good servant must never shirk; but most of us shirk it often. If you find that the discipline of prayer does not re- quire all the will power you have to spare you are a saint indeed. The man who drinks deeply of the wine of faith must beware lest it go to his head, for it is a heady nectar which may carry him off into a world of fancy from which the hard facts of the ma- terial world are dimly seen. But as the great majority of God’s servants must serve Him daily in the world of fact, the man who loses his hold on [ 165 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN fact is an unfaithful servant. Nothing is easier than to allow faith to degene- rate into fancy so that hard facts be- come soft and the man falls into loose thinking and quackery. Patient ve- racity, tireless effort to codrdinate fact with faith, the use of reason and method to the limit of their legitimate scope, never to guess or to rely on faith when facts are available—such habits of daily life give a man’s will exercise enough to keep it in hard condition. These few suggestions may well prove sufficient to quiet your fear lest in surrendering to the will of God you should lack opportunity for the exer- cise of free will. But there are many more. They are perhaps innumerable, and I shall only give one more example which is, however, the best of all for me. Each faithful follower of Jesus must take up his cross and follow Him. He C 166 7] THE BATTLE OF FAITH must be willing —nay, eager —to suffer for his faith, to face ridicule among other things for’ the Master’s sake. That is one of the hardest things for me — to make myself ridiculous for my faith, — but it is one of the most neces- sary. As.is my habit, I shall put this ex- ample in the form of a parable. Years ago at Christmas time I received, among other presents (from people whose friendship for me was stronger than their knowledge of my character) a couple of potted plants. One was what I call ““Wandering Jew,” from igno- rance of its true name, and the other a little rose bush. I have no knowledge of flower growing and very little knack with plants. But I like them and so, as I was away from the house all day, and often for days at a time, and could not look after them myself, I gave [ 167 ] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN them in charge of the parlor maid and directed her to water them and keep them as much as possible in the sun. This she did after the manner of par- lor maids, that 1s, whenever she thought of it. The Wandering Jew is a foliage plant of incredible toughness, which no amount of neglect will kill, and so it throve well under this treatment. But roses are delicate, sensitive things. Mine languished; the flowers died, no new buds appeared, and it fairly crawled with green aphis. Obviously, it was in process of death from neglect. I sprayed it once in a while with soap or tobacco extract, but without much effect. It needed something more. And then by chance a German professor with an Austrian wife came to visit me. The professor was a high expert in City Planning and immensely pre- [ 168 J THE BATTLE OF FAITH occupied with turning his ideas into bricks and mortar, while I was pre- occupied with my efforts to turn my ideas into dollars or dams or power houses. We were both fatuously busy fussing about our little hopes and fears. But the Austrian lady was of an- other type; calm, mystical, unworldly, impractical, but strangely winning. She noticed at once my poor little rose plant, remarked that it was dying and asked if she might take care of it. Of course she might! Nothing would please me more than to have some one else do it, provided they did not bother me. And so she took it over and liter- ally seemed to pray over it. Morning, noon and night she was forever fussing over it, often in quite ridiculous ways, while her husband and I jeered at her. She would kneel down by it, pat it, handle the leaves and smell it; and all [169 7 EXCEPT YE BE. BORN AGAIN of a sudden it began to thrive. The leaves changed their color from the yellowish tinge portending death to a darker green; the aphis vanished; buds appeared and later flowers. She had literally loved and tended the thing back to life. ‘Truly seen, a most beau- tiful, miraculous and sacred act of the deepest significance, but one which neither I (nor, I think, the bustling German professor) took any notice of at the time. Quite recently, walking in the wind and snow beside the Connecticut River, the picture of that lady loving her rose bush came back to me, as clear as if it were yesterday instead of §fif- teen years ago. In fact, more clear — far more — than when I saw her with the eye of the flesh, and I saw the true mean- ing of that parable. The rose plant was the symbol of a young and ten- [170] THE BATTLE OF FAITH der faith in God which my brutal neg- ligence had all but killed when the Lord sent down his angel to save it from me. She did it, but it was her soul and not mine that reaped the reward. She had the courage to brave ridicule for her faith. It is the sort of courage that we all need, the courage to brave the laughter and scorn of others, just as that Aus- trian lady did for her rose. Especially when you are young that is a hard thing to do. You fear the laughter of your contemporaries. It takes rare courage to face it. But such courage is the highest courage in the world, and the most necessary. It was one of the most significant char- acteristics of our Lord Jesus Christ. He showed it again and again. “Son, why hast thou so dealt with us?” “Wist ye not that I must be about my ivi a EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN Father’s business?”? “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews!” “Jews, behold your King.” If you can make the scenes in which these things were said perfectly vivid to yourselves you will have seen a truly miraculous thing; a courage beyond all other recorded courage; the courage of a King to make himself ridiculous. Think of that, and it will not be so hard for you to make yourselves a little ridiculous in the service of your faith. But do not think to escape ridicule. You can never do that and save your soul alive. “Take up your cross and follow me.”? What do you think that means? It means that your faith in God must be sturdy enough to with- stand suffering; that you must be able [1727] THE BATTLE OF FAITH and willing to make sacrifices for your faith and to face ridicule. This is an example of the sort of thing you may have to do. For worship and prayer you will need a sanctuary, a place hallowed by usage and so tuned to your mood that it will help you in the difficult art or business of praying. And you need such a place not only to pray in but to think in; a place where you can go daily to arrange your thoughts, to get your head in tune with your heart and soul. If you are like me, you will not find such a place in any of our Protestant churches. Most of them are closed when you want to use them, and if you find one that is open the sexton and the spiders will scare you away. You will have to make such a place for yourselves, and you can if you are not afraid of ridicule. What- ever your housing arrangements may [173] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN be, a place can be made for it in your home. “Go into your closet and there pray.” That’s not a joke. A good sized closet will do very well; a candle, a crucifix and a trunk for an altar, and there you are. You will have no troubles except one; the worst trouble in the world —the fear of ridicule. What will husband, father, brother, sister, or child think of it? Most probably they will laugh at you, or still worse, they will be shocked (or think they ought to be shocked) and will mur- mur something about‘ ‘Catholic ritual- ism.” That will be hard for you to face, but you must face it, or turn away at your peril. But before you give it up, face the risks involved. Just ask yourselves this question. Which is the greater, your fear of your family and friends or your fear of God? There is only one [1747] THE BATTEL OF FAITH answer to the question put in that way. So set your teeth, put your will into ° it, and “‘face the music.”’ The serious minded reader, if I am so fortunate as to have one whose patience has lasted to this point, may be tempted to throw his book down in despair, feeling that instead of de- scribing the stubborn battle to hold and expand the empire of faith, I have wandered off into a semi-philosophical discussion of dogma and free will. But let me recapitulate. I began by sug- gesting that in arming for the contest we do well to start light and alter our equipment as experience dictates and I then described the enemies to be en- countered, the five devils of disaster, fear, sloth, vagueness and_ ridicule. They are wary adversaries, whose con- certed attack,—one down and another come on—requires a sleepless vigilance [175 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN which will try the temper of your steel, and if you find that this is not a fierce and life-long battle, you are more for- tunate than I. [ 176 J CHAPTER IX MIRACLES AND MYTHS An opinion may be commonplace with- out being insignificant, for the com- monest things are the most important, and so I face the risk of boring you while I record the fact that the Bible has now become for me the most in- dispensable text-book in the _ world. There are doubtless several hundred thousand others of whom it is equally true that this is the only book which will always meet their need. There is no mood of spiritual elation to which men or nature can raise them, and none of spiritual abasement to which their sins can force them down, which does not find there some passage akin to itself which will help to turn elation C1777] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN into useful action, or to take the bitter- ness out of repentance. But it is not an easy book to read with understand- ing, for only after years of patient study, if ever, can its full significance be grasped. Much of the Old Testa- ment, for example, is even now, al- most meaningless to me because I am still ignorant of its historical setting. Owing to the fact that even at the date of the latest Gospels the art of writing was still little practised, I do not doubt that all but Christ’s most vital say- ings have been lost to us, and I find that such as we have are in a form so concentrated that however often I read them I always find new and _ illumi- nating truths. The natural conse- quence of such verbal compactness is that only those who bring to the study of these Books a burning faith and great earnestness of purpose, can hope [1738 7] MIRACLES AND MYTHS to extract their full value as spiritual food, and it does not, therefore, sur- prise me that until after my conver- sion the Bible was to me a closed book. A skeptical youth born in an age of scientific criticism is bound to find many obstacles in his path. In the good old times, I. am credi- bly informed that men accepted the “King James Version” of the Bible verbatim as literally true from cover to cover, but during the last fifty years the critics and the scientists have made this very difficult, for the critics have discovered many omissions and _ inac- curacies in the text, and the scientists many apparent statements of fact which are not true. The great Huxley, for example, was able to satisfy himself that the history of the creation con- tained in Genesis was grossly inaccu- rate and that many other portions of [179 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN the Old Testament could only be re- garded as mythology or even demon- ology. Taken as poetry and epic literature the average boy without much religious sentiment might well prefer Homer and the Greek tragedians. It was so with me, and I do not think we can expect young people, educated as they now are, to bring to the study of the Bible such powers of imagination and reli- gious insight as will enable them to disentangle parables from statements of fact or to grasp the complicated sym- bolism of this greatest of all works of literary art. For the result of our methods of teaching is such that our children accept as gospel truth the statements of immature teachers about such obscure phenomena as the struc- ture of matter or the nature of electri- cal energy, while they regard the teach- C180 7] MIRACLES AND MYTHS ings of the sacred Gospels as fairy tales or worn-out myths. There are few fathers I fancy who have not heard their sons parade with confidence sci- entific conclusions about which the most eminent experts would say they were in doubt; for it seems that our young folk will reject many of the miracles in the Bible as unworthy of their in- telligence, while they swallow whole the miracles of light, heat and sound, among which we pass our nights. But this does not alarm or even surprise me. I behaved so myself, and perhaps our hope of a brighter future may lie in this very fact, for we live in an age of miracles so to speak. The amaz- ing discoveries of modern science have made many of the miracles of yesterday the common habits of today. Our im- aginations have been so stimulated and the war has brought us so much suffer- [ 181 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN ing that we may well have arrived at the point where we can read our Bible with a new vision and draw from it the spiritual power which we must have to save our tottering institutions and even our civilization itself. I do not think I was exceptiona] when as a boy I regarded miracles as cata- strophic examples of the willfulness of the Almighty, breaking his own law for his own satisfaction and this nat- urally made me feel that the miracles in the Bible not only did not add to its authority but served to destroy it. The nineteenth century was too critical and scientific-minded to be imposed upon in that way. But the most recent dis- coveries of science have forced us to modify this view, for we now live in daily company with forces the nature of which we do not know. Miracles — that is, effects, the cause of which is [ 182 7] MIRACLES AND MYTHS obscure to us — are the commonest things, in life, and so I, at least, have been forced to adopt a wholly different at- titude of mind. Instead of being shocked or confused by many of the miracles in the Bible, my center of gravity has moved so far that I am more in dan- ger of thinking them unimportant. In this I find support in many sayings of Jesus which seem to indicate that he felt the danger of exaggerating the sig- nificance of his miracles of healing. The result of this change of attitude toward the stories and the miracles in the Bible has been such a blessing to me that I want to illustrate it specifi- cally and so I give here one or two ex- amples of what my recent studies of the Bible have brought me. At the outset I must confess that owing to my ignorance of the design of the temple upon the walls of which the great frescoes [ 183 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN of the Old Testament are painted, large sections of it are still very obscure to me, but I venture to assert that if the greatest artist of our day should under- take to describe the spiritual experi- ences of a man who, beaten down by the accidents of this life, was tempted to criticize the wisdom of the Almighty, he would pitch his manuscript into the fireplace after re-reading the Book of Job. That Book seems to me to fill the space so full that there is no room for another. The subject has been ex- hausted and we have been filled. When I was young many of the sto- ries of the New Testament seemed to me mere mythology or fairy tales which I had outgrown. Their true mystic value was beyond my comprehension, for my intellect was not then illuminated by faith. As an example of what I mean, I [184 7] MIRACLES AND MYTHS select at random the story of the Star of Bethlehem, which I regarded as mere feminine sentimentality. I did not be- lieve the story as a statement of fact and it never occurred to me that it might be a parable, so that until a very recent date I completely missed its beauty and power. But I have now come to see in it a marvelously vivid description of exactly what occurs to all twice born men. The “spiritual revolution’’ of conversion has been well described as a turning round of the man so that he faces God, and I find it literally true that like the shepherds of old each man turns round some night and sees in the East a great star which he follows to his Bethlehem where he does actually find the young child of his new faith just born in a humble place. Every word of the Bible story fits into my own experience, and I have [ 185 |] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN come to see in it not an incredible fairy tale, but a masterly description of one of the commonest experiences of life. It is not a myth to amuse the children, but a mirror held up to men in which they see their own lives more clearly than ever before. To me this legend is now a priceless link connecting me into the endless chain of an immortal past, present and future life. As an example of a miracle which I could not swallow, take the story of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. Read as a statement of literal fact regarding the material body of the man Jesus, it was repulsive and incredible; I could not possibly accept it in that form and no alternative was suggested. Now, however, I see it in a new light, which I offer very humbly because of my blunders in the past and because I recognize the fact that there are many [ 186 7] MIRACLES AND MYTHS wiser than I who take a wholly differ- ent view. With these I have no quar- rel. If you can believe in the virgin birth of Christ’s physical body by all means do so; but if you cannot, con- sider this view of it: What is the vital essence, or true reality of a man? I hear of men of science who solemnly affirm that the decaying carnal sheath in which we live for a day is the man himself. But to me it is incredible that so temporary and feeble a thing can be the end and purpose of creation. I hold that the real man is not his body but his soul,—his spiritual body which lived before and will outlive its cover- ing. Taken with the fact that all men except Jesus must be born again of the spirit before they can enter the King- dom of Heaven, I conclude that this second birth is the true birth of every [ 187 |] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN man, the birth of the spirit— an im- maculate conception — which is a mira- cle by the grace of God. The soul, or real spiritual body of every man is and must be of virgin birth, otherwise we are never truly born. But our Master Jesus was not a twice born man, for from the day of the birth of his body he lived in the world of the spirit with God in Heaven. On that day he was in literal fact immacu- lately conceived of the spirit, and I now find nothing in any version of the story of His birth which I have read which I cannot absolutely believe. I do believe it and I find the accounts in the Gospels quite in harmony with the law of the scientific and spiritual world. On this question which is now so hotly debated that an explosion in the Churches is threatened, I find my- self today in the comforting (though [ 188 7] MIRACLES AND MYTHS anomalous) position of believing that there is nothing to quarrel about. Though a liberal of the liberals, I can lie down with the fiercest fundamen- talist in the calm conviction that he will not, (in fact cannot,) bite me, for he has no teeth. | These are two examples of how faith and a more modern view of miracles have changed large portions of my Bible from wearisome or incredible mythology to lessons in the theory and practice of daily life. [189 *] CHAPTER X EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN I have been amazed and humiliated to find when men ask me, as they often do, how faith in God may be obtained, that the question irritated and alarmed me. What inquiry could be more natu- ral, more important, or simpler for the man of faith to answer, and why should I be irritated? It is a point over which I have puzzled long, bearing in mind my experience that when an assertion angers me, it is commonly because I am in the wrong, and when a question irritates me, it is because I ought to know the answer, but don’t. I now conclude that I am irritated because the ques- tion startles me. It comes at me from an unexpected quarter. The form and [ 190 ] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN not the substance of the question is what disturbs me, because it seems to assume that faith can be picked up like a house and lot, or like a knowl- edge of chemistry; that there must somewhere be a man who can {furnish it to you ready made. This to my mind is a dangerous mistake which is partly responsible for the destruc- tive confusion between faith and creeds, the assumption being that there is some patent medicine or other device which will cure all spiritual ills, like the “‘Mor- rison’s pill’’ to which Carlyle so aptly refers. There is none; that. box is empty. No man can give you faith, or teach it to you. My stubborn (perhaps stu- pid) insistence on this point, has sad- dened the hearts of my friends, I fear, for they feel that it amounts to de- nying the power and value of all re- [191] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN ligious education. To that point I do not go, but I do contend that faith can- not be taught, but only the forms of wor- ship — the Gospels, rituals and creeds. Faith is a free gift from God to all who ask it. ‘“‘Seek and ye shall find”; but you must be in earnest about it. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” God will give faith to all who seek it, but He cannot give it to those who do not. And if God can’t give faith except to the urgent searcher, can men do more? No, I repeat, men cannot give you faith, only God. But men can teach you the forms of worship developed by the age-long experience of mankind. Coming after faith, these are the tools and the skill you need, but if they come before faith or remain after it has vanished, they are useless or even worse. [ 192 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN You must earn your faith for your- self by intense labor and anguish of the spirit. In his essay on Compen- sation, Emerson declares that all things in this world must be paid for and al- though he excepts the soul, describing it as not a compensation but a life, I feel sure that he would have agreed that you must work for faith. Jesus said, ““Seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.” You must seek and you must knock, but do not seek from men. Faith comes by the grace of God. “Ye must be born again of the spirit” which comes from God alone. You must labor and search for it, but when it comes it will flourish amazingly like the grain of mustard seed. Conversion is the gift of God to those who pray to and serve Him. It cannot, I think, be produced by any method [193 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN of education. No priest can plant the seed. But there is virtue in religious environment and religious education. The hen does not create the chick— birth 1s a miracle of God — but she can keep the eggs warm and after the chick is hatched, she can feed and teach it. So it is with faith. Man cannot pro- duce it, but he can provide a warm re- ligious atmosphere favorable for its growth, and when the young faith is born, man can protect, inspire and en- large it. And so I conclude that the answer to the question, ““How do you get faith?”’ is; Pray for it to God; feel the need of it so intensely that the desire domi- nates your life, and God will give it. You will be born again. Ask of men — your earthly fathers — the gifts that they can give. But faith is not the child of man, but the child of God — for that T1947] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN you must ask your heavenly father. When the gift has come down to you from Heaven and lives upon the earth, the earth can feed it and it will grow; every instant of life will feed and clothe it. Men will crowd about you to share the riches of your faith, and the more you give away, the more you have left. This is how Jesus fed the multitude on five loaves and two small fishes and had more left afterwards than when — he began. To the scribes and pharisees, Jesus offered the gift of faith but they were -carnal men who refused it because it was beyond their imaginative power. “How can a man be born again when he is old?” Our world today is full of just such men. Jesus went up to Jerusalem and of- fered to the whole people of Israel the miracle of conversion and the King- [ 195 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN dom of Heaven, and when they spurned it, He went up to Golgotha, ascended the highest and most powerful wire- less sending tower ever built and dis- charged therefrom his message at such high potential, that it not only carried clean round the earth, but has con- tinued to circle it for two thousand years. [ 196 7] CHAPTER XI THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX Science vs. Religion The Protestant Churches are rent to- day by the struggle between the Fun- damentalists and the Liberals, the bone of contention being how to harmonize the findings of modern science with the theory and practice of traditional Christianity. The leaders of the battle are mostly clergymen who seem to re- gard with coldness the venturesome lay- man desiring to take a hand; who de- clare in effect that they are the chosen champions of faith and that they should be left undisturbed to fight it out. But I would remind them that the Churches are built for the worshipers and not for the priests and that it is [ 197 J EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN as much the duty of the layman as of his minister to face and to answer this question. It is vital to every one of us and for that reason, I make bold to suggest some considerations upon the subject. | I feel safe in assuming that Faith in God, or the religious instinct, is a natural possession of the normal child, but I think it may be no exaggeration to say that, before they are twenty, most men have lost it. This is a mere guess on my part, but whatever the proportion may be, it is undeniable that there are multitudes in our world today whose faith has vanished. Some have lost faith by starvation, and others by the accidents of life, such as disease, loss of property or loss of friends; some have wantonly murdered it by a sin- ful life, but from the great majority it has been filched, or stolen, away by [198 7] THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX the skepticism of the period, a skep- ticism which is produced by reason misapplied and by a false conception and misuse of the scientific or logical method of thought. It is to this class —those who have drifted into skep- ticism as a result of their liberal cul- ture—that I want to direct attention particularly. At skepticism—the child of reason—I have often before fired a shot, but now I want to concentrate my whole fire upon it and to light up as vividly as possible the hard-fought battle between Faith and Reason. Fail- ure to grasp the fact and the true mean- ing of this struggle appears to me to have plunged more souls into a Hell on earth than all the other forces com- bined. Faith in God, I hold to be the source of all human power; it arises from our feeling of weakness which makes us [199 7] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN long that there should be a God and leads us to find Him. It wells up out of the heart and is sustained by the will —for once man has felt the power which faith can give and has recog- nized that life is impossible without faith —he will never let it go. But mark this well, for it is vital: Faith comes from the heart; it is a feeling — an emotion—which man has exhibited from the dawn of history and to which he clings with an unreasoning (in fact an unreasonable) but desperate grasp. His feeling of God and of Immortality is one which he cannot completely ex- plain by any logical process — which he cannot clearly rationalize. He knows instinctively that it is essential, but he cannot tell you why. Faith is his life force — his will to live—the spark of life; the power that drives him on, but it is nonrational. He cannot C 200 7] THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX produce it by a _ purely intellectual method. And now upon the other side comes Reason, likewise a thing essential to the life of man. It is the quality which has differentiated him from the brutes; the power which in the struggle for sur- vival has given him the victory. It is his conscious intellect and reasoning faculty which has made it possible for him to fight his way up through the centuries to the mastery of nature which he now enjoys. Reason — intellect — memory applied to the phenomena of nature have made him what he is and have put beyond assignable limits the height of knowledge and power to which he may rise. And so, I repeat, reason is essential to the preservation of life. But once let it come to grips with faith — lhke- wise an essential thing—and it seems [ 201 | EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN that either reason or faith must die; that one must kill the other. IJt seems like an irrepressible conflict and, in fact, 7t is. If you apply the reasoning methods of science to your faith in God, you kill it. Science deals with demonstration, with measurement, with mathematical proof. The trade-mark of the scientist is skepticism. Nothing can be accepted until proved; what cannot be proved cannot be known; what cannot be demonstrated is not true. And so the scientist faced with the question of the nature of God and of the soul can only shake his head and say, “It cannot be proved; as a man of science I cannot affirm these truths. So far as my knowledge goes the soul is a function of the mind; the mind is part of the body; when the body dies the soul dies too. In science there is no immortal soul.” [ 202 || THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX And now if you turn to the philos- opher and ask him about God and the soul he must apply the reasoning method also; he must reason from the demon- strable facts of the material. world and by deduction and definition work out for you a theory of the life of man. By this method he will reach the con- clusion that the group of phenomena which he observes must have had a beginning or First Cause, and by dint of patient labor he will ultimately produce and display with triumph an idea of God. But such a thing is of small service to the man groping towards faith who demands an explanation of the living God whom he feels within him as the vitalizing principle of his life. The philosopher must perforce proceed by definition and dissection. But you can- not dissect a thing until it is dead and you cannot define it until it has ceased [ 203 |] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN to change, which also implies that it is dead. And so the philosopher can- not help you in your search more than the scientist; the one says he cannot know a living God, and the other hands you a dead one. With the psychologist or the psycho- analyst I sometimes find myself a little irritated because they try to apply the method of vivisection to the spiritual body. They seem to feel that they have succeeded in “beating the game,” so to speak, and are correspondingly pleased with themselves. But I must confess that in this matter my sympathies are with the common man when he catches these gentry fooling with his immortal soul. His instinct is to call for the po- lice. They might steal something. Vivi- section has achieved marvels in the world of science and in the service of man. The surgeon by vivisecting his [ 204 |] THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX guinea pig and sacrificing its life has saved the lives of men. The results justify him. Nay, I would go further and even sacrifice the lives of indi- vidual men in order to benefit the race. Such martyrdom is a proof of faith. But if, as the Master taught us, the life of God is the life of man, I dare not vivisect and kill my God, for if I do, I kill myself. And again, if you appeal to the theo- logian, you will fare no better, for he is the appointed servant of a Church — an institution —and so a bureaucrat by trade. . I readily admit the contention of the historian that an institution is a crystallized idea. There is certainly a sense in which that is true; but I would remind you that a crystal is a dead, not a living thing. At best it can trans- mit, but not produce light. [ 205 |] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN If the Church be such an institution, its servant the theologian, bound by his creeds, must follow the reasoning method. He may or may not transmit light but he can hardly produce it and give you life. These men, however, and their institutions, are of great service to us and one would remind the reformer — hammer in hand—who seeks to im- prove matters by shattering the crys- tal, that he cannot mend matters in this way. You may swallow the diamond whole without danger, but taken in pulverized form, it is more fatal than a poison. ‘Therefore, think twice be- fore you shatter the institution of a Church or any other ancient structure. This then is the conflict which the Spanish writer Unamuno calls the Tragic Sense of Life:— On the one side Reason, whose champions are the scientist, the philosopher and the theologian; and on [ 206 |] THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX the other Faith, the source of life, whose champion is the common man. It is the conflict of the intellect with the will to live; of the rational with the non- rational: of science with religion. And if, as is commonly assumed, it is a struggle in which one or the other party must die, the prophets of God might well be daunted by the forces arrayed against them. If it be true that we must sacrifice our reason to save our faith, or our faith to save our reason, science has indeed brought us to a desperate pass. But while it can- not be denied that multitudes have given up their faith for this. cause and that the churches are today tottering under the blows of those who will not abandon faith and therefore seek to beat your reason to death, I am bold enough to assert that the assumption is false. Both faith and reason can and [ 207 7 EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN must live. This I hold to be proved by what I know of history. Man with his will to live has fought with nature from the beginning of time. Neither has destroyed the other. On the con- trary, his progress has been buzlt wpon this struggle and is in fact the result of it and I am firmly convinced that the struggle between science and religion is of exactly the same nature; perhaps even the same one. Man has always lived in the presence | of danger; one might almost say he has lived by it and on it. The sporting in- stinct, the love of risk and danger so deep bedded in mankind, is the proof of that. What is the sense of pleasure which strong men feel when they hear wild beasts in the woods about them but an ancient instinct of danger and joy of fighting danger? Perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that men cannot E 208 |] THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX live without struggle, for they fear noth- ing so much as monotony, and if this struggle between Science and Religion — between Reason and Faith — can be brought out into its true perspective it may prove to be the moral equiva- lent of war, for which that great teacher, William James, so eagerly sought. In attempting to relate the struggle of Science and Religion to that be- tween man and nature, I must warn you at the outset that I shall retire into the imaginative world; that is, into what I feel to be the real world—and I begin by suggesting to you an analogy which I have found helpful. We often fall into the confusion of thinking that pain and joy are opposing and strug- gling realities; that, as with Reason and Faith, one must be killed to save the other. But this is not true. Pain and joy are not opposing forces but [ 209 |] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN two aspects or attributes of one power; the power of growth. Pain does not kill happiness; it may even produce it, for pain is a sign of growth, and growth, being the purpose of life, produces har- mony—that is, happiness. I see pain as simply the protest of the structure strained to its limit. When the muscle in your arm has put forth all its strength it cries out with pain; when your spirit is stretched to the breaking point by your effort to see the face of God, it makes you suffer. But that is the path to the “life more abun- dant” which Jesus offered men. So many fear to accept the gift! Such strains make the muscle in your body or the imaginative power of your soul stronger. They are not things to be avoided but to be sought. Or we may conceive of pain as the inertia or resistance of the flesh to the [ 210 J THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX spirit. It is from the painful struggle for happiness that personality is born; and one may believe that it was in part to prove this that Jesus submitted to the agony in the garden and to death upon the cross. We see Him grow and expand His soul by this anguish merging into joy. It would have been easy for Him to have avoided this ordeal, but He repeatedly and sternly refused every way of escape. He knew that the soul could only flower through suffering and that only through a death of agony could He prove to men the truths which he had preached. And therefore, I say again that pain is not a thing to be avoided, but a thing to be sought in order that we may find happiness. The most awful anguish which I have ever suffered has in fact proved to be my greatest blessing. It is in these moments that I have learned [211] EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN the lessons of life; these are the days which I look back to and hug with joy. During the struggle the sense of pain is dominating, but afterwards we see that these days have been the gift of God; that these are the days for which we have prayed and that from them come such peace as we have earned. I find it to be literally true that we enjoy our pain and suffer our joy. Far from the struggle of these being a mortal one, it is the fountain of life and makes us feel that we are immortal. And so I think it is with science and faith. Faith must use science for the preservation of life; the instinct of sur- vival drives us to rationalize, to investi- gate and to master the material world. The growth of science is what makes for progress in the race. But what is it that vitalizes and moves to action the men of science; these alleged ene- [2127] THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX mies of faith? It is this feeling which they are supposed to be fighting against — namely, Faith. Science cannot live and work without faith; faith is the motive power which drives it on. The ambition of the scientific investi- gator comes from a conscious or sub- conscious faith. Taken at its lowest the scientist has faith in the Laws of the Universe which he has discovered; faith that the same cause will always produce the same effect; that the eclipse of the sun will come at the time predicted. Taken at its highest, the ambition of the scientist to extend hu- man knowledge comes from his feeling that he is immortal, that his soul is a part of the soul of the Universe, which is God’s consciousness, and from an intense longing to enlarge his soul or his share of God. The motive power of all the disciples of reason is the same — [ 213 7 EXCEPT YE BE BORN AGAIN that unreasonable, nonrational thing we call Faith, and so it seems to me that we can truly say that this alleged strug- gle between Science and Religion is necessary to our life and progress. It is not a struggle in which science must destroy religion or be destroyed by it, but a struggle like the passion of cre- ative love from which life is born. [ 214] ‘ of aa Hy PYRE ieee i] y Pb At beak Fis * i ; f nat re | Bie 45 Fees ay 1) Py ited i oe mI rt ‘ vars + aL a ‘ Ve % | avin A Coot ei ye Except ye be ‘born. again, sete ter es wr mee) STANTS rane he recat eit rah atte pele t vet it oy exits = tp : * fects!