BR 50 .J66 1923 Jones, Rufus Matthew, 1863- 1948, Religious foundations ) \ t Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library t https://archive.org/details/religiousfoundatOOjone RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO Religious Foundations By A. Clutton-Brock; Elihu Grant, Ph.D.; Prof. L. P. Jacks; Rufus M. Jones; Prof. Eugene W. Lyman; Prof. Francis G. Peabody; B. Seebohm Rown- tree; Dean Willard L. Sperry. - v/ Edited by Rufus M. Jones, LL.D. jB eta fforft THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1923 All rights reserved PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Copyright, 1923, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and printed. Published January, 1923. Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. INTRODUCTION This little book by many authors needs a brief Intro¬ duction to explain its origin and to indicate its bear¬ ings. A religious Summer School has been held at Haverford College since 1900 at intervals of about every two years. This School has aimed to interpret religious history, Christian thought, Biblical knowl¬ edge, social reconstruction, and kindred subjects to persons who wish to think and act in the light of pres¬ ent-day truths and modern insight. It has been marked by deep reverence, constructive faith, unswerv¬ ing devotion to truth and a determination to go for¬ ward with the advancing light of the Spirit. As the attendance has never been large and the effort of preparation heavy and expensive, it was pro¬ posed this year that instead of holding a Summer School we should put our efforts and our funds into the preparation of a book which would reach many more persons than could possibly be drawn to our local gathering. The suggestion met with favor and I was asked to guide the experiment. Here is the re¬ sult—a little book but one of quite unusual quality. Many of the writers are very widely and favorably known and all of them have the characteristics I have emphasized: deep reverence, constructive faith, un¬ swerving devotion to truth and a determination to go forward whenever the pillar of God moves onward. There has been no attempt made to direct the dif¬ ferent authors or to force the book into a harmony of position. Each penman was free. But there is a striking unity of outlook and insight and there is an organic correlation of all the parts so that the book VI INTRODUCTION is an integral whole. I am sorry to have written more than my fair share of the chapters, but the three which have fallen to me almost necessarily had to be written by one person since they deal with such closely allied subjects as God, Christ and The Spirit revealed in man. It is an honest book, written by men who have said what they sincerely believe. It accepts the established facts of science and history, but it is penetrated with a great faith in the eternal verities by which men can live triumphant lives and stand the universe in this period of gravity and of heart-searching. “One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” R. M. J. Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania. “Indian Summer,” 1922. CONTENTS PAGB Introduction .. v CHAPTER I How Shall We Think of God? .... 1 by Rufus M. Jones II How Shall We Think of Christ? .... 15 by Rufus M. Jones III How Shall We Think of Man? .... 30 by Rufus M. Jones IV What Shall We Think of Nature? ... 42 V ' by Willard L. Sperry Dean of Harvard Divinity School V How Shall We Think of Society and Human Relationships?.57 y by B. Seebohm Rowntree York, England VI How Shall We Think of the Kingdom of God? v .73 by A. Clutton-Brock of London VII What Shall ^e Think of the Bible? . . 87 by Elihu v Grant Professor of Biblical Literature in Haverford College vii \ CONTENTS vm CHAPTER VIII How Shall We Think of Evil? . * . . >/ by Professor L. P. Jacks Editor of The Hihbert Journal IX How Shall We Think of Progress? . . . by Eugene W. Lyman Professor in Union Theological Seminary X How Shall We Think of Life After Death?. ^ . by Professor Francis G. Peabody Cambridge, Mass. PAGE 101 119 134 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS CHAPTER I HOW SHALL WE THINK OF GOD? By Rufus M. Jones It will perhaps be asked whether there is any use writing anything on the question, How shall we think of God? when there are so many persons who do not think of Him at all. Those who have always moved in religious circles and whose lives have been devoted to the affairs and concerns of the Christian Church do not perhaps realize how widespread is the loss, not only of faith, but even of interest in the whole ques¬ tion of the existence of God. Persons who are isolated from, and more or less immune to, these profound tendencies of doubt go jauntily on threshing the old straw of controversy about the infallibility of Scrip¬ ture, the form of sacraments, the sacred types of Church organization, the efficacy of ordination, the re¬ wards and punishments of the world beyond, and many more subordinate problems, when the foundations of the entire structure of religious faith to a very large number of persons all about us are insubstantial, and when the question of God’s existence receives less con¬ sideration in the minds of these persons from one year’s end to another than does that of the cost of a motor car. This is not merely fhe case with the “capital class.” It is just as true for workingmen and for the dwellers in rural communities. This situation will be found to 1 2 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS prevail to a striking degree in scholarly circles, both of the older and younger groups. The reports on the religious condition of the nation which were made soon after the close of the war both in Great Britain and America are very depressing to read, and seem to indi¬ cate a state of ignorance on questions of life and re¬ ligion that is almost staggering. If religion is vital to the essential welfare of men and nations, there is surely occasion for serious concern and alarm. The old argu¬ ments to prove the existence of God seem to-day to both teachers and students to be antiquated. His relation to the scientifically ordered universe appears to them difficult either to explain or to maintain, and prevailing ideas about Him are felt to be crude if not puerile. They are weary of discussions of theology. People of the present day do not respond to dogmatic methods and they do not accept the dicta of “author¬ ity.” This whole field of research, they consider, has become unproductive and uninteresting, and they have turned away from it to lines of work and issues of thought which prove to be more fruitful and rewarding. Everywhere one turns he finds this central question of life—the reality and character of God—treated with neglect, unconcern, and loss of interest. There is, therefore, no point in going forward with a book on Religious Foundations unless something arresting, con¬ vincing, and converting can be said at the opening of it about God. There are, without doubt, many persons who have no difficulties, who have not found it necessary to take long wilderness journeys over dreary sand wastes, stripped of faith and naked to the blasts of doubt. They have been led by the hand in early life into a calm and confident religious experience which has met all the needs of the soul, and which they have felt no more desire to investigate or to pull to pieces than they have felt compelled to make a chemical analysis of the bread and butter which have been admirably HOW SHALL WE THINK OF GOD? 3 nourishing their body during the years of growing life. Such persons look with some amazement at the re¬ ligious unsettlement of the world, and wonder why the faith which serves them so satisfactorily proves so dif¬ ficult of adoption or of maintenance for others. They have cared little for arguments because they have never been constrained to resort to them, and they have not been disturbed by the discovery of the weakness of the logical cables which bear the strain of proof in these great matters. This little book is not written for such persons. It is written rather for those who do not so easily find the trail to the city of God but who yet are serious in their desire to find it, and who are glad to know what leads an honest seeker and present-day student to believe in God and how he thinks about God’s nature and character. The famous logical proofs of the existence of God which were formulated in the period from St. Augus¬ tine to Descartes need not concern us very much. They are effective only for those who need no con¬ vincing. There is a certain amount of live force —vis viva —in them when one takes the pains to feel his way down to the full implication of the ultimate facts of experience upon which they build, but in their bare, logical form they do not coercively prove that which they aim to demonstrate. They undertake to do what cannot be done. The main weakness of these historical arguments lies in the fact that they are endeavoring to prove the reality of a God who is beyond the world, outside the entire frame of space, a first Mover, a Creator of all things, and related to all that is as a cause is related to a series of effects. The eighteenth century revealed how arid and empty that conception of God is and what an easy mark it is for doubt and skepticism. Thoughtful, mature interpreters of the na¬ ture of God have left it behind in the dull contro¬ versial books of the period, and have gone on to richer and profounder ways of thinking of God. 4 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS It should be said, however, that the opposite view to this transcendent God, i.e., the view of the pantheist who identifies God with the total frame of things, is no less unsatisfactory. “The God of things as they are” will not do for us. We have not found any solution of our deep problem when we have merely fused and merged the Great Reality we seek into the vast aggre¬ gation of the world of visible nature and finite mind. We cannot worship a magnified That Which Is, no matter how great and inclusive it may be. The God Pan—the All—as an object of worship includes too much. There are many things in that immense hold- all aggregation which, our spirits feel, ought not to be there, many things which mar the picture, spoil the harmony, and turn the worshiper from an attitude of adoration to one of protest. Religion is not born of addition. It is not aroused by the size of the list of things that are. There is another spurious trail which has attracted many writers on religion. This is the way of certain psychologists who reduce God to an idea in the mind, a subjective idea which has no objective reality cor¬ responding to it. He is an immense fictitious Char¬ acter which we can use effectively, as we use the con¬ structed entity, Country or Church, and which we un¬ consciously have built up for our corporate life and for community purposes. We are encouraged to go on cherishing the idea as though it stood for Something Real. We are urged to cultivate prayer for its emotional or motor effects. We are told that this God, who is a product of our own thought, can be “used” as effectively for individual and community purposes as though He had an independent existence. But it is only too obvious that such a self-made religion and such a constructed God will quickly lose emotional and motor effect as soon as education and self-conscious¬ ness have had time to bring disillusionment to those who in naive simplicity had been supposing that God HOW SHALL WE THINK OF GOD? 5 was at least as real as the human mind that now ap¬ pears to be the creator of Him! There is no future for religion, no permanence to its inspiration and lift¬ ing power, unless men and women—and the children who share their outlook and ideals—can continue gen¬ uinely and sincerely to believe in God as the ground and reality of that which is good, the spring and basis of a real moral and spiritual universe, the life and inspiration of all our aims at righteousness and truth, the Great Companion who shares with us in the travail and tragedy of the world and who is working through us to “bring things up to better.” I am convinced that the spiritual basis beneath our feet is solid. I have no fear that religion will turn out to be a slowly waning and gradually vanishing subjective dream. I am confident that the testimony of the soul is at least as reliable a guide to the eternal nature of things as is the witness which mathematics bears. Assertions of confidence, however, are not the same thing as facts, and optimistic statements of in¬ dividual faith are not demonstrations which carry in¬ evitable conviction to others. We must endeavor to search out the rational foundations of our faith in God, and we must then try to express as clearly and concretely as possible how a modern man thinks of Him. The rational foundations must of course be found revealed, if at all, in the nature of our own ex¬ perience. Reason, mind, thought, as it appears in our consciousness, is the only clue there is to that deeper fundamental Reason that holds as from one Center all the threads of reality and purpose in the mighty frame and congeries of things. The way of approach is like that to a great mountain peak such as Mount Everest. At first there are many paths which gradually con¬ verge, and up to a certain point there are many ways of traveling, but at the very last for the final climb there is only one way up. 6 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS In the first place, knowledge of truth, truth which we discover and verify in our human experience, always presupposes something more than finite. Knowledge is something more than the formation of subjective ideas. It implies a foundational reality underlying and unit¬ ing the knower and objects known in a wider inclusive whole. Sense experience furnishes no adequate basis for knowledge, s The so-called “items” presented by sense—color, sounds, tastes, odors, roughness and smoothness, weight and hardness—are no inore knowl¬ edge than chaotic masses of stone, brick, and lumber are a house. Knowledge involves organization, syn¬ thesis, unity, consciousness of meaning, interpretation, feeling of significance, a conviction of certainty, a sense of reality, aspects of universality and necessity. None of these features comes in through the senses. They belong to the nature of mind and are funda¬ mental to mind. “To know,” as a distinguished thinker of our time has said, “means more than to look out through a window at some reality of a different character.” Knowledge is not something which orig¬ inates within. Nor is it something received from without. It is an indivisible experience with an inner and an outer—a subjective and objective—factor, neither of which can be sundered from the other nor ever reduqed to the other. Our finite minds, through s the process of knowledge, reveal the fact that they be¬ long to a larger whole, a foundational reality, which underlies self and object, inner and outer, and which is the source and ground of the fundamental laws of reason through which we organize our experience, by which we get a world in common, and by which we transcend the limits of now and here, the fragmentary character of what is given to sense, and rise to some¬ thing universal, necessary, and infinite in its implica¬ tions, for knowledge with its element of “must be” always reveals the fact that the knower part&Jms in some degree of the infinite, at lqast he transcends the / HOW SHALL WE THINK OF GOD? 7 S / finite. We are always out beyond ourselves when we are dealing with .truth. This extraordinary characteristic of going beyond ourselves comes to light even more impressively when we are endeavoring to realize moral and spiritual ideals. Growth came when, looking your last on them all, You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day And cried with a start—what if we so small Be greater and grander the while than they? Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature? In both, of such lower types are we Precisely because of our wider nature; For time, theirs—ours, for eternity. 1 The tendency to extend our world in ideal directions, to leave the attained for the greater unattained, to see the unwon area lying beyond the limits and fringes of all our conquests, is an inevitable trait in beings like * us, and it is the supreme mark of our dignity, as it is also a clear intimation of our alliance with a spiritual universe in us and around us. “What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours, of this old discontent?” says Emerson in The Over-Soul. “What is the universal sense of want and ignorance but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim!” It is not easy to discover the nature of conscience nor to account for its august authority, but one point al¬ ways stands out clearly whenever the diagnosis is made, and that is the fact that man in his moral capacity is not only more than a bare individual self, but more, too, than a finite cell in a social organism. The full significance of “I ought, I must,” carries us beyond the empirical order of things and events, and involves a spiritual reality of which we partake and in which we share. Kant is right when he finds God, Freedom, and Immortality inherently bound up with the moral will of man. He is hampered by his abstract method and 1 Robert Browning’s Old Pictures in Florence . 8 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS by his tendency to divide the mind as well as the uni¬ verse into compartments, but he is sure that he has found the real trail, and so he has. Beauty is another revelation of a spiritual reality in the universe which links us up with something be¬ yond ourselves. Beauty is not there in any external object taken by itself. It is not, any more, projected out by our minds as a subjective veil of glory which we as artistic creators throw over the iron facts and circumstances of a dull exterior world. Beauty is an experience in which we find ourselves joyously ab¬ sorbed in something beyond ourselves, in such a way that the outer and inner, the beyond and the within, seem fused into a unity that transcends division. “Two distincts, division none.” And the whole uni¬ verse, from “the bands of Orion” down to the infinites¬ imal scenery which the microscope reveals when, for example, we examine a piece of mold, is crammed with beauty. All we need to do is to bring a sensitive soul, with its seeing eye, its unifying, synoptic capacity, to any point of observation, and the beauty breaks upon us. It is as though a Spirit like ours, only infinite in scope and range, were breaking through the world to meet us at our best and to raise us into union and to thrill us with joy. “Through these emotions,” wrote Arthur Balfour in his Theism and Humanism, “we have obtained an authentic glimpse of a world more resplendent and not less real than that in which we tramp our daily round. And, if so, we shall attribute to them a value independent of their immediate cause —a value which cannot be maintained in a merely naturalistic setting” The gradual evolution of life from minute beginnings to ever higher forms, and the no less unmistakable progress revealed in history are weighty indications of an underlying rational and pur¬ poseful power working toward a goal. There have sometimes been backward eddies in the stream and there are evidences that the gains are made at a HOW SHALL WE THINK OF GOD? 9 great cost, but, on the whole and in the long run, the movement is steadily onward and forward. Some¬ thing present in, and yet beyond, the existent seems all the time breaking through and pushing toward higher and completer forms, wiser and fairer types. Mutations in the biological order are mysterious ap¬ pearances and so too are geniuses in the historical series, but they prove, in the main, to be creative in their functions and they carry the march of life and the torch of the spirit forward- They must be either “accidents” in a stupendous chain of accidents, or they must be the pushing forth of the intelligent purpose of the great foundational Reality that moves with in¬ finite patience toward “a far-off divine event,” but a divine event always coming. Values are not tangible things, like Monadnock or a coal mine, but they are certainly as real as anything we ever see or feel. The world of values which in¬ cludes pure unselfish love of friend for friend, dedica- . tion to what ought to be but is not yet, loyalty to causes which concern unborn generations, appreciation of beauty, truth and goodness, is a world that must be accounted for somehow. It did not just “happen.” It is always in the making. It is revealed through us and is being created through our strivings. But values are not capricious, subjective things. They are not will-o’-the-wisps that gleam and vanish in freakish ways. They are the deepest realities of our human lives. They make us what we are and they shape our destinies at least as much as sunlight and oxygen do. They rest upon some vast underlying, foundational Reality without which we should lack all spiritual aim and purpose. Whether God is neces¬ sary or not to explain the world of nature, He is surely necessary to explain our world of values—our Kingdom of Ends. These are some of the implications of human ex¬ perience which furnish the ground and basis of a solid 10 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS rational conviction of faith in God’s existence. The only surer ground is direct experience of God, which many persons claim to have. Arguments lead to the base of the mountain, experience alone scales it. He who has climbed the peak gets an evidence—and a thrill—of summit-vision which the dwellers in the valley-hotels can never have. My figure of the peak is not meant to refer to the solitary aspect of the man who climbs, nor to the laborious feature of the enter¬ prise, though the experience of God is sometimes solitary and does always involve severe preparation and effort. I am only bringing out the fact that one cannot know the scenery and circumstance of the top unless he has been there himself. The mystic has been there, and he comes to tell us that beyond all con¬ jectures and inferences about the reality of God is the consciousness of enjoying His presence. Religion in its first and deepest intention is as solidly based on experience as is art or friendship. It is at bottom a direct way of vital intercourse between man and God. There would have been no real religion in the world if God in actual fact had not broken in on the consciousness of men, producing a feeling of reality no less convincing than that which characterizes our observations of sense. In the chapter on Man we shall see that there is a capacity for God in the very frame and structure of the inner self, and we shall come into closer grips with the fact of man’s inherent religious nature. “The soul’s east window of divine surprise” is not an invention of poets. It is as much an original part of us as is the outer eye. It is a native endow¬ ment of beings like ourselves, who are not constructed to be space-binders alone, nor solely to look out on things composed of matter. There is an inward depth, an interior scope, to personal consciousness which knows no boundary shore. Though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond, Still leagues beyond those leagues there is more sea. HOW SHALL WE THINK OF GOD? 11 In short, our spirits touch close upon the Spirit and there is no fixed “boundary” between spirit and Spirit, any more than there is where the sea and sky seem to meet. We do not need to go “somewhere” to find God, any more than the fish needs to soar to find the ocean or the eagle to plunge to find the air. We only need to be prepared to see and feel and find what fringes the inner margins of ourselves. Spirit seems to many persons a vague and unre¬ vealing word. It meant “breath” originally and it played a lowly role in the long childhood stage of the race. Then and since, it has often been the bearer of occult phenomena and it has been loaded with cargoes of superstition. But, even so, it is the best word there is to express the essential nature of God. It signifies that He is not to be confused with matter nor to be found in a framework of space. He is like that highest, purest inner nature in ourselves which we call “spirit.” He is intelligent, He is purposeful. He is devoted to the realization of the good. He is what we are try¬ ing to be. And wherever in the universe the good is being achieved, wherever truth is triumphing, wherever holiness is making its power known —there is Spirit, there is God. When we think of God we do not mean vague force, not some dim, vapory abstract reality, not a mere “power making for righteousness.” We mean all that can be expressed by the word Person and vastly more, since our word Person carries with it limitations which cannot be applied to God. We know spirit best as it works through persons in their incarnate, i.e., embodied, form. There is much mystery wrapped up in this junction of spirit and matter in ourselves. We do not know how the chasm is bridged. We have no way of explaining how spirit can move matter nor how matter can report itself to spirit. There never was, and never will be, a greater mystery. We do not allow it to disturb us overmuch. We go ahead and act as though we had a right to do 12 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS so, and we leave the solution of the immense mystery to some possible metaphysician of a remote age. Meantime, spirit and body work together as though they belonged together, which means that spirit can work through what we call matter. Our own connection with a body raises the wonder whether God as Spirit uses any medium or works through any secondary substance which is to Him what our bodies are to us. It may be that what we call ether, that curious super-matter which fills the universe, is the medium through which His purposes go forth and are revealed as energy, as law, as mathe¬ matical order, as power, as beauty, as ever evolving life. Ether would be, then, the medium of His presence as the visible and tangible body is the medium of our presence. It would not be He any more than the cor¬ poreal bulk which the scales weigh is I, but it might be thought of as the garment through which He ex¬ presses Himself, the hand of His power, the foot of His swiftness, the transmitter of His will and thought. On a higher level life, with its upward push, its tendency to differentiate into unique forms, and its endless potency for inaugurating novelty and surprise might also be a medium. On a still higher level con¬ sciousness would be a medium through which He could express Himself, a living gossamer robe. There are, again, all levels of consciousness from the merest sensi¬ tiveness up to the most inclusive self-consciousness. Human personality, with its immense^ submerged reaches of sub-consciousness and its higher ranges of ideal vision, might be regarded as the best type of medium yet known to us for revealing His nature. I have purposely avoided abstract, high-sounding words, such as “infinite,” “absolute,” “omnipotent,” and “omniscient,” because they do not help us to get closer to the real nature of God. They run us off into the vague and formless, and leave us with no light on our problem. If God is to become real for us, we must HOW SHALL WE THINK OF GOD? 13 think of Him in concrete terms and we must use a language that has a positive content. We must re¬ fuse to depend on the constructions of logic and we must keep close to experience. We have discovered that we can study electricity or life only where they are concretely manifested. All our scientific progress in the knowledge of electricity, for instance, has been made by the invention of ways of revealing it in operation. The dynamo, the various types of vacuum tubes, the coherer, and a multitude of other ingenious contrivances have enabled us to find out its nature, its laws of operation, and its practical application. If we had studied it in the abstract and endeavored to deduce its essential qualities by logical processes alone, we should not have progressed much beyond the stage reached in the eighteenth century. The same general facts are true of the progress we have made in the study of life. We have got much closer to the real nature and meaning of life by a careful, detailed study of its concrete processes in the various forms of life in our world. The discovery of the life-cell, the germ- plasm, the facts of heredity, the influence of environ¬ ment, the appearance of mutations, the immense im¬ portance of natural defection—-these concrete facts have steadily advanced our knowledge of what life is and how it works. So, too, we can come close to the heart of religion and get forward-leading clues to the nature of God only by turning to consider Him where He is revealed, rather than by thinking of Him in the abstract. The other chapters of this book will follow that sound method. We shall not leave God behind as we go on to deal with the other questions which lie before us. Each study that comes after this will throw some light on the way God reveals Himself—in Scripture, ini man, in society, through a growing kingdom, and in those great moral and spiritual events and purposes which express His thought and will. Supremely is He re- 14 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS vealed in that one Person who is most like Him and the nearest like us, i.e., in Jesus Christ. The early Christian Fathers talked much of the Logos—the Word of God. They meant by that great phrase the unfolding and manifestation of God in a Being who summed up in Himself all the intelligence, all the creative purposes, all the ideal ends and goals of the universe—the Alpha and the Omega of all that is spiritual. In Him all things consist, i.e., cohere, St. Paul says. He is therefore the revealed principle of intelligence and love—the progressive Idea of the God who is working through the visible world, through history and through man to reveal Him who was and is and ever shall be—the Foundational Spirit, One undivided Soul of many a soul Whose nature is His own divine control Where all things flow to all as rivers to the sea . 1 J The interpretation which has been begun in this chapter is car¬ ried on through the next two. CHAPTER II HOW SHALL WE THINK OF CHRIST? By Rufus M. Jones Whenever this question has been raised in the past —and it has probably been raised more often than any other religious question—the thought has focused at once on the metaphysical nature of Christ. Was He human or was He divine? Did He possess human nature or divine nature? Did He belong to the order of beings whom we call man or did He belong to a transcendent sphere and come down to earth from a heavenly realm? That question, the issues of which have divided men in almost every Christian century into intense theological parties, presupposes a very definite and at the same time a very ancient concep¬ tion of the universe. According to this view, the world, or the natural sphere, is sharply separated from an¬ other sphere which may be called the supernatural one. The sky, which in early Christian centuries was supposed to consist of seven concentric crystalline spheres, was believed to form the boundary between the two realms. Everything this side of the lower margin of the boundary was considered to be natural, everything the other side of the boundary was divine, i.e., supernatural. One of the main difficulties result¬ ing from this division is that we can say nothing definite or positive about the supernatural. It be¬ comes a sheer blank, an empty phrase. It throws open a vast realm for vain speculation and for super¬ stition to flourish in. Every positive thing we say or 15 16 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS think, every intelligent affirmation we make, has to do with some fact of life or experience and so belongs to the sphere of the natural. What is left, therefore, for the supernatural—for that which has no connec¬ tion with experience—is what Herbert Spencer called “the great unknowable.” This separation of natural and supernatural almost necessarily lands one in the bogs and jungles of agnosticism, since we cannot know what by definition lies beyond knowledge. The two realms by this unfortunate division are made wholly exclusive and lie entirely outside each other. Any interaction or commerce between them is necessarily miraculous. That which is “natural” can¬ not enter the divine realm, and if ever there is a projec¬ tion from the other world, the divine world, into this one, it must be called a supernatural or a miraculous occurrence. The being known as man, who for theolog¬ ical purposes is often called “mere” man, is considered to belong wholly on this side “the great divide” and therefore to belong to the realm of the natural. This theory of the universe quite obviously compelled those who held it to decide in which of the two spheres Christ belonged. They were confronted with a sharp either - or. If He was divine it became extremely difficult, if not impossible, as history has shown, to hold to His humanity, while, on the other hand, if He was genu¬ inely human, a real man, there appeared to be no way to maintain His divinity. One aspect or the other was bound to become illusory. The Arian view invalidated His divinity, the ancient orthodox view seriously re¬ duced, if it did not obliterate, His humanity. Copernicus and his scientific followers in the six¬ teenth and seventeenth centuries made that ancient theory of the universe forever impossible. The sky turns out not to be a dome at all. It is as unreal and unstable as is the horizon at sea. There is no boundary to the space above our heads. We are on a revolving globe and what we call “looking up” is just as truly HOW SHALL WE THINK OF CHRIST? 17 “looking down/’ The terms mean the same thing. Those opposite us—our antipodes—seem to be looking up at the stars and sky, but they are looking in a dia¬ metrically opposite direction to the one in which we are looking when we see the sky. We cannot preserve the ancient two-world view—one realm far above the other in a perpendicular direction. There is nothing in reality which corresponds to it. We go on using the old terms and phrases, just as we go on talking of the “ris¬ ing” and “setting” of the sun, but they are only con¬ venient words, not facts and realities. The division between “natural” and “supernatural” is difficult to maintain on any theory of the universe. There is no known, no fixed, boundary between any such divided realms. Anything that occurs anywhere in the universe, outside or inside—in the sphere of matter or in the sphere of mind—belongs in the order of the real, the natural. If an event occurs at all, it must fit in and correlate with other events and happenings. It must operate in a framework of space or time. It must submit to laws of sequence. Anything which did not do so could not be experienced, could not be an event. A supernatural occurrence would be one which conformed in no way to the frame¬ work and structure of our known universe. The mo¬ ment water becomes wine, or an ax-head floats, or some one walks on water, or five thousand persons are fed with tiny supplies, we have events occurring in space and time. We may not know how they were “caused.” We may be ignorant of the laws that are operating to produce the event, but if such things have really oc¬ curred no one surely would assume that they happened “without any cause,” or that they took place in defiance of the laws of the universe. Ignorance of a cause or failure to discover the laws that are operating, does not remove an event from the sphere of the natural to some other sphere. It only indicates the limits of our range of knowledge. We know now the causes and laws of 18 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS many occurrences which once were believed to be super¬ natural. If they were real events they were not super¬ natural, they merely transcended man’s capacities of explanation at the time. Here, again, we are evidently ♦ dealing with an artificial boundary line, like the hori¬ zon, a boundary which shifts this time, not as we alter our position, but as we enlarge the range of our knowl¬ edge. If the spiritual realm, the world of divine reality, is to reveal itself to us, it must be in such a way that it correlates with our normal experience. It must be made clear, however, that there is no surrender of the truth which these terms endeavored to express. The terms were coined to fit the ancient dualistic system which is no longer a live hypothesis and they are now inadequate for what we want to say. We are in a world that always and everywhere reveals a Beyond. We transcend whatever is before us. There is no here or now which we do not overleap. There is therefore in every situation something which defies description, something supra-naturalistic, but not something beyond the true nature of things. Spirit essentially transcends whatever reveals it or expresses it; it is in fact self-transcending. No person can ever put the whole of himself into any experience or mo¬ ment of his life. No cross-section of our life- reveals ' ( all we are. In an unspeakably greater sense that spirit in whom we Kve and have our being transcends what¬ ever we consider, examine or discuss. He is always both in and beyond the given fact or event—a tran¬ scending Reality, but not a supernatural one. We have'made all our progress in learning the nature of life and of electricity, as I have said in the previous x chapter, by studying them where they break through and reveal themselves in concrete and specific forms. No one would ever know what either of the realities was if he insisted on dealing with it in the abstract and universal phase as a thing in itself. There would be nothing to say, except in uninforming negatives—“it HOW SHALL WE THINK OF CHRIST? 19 is not this/’ “it is not that.” Everything is different when we turn to the manifestations for guidance and direction. We have discovered a thousand things about electricity by inventing contrivances that let it mani¬ fest itself in various ways of operation. It drives our cars, it carries our messages, it Tights our houses, it transmits wireless communications and it radios our music and our sermons across a continent. It reveals itself through one contrivance as magnetism and it manifests itself through another as Roentgen rays. We have perhaps only begun to discover its amazing possi¬ bilities, but in any case all we have discovered has been accomplished by observing its processes as they are re¬ vealed where it breaks through our human inventions —our dynamos, our transmitters and transformers, our coherers and our Crookes’ tubes—and where it shows its nature and power in concrete form. We have certainly come much closer to the nature and meaning of life than that great investigator Aris¬ totle did, because we have much better methods and vastly more adequate means of observing its concrete forms and processes where it reveals itself. We do not know, and we never shall know, what “life” is apart from the organisms where it is manifested. It is useless to talk about a mysterious “vital force” or an unknow¬ able X behind the living thing. That means, once mcft'e, * to turn away from the only opportunity of discovering the nature of life and to search for it in “the infinite dark where all cows are black.” v The flower i^i the cran¬ nied wall can give us more light in tfen minutesjon the - problem of life than we could derive in a Methuselah’s span of existence from studying it in itself apart from, and above, its particular forms and mutations. So, too, if we expect to find the divine and to know God in any real sense, we must look for Him where He manifests Himself in the world where our life has its scope and sphere. God is not outside and above the eternal nature of things. There would be no eternal 20 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS nature of things if it were not for God. He is the rational and spiritual foundation of all that is real in the universe. Order, law, energy, coherence, purpose are always and everywhere revelations of God; that is, they imply and involve an intelligent and rational basis •—a spiritual structure underlying it all. God is much more than that rational foundation, but we must begin there if we are ever to find Him. Order, law, energy, life—the central forces of nature—give as much of a revelation of God as can be shown through such an ex¬ ternal system of things, but God vastly transcends all that, somewhat as instinct reveals intelligence, though intelligence is immensely more than instinct. Beauty, too, is a revelation of God. The universe is crammed with it. Wherever the telescope ranges it discovers beauty, and wherever the microscope lets us see the minute and infinitesimal there, too, we find sur¬ passing beauty. The world is an amazing storehouse and conservatory of beauty. It is not just our creation. It is as much there as atoms and molecules are. It has its foundation in the eternal nature of that rational Spirit that loves and creates beauty. But God is more than beauty and He transcends all that it reveals and suggests. Truth is a revelation of God. We could not rise above the facts of sense, the now and here, and organ¬ ize universal and necessary truths if there were not some fundamental Reality who underlies all objects - of thought as well as the finite mind that thinks and binds them into an inclusive unity. But God is more than intellectual truth. He transcends all that can be proved and demonstrated. *There is something in the universe which we call goodness. It is hard to define, it involves many things, many aspects, but it is recognized on all counts as the greatest thing in the universe. iLcannot be found in a world composed alone of matter and energy. It does \ not appear in the stage of instinct. It is revealed no- HOW SHALL WE THINK OF CHRIST? 21 where except in persons. It is certainly a revelation of God, if anything is. It cannot be explained by “causes.” It cannot be accounted for by any self-seeking aims. It is not the outcome of social conventions or a “social contract.” It is not the product of any scheme or con¬ trivance. It has broken through men—men of the higher spiritual order—and revealed itself. It always comes from beyond the man. It takes him above him¬ self and it gives him a conviction of alliance with more than himself. If there could be a person who possessed this trait of revealing goodness in supreme measure and who possessed it without the limitations and handicaps which hamper ourselves and the persons whom we know, then surely we should get the most adequate revelation that it is possible to have in this framework of time and space in which we live our lives. In Jesus Christ we have such a person, and we have in and through His life the most complete revelation that has come to the world. We must not begin by dividing the human from the divine and by setting the dual aspects into sharp opposition. That is the way to miss the very revelation we seek. We are not limited to a stubborn either-or. This universe of ours, with its checkerboard colors of black and white, is essentially a spiritual world—a world groaning and travailing in birth-pains; and slowly bringing forth the higher out of the lower, the spiritual out of that which is natural. The divine is not to be found by going off somewhere else. The spiritual is not located in some other sphere. The divine and the spiritual can be found only as they break through the temporal and the finite and reveal themselves here in the processes of this growing, un¬ folding universe which is, after all, a spiritual world in the making. Christ is both human and divine and as completely one as the other. The revelation which comes through Him shows that the higher can be in every sense united with the lower and be revealed through it, as, for example, is the case when beauty > 22 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS breaks through the water-drops of a cloud, or when life and consciousness use the medium of matter. So completely are the two aspects united in Christ that we see as in a flash that at the highest point hu¬ manity and divinity not only are together but belong together. There must be something divine in man and something human in God, and if we are to see the true nature and character of God, we must see them as revealed in a Life which joins both together in a single union. Professor Harnack finely expressed the truth I have in mind when he said that in Christ we have “eternity revealed in the midst of time.” William Temple touched a high spot when he wrote: “What is God like? The answer to that question is ‘Christ.’ And when we ask, ‘What is Humanity?’ we look at Christ to find the answer.” We are no longer forced to con¬ template a vague, abstract, indeterminate “unknow¬ able” God—an inscrutable X. We can at least say henceforth that God has been revealed as a Christ- like God: Most human and yet most divine. The flower of man and God! When we go back to the head-waters of the mighty stream of Christianity, we find, not the formulation of a set-of doctrines, not the founding of a new ecclesiasti¬ cal organization, not the forging of a new body of com¬ mandments, nor the formation of a new ritual—we find a radiant and illuminating personality who made God mean more than He had ever meant before and who exhibited a new quality of life altogether. But while His life and personality were more significant than any¬ thing He ever said or did, He was nevertheless a teacher, a unique and inspiring teacher. He was usually called by this familiar title, and His most intimate group of friends were called “learners”— disciples. His teaching was fresh, vivid, unconven¬ tional, and revealing. He shows plainly enough the HOW SHALL WE THINK OF CHRIST? 23 influence of the spiritual leaders of His race who had preceded Him, but He never copies them, never merely transmits the past, never is a traditionalist. He speaks out of His own experience. “He opened His mouth and spoke.” He is always creative, illuminating, inspiring. He sets everything He touches in a new light ahd He raises every truth which He teaches up to a level which it had not reached before. He is like the householder in His own parable who brings out of the storehouse “things new and old,” but even the old things under His touch are made new. Let us review in the briefest possible compass His teachings as they can be gathered from the most primi¬ tive sources. His consciousness of God as Father and His interpretation of God’s deepest and most essential nature underlie everything else which He taught or did, and therefore His teaching about God forms the back¬ ground and foundation of everything in His gospel, or “good news.” He never uses abstract and metaphysical words—the words which play such a part in the great theological battles—when He speaks of God. His warm and intimate word, “Father,” is used to express the personal character of God. It sets at the front God’s attitude of love and tender care. The parable of the prodigal son, as perfect in form as it is in content, brings this attitude of the divine character up to its highest point of revelation. We discover to our sur¬ prise that the blunder and sin and estrangement of the son do not change the attitude of love in the heart of the Father. He does not become a Father, He does not under any circumstances cease to be a Father. He simply and essentially is Father. This truth is even yet only dimly recognized and has not dominated Christian thought, but it was Christ’s supreme mission to bring men into a consciousness of it, and in this consciousness He himself lived. No less emphatic is His teaching that men—all men —may become sons of God, in fact, always are poten- 24 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS tial sons. It does not follow, because God is Father, that all men are by nature sons. Sonship is not a birth- relationship. It is an attitude of heart, a spirit, a way of life. Nobody is a son until he wants to be one, until he discovers his opportunity, wakes up to his possi¬ bilities and chooses to enter his heritage. God is Father; we become sons. Sonship is a privilege, di¬ vinely offered, but it is also a human achievement. The poorest, most defeated person in the world has in his hand the key to the Father’s house and may rise up and go home when he will. This view of human life was one of .the great springs of the immense optimism of Jesus. His central teaching—His main proclamation—was the coming of the reign of God here in the world. It is not an easy matter now to decide what He meant by His great phrase y jWiXe ia rod deov, usually trans¬ lated “Kingdom of God,” but which more properly is rendered “the reign of God.” Christ’s own generation had formed an intense expectation of a mighty apoca¬ lyptic event. They were looking for a supernatural intervention—a relief expedition from heaven—which would bring the age to a sudden terminus and in¬ augurate a new and golden epoch. The kingdoms of the world, with their cruel yoke of oppression, would be ended, the slate wiped clean, and a new age of righteousness and peace begun under God’s anointed king who would raise Israel to its long-delayed glory. Some scholars hold that Jesus shared this expectation and looked for an apocalyptic event. There is no doubt that His disciples were charged with vivid apocalyptic hopes, and it is evident that all His teachings have been somewhat tinged and colored by the longings and ex¬ pectations of the interpreters through whom we have received them, but it seems fairly certain that His own conception of the reign of God was vastly different from the crude political and materialistic hopes of His HOW SHALL WE THINK OF CHRIST? 25 time. The temptations which were surely as real and subtle as any which have ever beset a human soul indi¬ cate that He felt drawn to take the line of least resist¬ ance and to become the popular leader of the nation’s hopes. This powerful tendency appears to have reached its height in the critical period in Jerusalem just before the crucifixion. He was, however, com¬ pletely victorious in this greatest of all struggles, and His life revealed a wholly unique type of divine reign, which even yet we have not entirely compre¬ hended. The kingdom, or reign, to which He was dedicated can be best discovered by the course of life and action which He took. It is not always easy to decide pre¬ cisely what He said on a particular occasion, but we know with a high degree of certainty what He did in the crisis issues of His life. He utterly refused to be considered as the kind of national figure that was ex¬ pected. Under no circumstances would He use force, either human or “superhuman.” He absolutely de¬ clined to save Himself. He exhibited unlimited faith in the conquering power of love, and He went to His cross assured that His sacrificial death would complete the purpose of His life. He himself is the perfect illus¬ tration and embodiment of the reign of God revealed in the life of a person. When we ask what He meant by His teaching about the kingdom, we get our clearest answer in the life of this Divine Lover who went the second mile and who chose to conquer, not by arousing the passionate populace nor by summoning legions of angels, but by taking the way of love as no one had ever taken it before. The reign of God, as expounded in His message, is a way of life. It is not a new theory of wealth and pov¬ erty ; it is not a change of political dynasty; it is not a church organization; it is not a new body of doctrine or a fresh set of commandments, either positive or nega¬ tive. It is a new attitude, a new spirit, a new en- 26 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS thusiasm and contagion of life. It begins when a per¬ son inaugurates in his life the vital relationship of son to God and the relationship of brother to all other men. It advances in height and breadth as fast as the full implication of this upward and outward relationship is wrought out in the experience and practice of creative, constructive love. Christ illustrated His meaning in simple figures of ordinary, every-day life. Farmers planting mustard seed, sowing grain, or fighting weeds, fishermen sorting their fish from their nets, little chil¬ dren playing games in the street, maidens going to a wedding, merchants making gain with their capital, shepherds searching for lost sheep, women making bread with yeast, travelers rescued from robbers, fur¬ nish pictorial imagery to illustrate the character of this sway of God and this widening brotherhood in men’s lives. The beatitudes and the model prayer show its scope and meaning more clearly than do any other passages. It “comes” as the will of God is done on earth through men. It widens its “area” as men learn to forgive as God forgives. It is realized as men begin to love as Christ loved. It is a way of life which carries beatitude in itself without any extraneous reward—the blessing attaches to the life. To hunger for larger righteousness, to be revealing mercy, to be pure-hearted, to be a maker of peace, is to be of the kingdom and to be an organ of its reign, for its reign—the reign of God—is in us and not in some capital city. An ye heard a music, like enow They are building still, seeing the city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built forever. It is a central feature of Christ’s message that there is a kind of life which is eternal—not exposed to the catastrophes and disintegrations which beset all things that belong in the space and time order. The phrase HOW SHALL WE THINK OF CHRIST? 27 “eternal life” is peculiar to the fourth Gospel, but the truth expressed by the phrase is found throughout the synoptic Gospels. Life, in Christ’s full sense of its meaning, is eternal—no attainment can ever exhaust or complete its possibilities. Eternal does not mean end¬ less, for that word has to do with time. The important thing about life as Christ thinks of it is not that it “goes on forever.” It is rather a life of new dimensions, life forever opening out and pushing forward in the Godward direction. It is infinitely expansive and cumu¬ lative. Instead of going on in a straight line like the rail of the track, life gathers depth and volume as a cone does when you go from its apex downward. It never occurred to Christ, and it never does to those who know from within what spiritual life means, that this life in God could be brought to a terminus by a disaster which wrecked the body or by its slow decay. He “brought life and immortality to light” by revealing the new spiritual quality and power to which life can be raised. To these .four supreme truths of Christ’s teaching— God as Father, men as potential sons of God, the reign of God as a new social order, life raised to an eternal quality—there must be added a fifth truth which radi¬ ated all His teaching and which received its highest expression and interpretation in His life. I refer to His method of redemption, His way of moving men to higher levels of life. He turned away from all the ancient methods used to influence action—power, authority, the spur of rewards, the force of fear—and He rested the whole weight of His appeal upon the attraction of self-sacrificing love for others. The people were looking for a king, greater than David, who would effect his ends by irresistible power. He reversed all expectation. He rested no claim upon power. There are no sadder words than those of His friends after the crucifixion: “We thought that it was He who should restore the Kingdom to Israel,” and the mob said what 28 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS everybody thought: “He saved others, now let Him come down from the cross and save Himself.” He could not save Himself and still be the Christ who was to regenerate the world. The way of love could be inaugurated only by love—a love of infinite depth and patience. If men are ever to be redeemed from sin and selfishness, it must be by the impact of a love that is freed from all selfishness and which knows no limit to what it is ready to suffer in order to reach them and serve them. Lives are roused to great issues not by command but by contagion of spirit, by the attraction of a great purpose and a glowing faith. Men do not leave an old life for a new, a low level for a high one, until they are fused and kindled by the attraction of a consecrated leader who counts not his life dear unto himself. Christ raised this principle to its nth degree. He proclaimed it as the essential trait of God’s character and He Himself joyously accepted the full cost and tragedy which attach to self-sacri¬ ficing, cooperative love. He does not stop with the mile which the law requires and the world expects. He goes the gratuitous second mile and shows us what life can be when it has reached the height of radiance and consecration. This is by no means all there is to say. The writer of the fourth Gospel felt in his day that if everything could be told which Christ had said and done, the world could not contain the books that would be written. The impact of this Life on other lives, the contagion of His influence, is surely one of the most impressive facts in human history. The speculative theories about Him, the endless conflicts of thought which have raged around His name and personality, are regrettable blun¬ ders, but they nevertheless bear witness to the powerful spell which His life has thrown upon the race and the impelling necessity which all ages have felt to think through the meaning and implications of His coming and His going. We are dealing here with something HOW SHALL WE THINK OF CHRIST? 29 like that tree which the Norse hero tried to pull up, but which proved to be the great Igdrasil Tree of the ages, with its roots running down through the whole world and with the sap from the central life of the universe feeding it. CHAPTER III HOW SHALL WE THINK OF MAN? By Rufus M. Jones There are multitudinous ways of thinking of man. It would be absurd to suppose that one short chapter could be adequate to deal with this complex and inex¬ haustible subject. Obviously we must single out for consideration here those aspects of man’s nature which are essential for religion. We are not concerned now with arma virumque, but with homo; not with the hero and his deeds, but with the fundamental nature of man as a spiritual being. In two former chapters I have, with utmost brevity and compactness, interpreted the nature of God and the nature of Christ. I reserved for this chapter on Man the treatment of a third aspect of the divine na¬ ture, the holy Spirit, for by holy Spirit we mean God in contact and relationship with human lives, God re¬ vealing Himself in and through persons. This third aspect has usually been feebly grasped or almost wholly neglected. The words of the creed, “I believe in the holy Ghost,” add no information which helps the be¬ liever to know what his great affirmation means. And when the “heretics” of the different periods proclaimed their new Pentecosts and called attention to the inrush- ing energies of the Spirit, they were apt to find their evidence in abnormal phenomena and in rare and mys¬ terious occurrences. They did not yet realize that the surer and sounder evidence of the Spirit is to be found in normal, every-day processes of life, that “the ever- 30 HOW SHALL WE THINK OF MAN? 31 lasting sign” is that slow transformation of our stub¬ born nature, so that the balsam comes in and the thorns go out; the sweet myrtle appears where the briers used to be. We know light as luminosity or pure radiance and we know light as it is revealed in the color-band of the spectrum. But that does not exhaust it. There is still a third manifestation of light as wonderful as the other two. This third aspect of light is its radiant energy, its photochemical, or actinic energy, as it is usually called. It works remarkable effects upon sensitive plates. It is, too, a vital energy, operating upon and energizing all life, producing that vital substance we call chlorophyl in plants and vitamins in food. Light as energy is a resident power. It is present where it operates. The sun is not only a material body ninety- one and a half million miles away, it is also just as truly here, in the vital, actinic effects which our vast and various orders of life reveal. No light, no life. So, too, we must go on to speak of God as resident, immanent, God with us, a vital, revealing, energizing presence, using man as the organ of His unending operation and revelation in the world. If this is true, it is a very important fact about man —the most important fact about him—and it means that we must think of man henceforth in different terms from those that have prevailed in the great theological systems of the past. It involves a Copernican revolu¬ tion as profound and far-reaching as that which has reorganized all our astronomical thinking. Man can hardly be considered as “a poor worm of the dust,” if he has a capacity for God and can become an organ of divine revelation. We cannot accept at their face value statements which affirm the moral depravity of man, if God and man, as we must believe, are essentially re¬ lated. This low estimate of man and these pessimistic theories of man’s nature are partly responsible for the long centuries of the perversion of Christianity, for the 32 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS calm acceptance of war as a normal part of life and for the base treatment of man by man. This medieval account of man, as morally depraved, it should be said, rests upon a great epic view of the universe which has gradually given place to a truer view, based upon verified facts. The classical account of this epic view of the universe—one of the greatest epics in human history—was written by St. Augustine of Hippo in his City of God, and it was accepted for the next fourteen centuries as though it were absolute and final truth. There were, of course, texts of Scrip¬ ture, in both Old and New Testaments, which seemed to support it; in fact, it was supposed to be drawn un¬ altered from the wells of revelation. We now know, however, that Plato’s Timceus, the Gnostic systems of the second and third centuries, the Mystery Religions, Neoplatonism and Persian Mythology, all played a very important part in the formation of this mighty epic system which the Carthaginian saint of Hippo be¬ queathed to the Christian centuries that followed him and which Milton turned into his great poem. Scrip¬ ture texts furnished one source of influence in the making of this view of the world and of man, but the complicated intellectual environment of the early for¬ mative Christian centuries was a no less important source of influence, and it must be emphatically said that Augustine’s theory of, the universe and of man is a Construction” which he made, not something fur¬ nished to him ready-made in the Bible. In any case, it was a work of extraordinary genius, as much so as is Chartres Cathedral or the greatest pictures of the Madonna. It suited the thought-climate of the fourth and fifth centuries, especially in Latin countries, and it grew to be an indispensable basis of religion. It seemed to rest upon unquestioned author¬ ity and it gave an immense ground and support for the growing imperial conception of the Church. Man was unable to do anything toward his own salvation. He HOW SHALL WE THINK OF MAN? 33 stood before God without the least claim of merit. He was utterly dependent upon the Church, which was the one and only vehicle of Grace, the mysterious in¬ strument of salvation in a wrecked world. When once this theory of man had become established as an essen¬ tial part of the faith of Christendom and was woven into the very fiber of Christian consciousness, it enjoyed long immunity from criticism and was accepted with¬ out serious examination, in the same way as the theory of the four elements of matter survived century after century. Wherever deep and solitary souls in the Middle Ages turned away from ecclesiasticism and dogma to try the venturesome paths of first-hand experience, this ancient construction of theology dropped out of focus, and these persons, the great mystics, speaking with the authority of inner conviction, asserted that there was something in the very structure of man which linked him to God. Their interpretation of man’s inner being was often put into cumbersome scholastic phraseology, which was the best they could do, but at any rate the fact got affirmed that there was a divine Spark— Funklein , or Ganster, as they called it—at the apex of the soul, or, as others put it, a divine soul center or ground, which kept man, here in the midst of time and mutability, unsundered from the great spiritual Reality who was his origin and home. These mystics were compelled, like other thinkers of their time, to express themselves largely in terms of Aristotle’s psychology. They were not able to break away from the prevailing conceptions which their predecessors had slowly forged out, but at least they struck this clear note, that if one goes down far enough into the deeps of man’s inner self, some¬ thing will be found of God’s very nature and substance there. God is the foundational basis of man’s religious experience. The sixteenth century, with its humanist teachers and its spiritual reformers, saw a strong and widespread 34 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS reaction against the dogmatic theory of man’s corrup¬ tion and depravity. The testimony of the mystics to the presence of God within was strengthened now by a great cloud of witnesses, though even yet there was no one who had hit upon a new basic psychological inter¬ pretation of man. The Quakers in the seventeenth century gave this message a new and powerful empha¬ sis. In fact, they form the first organized body of Christians who built their entire faith upon the prin¬ ciple that something of God is present in every man. They broke completely with the Augustinian concep¬ tion of man, raised in their time to a new stage of im¬ portance by John Calvin’s impressive interpretation of it. Their famous phrase was the “inward Light,” or the “divine Seed,” which they set over against the Calvin- istic view of man, who was thought of as totally corrupt and beginning life handicapped by the inheri¬ tance of seeds of sin implanted in the soul. Quakerism, in its historical significance, can be rightly understood only as a profound revolt against the Calvinistic inter¬ pretation of man. The Quakers meant by their inward Light what the noblest of the mystics had meant by the divine ground or foundation of the soul. They believed that man is not separated by a chasm or isolated from God. Some¬ thing of God, something of that highest spiritual Na¬ ture—that World within the world we see—is formed into the structure of the human soul, so that it is never, even though “born and banished into mystery,” beyond hail of its true source and home, and never without the possibility of divine assistance and communion. The early Quakers, like their mystical predecessors, were weak in psychology and were unable to think out the full import of their experience or of their significant phrase, the inward Light, but in any case they broke with that ancient epic theory of man which their con¬ temporary, John Milton, just at that very time was do¬ ing so much to glorify. They leaped to the position that HOW SHALL WE THINK OF MAN? 35 each newborn child is a new Adam fresh from the crea¬ tive hand of God and bears within him the mark of a divine origin and of a divine destiny. He comes to his great experiment here in this strange mixed world equipped with something which only God Himself could have put in him, something spiritual, something capable of vital response to the environing presence of the living Spirit. He may live upward or he may live downward, for he is free to choose, but he can never wholly obliterate the spiritual endowment which makes him something more than “mere man.” In the hush and silence of the corporate group which the Quakers raised to an immense importance, they believed man could become aware of that More than himself revealed within himself. Not only has man something spiritual in the founda¬ tion of his being, but the Quakers further believe that God is essentially Spirit. He is Life and Thought and Love and Goodness in unceasing revelation and action. He is the near and constant environment of the soul, as surely as the ocean is the environment of the islands which rise out of it. The reason there could once be a supreme revelation of God in one historical Person was just because God can pour His Spirit around and through a sensitive, receptive Life that wills to be an organ of His manifestation. The religious life for a man truly begins with the personal discovery of these inner divine resources. Man leaps into life and power as soon as he begins to recognize and appreciate the springs of spiritual energy ready at his hand to be drawn upon by his own initiative of will. From be¬ ginning to end religion is vital—it is cooperation and fellowship with God. It is drawing in and sending forth the vital energies of the resident Spirit. The faith of the Quaker in the inward Light does not rest upon traditional authority, it is not a theory con¬ structed out of ancient texts. It is, in so far as it is vital and significant, a fact of experience. Inward 36 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS Light, if it is to be real, something more than a phrase, must be something seen and felt and known. Light is light only when it is apprehended and responded to by an awakened consciousness aware of it. Inward Light ceases to be of any value to the world as soon as it is turned into a dull, scholastic theory, hidden away in a leather-covered book. The whole significance of the Quaker movement was its revolt from theories and notions and its appeal instead to experience. There has always been, however, a subtle tendency to slide back to the sovereignty of phrases and to suppose that spiritual battles could be won by coining a magic word. But if we have no testimony of consciousness to God’s immediate presence, if we cannot say, as George Fox could: “I know God experimentally and have the key that opens,” it is in vain for us to talk of theories of inward Light. If this great experience is real, as it appears to be, and if the claim which the Quakers have made for two centuries and a half is sound, namely, that God reveals Himself in man, then they have discovered a new fact about man, something which the Augustinian theology did not sufficiently know. According to this view, a Beyond always reveals itself within. Man is always and everywhere himself plus a More than himself. He is a finite center through which an infinite and eternal Spirit works and acts. To be man is to be more than the fragment called “mere man,” just as we now know that matter is never “mere matter”; it consists of cen¬ ters of tension where transcending energies break through and reveal themselves. There is no such thing as matter by itself. Wherever there is matter there is an exhibition of cohesion, gravitation, and other forces which sweep beyond and transcend the tiny fragment called “matter.” The entire universe is behind the fragment. This conclusion, which the mystics reached by a flash of intuitive insight and which the Quakers persistently HOW SHALL WE THINK OF MAN? 37 supported by their experience and their group-testi¬ mony, received much confirmation from leaders of thought and creators of literature in the nineteenth century. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) laid the solid foundation for the new conception of man and the universe which marks the last century. Man is no longer thought of after the manner of Locke, as possess¬ ing a passive mind into which, as into an empty recep¬ tacle, the external world conveys ideas of its nature and its activities. On the contrary, man as a self-conscious being, is a creative center and cooperates in the making of the world which he beholds. Space and time are forms of his own consciousness, not “things” which he finds ready made. So, too, cause and the other neces¬ sary relationships which link the parts of the world into one ordered whole, making law and purpose appear everywhere, are facts of the mind, not facts somewhere outside the mind. And these finite minds of ours which are loaded with the spiritual tools, by which the world of space and time is built, reveal within themselves a still deeper world of moral sublimity and grandeur. A categorical imperative, Kant believed, is imbedded in the structure of every self-conscious mind, commanding him to act in such a way as to treat every person, whether himself or another, always as an end, never as a means, which, being translated into common speech means to act always so as to enlarge and develop per¬ sons, never to use them as things or as tools. And Kant sees plainly enough that this extraordinary kind of a self-conscious person, with his creative powers, presup¬ poses a great foundational spiritual universe underly¬ ing and unifying all our personal selves into one spiritual kingdom in which the Whole cooperates with, and works through, each. Kant’s successors, less cau¬ tious and restrained than he was, carried the implica¬ tions of self-consciousness and of moral personality very much farther than he was ready to go. Their sys¬ tems were too involved and complicated for the com- 38 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS mon man to grasp. Their philosophical jargon and metaphysical patois sealed their books with seven seals for the untrained reader. But the poets and literary geniuses of the nineteenth century caught up their ideas and sent them out broadcast in winged words. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson are the four most important early transmitters of this enlarged conception of man as an organ of the living God. The poetry of Wordsworth is everywhere charged with this new message. Carlyle and Emerson are great prophets of it in prose touched with the quality of poetry. Cole¬ ridge is the most systematic of its early literary inter¬ preters—especially in his Aids to Reflection and his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. He was the first of English writers to introduce the important distinction between “Understanding” and “Reason” in man. Un¬ derstanding, according to his teaching, is the faculty by which man argues, syllogizes, categorizes, demonstrates, proves, while Reason is a spiritual capacity and endow¬ ment which raises man above the realm of space and time and mechanism, and enables him to partake directly of God and become a revealer of Him. Re¬ ligion is thus, according to Coleridge, not something mysteriously superadded to man from outside himself. It is, like beauty and goodness, a function of his own higher capacities of life when they are normally ex¬ panded, opened out, and responsive to the spiritual environment of man’s true nature. This insight of Coleridge led him to the discovery of a fresher and truer basis of authority than that which had previously prevailed in Christian circles. The old basis was tra¬ ditional and dogmatic and therefore weak and pre¬ carious. It asserted instead of verifying. Coleridge, following Kant, found a spiritual constitution in the very nature and structure of man’s rational being, so that the fundamental verities of religion can be verified as surely as can the other values of human life. Oddly enough, the discovery of the principle of evolu- HOW SHALL WE THINK OF MAN? 39 tion, made in the middle of the century, and the con¬ clusion which goes with it, that man is organically linked up in origin with the lower animals, instead of degrading man and making him seem a mere “naturalis¬ tic” being, has, on the whole, had just the opposite effect. It has resulted in the emergence of a nobler conception of God as immanent, and a loftier view of man as essentially partaking of God and sharing with Him in the slow creative task of making a spiritual world, a kingdom of God. There has appeared, to be sure, in some scientific circles, a strong set in the ma¬ terialistic direction, a tendency to level down and to explain later and higher forms in terms of earlier and lower ones. But that is only one tendency among many others. Those who have come under the in¬ fluence of idealistic philosophy and the noblest litera¬ ture of the nineteenth century have found in the evolu¬ tionary principle the solidest basis for their expectation of a growing, unfolding, spiritual order. They mark in the long series of cosmic process a steady, climbing ascent of life. The curve is ever not quite a circle. It does not swing back to the point where it began. It winds upward like a spiral, each loop a little higher than the previous turn, though sometimes, no doubt, there are depressions, delays, and backward curves. We have, at any rate, got forward since the days of the “pithecanthropos.” The “pithec” has dropped away and only “anthropos” is left. 1 Man is no longer hy¬ phenated, though he still bears in both mind and body some of the “stigmata” of the past. But if he carries the markings and some hereditary traits of beings lower than himself, he also carries in himself the forecast and prophecy of better things in front. “He partly is and wholly hopes to be.” Man sometimes seems very “common and unclean,” still close to the clay from^ which his body has emerged, but yet there are in the best of the race plain indications of connection with a *See J. Macbride Sterrett’s Modernism in Religion, p. 3. 40 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS spiritual world and of kinship with God. There is something in us, however it got there, which is not clay, nor even finer material stuff—a strain of spirit which links us with the Spirit that works through matter, with hints and foregleams of a goal worth the strange, long journey. My friend T. Rhondda Williams, of Brighton, England, has admirably expressed in recent articles what I have been saying about the fundamental capac¬ ity of man. “His spiritual root,” he says, “goes down into the soul of eternity; everything in his experience is related to something that transcends that experience. The human spirit cannot be exhausted of significance, because it is rooted in the universal life of God. There is no such thing as mere human nature. This is why neither physical science nor psychology can give any exhaustive description of man. Physical science has a wonderful description to give of his body; psychology has many interesting things to say about his mind, but there is an evasive secret about his inner life which they cannot get at. It is this inexhaustible depth in the human which goes down into the eternal life of God that makes religion inevitable and indestructible. Every sacred book might be burned, and every temple razed to the ground, but religion could not be destroyed without destroying man himself. There have been end¬ less controversies about the origin of religion, but its real origin is in the Eternal Spirit working within the human spirit. . . . The root of man’s spiritual strength always lies in the consciousness of his relation to the infinite Life which is God. This consciousness admits of degrees: it may be weak, it may be strong; it may be only a glimmer, it may be a full orb; it may be a feeble stream, it may be a flood tide.” I come back, then, to the point which is central in my three chapters in this little book, namely, that God is Spirit and therefore reveals Himself at the highest and best through man who, in his measure, is also spirit. HOW SHALL WE THINK OF MAN? 41 Some men live downward and focus their attention upon things that are seen and tangible. They hardly believe any testimony of man’s spiritual nature. There are others, however, who live out beyond the fringes of the things they see and handle and are all the time aware of “intimation clear of wider scope.” They care little for formal arguments to prove God’s existence, for they no longer seek for a God on Olympus or above the sky or outside somewhere, working as an architect. God for them is the rational foundational ground of all that is real. We find Him when we enjoy beauty. We prove Him whenever we discover truth. We are with Him and in Him whenever we love with a love which rises above self and gives itself to another. He is there whenever we suffer and agonize over sin and wrong, and dedicate our will to make righteousness and good¬ ness triumph. Does the fish soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air? So we do not need to go “somewhere” to find God. We only need to be something. We need to hate our sin and failure, our pettiness and narrowness of vision, to come back home from the arid land of the stranger, and to rise from our isolated, solitary aims and be merged in life and love and spirit with Him who is knocking at our souls, and lo! we have found Him and He is ours and we are His. CHAPTER IV WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF NATURE? By Willard L. Sperry Christians have always held that the drama of the human soul finds its most adequate literary statement in the Bible, and that the Scriptures contain the essen¬ tial elements of a maturing and a matured religion. We turn, with an initial interest, to see what part the order of external nature plays in the two Testaments. The Bible begins with a picture of a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with a vision of a vast ideal city, compassing within its four walls a citizenship which no man can number. In so far as all religion finds its point of departure and vernacular symbols in the conditions of that common life which it seeks to inter¬ pret and inspire, the causes of this change of scene are perfectly plain. The religion of the Old Testament had its origins near to nature, if not actually in nature. The faith of the Hebrews was kindled in the desert, passed through a period of nomadism, and then came to rest in a settled pastoral life. The little walled towns which the early Hebrews built were hardly more than fortresses for military emergency. They never incarnated the genius of Judah and Israel. The tides of great empires, to the north and the south, rolled back and forth across the land for a thousand years before Christ, but after they had passed the shepherds and the plowmen and the vine-dressers lingered on the soil. As the result of this basic fact the Testament of this people is everywhere 42 WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF NATURE? 43 graciously inspired by a tender intimacy with the gen¬ tler aspects of the natural world. And certain of its more austere passages are unmatched in any literature, for reverent wonder before the felt immensities of desert, mountain, sea, and star-strewn sky. In the religious imagery of Psalm, Prophecy, and Wisdom books there is a “freshness of the early world,” and both their devout insight into present circumstance and their indomitable revolutionary hope are drawn from a life that was lived near the soil and in the open air under the overarching heavens. The Gospels take up the story and carry it into a world of little villages hard by a lake. The fisherman is added to the plowman and the vine-dresser. During his years of youth and early manhood Jesus was a car¬ penter. But, strangely enough, the Carpenter gave us no parables from the workshop. His words are words of the sheepfold, the fishing boat, and the fields. He is never more deeply and truly revealed than in His sayings about the lilies of the field and the single spar¬ row fallen to the ground. The Gospels reflect the sen¬ sitiveness of His race to the natural world. They antici¬ pate, prophetically, certain moral problems in the order of nature keenly felt to-day. But there is no suggestion in the Gospels that the order of external nature is either an end or a problem in itself. Jesus’ interest was an interest in men, and He used the symbols of the soil and the sea, not to point the way to a reality apart from man, but to interpret the life of man with man under God. With the later New Testament the scene shifts again, and finally, from the soil to the cities. Paul seems never to have fingered in conscious contemplation of the natural world. Its order is taken for granted and ignored in the Apostle’s intense preoccupation with the interior dramas of the human soul, and with the inter¬ action of man and man in a socially complex order. The mountains of Tarsus, the slopes of Lebanon, “the 44 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece,” past which he sailed upon his missions, the wild wonder of “Eurocly- don”—these seem to have said nothing and suggested nothing to the mind of Paul. He was essentially a man of the cities. Here and there in the closing pages of the New Tes¬ tament there are fleeting glimpses of the natural world under sentence of death and reverting to old chaos, but there is no intimation that religion may be learned or unlearned, even in parable, in the school of nature. And the Bible ends with its vision of the Heavenly City, obviously conceived and proffered to the mind of man as a foil and fulfilment of all that man aspired to be and was not in the overtopping fact of the classi¬ cal world, the fact of Imperial Rome. This “metropolitan” stamp which the Apostolic and sub-Apostolic ages put upon Christian thought per¬ sisted, almost unchanged, until the dawn of the Roman¬ tic Movement in the early nineteenth century. With the possible exception of St. Francis, whose childlike love and trust of all nature are an independent moral miracle in Christian history, the makers of Christian thought and Christian institutions seem to have drawn little suggestion or spiritual insight from the outer world. The noblest writing of the first five hundred years of our era found its occasion in human institu¬ tions rather than in the flowers of the field and birds of the air—Augustine’s “City of God.” Through the Middle Ages we have fleeting glimpses of saintly men going about the ways of the world with their cowls drawn low over their eyes, their gaze turned inward. We see Bernard crossing the Alps. We hear his fellows at the close of day make casual mention of the great mountains they have passed. And we, who journey to Switzerland to lift our eyes to the eternal snows, won¬ der at his question, “What mountains?” The Renais¬ sance gave back to the non-religious world an artificial and self-conscious feeling for nature, but this emotion WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF NATURE? 45 was too shallow to give passage to the deeper religious impulses of the time, and nothing of this spurious pa¬ ganism passed into the religion of the Reformation. Erasmus follows Bernard across the Alpine pass and spends the hours of transit composing an essay upon Old Age! In so far as Calvinism was conscious of the order of external nature it looked upon it with distrust and turned away to ponder the superior glories of Total Depravity and Limited Election. If John Calvin ever saw the lone sparrow fallen to the ground he passed by on the other side. Until finally our modern world began to dawn, in which the order of nature was prophesied anew by Bacon, Pascal, and Galileo; truly seen and deeply felt by Blake and Wordsworth; interpreted as a vast sequence of cause and effect by Laplace, Faraday, Dar¬ win, Huxley, Spencer, and their successors; and now bequeathed to us partly as a tremendous, imperious, external reality dwarfing the little life of man, and partly as an inscrutable moral problem. And there, for thoughtful men, the matter rests to-day. “How shall we think of nature?” The problem, in its initial statement, concerns the premises of our think¬ ing quite as much as the conclusions of our thinking. In spite of all that the nineteenth century, with its romanticism and its severe sciences, did to recover our lost consciousness of the natural world, we belong to an age which does not instinctively turn to nature for the occasion of the spiritual life, nor for its statement either as symbol or reality, nor for its ideal destiny. Our point of view is far more that of Paul than that of Job and the Psalmist. For the plainest cultural fact about our time is the steady drift from the soil to the cities, and with this latest shifting of the human scene there has been, in latter years, a fresh loss of those ways of thinking of life which have their rise in an intimate feeling for the soil, the sea, and the sky. Neither the Romantic Move- 46 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS ment in literature nor the steady spread of the natural sciences has held its own against the growth of the metropolitan mind. We know more of the ways of nature as classified in a text-book or displayed in a laboratory than men ever knew before. But we have less immediate personal experience of the order of na¬ ture than any generation ever had. We think in the terms of empire and mechanics and ticker tapes. We know more about the fluctuations of wheat in the pit than about the waving grain of the prairies. So that Sir Arthur Thomson, who is making a brave attempt to recover for the common mind its dimmed vision of the external world, can say that the love of nature has been “lost for a while in ultra-urban conditions.” And the second premise of our thinking, despite the spread of the natural sciences in the past hundred years, is the correlative rise of humanism, a steadily deepen¬ ing consciousness of the major dignity and worth of the person and experiences of man. The true spiritual drama of the last hundred years is to be found in the struggle of the soul of man to hold its own, and to reassert itself victoriously in the face of paralyzing immensities progressively revealed by the natural sciences. Pascal sensed all this, prophetically, when in the seventeenth century he pondered the reced¬ ing boundaries of stellar space and attempted to recon¬ cile his conflicting impressions of the littleness and the greatness of man. And he gave to the generations that succeeded him the paradox which gathers up all the profounder history of the human soul in the interven¬ ing years, “Man is little because he is so; but he is truly great because he knows it.” The incredible seons of geologic time and the unimaginable light-years which measure astronomical space have been used to club us to our knees and beat us into submissive and impotent silence. This is the first obvious fact about the history of modern thought. But the second and profounder truth is to be found in Pascal’s word, WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF NATURE? 47 “Were the Universe to crush him—this weakest reed in nature—man would still be more noble than that which has slain him, because he knows he dies.” If the order of external nature has sought latterly to teach us that we are littler than we know, it has never entirely vanquished “man’s unconquerable mind,” and all the gathering humanism of these latter years rises up to chant its inviolate faith that in realizing our place in nature we are greater than we know. In short, we have taken new refuge in the contemplation of the essential nobility of inner man, as against all that is dark, in¬ scrutable, and seemingly irrational in what Huxley once called “the passionless impersonality of the un¬ known and the unknowable.” There was a little upper room in a Boston hotel, look¬ ing out upon the squat tower of Trinity Church, where Phillips Brooks used often to stop. One day a friend, coming to his room, asked him if he did not sometimes hunger to get away from the city and back again into the wide fields and open air of the countryside. And this Christian humanist went to the window and looked out for a moment and then turned and said “No,” .that the chimney pots of Boston were dearer to him than all the beauties of nature. There is the authentic voice of our own time. There is the record of a hundred years of stern mental fight and its homely conclusion. It is certainly true that we men of to-day do not live so near to nature or see nature with as single an eye as many of the generations gone. It is also true that we can never recover the first fresh raptures of a childish faith in nature. Too much water has gone un¬ der the bridge these centuries past for us ever to “have sight of Proteus rising from the sea.” That way lies an arid artificial paganism. Our lot is cast primarily in a world of men, and each of us defines his duty through “the need of a world of men for me.” If we seem to love nature less to-day, it is in some pro¬ founder sense that we love man the more. 48 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS This is the stable logic of all serious life. It was not only the course of Bible history, it is still the nor¬ mal drift of all deeper experience. Despite all that the infinitely extended boundaries of our knowledge of the order of nature have done to belittle man in his own eyes, this ultimate humanism remains good science. It is the major impression and conclusion which sur¬ vives all the shifting conceptions of organic evolution. If the modern biologist finds it hard to see God walking in a garden through the cooling vapors of a nebula, he can still look with a heightened appreciation upon the man and the woman. If the sciences have wakened the yelp of the beast in us, have made us feel the claws of the sabre-toothed tiger in our clenched fist, and even have given to these a certain fresh sanction, they have not broken the will to silence the yelp of the beast, or denied us the moral heights with their glimpse of a height that is higher. Sometimes the natural sciences seem to have disclosed the external order as a vast proscenium, receding on every hand into the inscruta¬ ble darkness of time and space and to have discovered man to himself as an actor before the guttering little rushlight of known history playing an insane drama without author and without audience. But even in such extremity man has held he was greater than the stage-setting of the order of nature, and that his seem¬ ingly trivial monologue was the cue to Reality. If modern man must cast his lot either with paganism or humanism, the one to the absolute exclusion of the other, he will choose the latter as against the former. But it would seem that our “ultra-urban,” self-suffi¬ cient humanism might profitably steep itself once more in the mind of Jesus, a mind which was near to nature that it might come still nearer to God and man. Surely we are not driven to an absolute subordination of our¬ selves to the external order, nor yet to a divorce of the moods of our thinking from their native kinship with WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF NATURE? 49 that order. Surely we are to seek to recapture our lost sensitiveness to the natural order, that we may use its symbols as clues to the ways of God with man and of man with man, and that humbly we may see in con¬ scious human life the purposed product of some divine discipline. We shall be most deeply true to the long tradition of history in which we stand, to our own deep¬ est intuitions and convictions, to the soberest conclu¬ sions of our sciences, and to the genius of our religion, if we think of the order of inanimate nature as a scene fitly planned for the drama of mind and heart and will, human and beyond-human, and of the order of animate nature as a patient physical discipline yielding in due time its fruitage of conscious moral persons. We shall think of nature most accurately and most significantly when our minds move with Wordsworth. For there is no finer perspective in this whole matter than that Eighth Book of “The Prelude”—“Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man.” As we follow Words¬ worth out over those “moors, mountains, headlands” that he knew so well and loved with such tender in¬ sight, with him we shall catch final sight of the solitary Cumberland shepherd, crowning the scene. A rambling schoolboy, thus, I felt his presence in his own domain. As of a lord and master, or a power, Or genius, under Nature, under God, Presiding; and severest solitude Had more commanding looks when he was there. ... As he stepped Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow. His form hath flashed upon me, glorified By the deep radiance of the setting sun: Or him have I descried in distant sky, A solitary object and sublime, Above all height! like an aerial cross Stationed alone upon a spiry rock Of the Chartreuse, for worship. Thus was man Ennobled outwardly before my sight. 50 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS Recall, My Song! those high emotions which thy voice Has heretofore made known; that bursting forth Of sympathy, inspiring and inspired, When everywhere a vital pulse was felt. And all the several frames of things, like stars. Through every magnitude distinguishable, Shone mutually indebted, or half lost Each in the other’s blaze, a galaxy Of life and glory. In the midst stood Man, Outwardly, inwardly contemplated. As of all visible natures, crown, though born Of dust, and kindred to the worm; a Being, Both in perception and discernment, first In every capability of rapture, Through the divine effect of power and love; As more than anything we know, instinct With godhead. To establish some such initial perspective is to begin to think rightly of nature. Having indicated this per¬ spective, there remain for mention a single problem and a single suggestion. The problem is the moral problem as it presents it¬ self in nature. It becomes at the last the somber prob¬ lem of evil, to which no satisfactory speculative answer has ever been given. All of our efforts to justify the ways of God to man fail of their ambition, and the world’s great religions have taught, rather, the lesson of reconciliation to God. In this respect the Christian ministry of reconciliation stoops to conquer and stands supreme. It should be noted, however, that the statement of the problem of evil in the terms of the natural order is essentially a modern aspect of this ancient inquiry, and that sensitiveness to this aspect of the problem is a characteristic distinctive of our own time, a witness not to the increase of wanton cruelty in nature, but to the growth of conscience in man, the observer. The jungle is neither more nor less cruel than it ever was, but man looks upon its tragedies with a tenderer heart. WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF NATURE? 51 A scrupulous and courageous mind will rule out of the problem as it is stated in these terms so much of evil as man brings upon himself by his ignorance of the laws of nature or his wilful disobedience of those laws. We shall feel no oppressive problem if we admit that in our bodily health, our mental integrity, and the for¬ tunes of our civilization, as Huxley has it, “the ledgers of the Almighty are strictly kept and every one of us has the balance of his operations paid over to him at the end of every minute of his existence.” There is no ultimate case against God or His world in nine tenths of the misery which man, in ignorance and sin, brings upon himself. Nor are we justified in imputing moral and immoral motives to the agents of inanimate nature or to the sub-human creatures. We cannot say that a bolt of lightning, of itself, is either moral or immoral. We cannot call the flash of a cobra’s fangs into its victim good or bad. In all such language we are imputing to the forces of nature and the beasts of the field an inde¬ pendent ability to say “ought” and “ought not,” which obviously they do not possess. We shall be rigid with ourselves in insisting that these agents in both orders of nature, animate and inanimate, are simply non- moral. The problem presses farther back to the Will that lies behind them and the divine, far-off event which they contemplate. But it is true, when we have cleared this aspect of the problem of evil of all those diseases, miseries, and catas¬ trophes which man brings upon himself in intimate ex¬ perience and in wide history, and when we have shriven non-moral agents in nature of the burden of immediate responsibility for good and evil, that there remains a stern problematical residuum of suffering and cruelty in our world, which cries out bitterly for interpretation. No religion can hope to command the attention and respect of the modern mind which ignores this fact. In so far as the world we see has bred men who can 52 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS know, and love, and choose between good and evil, that would seem to be the purpose of the natural order. And unless such men are to be mechanical puppets, achieved as a fait accompli, place must be made for an evolution, and evolution involves death. Our prob¬ lem is ultimately the problem of the ways and means for dying in the natural world, the “red ravin of tooth and claw” which gives its cutting edge to the fact of evil in nature. As man knows death, most of its misery comes as mental anticipation, not as immediate phys¬ ical pain. “The tempest in my mind doth make all else seem calm.” From this aspect of the problem we must suppose the lesser creatures are delivered. There may be momentary panic and pain, but given the necessity for death, it is incumbent upon critics of an immoral and cruel nature to devise a scheme whereby better place may be made for the evolving succes¬ sion of the generations and orders of the animate world. That there is a moral problem here we cannot deny, but we shall be untrue to fact if we add to the suffering of animals the deeper poignancy which comes from man’s memory and anticipation. He who laughs with bitter cynicism at the sober proposition that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds” is challenged at once to conceive a world in which conscious moral character could be better planned and realized, through a long evolutionary process. Moreover, the most significant achievements of man remain, in some measure, as the fruits of victory over hostile nature. It is the struggle that keeps the soul alive, and in so far as man’s struggle is a struggle with his total environment, the sense of an opposition in nature has kindled the conquering spirit in him. The analyst of “Civilization in the United States” can say, “Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge mixed instrumentalities,” but he can immediately add, “Success in mastering nature has overcome the feeling WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF NATURE? 53 of helplessness in the presence of misfortune. It breeds optimists of intelligence. To a cataclysm such as the San Francisco earthquake, it replies with organized relief and reconstruction in reinforced concrete. If pestilence appears, it seeks the germ, an antitoxin, and sanitary measures. There are no longer altars built to the Beautiful Necessity.” Not only so, but the most precious triumphs of the human soul have in some profound sense incorporated and transmuted the stubborn opposition of the natural world into a greater good. The genius of the deeper spiritual life of man lies not merely in his ability to oppose nature and to master nature; it lies in what the poet calls “the power an agonizing sorrow to trans¬ mute.” For he can say of himself, How strange, that all The terrors, pains and early miseries. Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part. And that a needful part, in making up The calm existence that is mine when I Am worthy of myself. Those words are in some wider and profounder sense true, not only of the individual, but of the life of man in nature. The serenity of the human soul at its noblest to-day is not unconscious of its total moral problem, nor the residuum of moral mystery in nature. But even this mystery has been transmuted and touched with a certain healing spirit, which redeems the life of man on the earth from being what otherwise it must be, a thing of bleak tragedy and makes of it a thing tender with redemption and nobler for the dark mysteries of nature which it transmutes into its own spiritual good and then dares to interpret as the inten¬ tion of the Eternal Goodness. One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists—one only; an assured belief 54 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS That the procession of our fate, howe’er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power; Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good. There remains a single final suggestion. Our re¬ ligious “problem” in the presence of nature has its origins in the fact that our thinking is far more char¬ acteristically Hebrew than Greek; that is, we instinc¬ tively subordinate emotion to ethics. In so far as religion is more than morality, nature has other aspects than the moral aspect, and we have approaches to nature other than the difficult moral ap¬ proach. Without sacrificing any of our hard-won ethical in¬ sights and convictions, it is fair to say that our time stands in great need of a religious experience in which the moral struggle is for the moment fulfilled in the known enjoyment of prophetic moral victory and of union with God. For what is religion? It is not the moral struggle alone. Its genius is not so truly incar¬ nated in the symbol of the soldier and the pilgrim as in the symbol of the lover. And its glory is not so much the glory of going on as the peace of God im¬ mediately experienced in “rest most busy.” Our characteristic “religious experiences,” whether we recognize them as such or not, are the experiences in which we feel deeply our communion and union with God and man and our whole world. To feel deeply and to know this oneness wherever and however it may be intimated in the homely circumstances of daily fife, and then to have the faith to say “God,” that is to have “experienced religion.” Whatsoever is less than this or other than this is ethics or theology, but not religion in its simple and satisfying reality. We live in an age when this sense of the oneness of things has been all but lost. It is our own fault, our most grievous fault, that we have forgotten how to WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF NATURE? 55 lift up our eyes to the hills, and have burdened our time with the bitter heritage of all man’s inhumanity to man. There is no simpler or straighter pathway to religion through the troubled circumstance of the present age than that which opens to us as we turn to nature, not with our moral questionings, but with our hurt hearts asking for healing. We need to be reassured that man still belongs to God, and that under God man and man belong to one another. It is hard for us to recover this forfeited peace. And if religion is to come into its own again we must use a language that is simple and universal. The language of nature remains to us as such a medium of healing, of interpretation, and of reconciliation. It needs not that we should journey to Grand Ca¬ nons or Sahara Deserts or High Alps to learn this language. He who does not speak it where he lives cannot be taught it in the show places of nature. It needs rather that we should look out upon so much of nature as the day reveals, it may be only the sunset beyond our smoky cities or the bit of garden at our doors, and that we should speak colloquially with na¬ ture as Thoreau spoke in Concord. For this colloquial conversation with the homely aspects of the natural scene is the universal language that man always speaks when he is intimately at one with his world. No rhetoric, no eloquence are needed, only a fresh sense of the friendly and familiar scenes of daily life, which, far more truly than all theologies, chant a faith held “always, everywhere, by all men.” A French poilu during the riven years just gone said that despite the hatred to the death which divided him from his enemy he could never escape the feeling that that which united them was more than that which divided them. For they both looked out upon the same poppies blowing in No Man’s Land, they were both warmed by the same sun, drenched by the same 56 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS rains, chilled by the same snows, obscured by a common night, and renewed by a common dawn. He had laid hold upon the true part which nature seems primarily intended to play in the spiritual life. This is beyond- morality, as Jesus knew. The inconclusive and tenta¬ tive terms of the moral struggle are superseded by a sure sense of the oneness of all things, behind and beyond, and ever present. We shall be but imperfect disciples of Jesus if we confine our thought of nature to scientific measure¬ ment and moralizing, and ignore those other moods in which nature speaks to us of a Father who maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. It is to intimate this truth that nature is spread be¬ fore our dimmed eyes to-day. And if we cannot see, nature can only say, ’Tis ye, ? tis your estranged faces That miss the many splendored thing. To learn to speak this language of intimate com¬ munion once more, to accept gladly our part and place in nature, to let it speak its own healing through homely and familiar scenes to the heart of a time that has sacrificed to its temporal hostilities its deeper capacities for religious experience, something of all this should return into our thought of nature. The sun is fixed. And the infinite magnificence of heaven Fixed, within reach of every human eye; The sleepless ocean murmurs for all ears; The vernal field infuses fresh delight Into all hearts . . . The smoke ascends To heaven as lightly from the cottage hearth As from the haughtiest palace. He whose soul Ponders this true equality, may walk The fields of earth with gratitude and hope. CHAPTER V HOW SHALL WE THINK OF SOCIETY AND HUMAN RELATIONS? By B. Seebohm Rowntree This is a question on which too many of us, even among those who are regarded as thoughtful persons, seldom or never do any sound and constructive think¬ ing. We allow things to happen, instead of formulat¬ ing a clear conception of what we believe that society and human relationships should be, and then working steadily and consistently to realize our ideals. Yet everything that has ever been created by man, whether a cathedral, a war, or a social system, is the outcome of thought; and careless, chaotic thinking inevitably results in careless and chaotic action. No thoughtful man is satisfied with the present state of society, yet we shrink from the hard thinking that must precede any radical improvement. Indeed, it is not unfair to say that we shrink from it more than we shrink from sacrifice. We would rather face physical stress and discomfort than the mental and spiritual stress that hard thinking involves. Therefore we try to content ourselves with the superficial mitigation of social evils. We never really try to find and to ex¬ tirpate the root of any one evil. But we break off the weeds at their stems—it is probably better than doing nothing, but it is not the way of true progress. Let us try to visualize the kind of society which we would like to see established. I am not thinking of some Utopia which is perhaps quite unattainable on 57 58 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS our present “plane of consciousness,” but of something capable of actual realization within a comparatively short period, something which practical men and wo¬ men may definitely set before themselves as a goal, to be reached by their children if not by them. The basis and starting-point of our social organiza¬ tion is the family, and from every standpoint it is es¬ sential that the home where the family lives shall be such as will be conducive to a healthy and worthy life. The right solution of the housing problem is there¬ fore a matter of vital importance. To-day, in England, it is very roughly estimated that five per cent of our working-class people live in slums; and probably this is true of all of the older countries, since “nothing is so international as the slum.” People have got it into their heads that slums are inevitable. That is a com¬ plete mistake. Slums will disappear as soon as we really make up our minds that we will tolerate them no longer. Had the war not intervened, legislation would probably have been in active operation to-day which in a few years would have made slums com¬ paratively rare in England . 1 But it is not enough to get rid of slums. We must also get rid of the long, monotonous rows of “cages for factory hands”—the dreary waste of featureless unlovely dwellings which the great majority of unskilled workers in our towns now inhabit. Such sordid surroundings cannot fail to exercise a deadening influence on the mentalities of those who live among them. The love of beauty is instinctive in human beings: so is the love of ample breathing-space for soul and body. In those mean streets, the faculties of admiration and of wonder, which are of such vital importance, are flung back upon themselves, stifled, or turned into unhealthy chan- 1 The methods by which slums were to be abolished are set out in the Report of the Land Enquiry Committee (Vol. II), Urban, published by Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1914, and in the Speeches of The Rt. Hon. D. Lloyd George in 1913-1914, dealing with the Land Question. HOW SHALL WE THINK OF SOCIETY? 59 nels. Only people who are supernormal, or subnormal, can fail to suffer impoverishment, physical, mental, and moral, in a cramped, dingy, ugly environment. As we consider housing conditions, we are forced to recognize that the housing problem is primarily a poverty problem, and to consider our economic sys¬ tem and the distribution of wealth. It is not generally realized that even countries like the United States and England are comparatively poor. If the total income of either country were equally divided among its in¬ habitants, the general scale of living thus made pos¬ sible would still be considerably lower than is socially desirable. Of course, this is not to argue against the advisability of a more even distribution of wealth; rather, it points to the inference that we cannot afford, from the standpont of the general well-being, to dis¬ tribute our wealth so unevenly, while its amount is so limited. But perhaps, before proceeding, I should pause to ask whether we should not be better and happier if we were content with a much simpler standard of living than is adopted to-day even by those who are generally regarded as living very simply. Are we right in de¬ manding a standard of creature-comfort so enormously higher than our great-grandparents enjoyed? Or is the constant striving after a higher general standard of life a mistake? Should we be well advised to eschew these modern refinements, such as telephones and tele¬ graphs, and bicycles and motor cars, and daily news¬ papers, and bathrooms, and electric light, and express trains and a highly developed postal system, and food brought from all the ends of the earth—tea, and coffee, and rice, and currants, and raisins, and oranges, and all kinds of things which now enter into the diet of every cottager, but which were regarded as rare luxuries a comparatively few years ago? Obviously it is important that we should not demand a standard of life which can only be provided at the 60 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS cost of excessive toil, either on our own part or that of others, and we should avoid enervating luxury; but I do not think any case can be made out against sur¬ rounding ourselves with the amenities of Western civilization. The average Western man is not a con¬ templative person like the men of the East. His nature calls for an active life. If he were shut off from rapid travel, and rapid and general dissemination of news, and from his accustomed interest and excitement of trade and commerce, he would not turn to spiritual contem¬ plation but would stagnate. The Western nature will develop its finest qualities amid an environment of rightly directed action. There are few Thoreaus amongst us. It may be urged that even the present comparatively low standard of comfort is only secured at the cost of hard toil. This may be readily admitted, but why is it? Is it not because of the waste of energy which is going on? Look at the industrial warfare— the tens of millions of days of work lost every year in the United States and England through strikes and lock-outs! And think of the hidden waste which is even more disastrous! The ca’ canny, the waste due to lack of cordial cooperation between all the human factors engaged in industry. If this waste and the waste due to inefficient indus¬ trial methods were avoided, a much higher general standard of material comfort would be possible with¬ out undue labor. It is in these directions that we should seek for change rather than in the lowering of the standard of comfort. But although we may conclude that the desire for a standard of material comfort higher than is generally possible to-day is to be encouraged, this is not to say that the present means of seeking to satisfy that desire are satisfactory. Few would claim that they are sat¬ isfied with the conditions of modern industry. Its shortcomings are so well known that I need not dwell upon them. Radical changes are called for. HOW SHALL WE THINK OF SOCIETY? 61 I think the ideals we should set before us in industry may be briefly stated as follows: 1. Industry should create goods, or provide services of such kinds, and in such measure, as may be beneficial to the community. 2. In the process of wealth production, industry should pay the greatest possible regard to the general welfare of the community, and pursue no policy detrimental to it. 3. Industries should distribute the wealth produced in such a manner as will best serve the highest ends of the community. I believe that no system of industry can be defended which fails to satisfy these three conditions—and it is for the defenders of any system to prove that it is capable of doing so. Obviously, the first thought that arises in our minds is, Can our present system of in¬ dustry meet the tests? As I shall try to show later, the spirit actuating those who are working any given system is of more importance than the system itself. The present system, as it is commonly applied, cer¬ tainly fails to meet the tests, but personally I believe that it will be possible to meet them without making any revolutionary changes in the structure of the in¬ dustrial system. There will, however, have to be pro¬ found changes in the spirit in which it is worked, as well as certain safeguards, and it is possible that grad¬ ually these may lead to structural changes in the sys¬ tem itself, but these will be evolutionary, and I do not think we can forecast their nature at present. I suggest that the next steps to be taken to improve industrial conditions are the following: 1. The payment of minimum wages to workers of normal ability which, in the case of a man, will enable him to marry, to live in a decent house, 62 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS and to maintain a family of normal size in a state of physical efficiency, with a reasonable mar¬ gin for contingencies and recreation; and, in the case of a woman, will enable her to live com¬ fortably, in respectable surroundings, providing for herself alone. The achievement of this aim at the earliest possible moment should be placed in the forefront of the policy of every industrial enterprise. 2. The hours of work should be such as to leave the worker sufficient leisure. Experience seems to point to forty-eight hours as the length of work¬ ing week suitable in most industries, and any deviation from this figure, either up or down, should be justified by the special circumstances of the case. 3. The workers should be given reasonable economic security during the whole working life and in old age. This involves unemployment insurance on a scale which will remove the fear of the actual suffering and privation which are due to in¬ voluntary unemployment, insurance against in¬ validity and long-continued illness, and an ade¬ quate old-age pension. The cost of providing these is within the reach of industry. 4. The status of the workers should be much more that of cooperators in industry than servants. This will not involve anarchy or any loss of in¬ dustrial efficiency. 5. The workers should have a direct financial interest in the prosperity of the industry in which they are engaged. I do not say that the attainment of the above con¬ ditions would mean the complete realization of the three ideals which I outlined for industry. But it would constitute a very great advance in that direction, and it is an advance which we can begin to make at once, HOW SHALL WE THINK OF SOCIETY? 63 and is already being made in many factories with strikingly satisfactory results. Let us now turn to the international aspect of what is really the same problem, that of establishing rela¬ tions of whole-hearted cooperation among human be¬ ings. Unless we can adopt some intelligent way of dealing with, and settling, the various disputes which arise between states and nations, not only will the progress of civilization be checked, but there is a posi¬ tive danger that the countries, to use Lord Rosebery’s phrase, may “rattle back to barbarism.” This is no empty fear. We of this generation, creatures of a day, may stand awestruck before the evidences of the power of civilization and its wonderful activities. Our world¬ wide trade, our laws, our cities, our art galleries, our museums, our schools and universities, and all our vast accomplishments in science and in literature: these surely represent abiding might! But so may the citi¬ zens of Greece, of Persia, and of ancient Egypt have argued in their day. Progress in civilization is not a thing to be assumed: indeed, the record of history sug¬ gests a very different assumption. The human forces that create civilization can even more speedily destroy it, if they are divided against themselves. If the chances of rapid advance are greater than ever they were before, so are the chances of a terribly swift retro¬ gression. As I write, forty-seven States in Genoa are seeking, like Frankenstein, to restrain the destruc¬ tive power of the monster they have created. The Great War was not an inexplicable phenom¬ enon: it was the logical result of events prior to 1914, and it was a world war because the whole civilized world is now bound up in “one bundle of life.” Rail¬ way and steamship lines, and international cables, and an ever-increasing volume of international trade, like the veins and arteries of some vast organism, have sent the life-blood of humanity pulsing from one end of the earth to the other. Isolation has become impos- 64 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS sible, and if one member is diseased or maimed, the whole body suffers. If only for this reason, it is es¬ sential to create some international organization for the achievement of mutually desirable purposes and for the avoidance of friction. We need not here ask whether the League of Nations as at present consti¬ tuted can adequately fulfil this function, but if it can¬ not, some other organ must be devised, having a similar objective. We have learned that to-day war directly involves not merely armies, but whole nations. And, just as the perils of war grow more appalling, so will the prep¬ aration for war, always spoken of in terms of self- defense, grow more costly, not only absolutely, but in its relation to national incomes. I am, in this chapter, purposely confining my dis¬ cussion to fundamental considerations affecting society and human relations, and shall not dwell on such ques¬ tions as intemperance, gambling, or vice, not because they are unimportant, but because they fall into a dif¬ ferent category from the subjects discussed. There are, however, two other subjects which claim our con¬ sideration. The first is education. That is funda¬ mental. No social system can be defended which re¬ fuses adequate opportunities of mental development to any considerable section of the people. Progress of a sort is possible in an autocratically gov¬ erned state, even though education is largely confined to the governing class. But in the Western World we are dealing with democracies, and to give people the right of self-government while withholding from them the opportunity of a sound education is as dangerous as to allow children to play with high explosives. It is a fundamental condition of good government in a democratic state that a high average standard of edu¬ cation shall be secured, and that all children of parts shall be given full opportunity to develop their mental powers. The imperative need to fulfil these conditions HOW SHALL WE THINK OF SOCIETY? 65 is more fully recognized in America than in England, but in neither country is it as yet adequately appre¬ ciated. An adequate system of education is necessarily costly, and we probably cannot afford it while so heavy a drain on the national resources is made by wars and military preparations. We must choose between the two. The other subject to which I must refer as funda¬ mental to any satisfactory scheme of society is that the form of government must be such as will give proper liberty to all members of the community and afford them adequate means of self-expression. The laws should accurately reflect the desires and aspira¬ tions of the people, not those of a favored class. In this connection, history reminds us that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” It is not enough to create a liberty-giving constitution; it is necessary constantly to watch that individuals or groups of individuals are not usurping powers which should remain with the people. I have very briefly outlined some of the chief char¬ acteristics of a state of society which, though not per¬ fect, would be infinitely superior to society as we know it to-day, and I have suggested some of the steps by which we may advance. I have pictured nothing im¬ possible, nothing fantastic: indeed, the criticism may with some justice be urged that the ideal put forward is too modest. But I believe that it is one which the vast majority of the people who think about the future at all would advocate. It is merely in accord¬ ance with the dictates of common sense that people should live in healthy, comfortable houses, that the common good should take precedence of private gain as a motive force in industry, that measures should be adopted for removing the principal causes of industrial unrest, and securing the cordial cooperation of all con¬ cerned in the production of wealth, that we should learn to settle international disputes by other methods 66 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS than those of the jackal and hyena, that educational advantages, and ample opportunities of self-expression, should be within the reach of every-one, and, finally, that governments should be democratic in fact as well as in name. Why, then, cannot we bring about the changes which are generally acknowledged to be desirable? The rea¬ son of our failure lies deep in our own souls. Take any of the social evils from which humanity suffers, trace it to its underlying cause, and you will find some spirit¬ ual failing—pride, vanity, love of power, avarice, sloth, or selfishness—that word which sums up all the other words. This is a point that I can hardly overempha¬ size, since the accurate diagnosis of any disease is the first step towards its cure. At present, social effort is mainly directed towards the partial remedy of external evils, while compara¬ tively little serious attention is being devoted by social reformers and statesmen to the underlying cause of social ills. Religion is too largely regarded as a soul¬ saving device which functions in a department of its own, and which has nothing to do with “practical politics.” But thirty years of fairly close study of social, economic, and industrial questions from the practical standpoint have driven me to the conclusion that there is no way out of our present difficulties if we leave the spiritual factor out of account. The real difficulty is not to devise a desirable scheme of society, but to persuade men to conform to it when it has been devised, and this is less a mental than a moral and spiritual problem. What the world needs to-day is a great spiritual revival, whose immediate object is not the saving of souls in some future life, but the establishment here and now of a standard of life more creditable to human hearts and heads than that which obtains to-day. There are two impulses which sway each of us. One is the impulse towards selfishness and materialism. It HOW SHALL WE THINK OF SOCIETY? 67 is the impulse to strive after ease and comfort, and good living, and power for ourselves, and perhaps also for members of our own family or our particular set or class. The other impulse is to give practical ex¬ pression to the spiritual side of our natures. Now, for most of us, the former impulse is the more insistent, and unless we guard and nurture the spiritual element within us, it is in danger of being stifled by its vigorous competitor. Merely from the standpoint of efficient reform, any social system that is to achieve permanence must rest upon a spiritual foundation. No other foundation en¬ dures : on no other can we raise a solid structure. Ma¬ terialism and selfishness, however judiciously com¬ bined, can never create anything worth creating. Now, suppose we admit that merely from the prac¬ tical standpoint of social reform it is absolutely neces¬ sary that our scheme of society shall be established on a spiritual basis, and that men and women generally shall emphasize spiritual rather than material values, to what practical action does this point? I think the first thing is to make it clear that what we are seeking after is not a dreamy, ineffective other¬ worldliness, but a spiritual dynamic which will make this world an infinitely better place to live in. At present, the kind of employer who asserts with con¬ fidence that “business is business” and the politician whose actions are based on a materialistic philosophy look upon themselves as hard-headed practical men, and secretely despise the spiritual teacher. This is largely because the religious teachers of to-day have been too much on the defensive—too apologetic. They must tell the “hard-headed” man of the world, whether he be an employer or a diplomat, that really he isn’t hard-headed at all, but very soft-headed; that it is his heart that is hard, not his head. They should ask him whether he is proud of society as he sees it to-day. We must make men feel that just in so far as social and in- 68 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS dustrial and international policies are based on selfish¬ ness and materialism they will be failures and stupid failure. Look at wars between educated and presum¬ ably civilized people. Are they not stupid? Look at strikes and lock-outs. Are they not stupid? Ought we not to burn with shame when we realize that we have actually failed to discover a better way of settling many of our differences than that of jackals and hy¬ enas? Next, we must see that nothing is allowed to parade as spiritual religion which is not genuine. There is far too much of the religion of smug respectability. Men outside the churches look at the lives of many churchgoers and they say, “These men, who profess much, are no better than we, who make no profession.” We must purge our churches of all hypocrisy. The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance. If the tree does not bear the fruit, it is the wrong kind of tree. Real spirituality is a virile thing, which there is no mistaking. There is nothing sanctimonious about it, and it is not given to wearing a dreamy, far-away expression. It is, indeed, singularly alert! One is conscious of it in the grip of the hand, in the atmo¬ sphere of the home, the office, or the factory, as some¬ thing warm and strong and vital. It may be found in a churchgoer or in a man who never enters a place of worship, but wherever we find it, it bears the hall¬ mark of a consecrated and unselfish life. Religion of that kind is always efficacious. But who will become its missionaries? Who will help forward the spiritual revival of which the world is so bitterly in need? There is a marked tendency to-day, as there always has been, for rank-and-file people to wait till those in authority take action. In politics it is usually: “Why doesn’t the government do something?” and in religious matters we seem to be waiting for the churches. But the actual relation of each individual to HOW SHALL WE THINK OF SOCIETY? 69 God and man is something simple and immediate, something which cannot be devolved. There is much talk of devolution nowadays, and a few of us might welcome the idea of devolving our spiritual responsi¬ bilities. We cannot do it. We cannot hand them over to any accredited leader. Moreover, even in matters of social and political reform, the leader’s rate of ad¬ vance depends on those who follow him. No ruler can long act far in advance of public opinion. This is true, to a great extent, in the sphere of spiritual activities. We must face our own obligations, and probably we all have greater opportunities for effective service than we realize. A large employer can do more than most preachers to deepen the spiritual life of the na¬ tion. Think what it means in some measure to set the tone of a factory in which hundreds or thousands of people are working. The tone of a workshop is just as important as that of a school or college. I have seen managers and foremen and individual workmen who, probably without knowing it, were preaching a spiritual religion, not through their lips but in their lives, and I have seen those about them respond, until the whole atmosphere was altered. Those men are pioneers of the spiritual age, and we are all called to be such pioneers, in our particular spheres. Only by development on those lines will spirituality finally conquer materialism, love conquer selfishness. It is not for me to dwell here on the teaching by which men now spiritually apathetic are to be rendered spiritually alive—that will doubtless be discussed in other chapters. My purpose is to press home two thoughts: firstly, that social reformers who are leaving spiritual considerations out of account in their efforts to set the world straight are courting inevitable dis¬ aster; and, secondly, that at present an entirely undue amount of time and energy and money is being devoted to altering various systems which form the structure of society, as, for instance, the system of industry, or 70 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS the mode of settling international disputes, when really what is primarily needed is to alter the ideals of the men who have the power to change the systems. After all, systems are but machines for carrying out the ideals of the men who create them. It is futile to attempt to change the system while leaving the ideals unchanged. The underlying motive power in the capitalistic system of industry is private gain. Not only the capitalist, but every grade of worker, from the highest to the lowest, is seeking to get as large a share as possible of the product of industry. When the economic position favors the capitalist, he forces wages down. When it favors the workers, they force wages up. And always each class of workers, laborers, skilled mechanics, clerks, administrative officers, are pushing their own claims as against those of the other workers. “Now,” say certain reformers, “these conditions are highly unsatisfactory. Let us change the system of industry for one based on the assumption that every¬ one is working unselfishly for the common good instead of for private gain. Then all will be well,” and so they devote their whole energies to changing the sys¬ tem of industry. Now one does not need to be a de¬ fender of the present system with all its evils to real¬ ize the futility of such a course. These men are cutting off the head of the noxious plant, but leaving the vig¬ orous root untouched. If a lasting reform is to be effected, the ideals of those responsible for the continuance of the present system must be changed, and then they will speedily devise a new system adapted to their changed ideals. Indeed, such a process may already be seen working in many factories, where employers and employed, actu¬ ated by unselfish motives, are changing their little part of the industrial system in which they function so that it shall respond to their ideals. And so, the answer which we are compelled to give to the question, What shall we think of society and HOW SHALL WE THINK OF SOCIETY? 71 human relations? is this. At present, society, based very largely on selfishness, is so sick that in Europe it is in actual danger of disintegration. In Russia, mil¬ lions are starving, and most of the other countries are so poor that they can hardly pay their way. In Amer¬ ica, material conditions are better, but here also signs are not wanting that the old basis of society is inade¬ quate to the needs of to-day. The fact is that the sit¬ uation has changed profoundly since 1914. So long as the power of government, whether in states or in in¬ dustry, rested with a small class, and the great mass of the people were willing to be governed, without asking too many questions if conditions were not ren¬ dered quite intolerable; and so long as wars, when they did occur, were confined to comparatively small bodies of fighting men, a society based on selfishness could make some show of success. But to-day, not only has it been clearly demonstrated that in future wars will directly involve whole nations, instead of merely armies, but a profound change has come over the psychology of the people. It is a change as great as, or greater than, that which swept over Europe in 1848. The war has given to the ordinary man a new sense of his worth and his power. In in¬ dustry, the workman is no longer willing to be the servant of capital. He demands the status of partner or, at any rate, of cooperator. He is claiming rights scarcely thought of even a decade ago. But in these new circumstances, the dry rot in the present system, largely based on selfishness, inevitably shows itself. So long as the relation was one of a self¬ ish master and docile servant, the falsity of the po¬ sition, judged by ethical standards, might remain hidden. But so soon as the spirit of servitude disap¬ pears, and each class urges its own claims with great and often selfish insistence, the position becomes quite impossible. That, put very crudely, but not, I think, inaccurately, is the situation in industry to-day. Ob- 72 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS viously it cannot continue indefinitely, since industry is essential to the existence of society, and unless it functions more harmoniously, society will bleed to death. And what is true of industry is true of inter¬ national relations. Here friction, when it occurs, is now on so vast a scale that unless we can relieve it, the outlook is indeed somber. Whether we judge it from the social, the industrial, or the international standpoint, selfishness has failed as a motive. It has never really urged humanity for¬ ward, and to-day its acknowledged tyranny threatens our very existence. But what shall we substitute as a working power? A search into the possible alterna¬ tives, no matter how profound or long-continued, can have but one result. The only dynamic strong enough both to replace and dominate selfishness is the old, old dynamic of love—the greatest, the most accessible, the most spiritual, the most practical force in the whole universe! CHAPTER VI HOW SHALL WE THINK OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD? By A. Clutton-Brock Before answering this question, we must ask what Christ meant by the Kingdom of God; and to that there are at least two rival answers which I must state before declaring for one of them. According to one answer, He meant something we cannot mean, something provincial and of the past in which we do not now believe. Like many Jews of His time, He expected an external change or catastrophe that was to come suddenly, like an earthquake, and to come soon. It was to end all the kingdoms of this world, especially the Roman Empire, and was to es¬ tablish the reign of the Jewish God here on earth, bringing rewards to the good and punishments to the wicked. Those who hold that Christ shared this ex¬ pectation say, no doubt, that He made something finer of it; but the fact remains that, if He did share it, He was mistaken. The change has never happened, nor do most Christians now believe that it ever will hap¬ pen. Yet we are told that His teaching, in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, was based on this mis¬ taken expectation of His; that He said, “Take no thought for the morrow,” because He believed there was not going to be a morrow; that, when He said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” He meant that they should soon actually see God on this earth and in this life. 73 74 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS If this be true, then Christians must accept Christ’s teaching for reasons other than He would have given; and it must seem to them right by a fortunate accident. He could not, we are told, be superior to the illusions of His own time; but out of those illusions He made a beautiful system of morality. Yet it is the mark of men of genius to be superior to the illusions of their own time. Galileo did not share the illusion that the sun went round the earth; and so it would not be even a miracle, but only a sign of genius, if Christ did not share the illusion of the Jewish Kingdom of God, of a coming celestial revolution. Now it cannot be denied that many of the reported sayings of Christ support the view that He did share this illusion. For instance, after speaking of certain signs commonly mentioned in the Apocalyptic writings of His time, He says, “When ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the Kingdom of God is at hand” ; and He continues, “Verily I say unto you, this genera¬ tion shall not pass away until all be fulfilled.” Again He speaks of the Kingdom of God as coming with power and of those who shall not taste of death until they see it. I mention only these instances, but there are many more; and certainly the writers of the Gos¬ pels believed that His Kingdom was coming soon and that He meant by it what other Jews of his time meant. But there are also many sayings in which Christ de¬ scribes the Kingdom of God and which cannot mean what other Jews meant by it. “Whereunto shall I liken the Kingdom of God?” He cries, showing that He meant by it something hard for His hearers to under¬ stand, something, as He said, which could be explained to them only in parables. And He likens it to things such as a grain of mustard seed, leaven, a hidden trea¬ sure, and a pearl of great price, which have no meaning if applied to the conventional Jewish Kingdom. He says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” or “among you,” it does not matter which; for in either THE KINGDOM OF GOD 75 case the words insist that the Kingdom already exists, that it is something to be seen or found and not some¬ thing about to happen from without. It is an internal as well as an external reality, something that may be sown and will grow within us. I would contend that these sayings, not clearly un¬ derstood by His hearers and contrary to what they ex¬ pected Him to say, are more likely to be just what He did say than the other sayings, in which we can often trace a growing adaptation to current beliefs. St. Matthew makes many of His sayings about the King¬ dom more Apocalyptic, more conventional than the same sayings in St. Mark; and even in St. Mark there is an Apocalyptic passage (Chapter 13) which few now believe to be authentic. But the sayings which were contrary to common belief cannot have been subject to this process of adaptation; they remain and were reported because He said them. We are all agreed, I suppose, that Christ, whether He be to us only man or God also, was a person of su¬ perior intelligence; and there is no doubt which view of the Kingdom is the more intelligent. The one is mere myth, a dream of wish-fulfillment; the other is both religion and philosophy. The one is something now obsolete, even though we believe that good came of it; the other is something with meanings which we have yet to discover. If the first be right, it is hard to understand why the teaching of Christ has had so much power in the world, and for so long. If the second, that is not hard to understand; for in that teaching there is the future rather than the past; it is, itself, like a grain of mustard seed and capable of infinite growth. Yet, as in Christ’s own day the Jews desired and ex¬ pected a material Kingdom of God and were rebuked by Him because they looked for material signs of it, so now there are many to whom the spiritual view of the Kingdom seems cold and unsubstantial. 76 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS It is said, for instance, that Christ could not have spoken with so much passion of His Kingdom, if He had meant by it only a “purely ethical” change. No indeed, Christ speaks always as if He had news for mankind; and He cannot have thought it was news that men ought to be good rather than bad. We have to account for His passion by the nature of His belief; it is not accounted for if He was a purely ethical teacher; but there is another alternative, besides the view that He was a teacher of things untrue, namely, the view that He was a visionary, that He did actually see His Kingdom of God, and that He wished all men to see it. Most people mean by a visionary one who sees things that are not there; but the word means one who sees what others cannot see. If Christ was a visionary in this sense, if He was aware of His Kingdom of God as an existing reality, as the only true reality, which would change the lives of men if they could see it also, then we can understand the eagerness with which He preached it and that cry of His: “Whereunto shall I liken the Kingdom of God?” He knew that others did not see it and that it was hard to make them under¬ stand what He meant by it. He could not talk to them in philosophical terms, for there were none in His language; and this Kingdom of His was something too real to Him for any general or abstract words; it was something to be described, not defined. By this I do not mean that He saw a celestial spectacle with His eyes; if that were so, the Kingdom would still be a material thing, however splendid. Vision is not a seeing of different things, but a seeing of things dif¬ ferently. Two men may hear with their ears a piece of music, but to one it will be only a chaos of noise, to the other music; and only the second hears the reality of it, knows what it is and why it is. Or, to take an¬ other example, one man sees a number of objects or phenomena and is aware of no relation between them; THE KINGDOM OF GOD 77 another is suddenly aware of a relation in which they are all connected. He makes a scientific discovery, his mind grasps a new truth; and that again is vision. Reality, in fact, is something that can be seen only by means of vision; and if we say that Christ was a visionary, we mean that He saw reality, saw an order and relation in things which other men do not see. These are cold words, which we must use because we do not see; but that does not mean that the vision is cold to one who sees it. On the contrary, men’s visions, whether of truth, of beauty, or of righteousness, are what they will live and die for; the pity is that there are no words by which they can convince other men of their reality. And yet the great visionaries have more lasting power over us than any other men; and Christ still has this power, so that we wish to know what He meant by His Kingdom of Heaven and hope to see it also. We are now more concerned with it than Christians ever were in the past, because, without it, Christianity is too primitive, too personal, too unphilosophic even to satisfy our minds. There have always been two tendencies in Christian theology; the one Jewish, which makes of God merely a person and too like ourselves; the other Greek, which makes Him too abstract and so unreal. But orthodox Christianity has usually in¬ clined too much to the Jewish view of God; and that view is now impossible to the modern world, however firmly it may be held still by a few devout reaction¬ aries. We see an order in the universe which is not merely moral or personal, which we cannot interpret in terms of a series of commandments, ten or more. There is for us a scientific, a philosophical, order in reality itself, and our religion must express that, if we are to believe in it. Now, the doctrine of the King¬ dom of God, or of Heaven, does express that scientific or philosophical order. It is a metaphor, not only for some one, but for some thing in which the divine pro- 78 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS cess is manifested. St. John said, “No man hath seen God at any time”; but the Kingdom of God is some¬ thing that can be seen; and upon the seeing of it the belief in God must be based. Further it is a doctrine which, unlike the narrow, primitive belief in a God always commanding, a too personal and too human God, does provide a necessary connection between faith and works. For, according to Christ’s doctrine of the Kingdom, we must live in a certain way if we are to see it; and the more clearly we see it, the more we shall be impelled to live in that way. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God”—that is not a contradiction of St. John’s saying; it means “Blessed are the single-minded: for they shall see reality, the heart of which is God.” According to the primitive, too personal, belief in God, He is a Being who might appear to a man as one man to another, suddenly and with an effect of instant conviction. According to the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, that Kingdom, which is reality, is something we can train ourselves to see as an artist trains himself by the practice of his art to see beauty. But as he knows that he can never see the whole of beauty, so we know that we shall not see the whole of reality. Truth is not something we can suddenly grasp and express in a sentence, as when we say, “Two and two are four.” Because it is real and not merely a proposition in words, it is something that may grow unendingly clearer to our minds and to all their faculties. Being real, it is not truth only, for truth by itself is but an account of reality; it is also beauty and righteousness; and all these three in one are the Kingdom of God. But this reality, this Kingdom, is not necessarily to be seen at all in the mass of disconnected facts of which the natural man is aware, any more than beauty or truth are necessarily to be seen by every-one. You must be seeking beauty or truth, you must value them absolutely, if you are to see them; and so it is with THE KINGDOM OF GOD 79 the Kingdom of God. It is easy enough, in the world as we know it, to see only chaos, to see nothing but the struggle for a life which is not worth having if there is nothing else to struggle for. But, according to all the great visionaries, reality is a hidden treasure, something we must train ourselves to find. It is not enough to say that we do not see it and therefore do not believe that it exists. That attitude, which many think scientific, would prevent the seeing of all scien¬ tific truths; for they are certainly not what the natural man sees. Christ insists always upon the need for a different attitude, one of value and expectation, one that commits us to great sacrifices before we can even see the prize. Just as there is a difference between the chaotic and discordant reality of which the natural man is aware and that reality which is to be seen by vision, so there is a difference between the life led by those who believe only in the one and the life led by those who seek the other. When Christ says that our righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, He means that it must be a righteousness based on belief in that other reality, the Kingdom of God, and on a desire to see it and to be of it. The old law was a law of commands; the new is rather what we call scientific or philosophic; it follows, not from the arbitrary will of God uttered in a series of edicts, but from a conviction that the Kingdom of God is reality. Yet the new law is not merely scien¬ tific or philosophic, nor is it merely law. Above all it is based on vision. It says, “Live in a certain way so that you may see; and, when you see, you will know why you should live in that way.” There is a saying of Lao-tse, the Chinese sage, which belongs to the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven—“True virtue is always paradoxical at first; yet in the end it exhibits complete conformity with nature.” So the sayings of the Sermon on the Mount seem paradoxical at first; but they will exhibit complete uniformity with nature, 80 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS or reality, when, by obeying them, we come to see what reality is. Hence Christ’s insistence on the need for a change of heart, for conversion, as we call it; He means by that, not merely a change of conduct, but another view of the nature of reality; and what He promises is that, if we live according to that view, we shall see the Kingdom of God more and more clearly ; that there will always be a closer and closer connection between our faith and our works, until they become one. If we are pure in heart, we shall see God; and, when we see God, we shall be, of necessity, pure in heart. The Sermon on the Mount preaches, above all things, self-forgetfulness; and there are many who speak of self-forgetfulness, or self-sacrifice, as if it were a good in itself. 'But that is not the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven. Mankind will never even try to forget themselves unless it be for something positive, some¬ thing better worth remembering; and the valuing of self-sacrifice for its own sake is not only unattractive, but also morbid. It is the notion of the pessimist, of Schopenhauer, for instance, who, like Christ, held that we must get rid of the “will-to-live,” but who had nothing positive to offer instead of it. Christ also says that we must escape from the will-to-live, but into something positive, something better worth having, namely, life itself, which is the Kingdom of God. For Him reality is something to be found, not something to be fled from; and so even the self is something to be found, not fled from. To me the doctrine of the Kingdom seems new and inspiriting because it implies, not that I have a self which I must lose in some kind of nothingness, but that I have yet to find myself by losing what I take to be myself. The Kingdom, for mankind, is an order like that of music, which already exists, has existed, and will exist, for ever and ever, but of which we must become a part, if we also are to exist fully. With regard to it, we are all like notes THE KINGDOM OF GOD 81 which, until they are part of music, are mere noises without meaning or character. But when they are part of it, when they fall into the order, they are not lost but found; they get character and meaning only from a right relation with each other. This view of the human self is, I think, confirmed even by our own common experience; for it is true, and we become more and more aware of it, that we are entirely different beings according as we are in a right or a wrong relation with each other. And how do we know whether a relation is right or wrong? Not merely by laws of morality, but by the fact that in a right relation the self is both lost and found; if at first it is, paradoxically, sacrificed, in the end it is heightened and finds itself far more real through that sacrifice. The sacrifice is not the end; rather the heightening, the intensifying, the abounding life of the self, that is the end. Yet of this we have no knowledge at all, so long as we live only for ourselves. We are like notes that do not even know there can be music. Of this difference and change I will give a simple example. Think of children quarreling to¬ gether in the gutter, of their aimless ugly noises, their instinctive, almost mechanical behavior; and then think of the same children trained to sing together a beautiful piece of music or to act a beautiful play. In the first case they are like little monkeys; in the second like little angels; and it is the relation that makes all the difference. And so it is with all human beings; they can be like monkeys and worse than monkeys, since there is all the human wasted in them; or like players in an orchestra, with all their powers height¬ ened, all their selves found, in the performance of a great piece of music. That is a concrete instance of the Kingdom of Heaven, but only an instance. The Kingdom itself is, as it were, a permanent and secure state of music in the whole of life, in all human relations. 82 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS Again, what makes the doctrine real and impor¬ tant to us is the fact that the Kingdom is always a relation, that a man cannot enter into it by himself any more than he can play lawn tennis by himself. There is an old idea of salvation still persisting, as something which the individual can obtain from God, as a kind of privilege and therefore to be got by a kind of magic. But, according to the doctrine of the King¬ dom, salvation means a right relation, it means enter¬ ing into that order, becoming part of that music, which is the Kingdom. It is, therefore, something which men must achieve all together and by the common or¬ dering of their whole lives. Music, the dance, all the arts, are a prophecy of it; worship as it should be, when it is the practice of all the arts and the exercise of all the faculties, is a prophecy of it; and worship exists, the arts exist, because the Kingdom of God exists and because men, consciously or unconsciously, are aware of the Kingdom in them. They are only an imperfect prophecy because they do not, and can¬ not, fill the whole of our lives; but by means of them the Kingdom becomes real to us, is something actually experienced and not merely a dogma or an abstraction. Music is, as it were, a pattern of the Kingdom of God; and here the doctrine of the Kingdom, passing beyond all Jewish conceptions, comes near to Platonism; only it is richer and more credible, because it has in it a different and more dynamic view of perfection. The Platonic idea of perfection is static, something that al¬ ways has been and always will be changeless. In that we cannot now believe, as we cannot believe in the Jewish notion of God. But we shall find in Christ’s idea of the Kingdom of Heaven, if we take it quite seriously and try to state it in philosophic terms, an idea of perfection which is dynamic and of our own time. It is something which grows as well as something which is for ever and ever; and it grows in the soul of man. It was this to Christ because He did not think THE KINGDOM OF GOD 83 about it so much as see it; but, if we think about it, we can express His meaning in the paradox that per¬ fection would not be perfect if it were without the power of growth and enrichment, for then it would not be alive. The Kingdom of God is, above all things, alive and may be part of our own life. We can not only see the pattern and conform to it; but we can make it, and make it always richer, more real, in our own lives, our own thoughts and actions, our whole society. There it is like art; for art, you may say, is made according to pattern, according to eternal, Platonic ideas of beauty; and yet each work of art is new and brings something new into the universe; it is a work of art because it not only conforms to the idea of beauty but also makes that idea; and so we may not only live according to the idea of the Kingdom of God, but also make that Kingdom, enrich it with the reality of our own, personal achievements. So we come to the doctrine of the immanent God¬ head, which is implied in the doctrine of the Kingdom of God; for the immanent Godhead, for those who really believe in it, is not merely an imitation of the transcendent Godhead; it is Godhead because it has an independent existence, because it lives. So there is in it the character, the personality of the individual; and this, if it grows in divinity, does add something to the very nature of divinity. But we are still afraid of the promise of Christ’s doctrine and will not dare even to state it to ourselves. Donne, in one of his sermons, does dare to state it. If ever he attains to Heaven, he says, “I shall be so like God as that the devil himself shall not know me from God . . . not to conceive any more hope of my falling from that Kingdom than of God being driven out of it.” He means, and Christ means, that we can achieve the utter security of the Kingdom of the Godhead itself, in ourselves; not so that we shall lose our identity in perfection, but so that 84 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS we shall find it; as in the relation of beauty all objects become one but are heightened in their identity, not emptied of it. The reader may be impatient, here, that I should try to state a doctrine so passionate, so visionary, thus in general terms; but, I think, we need to understand it, to grasp it with all our faculties slowly and one by one; for we do not start with the vision, but only with the potentiality of it. The immanent Godhead, if it really is in us, is in all things potential; the King¬ dom of God is, for us, potential. Our aim is to see it, as Christ saw it, and then to be of it and to make it; but we must also know where, and how, to look for it. And Christianity has long been losing its hold upon the mind of man because Christians have not regarded the ardor of thought as one of the Christian virtues. That ardor is the ardor of discovery and they have feared discovery; they have looked back to the past, like scholars, rather than forward to the future, like men of science and artists. We need now a Chris¬ tianity that shall enlist all the faculties of the human mind; that shall say to us—“There is something be¬ fore you to be discovered, not merely something be¬ hind you to be learned.” For we do not believe what we learn as we believe what we discover; since in learning, in obeying, we use only certain faculties; but in discovering, and acting upon our discovery, we use them all. The whole will, the whole self goes with the process of discovery, but much of it must be dragged into the process of learning and obeying. So we need to see the Kingdom of God as a fact to be dis¬ covered, found like a treasure hid in a field, and found by us, not by Christ only or the saints of the early Church. Then, if we find it, we shall live according to our vision of it, not according to law; for the whole will, the whole self, will then pour into the effort to belong to it and to make it more real, more precise, more rich, in ourselves. But we must, as the early THE KINGDOM OF GOD 85 Christians did, once more see it as a society; with philosophic as well as moral conviction we must be¬ lieve that the Kingdom cannot be perfected, cannot wholly exist, until all men, all living things, are part of it. As St. Paul says, all creation groaneth and travaileth; as St. Augustine says, Thou hast made us for Thyself; and restless are our hearts until they rest in Thee. The very aim of life itself is to become fully alive in the Kingdom of God; the aim of reality is to attain to complete reality in that Kingdom. And consciousness, that still precious achievement and pos¬ session of man, is consciousness, not merely of self, but of the Kingdom, the life, the reality, in which alone the self can be fully achieved. We hear much talk now of the unconscious; it is even glorified sometimes as the source of all power and joy; but, when they speak of the unconscious, most people confuse two different things. There is the subconscious, which is merely material used by the conscious ill or well; and there is the superconscious, a state to which we sometimes attain after long training and effort of the conscious, that state in which men seem without effort to do things far above themselves and to which, when they achieve it, they consent with wonder and joy. It is the .super-conscious that achieves great works of art, great acts of heroism, sudden visions of reality; and it is the Kingdom of God growing in the mind of man. It is possible only to those who have‘passed from the subconscious to conscious effort, who have the goal of the Kingdom before them, even if they have never yet seen it. Then, with the superconscious, they, see it, at least in part, and are filled with the power of it, and the power to make it. Then they can understand the meaning of those strange words of Christ, so often ignored like others of his greatest and most difficult sayings—“He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do.” The promise, for those who believe in the 86 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS Kingdom of God, is infinite; because it is here and now, whatever different names men may call it by; and be¬ cause it is always something to be made and to grow in man himself, something that will take on new forms of beauty in each new expression of it, something which is always of the future because it is of eternity, and which is immanent because it is transcendent. CHAPTER VII WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE BIBLE? By Professor Elihu Grant The Bible seldom comes before us in its own right. The moment it is presented we are conscious that here is a book of reputation and service through many cen¬ turies and one for which great claims have been made in our own day. On the other hand, its detractors say that it is an antiquated book and, in various ways, an obstruction to real progress. What impression would the Bible make if it were to come to us without recommendation? We should note that it is an Eastern work of considerable bulk, translated from languages of an ancient past, telling the story of races and tribes, nations and sects in the Levant, that it is much concerned with religion and morals. Three quarters of it is the elementary sacred literature of a small but culturally important people, the Jews. The other quarter is the peculiarly authori¬ tative sacred book of Christians who estimate in vary¬ ing ways the value of the earlier portion. Probably most Christians, by count, consider the Old Testament of equal, or nearly equal, worth with the New. If we go beyond these facts, even a cursory reading shows several grades of aesthetic and inspirational quality. The collection contains contributions of at least a thousand years and owes cultural dependence and literary connection with remoter ages. Yet, few of the pages, if any, sprang from a purely artistic desire to create, but usually show strong moral and religious conviction and, often, didactic intention. 87 88 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS How did this ancient, foreign, and, at times, obscure book become so influential? No doubt its great name is partly due to the fact that it has been powerfully recommended by church authority. But others, besides powerful churches and rigid sects, have given allegiance to it. At times, heretics and independents have valued it, which indicates an intrinsic worth as a mentor, comforter, and stimulator of the inner life. It seems that one has only to escape all trammels and prejudices concerning the Bible to increase one’s esteem for it. The notion that personal salvation is in some sense derived from the contents of books is an ancient and perhaps Oriental one which has been passed on successfully to the Western World. It cannnot, how¬ ever, account for the original prestige of these Scrip¬ tures, since in every case the larger value had been appreciated before any writing was placed in a sacred collection. None of these books was written to go into the Bible. Each had been tested and revered before it was included. So we may say that the right fame of these writings was fairly secure before they were canonized and will, presumably, survive a rational treatment of their contents. Their genius is of the en¬ during order. This is probably due to the very personal philosophy of the Bible, culminating, through realistic presentations of many personal careers, in the consummate personality of history. Ethical progress is portrayed in the Bible with dramatic appeal in a series of works edited by a growing religious conscious¬ ness. All these values were made available, early in our era, through many translations, and have con¬ tinued until now to be widely influential. The Bible is permeated with the spirit of growth; growth of the world and its peoples, of their customs, institutions, laws, moral and religious progress. Be¬ cause of this spirit it is most sympathetically inter¬ preted by means of the concept of development. Un¬ consciously, we are invited by our experience with WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE BIBLE? 89 these Scriptures to think of life's problems in the light of progress. This is so true that any bad or backward person or standard of action in the Bible is best judged by standards farther on in the book. Both the Old and New Testaments record movements of the spirit which suggest that man is approaching ever nearer to the destiny of a moral being in a world of personality as well as in one of material forces. So then, though a book cannot keep pace with advances in knowledge, it may be congenial with the mood of essential, advanc¬ ing humanity. The germ and the logic of an incal¬ culable improvement are of the very genius of the Bible. Ancient book-writing employed the compilatory method with much more freedom than is the custom at present. This fact makes it easier to reach back through the results of such accumulative authorship and edi¬ torial revision to those sources which themselves re¬ flect earlier stages of that social life out of which the literature grew. The Bible is much franker about its literary history than a modern book would be. It gives us the names of older books and collections from which it drew material and suggests others unnamed. Its quotations are often so direct as to make it easy to distinguish them from surrounding literary ma¬ terial. Thus small and large fragments of ancient lost works are recoverable in many of the books. A no¬ table instance of the preservation of both the source and the derived account is found in the book of Judges. In Chapters 4 and 5 there are descriptions of the same events. It seems pretty clear that the brilliant poem in Chapter 5 is the main dependence and source of the prose narrative in Chapter 4. This poem, which is probably the earliest passage of its length in the Bible, is a ruggedly heroic piece of primitive song, telling us of early Hebrew society long before the rise of the monarchy in Israel. The prose narrative based upon it was written at a later period of the national his- 90 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS tory, after the kingdom was a settled fact. The prose writer has asserted the rights of interpretation claimed by all true authors. It is fairly clear that certain other prose chapters in the early books of the Old Testament depended similarly upon poetic source material not so fortunately preserved as Chapter 5. We read in our Old Testament of a famous Book of Jashar, of a Book of the Wars of Jehovah, and many another to which the Bible writers refer as sources from which they drew. For something over a hundred years it has been clearly perceived that certain ancient books Jay back of our Pentateuch. At least four such books are clearly distinguishable by their different interests and styles. The evolving of one book, or harmony, out of the four was done in the interest of a connected history of the chosen people, their origins, their providential career, and their manifest destiny. The completed work, including Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, formed the first Bible of the Jews and the only Bible of the Samaritans. This was not the last time that such an undertaking was carried through. In the second Christian century, after it was fairly clear which books were going to be considered as mem¬ bers of the New Testament group, a Christian scholar by the name of Tatian made a new work by blending our four Gospels in a harmony, or life of Christ. This compilation, or simplified Gospel, was much liked and was used as a reading book in the churches until the officials of the Church decided to forbid it. Apparently they took this step because of the fear that the canonical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, might drop out of sight in favor of the handier work. The actual result was that the “Diatessaron,” as Ta- tian’s harmony was called, disappeared from use and view. It was known by name and through quota¬ tions in the early writers who had seen it, but for centuries no copy was known to exist. Toward the end of the last century a copy was discovered, and it WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE BIBLE? 91 has now been republished. It begins with a passage from John and it would be no difficult matter for a critical student who had never seen the original Gos¬ pels to discover that four characteristic documents lay back of the blend. It is interesting to remember this great similarity between the work of those who gradu¬ ally compiled the Pentateuch from, say, four docu¬ ments, and Tatian, who wrote his harmony at once from four with precisely the opposite fate, for some time, at least. In one case, the four documents dis¬ appeared and the blended result remained; in the other the blend was lost and the originals were well known. No prohibition prevented the Old Testament exemplar from outliving the component sources which, however, are pretty clearly discernible in the final work. It will be seen that the fact of development is as clear in the writing of the Bible as in its spirit. We do not need to depend on a few illustrations of this, nor are we confined to such as have just been described, but there is abundant material within the Bible which shows it. Writers of later books in the collection used preceding Biblical books with discriminating freedom, according to the purpose for which they wrote. Let us take two instances only of this, one in the Old and one in the New Testament. We select the writer of Chronicles and the author of Luke. The Chronicler made free, selective use of earlier Biblical books, omitted, expanded, heightened, and reinterpreted por¬ tions of them. Although he mentions more than a dozen outside sources for his references, yet he makes few salient points not already contained in the canonical books. Since his interest centered in the temple and ecclesiastical affairs, his history deals mostly with David, Solomon, and the kings of Judah. He used Samuel and Kings more than other books, al¬ though he made use of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, etc. From these books he quoted verbatim, 92 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS or paraphrased, or revised so as to meet the demands of later interpretation. This can be shown with great precision. His omissions in the history of the Hebrews are very noticeable in his early chapters, where the rich story lore of Genesis reduces to little more than a list of names from Adam to David, for whom we are prepared by a chapter on the disaster to Saul. There are long lists of names, many details of organization and frequent moral and religious explanations. A com¬ parison of the story in II Samuel 24 with its parallel in I Chronicles 21 shows many characteristic changes, the most famous being that while in Samuel, accord¬ ing to an older theology, David was tempted by Je¬ hovah to take the census, this is an abhorrent idea to the Chronicler who writes that it was Satan who led David on to this enumeration. A less important, but still amazing, difference is seen in the price paid by David for the threshing floor. It is noted as fifty shekels of silver in Samuel, but becomes six hundred shekels of gold in Chronicles. Similar variations are numerous. It is, in truth, an expurgated history of David and Solomon which the Chronicler presents of those two great ones, in which the interesting popular tales, much poetry and personal statements derogatory to them are omitted. The author treated in similar manner the history of their successors. 1 We have sug¬ gested but faintly the freedom with which the Chron¬ icler treated Scriptures and the method is not unique with him. This does not destroy his services, but gives us the valuable result that we know more of the mind of Jews of his period. He and his contemporaries lived in the centuries just before the Christian Era. As so often happens, in writing about others they reveal themselves and supply links in the continuous story of Hebrew development. The writer of our Third Gospel did a piece of care- 1 See E. L. Curtis and A. A. Madsen, “The Books of Chronicles,” The International Critical Commentary, pp. 6-19. Scribner’s, 1910. WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE BIBLE? 93 ful research, compared previous writings and living tradition. He made a judicious combination of the results and wrote the first of a two-volume work which we call Luke-Acts. In deciding on the order of events in the life of Christ he was influenced most by the Gospel according to Mark, which had been published years previously. He used another valuable writing to which our Gospel according to Matthew is also greatly indebted. He can be shown to have varied the versions used, somewhat after the fashion of the Chronicler, but with a superior skill and artistic grace, as different as Greek culture of the first century was dif¬ ferent from that of a Semitic ecclesiastic of an earlier day. Luke used the outline provided already in Mark’s Gospel narrative, supplementing and expanding it and greatly enriching its contents; he made many improve¬ ments in presentation and style. Sometimes he added, sometimes he omitted or simplified, as, for example, in Luke 18:35. Frequently, he heightened the effect or the impression of the scene. In such a parallel as that between Mark 1:34 and Luke 4:41 we have even the appearance of contradiction. According to Mark, Jesus succeeded in preventing the devils from utter¬ ance, but according to Luke, this was not until they had already succeeded in actually acclaiming the Lord. If we count the items in Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount as thirty, we find that Luke has but twenty of them and he did not include eleven of those in his version of the Sermon, but decided to place them in other connections than those which Matthew has suggested. In such cases it is now customary to follow the leading of Luke. Notable among such rearrangements is the new context of the Lord’s Prayer which Luke gives in much more plausible setting than does Matthew. (See Luke 11:1-4.) An¬ other interesting variant which reveals the value of comparative study is found in Matthew 7:13 f. and Luke 13:24 ff. The discourse, according to Matthew, 94 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS concerned a “narrow gate,” which is mentioned in Luke as a “narrow door.” The lesson drawn, according to Matthew, was of a place and way more difficult to find than the broad way to destruction, but according to Luke, the whole point is about a “shut door.” The in¬ ability of the man outside the door, in the one case, is to find and in the other case it is to enter as he stands before it. Therefore, in Luke, the adjective “narrow” has lost any significance since a shut door is as effective a bar, whether wide or narrow. But the very fact that the word “narrow” is retained by Luke where it has no present use and is an item of significance in Matthew, makes it pretty clear that the written source from which both our First and Third Gospels drew this pas¬ sage contained that persistent adjective. By such studies we are taken one step, at least, farther back in the record toward the teacher of the lesson whose very words we have the greater hope of recovering. The suggestion has been made, of course, that these sermons which are recorded by Matthew and Luke are different. It is not easy to accept this suggestion, however, since the fundamental thought of the two accounts is the same, and the opening and closing passages are so simi¬ lar. In spite of variations in the treatment of these passages, on the beatitudes and the builder, they are manifestly versions of the same originals. Let us notice one more of the numerous fruitful comparisons possible. In this case there seems to have been an actual difference in tradition. Luke, agreeing with all the Gospels, indicates that it was on Friday that Jesus died. But three of the Gospels, including Luke, would seem to place the date on the 15th of the month Nisan, while the Gospel of John indicates the 14th, thus, perhaps, throwing the date in a different year. Such variations, oppositions even, in Biblical literature are very well known, and attention need not be called to them as such. What is not so well known is that they offer one of the chief encouragements to WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE BIBLE? 95 students, since they make it more nearly possible to recover the originals on which they are founded. Moreover, it becomes plain that the first discriminat¬ ing, critical students of the Biblical contents were the Biblical writers themselves. The results of such studies are giving us greater hope of success in the effort to reach the presence of Jesus and to hear the words of His teaching as near as that can be done by the way of writings. Manifestly, inspiration works not by collusion nor in any stereotyped form. Each writing had its own spe¬ cial purpose and was not intended as a part in the complicated whole. Certain works, such as Luke-Acts, show the conscious workmanship of a literary artist composing an extended treatise with great skill and devotion. Groups of books, such as the Pentateuch, exhibit the heritage of ages and the welding together under the inspiration of a great ideal of venerable docu¬ ments. In fact, the resumption of this work added four more books, Joshua, Judges, Samuel (I and II), and Kings (I and II). In those days, the Pentateuch, as we call it, using the later Greek name, was looked upon as a great book of guidance {torah). Its treasured con¬ tent was the Law, though it contained, besides, intro¬ ductory narratives, commentary and other contextual material, but nothing quite of the glory of the Law. It may be helpful to us to recollect in this way how former ages regarded the Bible in its successive stages and editions. The impulse wjhich produced and then added the four books which follow the Pentateuch in the Hebrew Bible grew out of one of the most remark¬ able spiritual movements in history, the prophetic. Prophecy is a matter into which the greatest minds, if not angels, have desired to look. In the course of time, the great anthologies which we call by the name of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, etc. (but not including Daniel), came into separate existence and later into a prophetic volume. Still later and in the third place, the justifi- 96 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS able veneration of such works as Job, Proverbs, Psalms, and Daniel caused them to be assembled in a sacred or standard collection or canon. Certain of these, as Psalms, had already known a long growth. Within the Psalter may be seen, to this day, the boundaries of former booklets, as, for example, the beautiful “Songs of Ascents” (120-134). Similarly, within the Book of Proverbs are the vestiges of former groupings, once published by themselves. Job contains much that was thought out by successive delvers into the mysteries of the world-old problem of evil. Some of it is expressed in prose but most of the contents is in poetry. Paul’s letters were not written with the thought of any letters to follow. Several of them show consciousness of others already written. Perhaps the highest conception of inspiration will be found among those who conceive of the Scriptures as a transcript of the experiences of many men and women, named and unnamed, whose deepest moments in the divine school, which we call Providence, are here recorded that they may find re¬ sponse in other hearts. Four great dominant moods, or schools of thinking, divide the treasures of the Biblical literature. They are four very different ways of looking at life and yet each, in the Providence of God, has a large service to its credit. They are the prophetic, already mentioned, with its moral urgency seeking to challenge man in his sin and call him to immediate allegiance to the one righteous deity. Then there was the priestly-legal with its instincts of discipline within approved forms of ritual and law, yielding at its best a pastoral care such as that shown by Ezekiel in exile. An entirely different, almost academic, mood grasped the problems of thought and came as near as the ancient Hebrews ever did to philosophy. The disciples of this Wisdom School of the Sages speculated in their more reflective, but highly practical, way upon the behavior of man and nature, and even upon the mysteries of God’s ways. Lastly, WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE BIBLE? 97 the lurid melodrama of the Apocalypse was to serve to assuage the agonies of a people nearly crazed with all but hopeless persecution. Strong and peculiar medicine was needed for such abnormal woe as befell Jews and Christians on more than one occasion, and we have the reminders in Ezekiel 38-39, Isaiah 24-27, Zechariah 1-6, Joel, Daniel, Malachi 4:1-3, Mat¬ thew 23-24, Mark 13, II Thessalonians 1-2, II Peter, Jude, and Revelation. If we ask ourselves, in our read¬ ing of the Bible, with which of these four great types we are dealing, we shall increase our sympathetic ap¬ preciation of the meaning of the passage. In Leviticus and Numbers, the law is given a priestly cast, while in Exodus and Deuteronomy, it is as likely to be found expressed with a prophetic background. This prophetic spirit often lends the appeal to stories in Genesis, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, and Kings, and in the gospels and epistles of the New Testament, while the greater effort for formality and precision of the priestly type is noticeable in Genesis 1 and 17 and parts of Chapters 25, 28, and 46, in Joshua 13 to 21, and in Chronicles and Ezra. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians it is not difficult to distinguish between the legalistic argument of Paul the rabbi and the prophetic inspira¬ tion of Paul the apostle. The former is seen in 3:15-16, where he speaks “after the manner of men,” and in 4:22-31. The latter note is struck in 1:11-12; 2:16; 4:6-7; 5:1 and 13-15. In such books as Prov¬ erbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and James, with their non- mystical quality, one soon realizes that one is in the masterpieces of the Sages of the Wisdom School, whose scattered fragments are found in other books of the Bible as well. The Bible is a library of diverse books which reveal in their varying development a long men¬ tal history. Layers upon layers, vistas rather than flat records, are apparent. Whenever undue defense or patronizing care has been extended in a false or unnec¬ essary solicitude, the Bible has fallen into comparative 98 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS disuse, even if it has not met with abuse. Whenever the reverent genius of scientific research has gone along with untrammeled enjoyment of its riches, poetic, symbolic, moral, new value has been found increasingly. The worst treatment is to take up any question of the Bible in a partisan spirit, or to view its fate with any fear. The Bible will be there after all discussion, whether favorable or unfavorable. It must divest itself eventually of any dogmatic conclusion and start again on its career of influence by pure suasion. Investiga¬ tion must be permitted to do its particular work in the ways which it finds available. And there remains much work for it to do. When we express our best judgment concerning any part of the Bible, or upon any Biblical question, it should be understood that we are doing so in the spirit of freedom for others as well as for ourselves, in order that no data of experience may be missing from the symposium. Devotion does not need to wait upon literary and historical investigations, though devotion may often be served by them. The quality of the Bible is such that it speaks to the human spirit with power, irrespec¬ tive of the problems of true scholarly criticism, which lie in a different field. Sometimes it seems that the fewer prepossessions the better for the native effect of the Bible on the new reader. If a patient is revived and nourished by a cluster of choice grapes, it makes but little difference just then whether the fruit grew on the vines of Spain or California. However, in other ways, the question is of considerable importance. The naming of books in the Bible was usually a late effort at precision in accounting for them, and was com¬ paratively unsatisfactory. Often the name given a writing is flatly contradicted by the contents. Fre¬ quently the revelation of the character of an author, as in the case of the Epistle to the Hebrews, whose author is really unknown, however learnedly people WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE BIBLE? 99 talk about it, is so clear that the addition of a name would not be much gain. The true inspiration of such noble works coming to us through these historical and literary processes, as have been indicated above, is suggestively illustrated in the Bible itself. Read the passages in the great proph¬ ets which describe their call, or inspiration, to ser¬ vice: Amos 7:14-15; Micah 3:8; Isaiah 6; Jeremiah 1; Ezekiel 1-3 etc., and the Old Testament idea of in¬ spiration will be more clearly understood. It seems very clear that these heroes of the Spirit were imbued with the lofty teaching and even the very style of their predecessors. It was customary to describe one’s intro¬ duction to prophetic service in certain definite outline and terms, but the peculiarities of each prophet are manifest for all that. Ezekiel was not transformed into a poet, nor was Jeremiah led to the Miltonic expression of Isaiah. Each man was, apparently, himself, but purer, stronger, more single and effective in his service of the truth. When he was inspired, he was reinforced, so that we might say from these examples that divine inspiration is the enhancement, or quickening, of a persisting personality. Personalities are not dispos¬ sessed, or destroyed by inspiration, but reinforced. The mystery is comparable with that of companion¬ ship and friendship and is essentially the mystery of communication whether it be between man and man, or between man and God. A high scientific value is placed nowadays upon all expressions of the religious mood. Effort is made con¬ stantly to understand its psychical organization. We wish to understand the claim and the effect of religion wherever they are made. Many efforts have been made to explain man by a single, dominating principle, to unlock him with one key. Sex, self-preservation, and other instincts, in turn, are made the clue. Religion affords an aspect full of suggestion for the problem. In understanding man religiously, we understand him 100 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS in his peculiar genius, and evaluate the impulse and drive of many of his energies and creations. The Bible has proved to be an archive of religious experience. Recent study has deepened the impression of its rich¬ ness of resource in the field of the comparative study of religion. The Bible is secure in the testimonies of a venerable history. Its various parts are seen to be dominant ex¬ pressions of the best religious and moral value of the age represented by each. The greatest value will break forth as light from these sacred Scriptures when they are freely investigated by competent readers and students who themselves revere the spirit of freedom. We shall employ profitably those parts of Scripture which stimulate our sense of moral responsibility, our sense of moral personality in the seen and the unseen world, which release our purest emotional force. Dole¬ ful predictions and partisan pleas have both failed and the essential glory in literature of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is unsurpassed and may safest be left to that spirit of man which is the candle of the Lord. The Bible is so fundamentally true to human experience that its guidance is peculiarly valuable in indicating direction for human ideal and endeavor. It can have no real competitor, since it tends to send one to any book or personality or fact that will honor truth. It is an adjunct to man’s best conscience, and, like John the Baptist, is ready to recede if our Christian con¬ sciousness may thereby advance. If a homely illustra¬ tion may be allowed, we remember when we eat fish to lay aside the bones, so when we partake of this ex¬ cellent pabulum we shall exercise that good selective conscience in which a Biblical education has trained us. Its authority rests in its harmony with the truth to which the Spirit of God witnesses in our hearts. CHAPTER VIII HOW SHALL WE THINK OF EVIL? By Professor L. P. Jacks Christianity has not explained suffering and evil; no one has done so, no one can do so. Yet Christianity . . . has done two things greater, more profound and profitable for us. . . . Christianity has, from the first, immensely deepened and widened . . . the fact, the reality, the awful potency and baf¬ fling mystery of sorrow, pain, sin, things which abide with man across the ages. And Christianity has, from the first, immensely increased the capacity, the wondrous secret and force, which issues in a practical, living, loving transcendence, utilization, transformation of sorrow and pain, and even of sin. . . . Christianity gave to souls the faith and strength to grasp life’s nettle. 1 When thoughtful people embark on the study of evil one of two motives will commonly be at work. The first is the desire to escape from evil, or to get relief from it. The second, which is almost the opposite of the first, is the desire for power to bear evil and to conquer it. Which of these two motives is at work in the reader’s mind at the present moment? Which of them has induced him to take the trouble of reading this chapter? If his motive is the desire to escape from evil, or to get relief from it, I must tell him, plainly and at once, that he will receive no satisfaction from what I am about to write. But to the reader who is desirous, not of relief but of power—power to bear evil and overcome it—I may possibly have something to say. Many writers on the problem of evil (I think most) 1 Baron Friedrich von Hiigel, Essays and Addresses , pp. 110 et seq. 101 102 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS have addressed themselves to the desire for relief . Two main groups of theories have arisen which are obviously intended to meet that desire—the Epicurean and the Stoic. The Epicurean would give us relief from pain and suffering by teaching us to avoid them, to flee away from them, to turn our backs upon them, and to contrive for ourselves a mode of life where they are not to be found. The Stoic would relieve us by teaching that pain and suffering are fancies and preju¬ dices due to our ignorance, that what is evil in the part is good in the whole . So far as I can see, both of these methods fail utterly to attain their object, to give the relief they promise. The Epicurean fails because, do what we will, suffering and death cannot be avoided by any of us. The Stoic fails because, like all sophistries, it can be instantly turned upside down by anybody who has the mind to do so. To the optimist’s argument that if we could see the whole system of things, we should find that evil is imperfect good, there always comes the pessimist’s answer that if we could see the whole system of things we should find that good is imperfect evil. There is, in truth, just as much reason for believing the one as for believing the other; which is only another way of say¬ ing that both are false. In regard to all theories which offer relief, this im¬ portant point must be noted from the outset: that nothing whatever is gained, even theoretically, by ex¬ plaining the existence of evil unless at the same time we explain its amount and its distribution. First, as to the amount. Suppose you prove that the existence of evil is necessary to the existence of good. Before this argument can afford relief to my doubts and difficulties, you must further prove that the amount (and the kind) of evil that actually exists in the world is no more than is necessary for its purpose. Because suffering is necessary it does not follow that the amount of suffering produced by the Great War was necessary. HOW SHALL WE THINK OF EVIL? 103 It may have been far too much—many of us think it was—for the good which has resulted, or is ever likely to result, from it. What should we say then to a uni¬ verse where evil is necessary for good, but where the evil that actually exists is vastly more (or less) than is necessary for the good to which it leads? Should we not call it an extremely ill-ordered universe? I read the other day a book intended to justify the ways of God to man, which argued that if men are to have teeth at all they must have teeth that can ache. There must therefore be such a thing as toothache. Quite so. But what if the number of aching teeth in the world at this moment is a hundred times as great as it need be? And why should the aching be as violent as it is? Would not a milder and more endurable form of the malady satisfy the requirements of the argument? And why should my teeth ache rather than yours? This brings us to the question of distribution. Even if you had proved, as you never could do, that the amount of toothache in the world is the exact amount which the existence of teeth requires, you would still have to prove that the aching teeth are all in the heads of the right people; in other words, that the evil is rightly distributed. And so with suffering in gen¬ eral. What should we think of a God who created a universe in which some men must suffer for others but left chance to determine which men suffer and which are suffered for? Should we not deem him a most un¬ just and incompetent God? The more you succeed in proving that suffering is necessary the more incumbent it is to prove, further, that suffering falls on the shoul¬ ders and at the points where it is likely to be made the best use of and produce the best results. All that you have said on the first point only serves to increase the difficulty so long as the second point remains in doubt. Let it be granted that villains like Iago must exist from time to time if there is to be a moral universe. But why in the name of justice should Desdemona be 104 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS picked out, of all women on the earth, to suffer for Iago’s villainy? Why Desdemona? Why youf Why me —and not somebody else? Answer that if you can. On all sides, therefore, we see the futility of attempt¬ ing to handle the problem of evil by the method of seeking relief from it. Whichever variety of that method we adopt, a sure disappointment awaits us at the end of our labors. And it is a disappointment we deserve. For that in us which asks for relief is not the noblest part of us—not by any means. I will not say it is the basest part of us, but its face is certainly turned in that direction. A little more and it would become cowardice. “Skulkers,” said Nelson, “always get the worst of it”—words that might be written over many an attempted solution of the problem of evil. In this chapter, then, I am going to address myself not to those who ask for relief, but to those who ask for power , to those who are willing, in Von Hugel’s words, “to grasp life’s nettle,” and are anxious to grasp it more firmly. There are many questions in philosophy which begin to answer themselves as soon as we understand our own meaning in asking them. The question at the head of this chapter is one of them. Carefully examined, the question itself will be found to furnish a clue to the right answer. To begin with, how comes it to pass that we have any notion of evil at all? Whatever else we may mean when we use the word “evil,” or entertain the thought of it, our intention is clearly to indicate something which stands as the opposite to “good.” Suppose, then, we were living in a universe which contained nothing but “good.” I cannot see how in such a universe the notion of evil could ever come into existence, any more than I can see how in a universe where everything tasted sweet we could ever get the notion of something else that tasted bitter. Do you say that, in such a universe, the notion of evil, or of bitter, might arise HOW SHALL WE THINK OF EVIL? 105 as an illusion. I cannot see how or why it could. In a universe where everything we experienced was ac¬ tually good or sweet, what reason could any of us have for thinking, even falsely, that something else was evil or bitter? Let us remember, too, that the notion of evil, even if it be an illusion, is not an exceptional illu¬ sion, like color-blindness or a tendency to see double. It is an illusion which all men have. But in a universe which contained nothing but good I cannot see why anybody should have it. In such a universe the exist¬ ence of the illusion would remain quite unaccounted for. Besides, we don’t get rid of evil by proving the notion of it to be an illusion: we merely reinstate it in another form. The evil is now the illusion itself. We don’t improve the world by making out that all men are fools or self-deceived; we make it worse rather than better. For my own part, I would rather live in a world which contained real evils which all men recognize than in another where all men were such imbeciles as to believe in the existence of evil which has no existence at all. The idea, then, of a world which contains nothing but good while at the same time the human mind (which after all belongs to the world) is so perverse or stupid or mistaken or blind or self-deceived as to think that evil exists, is a flat contradiction in terms. All that this argument does is to exalt the goodness of the world at the expense of the sanity of its inhabitants. It transfers evil from its seat in objective fact to an¬ other and more dangerous seat in the human mind, that, namely, where the aforesaid perversity and self- deception hold their sway, thereby endowing evil with a more odious and contemptible form than any it had before a false philosophy began her task of whitewash¬ ing the universe. A better argument for the existence of the devil could hardly be conceived. In a world where no real evil exists, who but the devil could have created the illusion of evil and implanted it in every 106 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS human mind? Or, phrasing it a little more mildly, what shall we say to a universe which contains no real evil but has yet evolved a type of intelligence, like yours and mine, to which evil presents itself as a reality? A mad world, at the very best. Bearing these things in mind, we now see that the question, How shall we think of evil? begins to answer itself as soon as it is asked. Whatever else we may think of evil, it is certain that we shall never succeed in thinking well of it. We shall never reach the point of being able to say of evil “it is good for that thing to be here.” For the moment we think thus of any¬ thing it is abundantly clear that we are not thinking of evil, but of good. So long as we continue to think of evil, we must think ill of it. Suppose a philosopher should prove to us that evil is something which doesn’t exist, and that this, therefore, is the right way to think about it. But in thinking of evil as something which doesn’t exist, we are not thinking of evil at all. We are thinking of nothing. Or suppose he should prove that evil is ultimately beneficial, and that we ought to think of it as such. Is it not clear again that in thinking of what is ultimately beneficial we have ceased to think of evil and begun to think of good? All such attempts to make us think well of evil are tantamount to telling us there is no evil to think about. They are answers to quite a different question from that which stands at the head of this chapter and are therefore chargeable with the logical fallacy known as ignoratio elenchi. Our question is, How shall we think about evil? The question they deal with is, Shall we think about evil at all? And the answer they give is, “No, because there is no evil to think about.” If these philosophers would stick to the original question in¬ stead of quietly substituting another—a common trick when the problem of evil is in question—they would see that if we are to think of evil at all we must think ill of it, we must think of it as something which is there but HOW SHALL WE THINK OF EVIL? 107 has no right to be there. Obviously our question, How shall we think of evil? has no sense or meaning unless we assume from the outset that there is some evil to think of, and a philosophy which tells us there is none is simply beside the mark. It is as though a man with a broken leg were to go to a doctor to get it mended and were to be told by him that there are no such things as legs either to break or mend, and that those who think they exist are the victims of illusion. This might be metaphysically true, but it would not answer the question that brought the patient to the consulting room. In this chapter, therefore, I shall stick to the original question, How shall we think of evil?—a question, I repeat, which there is no point in asking unless we assume that something exists, called evil, for us to think of. If we deny that, we ought to frame our ques¬ tion differently. But let us see what we can make of it as actually framed. Before attempting to answer the question, we must get a firm grip on what we mean by it; otherwise we may fall into the error of the philosophers I have just been citing, who answer another question altogether. Now, of two things, one. When the question is raised, How shall we think of evil? either the questioner knows what he means by it or he does not. We will consider the second case first. The case of a person raising this question without knowing what he means by it is a little difficult to conceive. We can only do it by using our imaginations. He would have to be a person, or being, who had lived hitherto in a state of unalloyed bliss, who had never experienced evil himself either directly or sympatheti¬ cally, and had only heard evil spoken of as something experienced by other people. Our legendary forefather, Adam, as he was before the Fall, would be the kind of ' person we are in quest of. In Milton’s Paradise Lost we have the curious spectacle of the angel Raphael 108 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS instructing Adam how to think of evil at a moment of Adam’s life when as yet he had no experience of it, and was therefore incapable of raising our question with any knowledge of what it means. We need not grudge Mil- ton the large poetic license of which he here makes use, though it must be pointed out, as a plain matter of psychology, that to explain evil to a person like Adam, who had never experienced it, is as impossible as it would be to teach the infinitesimal calculus to a horse, or to awaken the sense of beauty in a jellyfish. The only way in which Raphael could have introduced the meaning of evil into Adam’s mind would have been by giving him a taste of it there and then, in his body or in his soul. Short of that, all instructions how to think about evil would have been thrown away on Adam for the simple reason that as yet he knew of no evil to think about. Any questions that Adam could raise about evil, at that stage, could be nothing more than mere questions about the word . In no other sense would Adam know what he meant by asking, “How shall I think about evil?” In no other sense could there be any significance for him in the answers given by Raphael. Terrors, threats, and appalling pictures would be alike in vain, since Adam, having never ex¬ perienced anything of that nature, would lack the means of interpreting Raphael’s words and would be unable to recognize what he was talking about. What is the use of telling a man that so and so will hurt him, when as yet he does not know what it is to be hurt? From first to last the whole performance, both question and answer, would be a mere verbal exercise; in which respect, I may add, it would resemble many of the attempts that have been made in more recent times to solve the problem of evil. I now turn to the second case, that of the person who knows what he means when he raises our question—the case, I imagine, of every-one who may chance to read these pages. What I have next to point out is that in HOW SHALL WE THINK OF EVIL? 109 knowing what we mean by the question we have al¬ ready gone most of the way toward answering it. Un¬ less we had already thought, and thought a great deal, about evil, and come to certain very definite judgments about its nature, we should not know what we meant by asking, How shall we think about evil? All that our thought about evil now stands in need of is a little clearing up; but the major part of our thinking has, I repeat, already been done before we come to the point of asking our question—otherwise we could never ask it intelligently, as every reader of this chapter is doing. Here I would beg the reader to cross-examine him¬ self, and to be very candid with himself in the answers he gives. Let us imagine for the moment—I hope he will pardon me for putting it in this way—that he is the pupil and I am the instructor. He is anxious to know how he is to think about evil, and he has come to me in the hope that I can tell him. Why, I would ask him, is he anxious about this matter? Why is he interested in it, and interested to the extent of finding it worth his while to read this rather difficult chapter? Has he not, before propounding his question to me, already thought about evil a great deal and come to the definite valua¬ tion of evil as a mighty unpleasant factor in the uni¬ verse and in his own experience? Has he not already learned to dislike it, to wish it away, and to take up a positive attitude of hostility toward it? If my answer to his present question were to take the form of telling him so to think of evil as to make him wish for more of it in his own and other people’s lives, would he nqt promptly throw this book into the fire? In giving the name “evil” to the thing he wants me to help him in thinking about, has he not already thought of it as something of which the less we have in life the better? Is not the question between us already prejudged to that extent? I put it to him that it is. I put it to him that his attitude toward evil is neither neutral nor in¬ different nor disinterested nor impartial. I put it to 110 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS him that he has already made up his mind and done his thinking to this extent—that he is determined to think ill of evil and not to think well. Is there any reader of these pages who is willing to be persuaded by me to think well of evil, and would not despise me as a writer of nonsense if I made the attempt? I say with¬ out hesitation—there is no such reader. To that extent his mind is already made up. I suggest, then, to any person who may come to me (in my assumed role of instructor) for further light upon how he shall think of evil: (1) that unlike Adam before the Fall he knows what he means by evil; (2) that his knowing what it means proves him to have begun his thinking about it before he came to me; (3) that he has thought ill of it; (4) that he is deter¬ mined not to be persuaded, by me or anybody else, to think well of it; (5) that the only further thinking about it which he would accept from me as valid must be continuous with that already begun, and to the same effect. I suggest, further, that even if I were to succeed, per impossibile, in persuading him to think well of evil, or to think it away, the burden and mystery of evil would not be lightened in the least. What would be gained by a philosophy which taught mankind to look with complaisance on the villainy of Iago, with satisfaction on the treachery of Judas, with indifference on the suf¬ ferings of the Great War? Would it not be a damnable philosophy? Would not the complaisance, the satis¬ faction, the indifference it engendered in the presence of these things be a new abomination greater than any of those it affected to displace? Would not the man who looked upon Iago with complaisance be a blacker villain than Iago himself? Who but a traitor double- dyed could be satisfied, even philosophically, with the treachery of Judas? And is not a fresh horror added to the sufferings of the Great War when we introduce on the scene a race of philosophers who have argued HOW SHALL WE THINK OF EVIL? Ill themselves into regarding those sufferings with in¬ difference? Does any of us really wish for an “explanation” of evil which would make him content with its presence in the universe? Does any of us want to think well of evil even in that limited sense? Would not such an explanation, if offered, be instantly rejected by every one of us as beneath his dignity as a man, nay, as an outrage to his self-respect? The only being I can imagine who would consent to think well of evil is the devil. Goethe’s Faust , it may be remembered, largely turns on the ability of the devil to whitewash evil or to argue it out of existence. Many great philosophers have done the same thing, not perceiving that such arguments merely serve to produce a devil’s mind in those who listen to them, thereby reinstating evil in a worse form than ever. Of all “solutions” of the prob¬ lem of evil that given by Mephistopheles, and by his disciples among the philosophers, is by far the easiest. The trouble is that the “solution” itself becomes a greater evil than the evil it professes to “solve.” For my own part, I refuse to follow the meditated guile of Mephistopheles. His arguments, indeed, are fascinat¬ ing enough till we come to the conclusion. But when that is reached every decent mind rejects it with horror, and with indignation at the foul trap into which he has been led. For minds such as ours, it is no more possible to think well of evil than it is to think ill of good. Think¬ ing evil away is no better, since we inevitably find that, in doing so, we think good away at the same time. Which won’t help us much! I am now in a position to give a general answer to the question at the head of this chapter. To the reader who asks me, How shall I think of evil? my general answer is, Continue to think of it as you thought of it up to the moment when you felt prompted to ask your question. You thought of it (did you not?) as an 112 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS obstacle of some kind—an obstacle to your faith in God, an obstacle to your peace of mind. Continue, then, to think of it as an obstacle. You thought ill of it before. Think worse of it now. Don’t expect one word from me which will make you think better of it. Don’t expect me to lift my little finger to remove the obstacle from your path. If you saw the obstacle dimly before, I would help you, now, to see it more clearly, to realize what a tremendous obstacle it is. I have not the faintest desire or intention to “reconcile” you to the villainy of Iago, to the treachery of Judas, to the sufferings of the Great War. On the contrary, my desire and intention are to deepen your opposition to all three. Instead, therefore, of trying to ease you of your consciousness of evil I would sharpen it to the very uttermost. I would offer you, at this point, not peace but a sword. If you want peace with evil I am not your man. Go to some other “instructor.” You will have no difficulty in finding one—in the school of Mephistopheles. You had declared war upon evil before you came to me. Stand firm to that declaration and sharpen your sword. Such is my general answer to the question. Before making it more specific I must ask patience for a short digression in psychology. There was a time when psychologists were in the habit of drawing a false distinction between the intelli¬ gence and the will. The intelligence was treated as a faculty which passively accepts what is given it to know, which knows things by simply finding them there, and reproducing them or reflecting them, as they might be reflected by a looking-glass. The will was treated as a separate and mysterious faculty which does not come into operation until a later stage, when we begin to make up our minds how we are going to act among the objects and ideas which our intelligence has passively received or found existing in front of it. In other words, the mind was treated as one thing and HOW SHALL WE THINK OF EVIL? 113 the process of making up our minds (will) was treated as another. Most unfortunately this false distinction has entered into popular thought and into popular speech. When the man in the street (who is an excellent fellow but a bad psychologist) gets talking about the things of the mind, his first mistake is, almost invariably, to speak of his intelligence as though it were one thing and of his will as though it were another, the difference be¬ tween the two words leading him to think that he is talking of two different things. The mistake comes out in many forms but never so plainly as when he turns to the meaning, or the problem, of evil. He insists on treating evil as though it were something which his intelligence has found in existence and passively ac¬ cepted as there; and he thinks that the problem of what his will has to do with evil is a separate problem, coming in afterward. In all this he fails to perceive that the meaning of evil, the very essence of it, lies in the attitude which his will has already taken up toward it. He fails to perceive that the very act of thinking about evil (intelligence) is also the act of making up his mind (willing) to oppose it. If the reader doubts this, or finds it difficult to follow, let him try an experiment. Let him try to think (intelligence) of some evil with¬ out at the same time taking up (will) a definite attitude of opposition toward it. He will find that the evil he is thinking of is evil precisely so far as he wills to oppose it, as his mind is made up against it. When, for example, he calls the villainy of Iago an evil, he means by that that the villainy of Iago is the kind of thing he is out against. Think of Iago’s conduct as something that you are not out against and where would be the point of calling it villainy? In recognizing it as vil¬ lainy you take an attitude toward it, condemn it, throw your weight against it, mentally strike at it with all your might, saying to yourself, as Lincoln said when 114 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS he saw slavery, “That thing I mean to hit, and to hit hard.” Why else should you call it “evil” or “villainy”? Unless you mean to hit it, the thing for you does not mean evil at all. The clearness with which you see it as evil and the hardness with which you mean to hit it are the same thing. The harder you mean to hit it the clearer you will see it. The clearer you see it the harder you mean to hit it. Obviously your will and intelligence, at this point, are two different names for a single mental act. Happily this false distinction between intelligence and will has now been abandoned by every psychologist who is worth either his salt or his salary. Thanks largely to the labors of William James, we now know that our intelligence is purposive at every moment of its action. The old myth which represented the human mind as “a disinterested and impartial spectator of the universe,” with a mysterious extra called the “will” tucked into its structure, has been finally exploded. All mind is a process of making up the mind. The will is all-pervasive, part and parcel of every mental act. To know anything is to make up our mind about that thing; to value it; to determine what it is good for and what we are going to make of it. On the table before me at this moment stands a bottle of fluid which I recognize as ink. But within my recognition of it as ink lies the purpose, the determination, the will to use it for writing and not for drinking—and there lies the true meaning of the ink. Similarly, in the universe there is something I recognize as evil. But within my recognition of it as evil lies the will to hit it and not to tolerate it. And there lies the true meaning of the evil. Show me an evil which I don’t want to hit and am prepared to tolerate, and you show me something which, for me, is not evil. This being admitted, we now come to a highly critical point of the discussion. There can be no honest dealing with evil which is HOW SHALL WE THINK OF EVIL? 115 not based on a frank recognition of its reality. In¬ genious dealing there may be; subtle dealing there may be; sophistical dealing there may be—but honest dealing, no! Many persons will find this statement formidable, forbidding, depressing. They embarked on this chap¬ ter, perhaps, in the hope of finding in it some argument which would lead to the conclusion that evil is not as bad as it seems, and they will not take kindly to an “instructor” who tells them that evil is worse than it seems; that evil is not only real but that the amount of it in the world is greater, and the malignancy of it more terrible, and the distribution of it more mys¬ terious than any of us have supposed. But now I am in a position to add something which I hope will relieve the gloom of this impression. When¬ ever we are oppressed by the reality of evil as we see it in the world, let us turn our attention round to that in ourselves which, in recognizing evil jor what it is, is at the same time resolved to hit evil and to hit with all our might. Let us reflect that the same universe which has produced the villainy of Iago, the treachery of Judas, and the sufferings of the Great War, has also produced that spirit in ourselves which, when con¬ fronted by such things, cries out, in the passion of the will, “This must be stopped and, by Heaven, I am here to stop it! ” See the purposiveness of your intelligence! Catch your mind in the very act of making itself up at this point. Observe how the purpose which finds ex¬ pression in this cry is interwoven with the very stuff of which you are made, or rather of which the universe has made you. In discovering the reality of evil, have you not discovered at the same time the dignity and power of your own soul, to which evil stands opposed? There is a double revelation: on the one side, of the evil which you recognize; on the other side, of that in you which recognizes evil and, in recognizing, condemns it. In one and the same vision there is shown you 116 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS the tremendous obstacle you have to overcome and the power within yourself to overcome it. What more in¬ spiring vision could you have, what clearer proof that your nature is divine? A new sharpness to the con¬ sciousness of evil, and therewith a new sharpness to the consciousness of something yet greater in yourself, standing opposed to the evil you see—such is the con¬ tribution of a true religion to the solution of this great problem. In the course of this psychological digression we have been approaching a more precise answer to the ques¬ tion, How shall we think of evil? We have seen that, in this matter, thinking and willing go together. To suppose that we first take an impartial and disinter¬ ested view of evil and then make up our minds how we will act in regard to it, is to misconceive the psychologi¬ cal situation. There is no such thing as thinking about evil in an impartial and disinterested frame of mind. Whoever thinks about evil at all takes a definite side against it and cannot, by any possibility, think about it on any other terms. Do you want, then, to think more clearly about evil than you have done heretofore, and do you read this chapter in the hope that it will help you to that end? Well, there is only one way by which you can attain that greater clearness of thought you are in search of, namely, by strengthening your will to oppose evil when¬ ever it confronts you. Think of evil as that which de¬ mands your opposition and you will think of it aright. Never think of it by itself , but always think of it in closest connection with that divine element in your own nature which stands opposed to it and is more than a match for it. When evil is in question, clearness of thought and resolution of will are not two things but one. Let your thought follow your will; let your will be your thought and your thought your will. Let HOW SHALL WE THINK OF EVIL? 117 each be the exact echo of the other. Think of the villainy of Iago as villainy; that is, as indicating a type of character which you are resolved is not to be suffered on this planet. Think of the treachery of Judas as treachery ; that is, as a crime which thirty million pieces of silver would not induce you to repeat against the humblest of your fellow-men. Think of the sufferings of the Great War as something which must not occur again, and the repetition of which you, so far as in you lies, mean to prevent. In short, think of all evils precisely as you would act if you found your¬ self in their presence. Let your thought be the action of your will translated into terms of the intelligence, and let your will be your thought translated into terms of action. Any other mode of thinking about evil you may choose to adopt—and many are offered you—will lead sooner or later to the discovery that you are not think¬ ing about evil at all, but have fallen a victim to the most nefarious of all the tricks which Mephistopheles plays on those who are foolish enough to listen to his sophistries. When thou hearest the fool rejoicing, and he saith, “It is over and past, And the wrong was better than right, and hate turns into love at the last. And we strove for nothing at all, and the Gods are fallen asleep, For so good is the world agrowing, that the evil good shall reap,” Then loosen thy sword in the scabbard and settle the helm on thy head, For men betrayed are mighty, and great are the wrongfully dead . 1 Where will you find a more poignant answer to the question, How shall we think of evil? or a more trench¬ ant stroke at the word-juggling in which this great question has been involved? There are people who still imagine that something is to be gained by “recon- ^William Morris, Song of Sigurd the Volsung. 118 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS ciling the existence of evil with the goodness of God.” For my part, I flatly refuse to recognize as God any being with whose “goodness” the existence of evil can be “reconciled.” Such reconciliations can have but one effect—to dishonor God and to scandalize men whom He has made in His Image. Let us think rather of evil as that with which no decent soul can ever be recon¬ ciled, and in our refusal to be reconciled with it let us learn to find a close point of contact between our own nature and God's. CHAPTER IX HOW SHALL WE THINK OF HUMAN PROGRESS? By Eugene W. Lyman Is human progress something that the Christian should welcome or discourage? Should he actively pro¬ mote it, or should he be simply indifferent to it? As men become wiser, do they also become better? As they grow in skill, do they grow in grace? Does mak¬ ing things beautiful tend toward creating the beauty of holiness? Does education aid in salvation? Does the increase of intelligence foster the life of faith? Does the advancement of civilization promote the coming of the Kingdom of God? Such are some of the questions that Christians have often asked down through the centuries, and many Christians ask them no less seriously to-day. The Christian feels that in his religious experience he has found something of supreme worth, and he sometimes suspects that this priceless thing is menaced by what men commonly call progress. When this suspicion arises, then the Christian is apt to take one of two attitudes. First, he may repudiate all that goes under the name of progress as being essentially worldly. In this case, either he will look for spiritual blessings to come in an entirely supernatural way—as a miracle from God; or else he will become more or less ascetic— seeking to be unworldly by disciplining, or even sup¬ pressing, his natural desires, so that he will not yearn for earthly things. 119 120 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS Or, secondly, the Christian may adopt a compromise attitude, regarding the things that belong to human progress as practically necessary and as good in their way, but as having nothing to do with the Christian experience. In this case, he will tend to divide his life into two water-tight compartments, putting worldly goods into the one and spiritual goods into the other. And he will use considerable care not to let the two kinds of goods get mixed up—just as a business man would take pains to keep his business accounts and his personal accounts quite separate from each other. There is, then, a well-defined tendency among certain Christians to regard their religious experience and hu¬ man progress as being somehow alien to each other. And it should be noted that this view is shared, on the other hand, by some of the believers in progress who are not professedly Christians. In this crisis of the world’s history, when civilization has been shaken to its foundations, such persons often ask whether Chris¬ tianity can be counted on as a positive force to help re¬ establish progress. They feel that Christians are prone to define their religious experience and ideals in such a way as to render them of no value for actual human progress, if not a positive hindrance to it. They con¬ sider that the Christian experience tends to disconnect men from the cause of progress, and to draft off into other channels energies which that cause sorely needs. And they are doubtful whether Christianity knows how to attack the major evils of our time. Thus, from many who are professedly Christian, and from many who are not, come similar judgments about the relation between Christianity and human progress. This fact brings before us a serious problem. For on the other hand, not a few Christians regard Christianity as one of the chief sources of the progress that has been made since the Christian era began and as the best hope of mankind for future progress. Where such conflicting views exist in regard to a fundamental mat- HOW SHALL WE THINK OF PROGRESS? 121 ter there is evidently need for careful and earnest thought. Cross-currents make choppy seas. When earnest men work at cross-purposes spiritual interests make little headway, and the forces of disorder and evil become turbulent. Such situations often can be traced back to some confusion of thinking. Different meanings may have been assigned to the same terms, or the meanings themselves may be unclear. The ques¬ tion, then, How shall we think of human progress? is of vital concern to all who have spiritual interests at heart. And this question really falls into two parts: first, What do we mean by the term “human prog¬ ress”? and, secondly, What is our conception of the standard by which progress should be judged? By answering the first question we shall mark out the field that we have to survey, and by answering the second we shall test the instruments to be used in surveying, so as to be sure that our judgments are “on the level.” i What then do we mean by “human progress”? At first thought, doubtless, a long line of practical inven¬ tions comes before our minds, beginning perhaps with the compass, the art of printing, the magnet, extending down through the steam engine, the gas engine, the dynamo, the camera, and ending with limited expresses and ocean liners, high-power motor cars and airplanes, the telegraph, telephone and wireless, the modern printing press and motion-picture machine. In short, there is no question but that we now can do many things that our forefathers could not do. But then there probably will arise in our thought the growth in knowledge on which these inventions rest: such knowledge as is made possible by the tele¬ scope, microscope, and spectroscope; such knowledge as is embodied in theories about atoms and electrons, living germs, the composition of the distant stars; such 122 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS knowledge of plant and animal life as is spread before us in our botanical and natural history museums; or the story of the human race as it has been gathered from excavations, ancient monuments, and documents ancient and modern. In brief, it is plain that we now can know many things that our forefathers could not know. But our thought also may pass on to some of the great organizations of modern life: the immense system of mines and factories with their enormous output of goods; the great development of modern agriculture, vastly increasing the supply of food; the extensive or¬ ganizations of trade by which raw materials are gath¬ ered and goods are distributed all over the world; the colossal banking systems of modern business; and the swarming, sky-scraping cities, where so many of these interests center. And as we think of these matters we realize that we of to-day can have and share in many things that our forefathers could not. Now if we pause at this point, as we often do, we are apt to think of what we call progress as being summed up in “our big material civilization/’ and then we sometimes wonder how real the progress is. Are we much better, or happier, or even wiser, in respect to the things that really matter, because of the many things that we can do and know and have which our forefathers could not do and know and have? A little reflection, however, ought to show us that as yet we are far from having surveyed our field. There are gains in the immaterial realm which belong no less to the story of human progress than any of the material gains. Moreover, the gains of the two realms cannot be sharply separated, but rather are so closely inter¬ woven as to form one story. Why should we speak of inventions in the mechanical realm as illustrating progress and say nothing about discoveries in the moral realm? Think, for example, of the most fundamental of our moral discoveries—the HOW SHALL WE THINK OF PROGRESS? 123 sacredness of life, the worth of every human soul, the value of human personality as an end in itself. It is unmistakable that this discovery has been deepening and spreading through the centuries, effecting progress in our treatment of children, in the status of women, in the lot of the masses of men in widening areas around the world. Similarly, there has been progress in the discovery of what justice, freedom, truth, love, and many other spiritual principles really mean which has been vastly beneficial to the human race. And are not the moral discoveries conditioned to an important degree upon a growth of knowledge in the spiritual realm which is comparable to the growth of knowledge in the physical realm? The history of human languages and literatures and customs, the comparative study of men’s faiths and morals, the spreading of information about other races, nations, and classes, the analysis and exploration of man’s psychic nature—how poor we should be without this accumulated knowledge of the spiritual life of man¬ kind ! If we recall what went into the making of John Milton, for example, we see at once how the wealth of the accumulated knowledge of his modern world bore fruit in a great spirit. The Bible, the Greek classics, European art, the forces making for British liberty, the new life of America, all conspired to make Milton one of the powerful forces for human progress. No less is the spiritual aspect evident in the institu¬ tions of society. The missionary has often been ahead of the trader and the consul in penetrating to remote and isolated portions of the globe. The spiritual forces incarnated in David Livingstone have certainly not been less significant for Africa than the commercial and imperial forces incarnated in Cecil Rhodes. Evi¬ dently our missionary organizations have done much of the pioneer work of the world. Educational in¬ stitutions also are often centers of spiritual progress. From them emanate wholesome criticism and fresh 124 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS idealism which penetrate politics in a stimulating way. Certain of our educators are known to be the real drafters of many of the laws in which progressive movements get embodied. The Institute of Politics which Williams College convenes each summer is far ahead of our congresses and parliaments in getting at real problems and dealing with them in a vigorous, constructive way. So also our institutions of worship and of art, at their best, are powerful forces for progress. The forces of business and of the state may often be the means of preserving the unity of a people, but the forces that create that unity are more truly the people’s songs, their artistic shrines, and their faiths. Thus human progress is an immaterial, spiritual mat¬ ter as truly as a material matter. It includes moral discoveries as well as physical inventions, gains in spiritual wisdom as well as the advancement of physical science, and the institutions that nourish man’s higher life as well as the commerce and industry that feed, clothe, transport, and amuse him. And these two sides of human progress are so closely bound up together as to make one story. For instance, one of the deepest notes of the spiritual life in all ages is the note of com¬ passion. But to-day, genuine compassion must make large use of physical invention—landing supplies in Armenia by airplane, using the tractor plow to conquer the famines of India, taking the X-ray machine and the sterilizing apparatus to distant peoples. Thus, the spiritual side of life musters the material side into its service and multiplies its significance. But material advancement, in turn, gives spiritual life its oppor¬ tunity. Material advancement normally results in aspiration. Often, it is true, this aspiration—for want of positive spiritual leadership of the right sort—does not get beyond dissatisfaction and unrest. But nor¬ mally it reaches out toward liberty, education, and the finer things of the spirit. We are now in a position to define what we mean by HOW SHALL WE THINK OF PROGRESS? 125 human progress. Our defining, we see, must be inclu¬ sive, making room for both the material and the spir¬ itual and their interactions. Human progress, let us say, is the unfolding of human power for the achieving of goods, and the attainments that result. Progress is essentially a matter of the release and control of power. And mankind has made momentous gains in the release and control of power since it started on the long trail of history. This appears in three great realms: physi¬ cal nature, personal life, and society. In the realm of physical nature these gains have been in the modern time swift and miraculous. In the realm of personal life we have the slow but cumulative effects of educa¬ tion and religion. In the realm of society in the mass the gains have been fluctuating and uneven. Yet any one who compares 1922 a.d. with 1922 b.c. will not doubt that real and momentous gains have been made. And out of this vast increase in the release and control of power has come a multitude of goods that enter in the most various ways into making up the meaning and value of life. ii Having thus determined what we ought to mean by “human progress,” we now are in a better position to answer the questions asked at the outset. And those questions still remain to be answered, notwithstanding the fact that progress is spiritual as well as material and that the two sides are closely bound up together. We have said that progress is a matter of the release and control of power, but to what ends is the power to be controlled? We see the multitude of goods avail¬ able for men, but how often they conflict, how often they abolish each other! Industries become organized into marvelous productivity, but what of the inhuman¬ ities of industry? Able men acquire enormous power, but do they have a corresponding wisdom and will to serve? Nations develop each a rich and varied culture, 126 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS and then—war! And so we have to return to the question again, What is the connection between civili¬ zation and salvation, between goods and goodness, be¬ tween increase in skill and growth in grace? This is really the question of the standard of progress. The unfolding of human power in all its range and scope can be heartily welcomed if its various phases can be made to cooperate toward high and harmonious ends. The attainment of the most various goods can be encouraged if they can be made vital parts of a cen¬ tral and supreme good. What, then, is the test of human progress by which we may determine whether it is real progress, or by the application of which we may hope to make progress more real? As Christians, we seek our test from the Christian faith and experience. But the trouble has been that, even so, our tests have been considerably at variance with each other. Even when we have had the same names for our tests, we frequently have allowed these names, perhaps half unconsciously, to stand for widely different meanings. But if we are honestly seeking the central realities of the Christian experience, shall we not agree that the standard by which progress should be measured is given us in the spirit of Jesus? Jesus Christ—His person, His teaching, His revelation, His work—that is what is central for all Christian ex¬ perience. But Jesus is not to us a second Moses. Moses was a great lawgiver, but Jesus is, as Paul tells us, “a life-giving spirit/’ The cross of Christ has been, down through the ages, central for the experience of Chris¬ tians. But we do not possess inwardly the truth of the cross of Christ unless, having died with Christ unto sin and risen with Him, we “walk in newness of life.” And the climax of the Christian experience and Chris¬ tian fellowship comes when “we all, with unveiled face, reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are trans¬ formed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit.” Thus, in the spirit of HOW SHALL WE THINK OF PROGRESS? 127 Jesus we truly have that which must be central for the Christian life and the Christian’s standard of progress. But if we are to apply the spirit of Jesus as a test of progress, it will be well for us to bring out more fully some of its main meanings. Let me suggest four great meanings of the spirit of Jesus as being particularly applicable to the problem of progress. And first of all, the spirit of Jesus means Freedom. Jesus called men into the experience of living as sons of God. That meant a new dignity for the oppressed Jew and the disinherited Galilean. It enfranchised their souls and set them inwardly free from the political tyranny of the alien and the religious tyranny of their own social system. The common people began to dis¬ cover that religion was something for them in the midst of their common life, and they made the discovery gladly. The result was that a new yeast, a powerful ferment, began to penetrate the lump of society in Palestine. Jesus Himself was clearly conscious of this transforming and liberating character of His work. He said that His teaching was like strong new cloth, not to be used simply as a patch on an old garment, and like new wine, which could not be contained in old wine¬ skins. He said that His followers were children of the bridechamber and could not but rejoice, and that the least in the New Order were greater than the greatest in the Old. This freedom which marked the spirit of Jesus passed on into the early Church. It is seen at Pentecost and in the many other outpourings of the Spirit. A friend who is a professor of English literature recently re¬ marked on how strikingly the whole New Testament was characterized by the note of exuberance and joy. Preeminently is this true of Paul, whose understanding of Christ’s work is that it makes us new creatures. Un¬ mistakably the spirit of Jesus is one of Freedom. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” But in the second place, the spirit of Jesus no less 128 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS unmistakably means Fellowship. To Jesus, sonship and brotherhood, love for God and love for one’s neigh¬ bor, go together. According to His thought, one cannot be truly free unless he is also fraternal. Would we be reconciled to God? Jesus bids us first be reconciled to our brother. Would we become sons of God? Jesus shows us the one true way—that of love, even for our enemies. Would we become great among men? None is great, Jesus tells us, except he who greatly serves. Similarly, Paul declares that if we have been truly set free we shall bear the fruits of the Spirit, the first of which is love; and that speaking with the tongues of men and of angels is no evidence of the Spirit if we have not love. Do we ask how far this love should go in its fellowship and fraternity? Paul gives us a living demonstration of the answer, for he is ready to die daily for the churches and to be the bond-servant of all, while all the time there is at the center of his life the con¬ sciousness of the glorious liberty of the children of God. Thus, the spirit of Jesus means both liberty and love, both freedom and fellowship. It enfranchises men’s souls and at the same time enlists them in limitless service for the redemption and progress of mankind. But to Freedom and Fellowship as qualities in the spirit of Jesus we must add a third quality, namely, Faith. With Jesus faith was the root of which freedom and fellowship were the fruit. Human sonship and brotherhood were grounded in the divine Fatherhood. Morality was fed by mysticism. Faith was what He sought in men. It was the power that, though tiny as a grain of mustard seed, could level mountains. Faith was also what He awakened in men—in the palsied in¬ valid, in the Roman soldier, in the taxgatherer, and sometimes in the Pharisee—and, when awakened, it enabled Him to say, “Thy sins be forgiven thee,” “Thy faith hath made thee whole.” And again, it was faith that He himself brought to men. He founded his mission upon faith when He declared, “Man shall not HOW SHALL WE THINK OF PROGRESS? 129 live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” The crisis of His mission turned upon the same principle when He told the re¬ ligious officialdom of His time that the service of God was not tithing mint, anise, and cummin,—but jus¬ tice, mercy, and faith. And faith was the closing note of His life when in Gethsemane He said, “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.” What wonder that evangelicalism has always enshrined this central prin¬ ciple of the evangel in its watchword, “justification by faith.” But there is yet a fourth quality of the spirit of Jesus which is of peculiar importance for our problem. It is Truth. Jesus, to be sure, has nothing to say about truth in the scientific sense, because neither He nor His age was concerned with scientific problems. But He has the moral equivalent of scientific truth, namely, sincerity, the hatred of sham, the love of reality. He was impatient of the conventionality of the adult but He loved the candor of the child. He revolted from the pretense of the Pharisee’s petition, but His heart went out to the humble frankness of the prayer of the publican. He saw only hypocrisy in the jealousy for the Sabbath which was indifferent to living human needs, but real faith and sincere compassion He praised wherever He found it, whether in Roman centurion or Samaritan. The single eye and the single mind, the discernment which belongs to the pure heart, the forth¬ rightness of him who not only knows but does God’s will—these are fundamental for Jesus. They reveal how deeply truth-loving the spirit of Jesus was and show the extent to which His Gospel is founded on Truth. Hence it is that the Fourth Gospel, when it makes Truth one of its great words, is so revealing of the mind of Christ. In this Gospel we clearly see that the spirit of Jesus is a spirit of truth, which sets men free, creates fellowship, and kindles faith. Freedom, Fellowship, Faith, and Truth are the great 130 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS qualities of the spirit of Jesus which are most impor¬ tant for defining that spirit as the measure of progress. They are the quadrilateral of the Gospel which fit it to stand four-square amid the currents of human life and to gauge their direction and their value. They define the ideal and the end according to which the release and control of power must be regulated if there is to be real progress. hi Having thus brought out what we should mean by the spirit of Jesus as the standard of progress, we need now to indicate some results which follow when the actual unfoldings of human power are judged by this standard. When human power and human goods are judged by the spirit of Jesus two outstanding conclusions be¬ come evident. The first conclusion is that, in all the varied unfoldings of human power and in all the goods that have resulted, there is nothing that inherently is common or unclean, but that human powers and goods are in principle intrinsically worthful and capable of being united into a true progress. That is, there is nothing that man has learned about the release and control of power which may not be turned to account in making a world governed by Freedom, Fellowship, Faith, and Truth. The multitude of things that we to-day can do and know and have which our fore¬ fathers could not can all be controlled and utilized by the spirit of Jesus. The missionary enterprise is the perfect illustration of this. The missionary in China, for example, centers his work in the church as a Christian fellowship, but he also starts the school and the college, he builds up the hospital, he promotes printing, he improves agri¬ culture, he looks upon the railroad as an ally, he sum¬ mons the civil engineer to help in defeating flood and HOW SHALL WE THINK OF PROGRESS? 131 famine. He is ready to enlist all our inventions, all our scientific knowledge of nature and of man, all our organized social life in the service of the spirit of Jesus. For the very sake of bringing men effectively into the experience of Freedom, Fellowship, Faith, and Truth he draws upon all that has been learned about the release and control of power. But the other conclusion is no less important. There may be much progress in learning how to release and control power, and there may be, in consequence, an achievement of goods on a great scale—goods both material and spiritual—and yet this progress and achievement may become self-defeating because they are not sufficiently controlled by the spirit of Jesus. We know too well that there is great wealth that does not serve the commonwealth, that there is high art that does not elevate character, that great organiza¬ tions of industry often breed bitter class strife, that civic loyalty may not inhibit race antipathy, and that the factories, laboratories, universities, and churches of one nation may suddenly be mobilized for war against another nation. Clearly, progress is not a matter of a self-operating evolution that moves steadily onward and upward without needing any central principle and regardless of whether men dis¬ cover such a principle and are guided by it. On the contrary, progress comes about at all only because there is a Divine Will at the heart of the world that aims to make Freedom, Fellowship, Truth, and Faith prevail, and that accordingly is conditioned upon the extent to which these principles become incarnated in the lives of men. To the question, then, with which we began, Should the Christian welcome progress or be indifferent to it? we answer emphatically that he should welcome it, for the reason that he is called upon by the spirit of Jesus to be a creator of progress. The Christian is in¬ terested in every manifestation of the release and 132 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS control of power, because all such manifestations in¬ crease his opportunity of incarnating Freedom, Fellow¬ ship, Faith, and Truth, and because he knows that without these principles of Jesus the most elaborately built system of powers will bring about its own de¬ struction in the end. It is thus a vital part of the Christian’s task to make wisdom and righteousness reinforce each other; to bring growth in skill and growth in grace into har¬ monious interaction; to learn how the making of things beautiful and the attaining of the beauty of holiness may be part of one spiritual experience; to develop an education that saves and to preach a salvation that educates; to show that the deepening of intelligence leads on to faith, and that the more vital the faith the more intelligence will be welcomed: and by all such means to bring into fruitful union the two great ideals of the advancement of civilization and the coming of the Kingdom of God. And when the vital kinship between the ideals of Progress and of the Kingdom is thus realized a new depth and range and glory are revealed for the religious experience of the Christian. For God is then seen to be, not simply the author of creation, but also to be ac¬ tively creating now. He is seen to be, in reality, the Eternal Creative Good Will. Therefore the Christian experience of God, in its deepest and fullest sense, will mean a sharing in God’s creative work. The full meaning of sonship to God is to be found in creative living to the end of achieving for all men a world of Freedom, Fellowship, Faith, and Truth. Herein the deep joyfulness of the Christian life appears. From this point of view, the Christian life is clearly evident as a life abundant. And there is nothing in the whole range of man’s experience of the release and control of power—whether in the material or the spiritual sphere —that cannot be taken up into the life with God, thus understood, and transfigured. HOW SHALL WE THINK OF PROGRESS? 133 And when those tragic experiences come, which be¬ fall us because man’s efforts for the release and control of power turn self-defeating, the life with God, from this point of view, remains vital and intimate, while at the same time opening out new depths of meaning. For in such tragic crises God is realized as an actively redeeming God, just as in more normal situations He is realized as the actively creating God. As Jesus when He was on earth was both a Redeemer from men’s blindness and suffering and sin and a Creator of a New Order, so all through human history God is redeeming and creating; and so each one who has a living ex¬ perience of God becomes a sharer in His redemptive and creative work. Thus the Christian, through the spirit of Jesus, not only becomes possessed of the standard of progress, but also is sent out into the stream of history with in¬ finite resources from God with which to redeem the defeats of progress and to carry it forward to such creative achievements as men in the past have hardly dared to hope for. And in turn, by recognizing human progress as the chief sphere of application for his re¬ ligious experience, the Christian becomes most fully a sharer in the saviorhood and the creativity of God. CHAPTER X HOW SHALL WE THINK OF LIFE AFTER DEATH? By Francis G. Peabody The first answer which must be made to the ques¬ tion, How shall we think of life after death? is that we should not think too much or too seriously about it. A vast amount of precious time and anxious thought, which might have been devoted to immediate obliga¬ tions and opportunities, has been wasted in apprehen¬ sive expectancy or fruitless speculations concerning the mysterious future. What has been commended as otherworldliness, and which might be applied to the mastery of this world, has been applied to contempt of this world and contemplation of another. Life, to such a habit of mind, becomes little more than a preparation for the supreme incident of death. “Prepare to die,” becomes the controlling maxim of conduct. “Suffer me not for any pains of death to fall from Thee!” be¬ comes the tremulous prayer of the devout soul. The fact is, however, that so normal and universal an experience as that of bodily death is quite misin¬ terpreted when it is thus assumed to cut life in halves. To live a divided life, with immediate duties demand¬ ing attention, but with an apprehensive glance to fu¬ ture rewards and penalties, may be to lose the best of both worlds. To inquire insistently concerning the forms and conditions of the future may be, as Paul said, to “turn again to the beggarly elements,” instead of resting in confidence that one is “known of God.” In a 134 LIFE AFTER DEATH 135 word, the Christian doctrine of immortality must be approached through a large area of confessed ignorance, remembering that when some asked, “How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?” the candid rebuke of the Apostle was, “Thou fool!” There can be but one way to win heaven—through the glad and serene fulfilment of the duties of earth; there can be but one heaven which is worth winning— where the hopes and dreams of earth may be realized, and its failures and blunders forgiven. If meditation on eternity become a substitute for the duties of the passing day, death is not so much an event of the future as a present condition of moral paralysis and decay. The less one thinks of the life after death as set apart from this life by a grim wall the better for one’s present duties and for one’s future peace. The first summons to a human soul is not “Prepare to die,” but “Prepare to live.” These preliminary reflections do not, of course, imply that speculations and anticipations concerning life after death are unimportant or superfluous. They are, on the contrary, inevitable. From the beginning of hu¬ man history, the condition and occupation of departed souls, the bliss of saints and the fate of sinners, have been the themes of prophets and poets, of system- makers and seers; and sorrowing hearts in the modern world renew the cry of the ages, when they ask: Ah, Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we love, that they might tell us What and where they be. It is not essential, however, to enter into these world- old discussions of rewards and penalties, probation and occupation, in order to make one’s first approach to the thought of life after death. The first condition of a rational faith is in recognizing that life is not made of two detached existences, but of one continuous 136 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS whole, with all the possibilities of growth, education, degeneration, or decay. From such a starting point, one’s preliminary answer to the question, How shall we think of life after death? becomes changed into the question, How shall we think of life before death? Mysterious as the future may appear, it is, in fact, hardly more mysterious than the experiences of this present life, with their strange surprises of joy and sorrow, their summons to adventure of thought and desire, of work and love. How is one to live in a world like this, of such confused and clashing aims, of self- realization and self-sacrifice, of getting and giving, of material and spiritual desires, and find in it the intima¬ tion and assurance of continuity? How are the routine and detail, the daily round and common task, to furnish all we ought to ask of worth and hope? At this point, one meets the clearly indicated, but dimly appreciated, teaching of the New Testament concerning the real significance of life and death. With a reiteration and emphasis which leave no doubt of the intention, the entire problem of life is transferred, not by way of rhetoric, but by strict definition, from the incidents of the body to the experiences of the spirit. The promise of Jesus, given to his followers just before his physical death, is that they shall have life, and have it abundantly. The Apostle’s message is that “we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren.” The warning of Paul is that “to be carnally- minded is death, but to be spiritually-minded is life.” It is not, he teaches, disease, but sin, which kills. “The body is dead because of sin.” Assurances and admo¬ nitions like these imply a definition of life and death which is quite distinct from physical condition or change. Life becomes, not a matter of bodily dura¬ tion, but a matter of spiritual vitality. One may fancy himself alive, in the flush of bodily health, and yet, ac¬ cording to this teaching, may be sick, even unto death. “This my son,” says the father of the prodigal, not in LIFE AFTER DEATH 137 a figure of speech but as a statement of fact, “was dead, and is alive again.” The same transfer of significance is made in the New Testament concerning the life after death. Eter¬ nal life is not a problem of the future, but a gift in this present world: “This is life eternal.” “Lay hold on eternal life.” “Ye have eternal life.” Even the resur¬ rection of Jesus Christ is described as an experience which may be shared as a present possession. “If ye be risen with Christ,” says Paul, “seek those things which are above.” “If by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have al¬ ready attained; but I am pressing on, to lay hold of the prize, for which also Christ laid hold on me.” To seek the things which are above is to rise with Christ. To lay hold of the prize for which Christ laid hold of me is to attain to the resurrection. Thus, the funda¬ mental question concerning life and death is not, Shall I after death enter into another life? but, Am I alive now, with a spiritual vitality which is free from the vicissitudes of the body, and has the quality of time¬ lessness? In a word, the New Testament sets the spiritual world over against the sensuous world. When¬ ever, and in so far as, one passes from slavery to the flesh to the freedom of the spirit, he has already passed from death into life and satisfied the conditions of con¬ tinuity. This New Testament doctrine of life before death has, however, a twofold significance when it is applied to life after death. It cuts both ways in one’s thought of the future, revealing, on the one hand, the source of much that is crude and futile in these anticipations, and, on the other hand, opening the way to what is stable and sane. On the one hand, it becomes evident that the chief reason why a materialized and vulgar¬ ized heaven has seemed inviting to believers is that their present life has been such that nothing but ma¬ terialism and vulgarity becomes alluring. Harps and 138 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS crowns hereafter may well appear adequate rewards if life itself has been devoted either to play or glory. A life distracted by nervous strain, or weary of unremit¬ ting routine, may not unreasonably desire a future of irresponsible repose. The tense emotion of bereave¬ ment may welcome even such intermittent and frag¬ mentary communications as are given through the language of trance. Glimpses or guesses of this na¬ ture, whatever may be their validity, are, in any event, evidences of the hopes and fears which dominate the present life. What is seen or foreseen visualizes what is hoped for. One’s thought of heaven reveals one’s desire on earth. The deep beyond cannot call to the shallows here. Spiritual things must be spiritually discerned. No evidence of the habitual level on which many lives exist is more convincing than the narrow range of spiritual horizon which their imaginations see. To a dweller in the lowlands, the foothills hide the mountains, and one may not even know what lies be¬ yond. And if it be true that misdirected living in this life distorts or represses one’s thought of the future, it is not less true that the most irresistible evidence con¬ cerning the future is derived from present association with lives which do not seem likely to die. That was the fundamental conviction which sustained the dis¬ ciples of Jesus when their Master died. His life had become to them dissociated from the fate of His body; its continuance was the corollary of its character. Death, as Paul wrote, had no more dominion over Him; and the seer of the Apocalypse puts the great saying in the mouth of the glorified Christ, “I am alive forever¬ more, and have the keys of death.” It was not so much the appearances of His form which confirmed faith in Him, it was faith in Him which assured His followers of the appearances. “Have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?” wrote Paul, years later, of his vision of the Master, LIFE AFTER DEATH 139 The same experience of spiritual intimacy has sus¬ tained and restrained conviction ever since. One has had experience of lives which had in them the quality of timelessness,—the guileless charm of a little child, like one ^hom Jesus set in the midst as the type of God’s Kingdom; the companionship of maturity; the serenity of age; and across the centuries, the undimin¬ ished inspiration of the personality of Jesus Christ. As one contemplates these witnesses of the spirit, the fate of the body becomes a passing incident in the continuity of their lives. It may be difficult to picture the form which this spiritual vitality may assume, but it is much more difficult to think of it as extinct. In¬ timacy with such lives detaches one from the tem¬ porary, and associates one with the permanent. The things that are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. Such is, as Emerson said, the Verdict which accumulates From lengthening scrolls of human fates, Saying, What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent. Quality in life is the best assurance of quantity. It is those who have attained to the resurrection here who convince us of its continuity hereafter. Such remi¬ niscences and assurances remove one altogether from the region of argument or proof. As one knows what life is by living, or what sight is by seeing, so we know what immortality is by seeing and loving souls that are obviously immortal. Nor is this the only inference which may be derived from observation of the Excellent. For it is in reality this spiritual continuity which is the only life after death that can be worth the having. A future life which is mere duration, or which is concerned with trivial aims and indolent satisfactions, is by no means to be anticipated as desirable. Far more welcome would be a release by extinction, or an absorption in 140 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS the Infinite, than a fixed eternity, even of blessedness. But to contemplate the future as opportunity, not to repent alone, but to repair; to think of life not as standing still, but as going on, and of death not as a condemnation, but as a migration; to escape from a heaven of monotonous blessedness, and find a heaven of discovery, adventure, vision and enlarging service; to be given a chance to redeem the blunders and follies which one so bitterly recalls; to believe that the shining witnesses of the spirit which have illuminated this life are undimmed by the incident of death, and shine as the stars for ever and ever,—that is to think of the life after death, not as an answer to a problem, or as the satisfaction of a dream, but as the rational prog¬ ress of the human soul from one room to another of a Father’s House. It is to hope, as Matthew Arnold said, that we shall One day gain, life past, Clear vision o’er our Being’s whole; Shall see ourselves, and learn at last Our true affinities of soul. If, then, the spiritualization of the present life is the way to an interpretation of the future life; if the straight road to faith in immortality is followed as one walks by faith along his daily path, it remains to con¬ sider what there is within one’s reach in this world which is transmissible to the future, immune from change, and capable of expansion and growth. Here at once is met the meaning of lives which may fancy themselves unfit for the future because so much tied to the present. They have no time for meditation on eternity, and no share in mystic dreams. The tasks of life, the obligations of routine, the self-effacing service awaiting them each day, hide from them the heavenly vision, and if they think of the life beyond death at all, it is as if it were not for such as they. Yet it is in reality to such lives that the truth of continuity brings LIFE AFTER DEATH 141 most refreshment and reinforcement. Neither for them, in their modest experiences, nor for the most dis¬ tinguished and effective lives, are the things which are done, the achievements and accomplishments of this world, to be permanent possessions. All these are of the flesh, the temporal, the imperfect. Prophecy shall fail; tongues shall cease; knowledge shall vanish away. What remains is the discipline, the power, the pre¬ paredness for opportunities and privileges for which this life is a preliminary training. That is the rational anticipation which justifies patience in perplexity, hope in failures, courage to go on; and which puts beneath the incomplete tasks and heavy burdens of life the strength of willingness and joy. And is it possible to indicate more precisely the na¬ ture of these transmissible possessions? They must, it would seem, be varied manifestations of the ideals which clarify and control this present life, and which obviously have no relation with physical vicissitudes or material change. The first of these unchangeable pos¬ sessions is the search for truth—the intellectual pas¬ sion which sustains the truth-seeker, the thirst for knowledge which no increase of knowledge satisfies, the education which culminates in the confession of ignorance, and beyond which lies the truth which makes men free. All this, if it be not the mark of a futile and mocking universe, is the prophecy of con¬ tinuity. Expectancy, persistency, patience, assurance of the truth beyond all fragmentary truths discernible here,—these are the springs of all education, self-dis¬ cipline, and peace of mind. Death has no dominion over this domain of truth. With that I bear my senses fraught Till what I am fast shoreward drives. They are the Vessel of the Thought; The Vessel splits, the Thought survives. The same quality of timelessness is to be seen in the nature of the moral life. The ethical paradox 142 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS which presents itself every day to the duty-doer is the contrast between an absolute command and an im¬ perfect obedience. “Be ye therefore perfect/’ says the categorical imperative, “even as your Father in heaven is perfect”; but the perplexed or wayward conscience replies, “The good that I would, I do not; but the evil that I would not, that I do.” There can be no quick solution of this moral paradox. It needs time, horizon, emancipation from the flesh, a better chance for growth and power. How long it may take to efface moral stains, what discipline, probation, or anguish it may in¬ volve, one can only imagine of the future by recalling the regrets and remorse which torment life here. The Moral Law thus becomes a prophecy of continuity. The sense of obligation is a way of revelation. As duty ceases to be a task, and becomes a joy, as love, in Paul’s words, becomes the fulfilment of the law, life enters into a world of permanence. Love never faileth. The crown of a good conscience is not of gold, but of life. “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” The best reward of a good life is the joy of going on. That, as Tennyson said, is the glory of virtue: Nay, but she aimed not at glory; no lover of glory she; Give her the glory of going on, and still to be. That is the reasonable expectation which Lowell an¬ ticipated for the truth seeker: Thou art not idle, in thy higher sphere. Thy spirit bends itself to lowly tasks; And strength to perfect what it dreamed of here Is all the crown and glory that it asks. Finally, the same prophetic note is heard in the ap¬ peal of Beauty. The artist is persuaded by the ever- inviting, yet ever-receding, ideal of his art. He lives in a world unrealized. If he gain his ideal he has lost it. He produces a fragment of the beautiful through LIFE AFTER DEATH 143 faith in a completely harmonious whole. Nor is this persuasion of the perfect lacking in the more ele¬ mentary experiences of appreciation and delight. The tranquilizing landscape, the flower in the crannied wall, the cadences of music, the soaring arches of Gothic art,—these and many other symbols of absolute values lift life out of flatness and prose into visions and dreams. The wayside lilies speak to Jesus of His Father's care, even for those of little faith. The meanest flower that blows may stir thoughts too deep for tears. The enjoyment of beauty is an open door from the world of sense to the world of spirit. The fruit of the spirit is not only love, but joy. These elements in human life, which in their very nature are timeless and progressive, are what we really mean by personality. External features, the beloved counte¬ nance, the physical charm,—these are necessarily changeful, temporary, sharing the body’s fate. But personality is of the mind, the soul, the heart, the spiritual response to the True, or the Good, or the Beautiful. The more unfleshly personal relations grow, the more prophetic they are of permanence. The cor¬ ruptible must put on incorruption if death is to be swallowed up in victory. “When that which is perfect is come then that which is in part shall be done away.” Nor is personality in its human aspect the end of this progressive revelation of the spirit. For these abiding elements of consciousness bring one into direct relation with that sense of spiritual unity in the Uni¬ verse as a whole, which is but another name for the thought of God. All that has been thus far said as¬ sumes a universe of spiritual meaning, and a move¬ ment toward a Divine Event. In other words, the faith in spiritual continuity is a part of one’s faith in God. Immortality is a corollary of theism. If the universe is anything more than a chaos of conflicting atoms; if human experience is anything more than the tale of an idiot, signifying nothing, it is because the 144 RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS ideals of the True and Good and Beautiful, which are so imperfectly realized, yet so persistently persuasive, in human experience, have their origin in the law, and their end in the love, of God. A Godless universe would be the appropriate environment for a frustrated hope and an extinguished personality. A Divine Or¬ der is at once the pledge that what is fit to survive will have the chance to grow, and that the destiny of man will not obstruct the purpose of God. If even in this world we may be partakers of the Divine nature, then, with all that must change or perish, we become partakers of the permanence of God. Less than this would be not only disillusion for us, but failure for God. “The secret of heaven,” Emerson has said, “is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropped an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. . . . But it is certain that it must tally with what is best in nature. It must not be inferior in tone to the already known works of the Artist who sculptures the globes of the firmament and writes the Moral Law.” Princeton heo ogical Seminary Libraries 1012 01245 0344 DATE DUE ; ' GAYLORD PRINTED IN U.S.A *>