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Fundamental	questions

FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO - DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE

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TORONTO

Fundamental Questions

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4!,

BY

HENRY CHURCHILL KING

AUTHOR OF

" THE LAWS OF FRIENDSHIP "

" RATIONAL LIVING "

ETC.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1917

Jll rights reserved

Copyright, 1917, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1917.

Narfaoooli i^ress

J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE

This volume aims to deal, in not too technical fashion, with some of the most fundamental ques- tions, theoretical and practical, which are involved in the Christian view of God and the world. It is naturally intended, thus, both to answer diffi- culties and to suggest lines of thought which may help to confirm and to clarify Christian faith.

Its chapters take up in order the perennial problem for all ideal views, — the question of suffering and sin ; the difficulties for any religious view which gather around prayer, — the central relation of revelation and response between God and men ; the question of how we may best think of Christ, — the central fact of the Christian reli- gion ; and then, in the light of these conclusions, four large problems for Christian thought and life : the questions of life's fundamental decision, of life's fundamental paradox of liberty and law, of Christian unity, and of Christianity as a world religion.

vi PREFACE

Each of the last four questions, as well as the first three, are truly fundamental and vital. The question of life's fundamental decision has to do with those basic will-attitudes which chiefly give to life its reality and meaning and value. The kinship of religion with all earnest living can be here discerned. The question of life's funda- mental paradox of liberty and law is necessarily involved in man's use of his will, and its solution is requisite both for the satisfaction of man's reason, and for his ethical and religious freedom. Every life has this paradox constantly to face. The question of Christian unity refuses to be ig- nored, and probably no other generation has seen so much definite effort for the unification of Chris- tianity. It concerns us all to estimate values and measures aright at this point. Moreover, the question of Christianity as a world religion, the Christian church must frankly face, both for the justification of its world-wide missionary en- deavors, and to meet the demands made upon it by the complex modern world in this time of world-shaking war. There is a very real sense in which Christianity as a world religion is on trial.

Parts of this volume have been printed before, but nothing is included that is not believed to have vital connection with the theme. Thanks are due to The Biblical Worlds The Pilgrim Teacher^

PREFACE vii

The Constructive ^arterly^ The International Re- view of Missions^ and The Expositor, for permis- sion to use material which has appeared in their

pages.

HENRY CHURCHILL KING.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN— THE PERENNIAL PROBLEM FOR ALL IDEAL VIEWS

PAGE

I. Preliminary Considerations . . . . i

1 . The three realms of reality .... 3

2. The universality of the problem ... 5

3. Suffering in the animal world .... 7

II. The Prerequisites of Moral Character . 12

1. Some genuine freedom of volition ... 13

2. Some power of accomplishment ... 16

3. An imperfect developing world . . . • 17

4. That men should be members one of another . 18

5. A sphere of laws 20

6. Some element of struggle . . . . .21

III. Help from the Common Deeper Life of Men 23

1. The smallness of man's view . . . -25

2. Added light upon the trend of the world^s devel-

opment 29

3. Man's faith in immortality . . . .31

4. The four common views of suffering ... 34 (i) Suffering as punishment for sin . . . 35

(2) Suffering as discipline .... 36

(3) Suffering as necessary to save men from

simple prudential selfishness . . 38

(4) The majesty of God 41

X CONTENTS

PAGE

IV. The Christian Implications of Man's Nature . 43

1. Man made for heroic achievement ... 45

2. Life deepens through opposition ... 46

3. Man made for personal relations ... 47

4. The joy of redeeming work .... 48

5. The greatest sufferers not the most unhappy . 49

6. Growth of love through fellowship in suffering . 51

7. Suffering the key to life's most precious experi-

ences 51

V. Light from Christ 54

1. Christ's suffering has proved vicarious . . 55

2. This suggests that all suffering may be made

vicarious ....... 58

3. Suffering can be turned into voluntary sacrifice,

and so become an instrument of joy . . 59

4. The suffering of Christ, as a power against sin

also 61

5. The suffering death of Christ, a revelation of

the heart of God 63

CHAPTER II

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER— THE HEART OF RELIGION. DIFFICULTIES CONCERN- ING PRAYER

Difficulties Connected with a Supposed

Scientific View-point 66

1 . No doubt of men's need of a sphere of law . 66

2. But no eternally self-existing laws ... 67

3. No doubt of man's need of God ... 67

4. No compelling reason to deny access of God to

human minds ...... 68

5. Man, as the goal of evolution .... 70

6. Prayer fits human nature 70

7. Are not narrowly to fix the scope of prayer . 72

CONTENTS xi

II. Difficulties prom a False Conception of Prayer . . . .

1. The idea of a prayer gauge

2. God knows what I need ....

III. Difficulties from the Supposed Improba

BiLiTY OF Prayer .

1 . God is ; we are

2. We need God .

3. All men impelled to pray

4. The example of the best

5 . Christ's own practice, example, and urging

IV. Difficulty from the Lack of a Felt Pres

ENCE AND Response in Prayer .

1 . God known through his self-manifestations

2. Relation to spiritual world compared to relation

to physical world

3. Even in closest personal relations, no literal

transfer of thought

4

5. God's relation to men should be unobtrusive

6. What kind of answers to prayer really to be

desired

V. The Difficulty of Intercessory Prayer

75 75

n

81 82 82 82 83 83

85 86

87

88 90 90

92 94

CHAPTER III

THE QUESTION OF CHRIST— THE CENTRAL FACT OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION: HOW ARE WE TO THINK ABOUT CHRIST i

I. The Best Life 97

II. The Best Ideals and Standards ... 98

III. The Best Insight into the Lavv^s of Life . 99

IV. The Best Convictions loi

V. The Best Hopes 102

xii CONTENTS

PAGE

VI. The Best Dynamic for Living . . .103

VII. The Best Revelation of God . . .105

CHAPTER IV

THE QUESTION OF LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION

I. Drifting or Steering in

II. Domination by Feeling or by Rational

Purpose 112

III. Loyalty or Disloyalty 113

IV. Following One's Conscience or Not . .114 V. The Surrender or Not, to the Scientific

Spirit 115

VI. The Larger Life or the Lesser Good . .116

VII. Wilful or Obedient 117

VIII. Following Duty or Pleasure. . . .118 IX. Taking On or Refusing the Will of God . 119 X. Deep-going Ethical Decision, even without

Religious Faith 121

XI. The Love of the Father or the Love of

THE World 123

XII. Selfish or Unselfish 128

XIII. Disciple of Christ or Not . . . .129

CHAPTER V

THE QUESTION OF LIFES FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX— THE QUESTION OF LIB- ERTY AND LA W : THE LA W OF LIBER T Y

I. The Fundamental Nature of the Problem . 133 II. Why this Problem Constantly Recurs . 137

CONTENTS xlii

PAGE

III. The New Testament Solution of the Prob-

lem 144

IV. The Relation of the Christian Solution of

THE Paradox to Other Theories of Life 148

V. Modern Examples of the Paradox . -153

VI. The Achievement of True Freedom . . 163

CHAPTER VI

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY— THE CONFESSION OF CHRIST

I. The One Uniting Word is Christian . .171 II. Temperamental Differences . . . • i74

III. A True Organic Unity 176

IV. Uniformity Not Desirable . • "^11 V. Complete Uniformity of Belief and State- ment Impossible

VI. Complete Uniformity of Belief and State- ment Undesirable 183

VII. Our Real Unity in Our Common Life in

Christ '^6

180

CHAPTER VII

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIANITY AS A WORID RELIGION I: CHRISTIANITY THE ONLY HOPEFUL BASIS FOR ORIENTAL CIVILIZATION

The Need of an Adequate Spiritual Basis

for Any Civilization 191

The Increasing Sense of Need of a New

Spiritual Basis for Oriental Civilization 194

xiv CONTENTS

PAGE

III. The Necessary Threefold Test of the Re-

ligious Basis of a Modern Civilization . 199

1. Neither the Emperor cult nor Shinto can meet

these tests 200

2. Nor can Buddhism or Confucianism . . 200

3. Nor a new religious syncretism . . . 202

IV. Only Christianity Can Meet These Tests,

AND Furnish an Adequate Spiritual Basis for the Modern Civilization of the Orient 205

CHAPTER VIII

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION II: CITIZENS Of A NEW CIVILIZATION

I. Faith in the Possibilities of a New Civili- zation 216

II. The Special Obligations Now Resting upon

America and America's Youth. . .221

III. The Demands of the New Civilization . 224

1 . The inescapable grip of the laws of God in the

life of nations ...... 224

2. The needed reinvigoration of the life of the

nations in its entire range . . . .229

3. A new grasp upon the principle of the organic

view of truth and of human society . . 236

4. The new civilization must be frankly, definitely

Christian 239

(i) The sifting out of the true from the false

Christianity 239

(2) The abandonment of the philosophy of the

state as above moral law . . . 242

(3) A league of nations to enforce peace . . 247

(4) Further plans for a permanent peace . . 247

IV. The Appeal to American Youth . . . 249

FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

CHAPTER I

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN — THE PERENNIAL PROBLEM FOR ALL IDEAL VIEWS

I

Preliminary Considerations

One questions his right to take this theme at all, for two reasons : First, because only experience of life can fitly interpret it, and without some depth of experience discussion of this dark problem is little else than mock- ery. One doubts the adequacy of his experi- ence, and his capacity to see and feel deeply enough to justify discussion. One would not further darken counsel on this subject by words without knowledge. The second reason for hesitation is just because the prob- lem is so old. It is in truth man's perennially darkest problem — the question of the ages —

2 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

that seems to confront him with the constant and often-stated dilemma : either God is good and not omnipotent, or he is omnipotent and not good. No one of us can escape this challenge. In some form it concerns us all, whether our primary interest is religious or scientific or practical. At some point we all need an assured conviction of the essential rationality of the world — that aims that compel our respect are ruling in the world. Is it at all worth while to discuss anew this age-long problem ?

If, in spite of this double misgiving, and with no feeling that I have new and startling light to shed upon it, I am undertaking once more a sober survey of this most difficult problem of human existence, it is simply because even the oldest questions inevitably change their form with changing times, and so need to be reconsidered again and again ; and because it is precisely in wrestling with our largest and darkest problems that our most fruitful in- sights are likely to come. A comprehensive, even if sober, resurvey of all that is involved in the problem of evil, natural and moral — in the question of suffering and sin — ought, then, to prove of some value, especially when this problem is being pressed on us all anew

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 3

by the terror of the Great War. And this, in spite of the fact that one has no expectation of solving the problem. It probably was not intended that complete demonstration should be possible to us here. One can only hope to give a series of suggestions that may help to faith, suggestions which themselves can be of weight chiefly to those who can interpret them out of their own experience.

I. From the start it is well to remember that we can know beforehand that there can be no demonstration of the reasons for actual matter-of-fact existences. We can- not demonstrate mosquitoes or snakes or potato bugs. We cannot demonstrate the grass or the grub or the bird. The concrete facts can never be fully reached and the necessity of their existence shown by any philosophy or any summary of principles, however widely accepted. The most that we could do at this point would be to agree on certain great ends that ought to prevail in any universe ; to infer from these the probability of some larger necessary laws (although many so-called laws, especially in the physical world, are doubtless not primal necessities at all, but only widely prevalent matters of fact) ; and then to show that the

4 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

existence of various matters of fact is not inconsistent with these ends and laws.

It was long ago pointed out that reality- has for all men three realms — the realms of the is, of the must, and of the ought; and we cannot have any hope of final unity in our thinking, except as we start from the ought. Quite aside from any ethical interest, the very meaning of these three realms of reality is such that we plainly cannot derive the ought from the is or the must. That a thing is does not prove that it ought to be. Nor even that a thing must be, does it follow that it ought to be. We might have to regard it as an evil necessity. We mean something quite different when we say a thing ought to be, from what we mean when we say it is or it must be. If we are to get any final unity in our three realms of reality, then, it can only be by starting from the ought, pro- ceeding to the must, as involved in the ends contained in the ought, and accepting the is as merely actual, not demonstrable, but also not inconsistent with the ought and the must. Our metaphysics, thus, as Lotze and Paulsen and Wundt all contend, must root in our ethics if we are to be able at all to believe in the final unity of the world. This

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 5

initial consideration — the necessary primacy of the ought for any unity in the world or in our own thinking — is itself good reason for faith that purposes of good do rule in the world, that there is love and not hate at the world's heart.

2. There is a further preliminary consid- eration that may give us hope as to the final issue of our problem. The very fact, as I have elsewhere pointed out, that all men, practically without exception, feel somewhere the problem of evil — the difficulty of the suffering of the righteous, of the prosperity of the wicked, of much seemingly needless suffering — as well as the increasing sensi- tiveness at this point, itself shows that all men instinctively feel and make the universal assumption that a really rational world must be a world that is worth while, a world that can justify itself to a sensitive and enlightened conscience, a world that is not merely coldly logical but warmly loving. The fact that men so universally make this assumption is itself good evidence that we may believe that the world will finally justify that assump- tion.

For men are themselves a part, the last evolved part, and at least a very important

6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

part of that world which they are seeking to understand. They are, indeed, that part of the world in which the world itself has come to consciousness and to intelligent judg- ment. If their universal assumption is that this world must be a good world, as well as a logically consistent world, if it is to be truly rational and tolerable at all, then if that assumption is not justified, the world has contradicted and condemned itself in its own highest product, and there is an end of rational thinking. For you cannot rationally think through a world fundamentally irra- tional. In that case, the fact of the human mind and the fact of the rest of the world do not fit, and cannot be made to fit. You could then only accept the universe in its entirety as a self-contradictory and evil thing, and utterly abandon any attempt to think it into unity. That would mean an end of rational thinking and of all phi- losophy, to say nothing of religion. And such a futile and chaotic outcome is itself a reason for faith that the contrary view, the view that all men assume as essential to a rational world, is justified. In spite of seeming contradictions, the world probably bears true witness to itself in men's instinctive

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 7

demand upon the world and upon life. A controlling love, we may believe, is at work in the world. There is, then, some initial rational presumption that our problem is not insoluble.

3. One subordinate aspect of the problem of suffering — the suffering in the animal world — has been much accentuated in our modern time, for two reasons : first, because with the progress of Christian civilization the sensitiveness to all suffering, even animal suffering, has greatly increased. And, sec- ondly, because the tendency of the Darwinian theory of evolution was to formulate all de- velopment in terms of "the struggle for existence," and so to seem to most minds to involve a terrible severity in the condi- tions under which life evolved, and a cease- less preying of animals upon one another.

As to this whole question of animal suffer- ing, it seems clear to me, in the first place, that, even if the Darwinian theory of evolu- tion be fully accepted, the facts would by no means warrant many of the statements made concerning the cruelty and pain of the struggle. The word struggle itself — as applied to the whole biological field — tends to mislead. Surely we may well give

8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

heed at this point to the testimony of Darwin and Wallace themselves, as quoted by Drum- mond. Darwin says :

When we reflect on this struggle, we may console our- selves with the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

And Wallace expresses himself even more explicitly :

On the whole, the popular idea of the struggle for existence entailing misery and pain in the animal world is the very reverse of the truth. What it really brings about is the maximum of life and of the enjoyment of life, with the minimum of suffering and pain. Given the necessity of death and reproduction — and without these there could have been no progressive development of the organic world — and it is difficult even to imagine a system by which a greater balance of happiness could have been secured.

Moreover, with continued study of the prob- lem of evolution on the part of men of all schools, it is significant that there has been a marked recognition that there can be no such exclusive emphasis upon the struggle for existence, but that other factors have a large part to play. Thus, scientists are themselves insisting, to a larger extent than

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 9

when John Fiske wrote the words, that "other agencies are at work besides natural selection, and the story of the struggle for existence is far from being the whole story." And the recognition of "these other agencies" greatly modifies the former impression, itself unjustified, of a pitiless and bloody warfare involving exquisite animal anguish at every step. In the words of Thomson and Geddes :

There Is no doubt that the general tone and treat- ment of Darwinism, even hitherto, has been deeply coloured by the acute individualism of Darwin's and the preceding age. We may therefore restate here the concluding thesis of our own Evolution of Sex (1889), since elaborated in various ways by Drummond, by Kropotkin and others. It is that the general progress both of the plant and th'e animal world, and notably the great uplifts, must be viewed not simply as Individ- ual but very largely In terms of sex and parenthood, of family and association ; and hence of gregarious flocks and herds, of co-operative packs, of evolving tribes, and thus ultimately of civilized societies — above all, therefore, of the city. Huxley's tragic vision of "Nature as a gladiatorial show," and consequently of ethical life and progress as merely superposed by man, as therefore an Interference with the normal order of Nature, Is still far too dominant among us.

There is, indeed, every reason to believe that the method of animal development

lO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

chosen, costly as it undoubtedly is, was the least costly in pain ; and that, in any case, the goal was worth the price paid. We have small reason to doubt that life itself for the animal involves general pleasure ; and the aim in creation seems to have been, as Lotze has pointed out, to crowd each least cranny of the world with life and the joy of life.

The naturally growing sensitiveness to suffering has been further accentuated in our time, I must believe, by a falsely senti- mental view of the animal world, that has led us to attribute to them sufferings that they pretty certainly do not have. There has been much exaggeration at this point. Men have naturally enough made themselves the standard for judging of suffering, and so have forgotten that even the highest ani- mals have quite certainly a less sensitive ner- vous system than we, while the lower animal forms are almost out of comparison with men in this respect.

Still less may we attribute to the animal world our mental sufferings and anxieties. Lacking all clear self-consciousness, animals suffer neither from memory nor from an- ticipation as do men. The popular animal stories have here much to answer for. One

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN ii

feels indignant at the amount of entirely groundless suffering that has thus been caused many persons by the assumption that there must be transferred to the animal world suf- fering that is to be found only among human beings. There is suffering enough among men in any case. Gratuitously to increase it is inexcusable. And men need not carry the load that comes from the thought of constant mental anguish among animals.

Moreover, one may well protest against such false animal psychology — glad as he may be to help every movement to relieve physical pain among animals — because the ascription of mental suffering to animals tends to draw attention away from the undoubted and far greater suffering of men, due to remediable conditions. In general, there is surely good reason to believe that pleasure in the animal world far outweighs pain ; and that the organic world below man certainly holds no presumption that a cruel, heedless power is dominating the processes of evolution.

12 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

II

The Prerequisites of Moral Character

Passing, now, to our main problem — that of suffering and sin among men — it seems clear that any discussion of this question is useless that does not, first of all, make plain the prerequisites of moral character, the inevitable prerequisites that the world may be a sphere for moral training and action. For our whole problem is an ethical one. It is for moral reasons that we feel its pressure. The point of our doubt, indeed, is simply whether the world can meet the demands of a sensitive and enlightened conscience. Our very problem assumes, then, the final and intrinsic value of moral ends. We must ask from the world that it make character and growth in character at least possible. We can only play with our problem, therefore, if we are unwilling to make explicit to our- selves those prerequisites that must be ful- filled if the world is to be a sphere for moral training and action.

I can only answer, of course, for myself. These necessary prerequisites seem to me to be six : ^ some genuine freedom of volition on

^ Cf. Theology and the Social Consciousness, pp. 30-32.

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 13

man's part ; some power of accomplishment In the direction of the volition ; an imperfect developing environment ; a sphere of laws ; that men should be members one of another; and that there should be struggle against resistance. Now every one of these six prerequisites, it should be noted, Involves the possibility of resulting suffering, and most of them, the possibility of sin. It is this paradox, therefore, which confronts us : That the world may be one that we can approve, it must contain conditions that involve the possibility at least of suffering and sin that we cannot approve. Character is an im- mensely costly product. We are not able even to imagine any way by which it can be cheaply produced. The degree of final satis- faction as to the solution of the problem of evil, therefore, will probably depend upon how deeply valuable character seems to us to be. If it seems to us of Infinite worth, we shall not grudge the cost, but justify the process.

I. Let us look, then, at these prerequisites, if the world is to be a sphere of moral training and action. And, first, there must be, for the very possibility of character in man, some genuine freedom of volition on man's

14 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

part. I do not purpose to reargue the old question of freedom. The will seems to me not comparable with anything else. I only have to say for myself that I share James's feeling, that if there be no power of genuine initiative in man, however limited in scope (as in unforced direction of attention, or in retaining of the passing thought for an in- stant, or in simple approval or disapproval), life would be like "the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago." I find myself unable to conceive of character as a reality, or as in any vital sense uniquely man's own and not a mechanical product of outside, wholly unmoral forces, unless there be this incomparable power of freedom. Eucken's and Bergson's new emphasis on the will seems to me, therefore, a sane reac- tion from a too prevalent necessitarianism. I cannot see that character and moral prob- lems have any meaning as such, without a clear recognition of freedom. One cannot have both mechanical explanation and moral freedom at the same time and at the same point. He must pay the price of a freedom that is not a play-freedom but real through and through. That there might be char- acter at all, then, in the world, men must

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 15

be not only self-conscious, but have the power of moral initiative. And for God this meant a certain divine self-limitation, and for men the possibility of choosing against God — the possibility of sin. This terrible possi- bility is the necessary price of free sons of God, who were free to choose to do his will.

I see no conceivable way of accounting for error and for sin in the world without mak- ing God directly responsible for both, if genuine creative freedom is not assigned to man. We must be dead in earnest as to man's real initiative, if we are to solve the problem of suffering and sin. As Bowne says, concerning error, ^' every system of philosophy must invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error or make shipwreck of reason itself." ^ James vividly sets forth the same difficulty as to sin : ^

When, for example, I imagine such carrion as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature without shrinking from complicity with such a whole. And I deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of

^ Theory of Thought and Knowledge, p. 244. 2 The Will to Believe, p. 177.

i6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

the whole, is not carrion. There are some instinctive reactions which I, for one, will not tamper with.

On the completely deterministic theory, every fact, however horrible, must be regarded as a necessary step in the development of the universe ; in other words, from the religious point of view, God is absolutely and directly responsible. If, then, we are to be able to keep our faith at all in the broad rationality of the universe, we must assume man's real freedom.

2. Nor could there be denied to man, with volition, some power of accomplishment in the direction of his volition ; though this involves the possibility of suffering on his own part and on that of others. This power of accomplishment may be decidedly limited, but it must be there. To grant man a mere resultless volition must be felt to be, as Lotze suggests, "sophistical." Some results of our volition are needed to make our act real and to reveal the character of it even to ourselves and to others. Man's whole being calls for such expressive activity, if there is to be any "realizing sense" of the meaning of inner states. This, then, is one answer to the natural question, Why was not the world so made that only good designs could be

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 17

carried out, or that evil volitions would be at once frustrated ? The volition is truly revealed only in the light of its logical conse- quences, and the worst of these are in the realm of personal relations. A world in which that was impossible would seem, then, to be no fit world for the moral training of a finite developing creation. Ethical consider- ations must decide here. Life cannot be a play. It can certainly be no farce. Both God and man must be in dead earnest with the fact of freedom.

3. An imperfect developing world, there- fore, in the sense of a world in which many things may occur, because of men's choices, which in and of themselves ought not to be, is needed for the development of moral char- acter in man. Even those other natural imperfections that belong to an earth in pro- cess probably make an actually more suit- able environment for a creature developing toward character than a world conceived on more final lines. An Imperfect developing world is fitted to an imperfect developing man. The imperfect here is the more perfect. Such a world calls out man's powers, chal- lenges him to achievement, stimulates him to moral purposes, trains him in moral action.

1 8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

4. But it may be felt that while doubtless the granting to a man of resultless volition would be sophistical and futile, at least the results might be confined to the man himself. And it is with this difficulty that the still more fundamental fourth prerequisite of a moral world has to do : that men should be members one of another. Of the fact there is no manner of doubt. Ought it to be a fact .?

Now It is quite conceivable that men might have come into being quite independently of one another, and be in as absolute isolation as Leibnitz' "windowless monads," or as the chemical processes going on in a multitude of utterly disconnected test-tubes. It would be a more than Robinson Crusoe-like existence, with no personal relations either in memory or in vaguest anticipation ; though a shadowy kind of purely individualistic morality would be still conceivable. In such a world the re- sults of the processes in one individual could not in the least extend themselves to others. Would it be a better world, a world that we ourselves would prefer ^

We can at least see that all that we most prize in this world would be absent in that, even though certain evils would have van-

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 19

ished also. Such a world could not be prop- erly called a universe at all/ There would be as many absolutely independent worlds as there were individuals. Unless relations, at least of knowledge, were admitted, there could apparently be no significant enlarge- ment of life. There would be no need by one life of another, and no possibility of service. All the possibilities of personal rela- tions — of friendships — would be cut off. Love would have no meaning; and, indeed, so far from being the sum of virtue, it could have no existence. Anything that could conceivably be called a moral universe, with all the infinite and endless significance that that fact contains, would have utterly ceased. That would seem to be the world we must have, if we are to insist that results of an individual's conduct are to be confined to the individual himself.

In other words, the very possibility of such a moral universe, as we know and feel the need of, demands that we shall be members one of another, knit up indissolubly with other lives, with all that that involves. But in such a world the results of conduct must register themselves chiefly in personal relations. Where wrong choices are made.

20 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

we can cause and be caused suffering. Those personal relations in which lie the most exquisite joys of life contain inevitably like possibilities of pain. Sin thus necessarily carries suffering with it, even the suffering of the innocent. The world is not a play- world. But it should be remembered in exactly this connection that this very fact of our inevitable membership in one another is one of the greatest of all restraints from moral evil, and one of the greatest motives to good.

5. Once more, that the world may be a sphere of moral training and action there must be a sphere of laws in the structure of the world, on whose operation men may steadily count. Such a sphere of laws is not only not opposed to freedom, but is necessary to give to freedom any field of action ; for the possibility of all growth and accomplishment in knowledge, in power, and in character depends upon it. This implies that character is a becoming, a growth, an accomplishing on the part of each individual ; and cannot possibly be inherited or passively received. It can realize itself only as it sets worthy goals and works toward these goals. But such a sphere of laws — while

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 21

It alone can save us from the wild chaos and resultlessness of a lawless world — does neces- sarily involve also the possibility of much suffering, and of suffering not due to sin, prop- erly so called, but to ignorance of the laws of nature. Such suffering is not properly to be regarded as punishment, or as ''sent by God." It needs, as LeConte says, only knowledge of and conformity to law.

6. And finally, as to the prerequisites of moral character, we know no way of growth in character that does not involve struggle, resistance, repeated choosing of the right against the solicitation of the wrong. This is quite in line with the psychological fact, that man is made, in every fiber of his being, for action ; that his ideas and ideals become truly his, only through increasingly complete expression of them in work. And the im- perfect developing world of which we have spoken, on this very account, becomes a peculiarly good world for moral training.

So that we may well believe with Martineau that even ''the ills of life are not here on their own account, but are as a divine challenge and Godlike wrestling in the night with our too reluctant wills." This need of struggle and resistance seems to be an inevitable law of

22 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

life. Growth and discipline of character re- quire it. And it is this law that Browning makes the old rabbi so effectively voice :

Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go ! Be our joys three parts pain ! Strive, and hold cheap the strain ; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe !

For thence, — a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, — Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail : What I aspired to be. And was not, comforts me :

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.

Must this necessity of struggle and resist- ance be still called a psychological defect in our natures ^ The question may indeed be raised. But once more it seems fairly clear that, so far as human insight is able to go, one is obliged to conclude that if the con- ditions were otherwise, it would be only a play-world in which we live; that character is too stern a thing for one pleasantly to drift into ; and that a good that could be so achieved would seem to us too cheap a goal, quite unworthy of our steel. The heroes,

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 23

some one has insisted, are those who can stand the world as it is.

It is hardly too much to say that the whole solution of the problem of evil depends pri- marily upon a proper estimation of the pre- requisites that are necessary to the develop- ment of moral character. For the man who clearly sees what those prerequisites are, and what possibilities of suffering and sin they involve, and who believes at the same time in the infinite value of character, will find in these very facts a comprehensive answer to his questioning.

Ill

Help from the Common Deeper Life OF Men

In attempting frankly to face the perennial problem of evil, we have been dealing hitherto with what might all be called preliminary considerations, in order to be sure that the sweep and conditions of the problem itself were correctly conceived. For there is plainly no cheap and easy solution of this question. Men have been universally occupied with it through the centuries, just because there are so many phenomena that seem to deny

24 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

a purpose of love in the world. No mere reexamination of individual phenomena, then, will meet the case. We must make plain to ourselves that personal character is the only aim that will finally satisfy our thought ; and we have seen that that goal, in the na- ture of the case, carries v/ith it large possi- bilities of sin and suffering. We might ex- pect, therefore, to find in the world many facts that would seem to deny a God of love. The solution of our whole problem lies funda- mentally just here.

But it is abundantly worth while to see that there is a mass of corroborating evidence that may confirm our faith in the goodness of God. We have already found that cer- tain important and practically inevitable trends of our natures encourage the hope that the problem is not insoluble. And there were reasons to believe, too, that the partic- ular fact of animal suffering raised no insu- perable difficulty.

With the present section we turn to seek such help as may come from the common deeper life of men. For there are certain great considerations that have made a uni- versal appeal to men who have had some depth of moral and reflective life. And

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 25

they are considerations that deserve still to weigh with each individual, wrestling anew with man's darkest problem.

I. First of all, it has probably never escaped thoughtful men that their vision was greatly limited. The smallness of man's view cannot be ignored. The facts surveyed, the region within their knowledge, the data in any way at their command, were all too severely restricted to make an adequate judgment possible. Sometimes this has been asserted in humble faith, and sometimes in skeptical rebellion ; but, whether in one way or the other, men have had to own that they did not have sufficient data to judge the ways of God. It has remained always possible that a few additional facts would quite change the seeming of things. We cannot judge the building, men have habitually urged with themselves, while the scaffolding is up. The world is too large, time and space too great, for our reach. Moreover, the world is in process ; we can judge it only in the light of the final goal.

Does this consideration still deserve to weigh with thoughtful men to-day ^ There is a curious passage in Lotze's Microcosmus,^

1 Vol. II, p. 716.

26 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

in which, in a fashion, he seems to turn this attempted answer into a further objection, in his desire to deal with utter honesty with the problem of evil :

It may be said that evil appears only in particulars, and that when we take a comprehensive view of the great whole it disappears ; but of what use is a consola- tion the power of which depends upon the arrangement of clauses in a sentence ? For what becomes of our consolation, if we convert the sentence which contains it thus : The world is indeed harmonious as a whole, but if we look nearer it is full of misery ?

But one wonders if, after all, this would not be a bit too ingenious, if it were intended to set aside the help coming from the consider- ation of the smallness of our view. So under- stood, it would certainly be inconsistent with some of Lotze's own deepest convictions. For example, he reminds us elsewhere that the view-point does make a vast and inevi- table difference. Wherever purposes are being worked out at all, there one must have, for any final judgment, knowledge of the ends sought. And so we find him saying :

Only if, standing in the creative centre of the universe, we could fully scan the thought whence it has sprung, could we from it foretell the destinies of the individual called to contribute to its realization ; this

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 27

we cannot do from our human point of view that brings us face to face not with the Creator and His purposes, but only with the created. . . . We stand neither in our knowing nor in our acting at the motionless centre of the universe, but at the farthest extremities of its structure, loud with the whirl of machinery; and the impatient longing that seeks to escape thence to the centre should beware of thinking lightly of the serious- ness and magnitude of conditions under whose sway an irrevocable decree has placed our finite life.^

And indeed, he is himself inclined to urge this necessary modesty of our speculation as a chief consideration in what we may say concerning the problem of evil : ^

I have never cherished an assurance that speculation possesses secret means of going back to the beginning of all reality, of looking on at its genesis and growth, and of determining beforehand the necessary direction of its movement; it seems to me that philosophy is the endeavor of the human mind, after this wonderful world has come into existence and we in it, to work its way back in thought and bring the facts of outer and of inner experience into connection, as far as our present position in the world allows.

It is natural, therefore, that he should urge : ^

Let us therefore alter a little the canon of Leibnitz, and say that where there appears to be an irreconcilable

1 Microcosmus, Vol. I, pp. 388, 400.

2 Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 717.

3 Op. cit.j Vol. II, p. 717.

28 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

contradiction between the omnipotence and the good- ness of God, there our finite wisdom has come to the end of its tether, and that we do not understand the solution which yet we believe in.

I cannot doubt, myself, that we may still well emphasize with ourselves the smallness of our view. Even in judging human con- duct, we find how often our appraisal has been utterly changed by the knowledge of a few additional facts, or by some further glimpse into intentions. How much more, even without explanation, might one reason- ably conclude that in judging the ways of God his highest wisdom would be, like the patriarch of old, to lay his hand upon his mouth and keep silence- Moreover, if this consideration ever de- served to weigh with men, one might think it deserves to weigh still more now. The world has been so infinitely enlarged for our time, by modern science, in space and in time and in energy, that humility never more became men. I wonder increasingly whether an illustration of my own old theo- logical instructor was exaggerated after all. He said that an insect crawling up a column of the Parthenon, painfully making its way around some pore in the stone, was as well

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 29

fitted to judge of the architecture of the Parthenon as we, of the infinitude of God's plans. It may reasonably be that much that seems to us quite inexplicable would fall easily into its fit place, if only we could stand at the center with God and see his full purpose working itself out in all crea- tion.

2. But modern science not only contains an argument for humility. In the immensely longer stretches of time and space which it opens out to men, it brings real relief to thoughtful souls by throwing some additional light upon the probable trend of the world's development. Similar light has come from a greatly enlarged historical perspective. In the light of evolution we can survey a far longer period, and can see what appears to be a "dramatic tendency"; and the goal to be achieved seems to be worth its cost. Evolution may thus be said to give to men the vision of a larger portion of the world's orbit in the inorganic, organic, and historic, and so to enable men better to estimate what kind of a curve it is to describe. While we still feel keenly the smallness of our view, there is given at the same time, thus, some added insight into the direction of the pur-

30 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

pose of God, and so some better possibility of judging of the meaning of the whole pro- cess, and of even consciously and intelli- gently cooperating with God in the carrying out of his purposes. So John Fiske feels that he is justified in contending that the "cosmic process exists purely for the sake of moral ends," and in asserting "the omni- present ethical trend" of the universe:

Though in many ways God's work Is above our comprehension, yet those parts of the world's story that we can decipher well warrant the belief that while in Nature there may be divine irony, there can be no such thing as wanton mockery, for profoundly under- lying the surface entanglement of her actions we may discern the omnipresent ethical trend. The moral sentiments, the moral law, devotion to unselfish ends, disinterested love, nobility of soul — these are Nature's most highly wrought products, latest in coming to maturity ; they are the consummation toward which all earlier prophecy has pointed. We are right, then, in greeting the rejuvenescent summer with devout faith and hope. Below the surface din and clashing of the struggle for life we hear the undertone of the deep ethical purpose, as it rolls in solemn music through the ages, its volume swelled by every victory, great or small, of right over wrong, till in the fulness of time, in God's own time, it shall burst forth in the triumphant' chorus of Humanity purified and redeemed.^

* Through Nature to God, p. 129.

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 31

3. More important than the immediate help derived from either of the considera- tions already named is the help from man's faith in immortality. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that we should be obliged to give up any solution of the problem of evil, if faith in immortality were impossible. No supposed substitutes for immortality seem to me at all to suffice at this point. They must appear only "words, words," to the souls wrested away from a noble friendship. Nor does this imply an essentially pessimistic view of life. Indeed, one might be quite ready to say with Le Gallienne : "Man is born to be in love with life, and in spite of all the sorrow that life brings along with its joy, it is only an occasional pessimist here and there that becomes estranged from it. The saddest will usually admit that it has been good to live." Still, one would have, even in that conviction, no sufficient answer to the problem of evil. It is just because men are made on so large a plan, with such capacity for endless growth, that we do not know how to harmonize with the wisdom and goodness of God the abrupt snuffing out of their lives. The more life means, the deeper its joys, the more inex-

32 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

plicable is its utter ending. The goal which the universe has reached in man seems too great and too precious, and its cost too inestimable, to make rational or right the flinging aside of human lives into the waste heap of the world. We cannot, then, solve our problem at all, if we may not keep our faith in immortality. It is because we can believe that this life is only a fragment of a larger whole, that we can still keep our faith in the love of God.

It is a fact most remarkable, when one reflects upon it, that men should have main- tained so persistent a faith in immortality, in the teeth of all the appearances that death ends all. After all secondary explana- tions of this fact have been made, it remains remarkable and becomes itself an assurance of immortality. Among all peoples, and in all times, though with very varying estimate of its content, men seem to have cherished something of an immortal hope of another life. And we need still to make sure that we are not underestimating the help which faith in immortality has to give, in facing with cour- age and cheer the facts of sin and suffering.

And the perfect familiarity of the sugges- tion is not to be allowed to hide from us the

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 33

fact that it is no slight consideration which is thus brought to view. If there is another life at all, that simple fact greatly aifects our judgment of present conditions. The present life comes then to be thought of, almost inevitably, as a period of training, of learning how to live; and we do not try longer to estimate it as a finality. What we could not defend as final, we can conceive as not only defensible but as having a valu- able function to perform, as temporary. And if that other life may be conceived as a life of still larger possibilities, fulfilling the best potentialities of the present life, the help to be gained from faith in immortality is yet greater.

Now, if one really believes in a future life of still larger possibilities, surely the whole aspect of things has changed for him. Even in the hardest of situations, he can still say, ''This too shall pass away"; and

Because the way is short, I thank Thee, God.

To the common and natural hopes of men concerning immortality, Christ has added his own explicit assurance of the future life and of its satisfaction to us. It is plain that many of our greatest sorrows would

34 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

cease, if we really believed in the immortal hope ; and at least it can certainly be said that the way to such faith is not closed ; and that we have a right to use this large possi- bility as a part of our answer to the problem of evil.

4. There is further help for us from the common deeper life of men. For out of it have developed through the centuries the four common views of suffering, each of which has some aid to give in the solution of the problem of evil. The four views have each had many advocates, and all are represented in the Book of Job. These views are : that suffering is the punishment or direct consequence of sin ; that it is present in life for the sake of discipline or chastening ; that without it real virtue would hardly be possible to men ; that there is no answer to the problem of suffering but the majesty of God. These views make some use of considerations already employed, but are suggestive in their interrelations, and as con- taining a kind of consensus of the thought of men on the problem of suffering. Concerning all explanations of suffering, it is to be re- membered that it is the suffering of the right- eous for which men chiefly seek justification.

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 35

(l) The view that all suffering is to be considered as the punishment or direct result of sin is naturally one of the first suggested. It is the view of Job's "comforters." This theory tends to solve the difficulty of the suffering of the righteous, by denying that there are any righteous who could be exempt. The marked incongruities that the theory had to face in the suffering of little children, for example, drove men logically to extend the theory by the hypothesis of preceding ex- istences and of the transmigration of souls ; so that suffering otherwise unexplained might be referred to sins in a previous existence.

With or without this extension, the view that sin brings suffering certainly has in part a solid basis in human experience. No man can deal honestly with himself and not know that much of his suffering has come through his own sin. It was natural that this inference from self-observation should be extended to others, and so an attempt be made to explain all suffering as due to the sin of the sufferer, thus relieving God of all responsibility. Now the theory undoubtedly does explain much suffering; but closer and wider observation of life made it impos- sible to regard it as an explanation of all

36 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

suffering. There was too obviously much disproportion between sin and suffering, and much suffering on the part of the innocent just because of the closeness of their rela- tions to the guilty. And to apply the theory in judging others requires an intimacy of knowledge that no outside observer can have. We are no doubt justified in believing for all men that much suffering does follow directly on the sin of the sufferer; but we cannot safely apply the theory except to ourselves, and here we do well to apply it searchingly. One may wisely take many of his own difficulties as only proper punish- ment for previous remissness, and uncom- plainingly and courageously face them.

(2) The view that suffering is to be re- garded chiefly as discipline, as chastening, justly makes a wide appeal. In Job it is the view of Elihu. It is commonly used to supplement the first view, to account for the suffering of those at least comparatively righteous. It, too, has a sound basis in experience. We have seen men and women strengthen and refine and grow under trial and sorrow. We have seen suffering thus apparently do what prosperity had failed to do. We know in our own cases that the

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 37

presence of difficult circumstances has often brought out of us what easy times did not secure. Men naturally extended this theory, too, to try to cover all the facts. All moral and religious thinking has tended to make use of this view, and has found great help in it.

And yet, taken alone, it is plainly not an adequate explanation of the facts of suffer- ing. The distribution of suffering, its inten- sity and duration in many cases, the lack of it where it seems peculiarly needed, and the overplus where it seems much less needed — such facts as these, so far as man's insight can go, indicate the limitations of the theory.

And the theory has a further limitation, often disregarded by its defenders. After all, suffering in itself is not purifying, is no wonder-worker. The result depends on the individual's own reaction. As the sun softens the wax and hardens the clay, so suffering may either soften or harden, sweeten or embitter ; it all depends on how it is taken. The theory, too, tends to ignore or implic- itly deny the helpful influence of joy as well as sorrow.

All this does not forbid the thought that in God's intention suffering is often allowed

38 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

for our discipline. We have already seen that character seems to require for its de- velopment a large element of struggle; and this makes it certain that the disciplinary theory of suffering has solid justification. But we cannot allow that suffering in itself has any magical power, or that all suffering is to be explained as disciplinary. Even when the first and second views are com- bined, much suffering seems still unaccounted for.

(3) The third view of suffering, that with- out it virtue would hardly be possible to men, is the view suggested by the prelude of Job. This view is less immediately ob- vious than the two preceding views, but it roots in a genuine insight into what is morally necessary. The question really raised in the prelude of Job is whether there are any truly unselfish men of character; whether, after all, the seemingly virtuous man is not simply an example of prudential selfishness. "Doth Job serve God for naught.^" the Adversary sneeringly asks. Does not the seemingly righteous and religious man simply see clearly that God has everything in his hands, and that, therefore, if man is to prosper he must, in mere prudence, do what God

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 39

requires ? If this is not to be the case, this view suggests that neither the certainty of God nor the certainty of the reward for righteousness must be too plain. It must be really true that the righteous often suffer, and suffer many times just because of their righteousness. It must often seem that God has forgotten. Reward must not follow too closely or too inevitably upon the righteous act. The great spiritual facts and rewards must be obscure enough to make unselfish virtue possible. One needs to be able to believe, for himself and for others, that bare prudential selfishness is not the final word. Men need in this sense the invisible God, and a seeming unreality of the spiritual life.i

This is a consideration strongly urged by Kant, and felt increasingly since his time, until men have come to feel that they may well thank God that they live in a world in which there is a problem of evil, a world in which uncalculating, disinterested love is possible. For, as I have elsewhere said, "the greatest evil, after all, would be that conditions of genuine character should fail."

1 See, for further discussion of this point, the author's Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life, pp. 141-155.

40 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

Every such true soul is a new witness for the reality of God and the spiritual world — "Jehovah's champion."

"Reactions," eh ? Well, what's your formula

For one particular kind — I won't insist

On proof of every theorem in the list

But only one — what chemicals combine.

What CO2 and H2SO4,

To cause such things as happened yesterday,

To send a very gallant gentleman

Into antarctic night, to perish there

Alone, not driven nor shamed nor cheered to die.

But fighting, as mankind has always fought.

His baser self, and conquering, as mankind

Down the long years has always conquered self ?

What are your tests to prove a man's a man ? Which of your compounds ever lightly threw Its life away, as men have always done, Spurred not by lust nor greed nor hope of fame But casting all aside on the bare chance That it might somehow serve the Greater Good ?

There's a reaction — what's its formula ? Produce that in your test-tubes if you can !

The significance of this third view of suf- fering is confirmed by all those considera- tions that arise from the moral necessity of constant respect for man's personality on God's part as well as on the part of his fellow

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 41

men. There must be punctilious regard by God not only for a man's liberty, but for the inner sanctity of his being, if he is to be brought to the highest in character. Char- acter cannot come through coercion or dom- ination or even by prescription. There must be much that may seem like forgetful- ness and neglect on God's part, if there is to be that scrupulous reverence for man's per- sonality which man's own true victory re- quires. For character must be the man's own chosen creative act ; and to that end the very love of God in its farsightedness does not intervene nor obtrude. This deep- going principle of the necessity of constant reverence for personality goes far to explain many puzzling things in God's dealings with men.

(4) The fourth view of suifering — that there is no answer to the problem of suffering but the majesty of God — really falls back, in large measure, on the consideration of the smallness of our view, already dealt with. It is the view of the latter part of Job, and it suggests not only that the works and plans of God are quite certainly beyond our power to estimate ; but also that in proportion as a man comes to know God,

42 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

and to get even a poor appreciation of his character, his majesty, and his infinitude, he will leave the question readily in God's hands unanswered. He can believe where he cannot see.

I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear ; But now mine eye seeth Thee, Wherefore I abhor myself And repent in dust and ashes.

Job's questions are not answered, but the vision of the majesty of God suffices to give him faith and patience in the face of unan- swered questions. This view allies itself nat- urally with the third view and supplements it by humbling man where the other exalts him. We are glad for all deeper insights into truth granted, but at the utmost we must own our weakness and folly in the face of the infinite majesty of God.

All four of the common views of suffering thus have elements of truth and genuine help ; at some points they strike deeply into the heart of this difficult problem ; and taken together they are a worthy result of the travail of men's souls through the centuries over this dark problem.

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 43

IV

The Christian Implications of Man's Nature

We have seen in the previous sections that there are some important initial reasons for faith in the final solution of our problem, and that such a faith is not precluded by the fact of animal suffering. The inevitable pre- requisites of a moral world, too, were seen to be such as to require the possibility of sin and of suffering — a weighty and far-reach- ing consideration. We should have only a play-world otherwise. We might therefore anticipate exactly such difficulties as we do find. The deeper common reactions of the race upon our problem, moreover, were felt to bring real help. The necessary smallness of our human view, the bearing of the race's faith in immortality, the further light from the trend of evolution, and the four common views of suffering, all alike have light to give. Much suffering is indubitably due to the sin of the sufferer himself. Other suffering is as probably due to conditions required for our full discipline in living. Particularly is it deeply true, that reward must not follow too closely or too surely upon the righteous

44 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

act — that the good must often suffer and the wicked prosper — if genuinely unselfish character is to be produced. We come even to be thankful, from this point of view, that we have a problem of evil. And no doubt ultimately we must fall back upon the thought of the majesty of God. Any adequate vision of God makes us feel anew the smallness of our view, and the wisdom and necessity, after our best attempts to understand God's ways, of leaving the whole problem in his hands, with faith in a solution we cannot fully see. Now, has the peculiarly Christian view any further answer to our question ? Has Christ himself some still larger help to give ? This is our present inquiry.

A series of considerations makes us feel that we have not yet reached the heart of the matter. For Christianity has made us far more sensitive to certain implications of our natures, to which the race as a whole, to be sure, has not been blind, but which have received an emphasis and setting, from the Christian point of view, not before pos- sible. Christ's teaching and life and death throw into strong relief certain great trends of our beings, and make more possible a positive attack upon our problem.

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 45

I. First of all, we are impressed anew from the Christian view-point that man is really made for action, for heroic achievement, for service and sacrifice — so made for all this that he cannot be satisfied

With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart, Tame in earth's paddock as her prize.

His very sports show that he joys in diffi- culties for their own sake. He seeks adven- ture and delights in obstacles. There is something in men far deeper than the desire for easy-going pleasure and passive self- indulgence. So that a moral philosopher like Paulsen feels compelled to say :

Who would care to live without opposition and struggle ? Would men prize truth itself as they do, if it were attained without effort and kept alive without battle ? To battle and to make sacrifices for one's chosen cause constitutes a necessary element of human life. Carlyle states this truth in a beautiful passage in his book on Heroes and Hero-Worship: "It is a calumny to say that men are roused to heroic actions by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense — sugar-plums of any kind in this world or the next. In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. The poor swearing soldier hired to be shot has his 'honor of a soldier,' different from drill, regulations, and the shilling a day. It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true

46 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

deeds, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day- drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man."

The difficulties of life therefore have their own contribution to make to life, just as soon as one looks at life even approximately from Christ's view-point. When a man thus positively faces life's ills he finds in them an opportunity, which he would not spare, for a field for training and for conquest, for such all-round self-discipline and development of will as he knows he needs. He even rejoices, therefore, in many-sided trials and tempta- tions, in order that a patient steadfastness may "have its perfect work," and that he himself may be called out on every side, and be made "perfect and entire, lacking in noth- ing." It is still partial defeat that one should be able only to stand his lot, and not also to be "happy in his lot."

2. Nor are there only this many-sided discipline of will to be achieved and the nat- ural joy in such achievement. Life itself and joy in life both broaden and deepen

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 47

through opposition and labor and misfortune, as Lotze has penetratingly pointed out :

By the opposition which the natural course of things offers to a too easy satisfaction of natural impulses ; by the labor to which man is compelled, and in the prosecution of which he acquires knowledge of, and power over, things in the most various relations ; finally, by misfortune itself and the manifold painful efforts which he has to make under the pressure of the gradually multiplying relations of life ; by all this there is both opened before him a wider horizon of varied enjoyment, and also there becomes clear to him for the first time the inexhaustible significance of moral ideas which seem to receive an accession of intrinsic worth with every new relation to which their regulating and organizing influence is extended.

This is only the use of the laboratory method in life itself. Nobody is going to take in the sweep of the moral ideas by passive reception. He must work them out in the laboratory of life's active experiences. Man's very being demands it. The insistence of modern psychology, therefore, that we are made for action, serves further to accentuate considerations essentially Christian.

3. The like facts that men are made not less surely for personal relations, and that the whole man can come out only in such relations, have other vital bearings on our

48 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

problem. The light from Christ's life is here unmistakable. Whatever the initial dif- ficulties — given a world of sin and suffer- ing on the part of others — if one loves others, he must suffer, and he cannot but choose to suffer. Because we love, and in proportion as we love, we must suffer and choose to suffer. Without some such experi- ence of our own, indeed, we should be shut out from all the more significant relations to others who suffer. There could be other- wise but a shallow understanding of them or sympathy with them. If, then, in such a world one would belong in the company of the highest in character, he cannot choose but suffer. We are made on so exalted a plan that we cannot be wholly happy in selfish- ness. Even the most selfish wish at least the selfless devotion of some other. Some companionship in suffering then is necessary, if we are to be let into the high privilege of helping another in his darkest hours — if we are not then to be left in the outer circle of the uninitiated. The testing question of life continues to be: "What, could ye not watch with me one hour .^"

4. And it is only to souls thus willing to pay the price of suffering that there can come,

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 49

too, the joy of truly redeeming work. It is part of these very natures of ours, every- where knit up with other lives, that there is no cheap way in which this highest joy can be tasted. Human love would be less worthy than it is, were it not ready and glad to pay the price of the suffering involved in winning another to his own highest good. For joy's sake, as well as for duty's sake, the highest in character cannot excuse themselves from redemptive suffering.

5. Moreover, it must stir our thought to see so often that it is not those who have suffered most who are most unhappy, or most at cross-purposes with existence, or who trust God the least. The deadly ennui belongs on the whole not to these, but to the "favored sons of destiny," whose wants seem all provided for and who have no struggle to make. Suffering, this would suggest, can- not quite be the unmitigated evil we are tempted to regard it. One suspects there must somehow be hidden in the heart of suffering some distillate even of joy — some cure for its own pain. This finds beautiful and truthful expression in a passage in Eliza- beth Hastings' thoughtful novel, An Experi- ment in Altruism. To Janet, who has been

50 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

inclined to quarrel with life, has come a great sorrow in the sudden death of her noble lover. A friend goes to her to speak what comfort she can, but expecting to find her still more bitter than before.

"Do you know," she said, "the sorrow almost rests me ? I have had so much of the bitter and meaningless pain. Perhaps my quarrel with life is over."

"But this is so inexplicable," I cried, taking the girl's hands in mine and forgetting that I was there to com- fort her.

"It doesn't need to be explained, because it hurts, and the hurt is life, and life is good. Oh, I tell you," she added proudly, drawing her hands away and going over to seat herself by the window; "it is only when you are standing outside, looking at life, talking about it and thinking about it, that you can say it is cruel. When you are really living, the very hurt is glorious."

I sat and watched the tearless face. The girl had been carried beyond me, out into the deeps of life where my words of help could not reach her.

"I have always been trying to reason out the mean- ing of things," she said, turning quickly toward me, "and nobody even told me that it is only what cannot be said that makes life worth while."

"People have tried to, Janet," I said softly, "but that is one of the things that cannot be told."

"There isn't any kind of pain," she said slowly, "that can equal the joy of simple human love."

I forgot my rebellion of the night before. I bowed my head in the presence of this power for whose better

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 51

apprehending we covet the very agony and pain of life. We follow swiftly to let even its shadow fall upon us, for if "in its face is light, in its shadow there is healing too."

6. There is still another human experi- ence in these personal relations that suggests that suffering Is no dumb, barren, brute fact without any ideal message. That fact is the repeated experience of the special growth of a true and high love, through fellowship in suffering, in the sharing of burdens. It is not only that suffering seems many times a thing to rejoice in, because it reveals our friends and God ; but that the very sharing in the common suffering pecu- liarly draws souls together. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains. And the deep- ening love is rightly felt to be more significant than the suffering by which it was purchased. This fact is an intimation, once more, that the deepest draughts of joy even are not to be found in unmixed and easy pleasure ; that harmony is more than melody and unity than simplicity. Man's nature is too broad to make it possible to satisfy him without an admixture of self-giving love, and he glories in the cost of such love.

7. This holds not alone in the realm of personal love. It seems indeed to be in

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general true that life's most precious experi- ences are open to us only through suffering. Here, again, whether we can explain it or not, a life seems to us shallow into which small experience of suffering has come. We cannot, with our eyes open, choose it either for ourselves or for those we love. George Eliot has laid her finger on one reason for this common human experience, and men have turned often to these words of hers just because they rang so true :

We can indeed only have the highest happiness, such as goes with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world, as well as ourselves ; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we should choose above everything.

I always wish, myself, to couple with this word of George Eliot's another equally dis- cerning but rarely quoted word of Lotze's :

And then there is pain, the bitterness of which is only intelligible by reference to the refined relations of social life, and to the consciousness of combined victory and reconciliation springing from practised ethical insight — pain which gives rise to innumerable feelings not easily expressed, and pervading our whole life like a precious fragrance that we would on no account consent to renounce.

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 53

Here too the joy is inextricably mingled with the pain. To insist that one must be spared such pain as George Eliot and Lotze here describe is to insist that life should be a comparatively barren and futile thing — is to insist that one doom himself to an es- sentially narrow and shallow life. Obviously the indication here confirms our earlier reflec- tions on the prerequisites of a moral world. In such a world the bitter and the sweet go back to essentially the same sources. Both arise from the fact and meaning of those close personal relations in which men stand. Even when we are most rebellious against the scheme of things, nothing could persuade us to give up the personal relations, out of which our rebellion springs.

Still another fact of our human experience shows that life's suffering is seldom bare pain and evil. Nothing seems to men more sacred than certain kinds of suffering, but it is always suffering in which there is some ele- ment of sacrifice. This brings us directly to seek the help that may come from Christ's own thought and life.

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Light from Christ

Christianity has done most of all to bring the sacredness and value of sacrificial suffer- ing into relief. Paulsen thus cannot be said to overstate the case when he says :

The third great truth which Christianity has im- pressed upon us is : The world lives by the vicarious death of the just and innocent. Whatever system- loving theology may have made of it, it remains the profoundest philosophical-historical truth. The na- tions owe their existence to the willingness of the best and the most unselfish, the strongest and the purest, to ofi"er themselves for sacrifice. Whatever humanity possesses of the highest good has been achieved by such men, and their reward has been misunderstanding, contempt, exile, and death. The history of humanity is the history of martyrdom ; the text to the sermon which is called the history of mankind is the text to the Good Friday sermon from the fifty-third chapter of the prophet Isaiah.^

We need the help of the deepest facts if we are to read the riddle of the world's sin and sorrow, and we are certainly close to earth's deepest facts in the phenomena to which Paulsen here calls atention ; for this

^ A System of Ethics, p. 159.

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 55

point of view, as he clearly recognizes, has grown directly out of the life and teaching and death of Christ.

I. We have then one more outstanding fact with which we may face the problem of suffering and sin: '^Christ also suffered." At first sight the crucifixion of Christ seems only to accentuate and increase our problem ; for it looks as if God had forgotten Jesus too and allowed the evil to triumph over him. But the experience of humanity is that, as the years roll on, the fact of Christ's suffering and death has been the source of men's greatest help, as they themselves have stood face to face with suffering and sin. Already those who were as close to Jesus' time as the New Testament writers disclose with unmistakable plainness this triumphant view-point. They are sure that Christ's suf- fering greatly counts, and that it cannot therefore mean that God forgot him. They appeal thus to Christ's suffering to strengthen their own hearts and the hearts of their brethren under a like undeserved suffering. The books of Hebrews, i Peter, and Revela- tion all seek thus to stay persecuted and suf- fering souls. In essence their argument is the same : If Christ was allowed to suffer

56 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

and die in rejection and apparent defeat, your suffering too, though it were equally undeserved, does not mean that God has forgotten you or his kingdom. In many varied forms they express it — in literal phrase, in analogy, in vivid pictorial presenta- tion, like the vision of the souls under the altar, and of the "Lamb that had been slain" upon the throne. Christ's suffering, therefore, suggests to them rather that their suffering, too, may count, and that they are thus honored in sharing in the inmost work of Christ. "Beloved," runs a passage in I Peter, "think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which cometh upon you to prove you, as though a strange thing happened unto you : but inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings rejoice."

Christ's life-purpose and the cardinal prin- ciple of his teaching had been self-giving love. In the terms of such a love he inter- preted God and life and heaven. His king- dom was to come, not by force, but by trust in the omnipotence of such love. Were there any circumstances too strong for that ? Can it stand the world as it is ^ May we trust God to the bitter end, even to seeming defeat and death with every accompaniment of

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 57

mental agony ? These seem to be the ques- tions involved in the crucifixion of Christ, and his disciples came to believe that the results of his suffering death justified, vindi- cated, and fulfilled the faith shown in his life and teaching; and showed in turn to men that they might believe that their suf- fering, too, could be made to count for others. In that great consummation they would have a right greatly to rejoice. Once more, however we explain it, the suffering death of Christ, conceived as the culmination of his life, is seen to have power to stay the hearts of men as has no other fact.

The greatest gift the hero leaves his race Is to have been a hero.

"The prophet," wrote Professor James in his chapter on the will, "has drunk more deeply than anyone of the cup of bitterness, but his countenance is so unshaken and he speaks such mighty words of cheer that his will becomes our will, and our life is kindled at his own." In supreme degree this has proved true of Christ. Mrs. Stowe is thus faithful to human nature, when she makes Uncle Tom, bruised and bleeding for a right- eous and kindly deed, turn for enduring com-

58 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

fort only to the story of the crucifixion. And "The Sky Pilot" can bring to the rebellious sufferer, to whom he would minister, no deeper word than one that goes back again to the crucified Christ. And as he reads in Hebrews the passage, "We see Jesus for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor," he can only add: "You see, Gwen, God gave nothing but the best — to his own Son only the best." It must ever mean much to men, that something of that best, it should be open to them, to share with Christ.

2. The cross of Christ thus faces this greatest problem of men — the problem of evil — with a surpassing fact. The cross has mightily, gloriously counted, beyond all doubt, in the actual history of men. It brings thereby a new note into the whole discussion; for it suggests that all suffering may be made vicarious — may count for men. How great a change this may make in our point of view Professor James suggests in his illustration in his little book. Is Life Worth Living?

Consider a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strapped on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark consciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single re-

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 59

deeming ray in the whole business ; and yet all these diabolical-seeming events are usually controlled by human intentions with which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce. Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and man are to be bought by them. It is genuinely a process of redemption. Lying on his back on the board there he is performing a function incalculably higher than any prosperous canine life admits of; and yet, of the whole performance, .this function is the one portion that must remain absolutely beyond his ken.

Now turn from this to the life of man. In the dog's life we see the world invisible to him because we live in both worlds. In human life, although we only see our world, and his within it, yet encompassing both these worlds a still wider world may be there as unseen by us as our world is by him ; and to believe in that world may be the most essential function that our lives in this world have to perform.

3. In any case, the fact that Christ's suffering death has so counted for men in all the generations since is a very direct in- timation that all suffering may be vicarious, may directly count for other lives. For all suffering may be turned into a voluntary sacrifice, and so be made an offering to God and our fellow-men, and thus have the bitter- ness of unmeaning suffering taken out of it. Matheson may thus well say: "If Thou

6o FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

art love, then thy best gift must be sacrifice ; in that light let me search thy world." And Hinton, in his Mystery of Pain, says still more directly: ''All pains may be summed up in sacrifice and sacrifice is the instru- ment of joy." "The happiness for which we are intended is one in which pain is latent — not merely absent, but swallowed up in love and turned to joy." Now that state- ment seems to me to be absolutely true to our highest human experience. Men literally rejoice in sacrifices made for love's sake. They know no truer joy than that which so comes to them. If, therefore, they can reach a point of view whence they can feel that all their suffering may be, by the way in which they bear it, transmuted into volun- tary sacrifice, it does thereby become an "instrument of joy." In that case we might believe that no sacrifice was lost. For the highest gift we can offer to man or God is a self-giving love. We do not seek the pain and trouble of our friends, but we do prize, nevertheless, beyond all price, the love that is sacrificingly shown. And in the full light of the cross of Christ, we can see that we are praying to be delivered from the most precious thing in life, when we pray to be

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 6i

delivered from the sacrificial spirit. Men have thought it a learned and philosophical thing to say that there was nothing that men could do for God. If God be in any true sense a Father, this common statement must be fundamentally false. And the old rabbi was right in his contention that it was given to him to ''slake the thirst of God."

4. The cross of Christ has proved its power not less against the other still darker fact of sin, in spite of all inadequate and even sometimes repulsive theories concerning the meaning of that death. To help men to courage and faith, in the face of suffering, is itself a help against sin, a help to character. But the cross of Christ does more than that. It proves practically and directly effective, in winning men out of sin and into a sharing of Christ's own purposes. It suggests inevi- tably that an unconquerable, seeking, self- giving love is the one great redemptive force the world holds. It has drawn, and it still draws, men into a spirit like Christ's own. No soul — father or mother, husband or wife, brother or sister, or friend — can truly love a sinning man and not suffer in his sin, and carry its load. The greater the love, the deeper the suffering. The more stub-

62 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

bornly the sinning man holds on his loveless course, the more bitter is the suffering of the one who loves him. There is no way by which the winning of such a man back to his best self and to his God can be made cheap and easy and painless. The very relations themselves make it impossible. There is only one thing that can win him, if he is to be won at all — the unconquerable, unstinted love of another, suffering for him and with him. This vision men have caught in Christ, and it has broken their hearts, humbled and subdued them, won their love and endless devotion, and dedicated them to a sharing in Christ's own redemptive work.

Here too we have direct help as we face the fact of human sin. There is pointed out to us the one sovereign way in which the conquest of sin is to be accomplished, both in ourselves and in others. And a new great motive is brought in, to give us strength to bear all that suffering which is due to the sin of others. We may so bear it, after the likeness of Christ, as to make it truly re- demptive; and may believe therefore that Hinton is justified in saying, "All our pains identify themselves in meaning and end with the suffering of Christ." In a very

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 63

real and deeply significant sense, thus, it is given to us to "know the fellowship of his sufferings"; it is given us to share in, and to carry on, Christ's own redemptive work.

5. But the suffering death of Christ has a still larger and deeper message for us. Our highest conception of love, our great and increasing tenderness to suffering itself, and our courage and faith in the face of suf- fering and sin, all grow directly out of the spirit and life and death of Christ. Now the best light on the character of God should come from the most outstanding and signifi- cant facts of the world. I cannot myself doubt that the great personalities of history are such facts, and that among these person- alities Christ is supreme, and therefore of supreme value as indicating the kind of char- acter we may expect to find in God. As a mere matter of fact, his life has thus untold significance.

Moreover, there must be taken with this fact the further fact of Christ's own con- sciousness of mission from God — his sense that the very meaning of his life was that it revealed God. This ultimately means — what has been rightly called the great- est proposition of the Christian religion —

64 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

that *'God is like Christ;" that we may believe that there is at the heart of the world just such a love as Christ's, a love that suffers with men, unstinted, endlessly self- giving; that this is what is meant by calling God Father. If we can look at Christ in this way, as a true manifestation of God's own character and love, then we can see that God's relation to us is not an external one ; that he is no mere on-looker; but that, because our Father, he suffers in our sin, bears as a burden the sin and suffering of us all, and cannot be satisfied so long as one child of his turns away in sorrow and sin. The cross of Christ would then drop as deep a plummet as we can conceive into this dark problem of suffering and sin. It would give us universally penetrating and enduring light. For then indeed it would be true that "the agony of the world's struggle is the very life of God. Were he mere spectator, perhaps he too would call life cruel. But in the unity of our lives with him, our joy is his joy; our pain is his."

The life and teaching and death of Christ, as the great outstanding person of history, and men's experience with Christ's life, may fairly be said, thus, to confirm and to crown

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 65

the earlier considerations, suggesting faith in a purpose of good in the world. The pre- requisites of moral character themselves were seen necessarily to involve the possibility of suffering and sin. The common deeper life of men suggested valuable uses of suffer- ing and further reasons for faith. And we have found man's own being involving im- plications that could be called prophetic of the full Christian view, revealed through Christ. The larger light coming from Christ, then, is harmonious with the deeper experi- ence of men elsewhere, and puts solid ground under our feet in our search for reasons for faith in the goodness of God, in spite of the facts of sin and suffering.

We turn next to consider that fundamental question, which deals with the possibility of living relations between God and men — the question of prayer, the heart of religion.

CHAPTER II

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER — THE HEART OF RELIGION. DIFFICULTIES CON- CERNING PRAYER

I

Difficulties Connected with a Supposed Scientific View-point

I. In the discussion of any spiritual theme in a generation in which the influence of natu- ral science has been so momentous and so dominant as in ours, it is hardly possible to ignore the initial questions that arise from the scientific point of view. And with reference to prayer, it is well to remember, there is no reason why we should not recognize the scien- tific principle of the universality (but not ''uniformity") of law — that there is law in every sphere of life. There is no doubt of laws and of our need of them, even from the religious point of view. For it is plain that without a sphere of law we could make no progress in knowledge or power or character ;

66

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that the significance of freedom itself would depend upon the sphere of laws through which that freedom could express itself; and that without some abiding laws in the world we could not even maintain our faith in the trust- worthiness of God.

2. But, on the other hand, we need to make it clear to ourselves that there is no sphere of eternally self-existing laws, or laws preced- ing all reality. Such a conception, it should be plain, is really unthinkable. We need clearly to see that law can "exist" only in one of two ways : either as the mode of activ- ity of some existing reality or as a formulation made in the mind of some observer of the way in which this reality acts. It is therefore im- possible to speak of laws as preceding all exist- ence, or as having any existence of their own apart from all really existent beings. It fol- lows also that laws, as such, can do nothing. They cause nothing, they finally explain nothing. They are only our formulation of the way in which things act, or, in any final statement, of the modes of God's activity.

3 . But, as surely as there is no doubt of laws, and of our need of them, so surely is there no doubt either of our need of God and the sense of his presence and power and love back of

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all the world. If religion is to exist at all, men need to be able to believe in a living God who can come into real and effective relations with his children, who is able to manifest himself to them, and able to adapt himself in love to their changing needs. And there can be no possible defense of the real rationality of the world if the moral and spiritual inter- ests are not supreme. Here religion is at one with every ideal interest. For all ideal in- terests must insist that the world cannot be a mere machine, but must have meaning and worth. Its mechanism must be subordinated to great rational ends. Eucken speaks the inevitable conviction of the religious man when he says :

When, however, we put the question universally, showing at the same time that in ceasing to give life a spiritual basis we allow the purely humanistic culture an undisputed right over the whole field, and that this culture has no effective way of dealing with the hollow- ness and illusions of existence, then to every thinking man the great alternative presents itself, the Either-Or. Either there is something other and higher than this purely humanistic culture or life ceases to have any meaning or value.

4. It may well be urged, too, that there is absolutely no compelling reason, philosophic

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 69

or scientific, to deny the direct access of God to human minds. Men can hardly help rea- soning : We have such access to each other's minds, can it be that He, who made these minds and knows every avenue of approach to them, has not such access ? We can change the course of life of our fellow-creatures ; can it be that God is powerless at this point ? In one of his earlier works Pfleiderer naturally reasons to the same import :

And why should it be less possible for God to enter into a loving fellowship with us than for men to do so with each other ? I should be indined to think that He is even more capable of doing so. For as no man can altogether read the soul of another, so no man can altogether live in the soul of another; hence all our human love is and remains imperfect. But if we are shut off from one another by the limits of individuality, in relation to God it is not so ; to Him our hearts are as open as each man's own heart is to himself; He sees through and through them, and He desires to live in them, and to fill them with His own sacred energy and blessedness.

To deny such access of God to the human mind is to deny the possibility of revelation, to deny prayer, to deny any living contact with God ; practically to deny that there is any really living concrete God at all. It is to go back to something very like the castoff

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deism of the eighteenth century. It is hardly- possible that religion should be able to main- tain such a view of things. As Orr says : "The kind of theism that remains after the Christian element has been removed out of it is not one fitted to satisfy either the reason or the heart."

5. Evolution itself, too, seems to point to revelation and prayer — to a living associa- tion with God, in that its goal, so far as we can see, is man. And in man evolution has reached a creature in whom a new spiritual evolution begins, whose life is primarily in personal relations ; that is, in relations of self-revelation and faith. Man is made, thus, one may well feel, for revelation, for prayer. And it would seem a very helpless God in- deed who was unable to come into these rela- tions of self-revelation and faith and so to meet our deepest needs.

6. Moreover, it is sometimes urged that prayer cannot be harmonized with the course of nature. But the objector needs to be re- minded that no small part, and not the least important part, of nature is human nature, and that prayer most certainly does fit human nature. As Professor James said long ago, in his Psychology :

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 71

We hear, In these days of scientific enlightenment, a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are given us why we should not pray, whilst others are given us why we should. But in all this very little is said of the reason why we do pray, which is simply that we cannot help praying. It seems probable that, in spite of all that "science" may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner which nothing we know should lead us to expect.

What so fits human nature, what is practi- cally inevitable to it, is intrinsically probable. On the other hand, any mere machine pro- vision, in which answers to prayer are wrought into the machine, utterly fails to meet the moral and spiritual needs of men. Our high- est need, after all — the chief source of both character and happiness — Is personal associa- tion. Are the divine association and response denied us ? If they are, then It is the simple truth to say, as Browning frequently insists, that men can be more to us than God. That will be regarded as an impossible conclusion.

Now if these larger considerations are to be given any weight at all, it is plain that we can- not admit that the scientific view-point com- pels us to turn prayer into what is simply a kind of spiritual gymnastics. If religion is to be possible at all, the reality of effective

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relations between God and men cannot be denied — relations that involve actual re- sponse on God's part.

7. Nor, if such effective relations are to be supposed, can we narrowly fix the scope of prayer. Doubtless in the Christian view of prayer spiritual interests are always put above temporal interests. The very proportion of the petitions in the Lord's Prayer makes this emphatic. Doubtless, too, it will be increas- ingly true as a man goes on developing in the spiritual life and grows in prayer that the spiritual interests will more and more take the lead and occupy the main place in his commu- nion with God. But the relation with God can hardly be the real and adequate and vital thing it ought to be, if it is on any ground to be assumed that one may not bring all things to God. I cannot doubt, here, that a rather mechanical conception of the world which has naturally come into the foreground of this scientific generation, has produced for many minds what is, after all, a bugbear of the religious life. The universe is not a machine with which nothing can be done. Even if we were assuming the same kind of finite and partial relation to the world on God's part that holds of men, we should hardly be

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 73

able to infer that God's relation must leave him less able to accomplish results than we ourselves. Let us be sure that if religion has any rational basis at all, God is not dead or powerless.

Nor is it well for us to adopt some a priori theory of prayer, on supposed scientific grounds, that would rigidly exclude all tem- poral requests. However sure we are that the spiritual interest must be the dominant interest in prayer, and however clear it is to us that in prayer we are to seek God and not things, we simply must pray concerning that which disturbs our peace ; else, as Herrmann has suggested, our prayer is not a really hon- est prayer; it does not truly represent us. As he says :

Whatever really so burdens the soul as to threaten its peace is to be brought before God in prayer, with the confidence that the Father's love understands even our anxious clinging to earthly things. ... If we try of ourselves to get free from these, and so far do not pray about them, we do ourselves a twofold injury. In the first place, we make our prayer dead and insincere; it is in truth not our own prayer at all, but might be the prayer of a man placed in utterly diflterent condi- tions ; and secondly, we do not really lay ourselves before the God who would be sought of us as our Helper and Saviour ; we rather Imagine a God who has

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a kind of love for the human ideal, but has no sympathy for our needs. ^

Obviously, if our religion is to be contermi- nous with our life and permeate the whole of it, we simply cannot put all our common life out of touch with God. We are not, there- fore, to limit prayer to what we ourselves see that it is possible for God to do. Even in our human relations it would be a foolish child that would so limit his requests of his father. We are not very wise at best as to the possibilities in this universe of ours, and we need not be afraid of embarrassing God.

On the other hand, there is obviously a great possible abuse of prayer in pressing purely temporal requests with God. No personal relation can bear a dominant selfish interest in the things which the friendship may bring. It will surely not be less true in our relation to God that we shall utterly spoil the relation if we think of it as primarily a means to temporal results. God is no mere reservoir of good things, nor is prayer an in- fallible way of obtaining them. As Trum- bull long ago insisted, what men need is faith in God rather than "faith in prayer."

1 The Communion of the Christian with Cody Second English Edi- tion, p, 338.

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 75

II

Difficulties from a False Conception of Prayer

Besides the difficulties which arise in part from certain unwarranted prepossessions due to a mechanistic view of the world, there are difficulties which arise from a false conception of prayer itself.

I. It is here, It seems to me, that the famous proposal of a prayer-gauge (commonly associated with the name of Mr. Tyndall) lies, rather than in the field of scientific diffi- culties. As a matter of fact, neither the idea nor the term came originally from Tyndall, though It was through him that the notion be- came current. The idea amounted to attempt- ing to apply a gauge to prayer, in the same sense in which one might apply a gauge to steam. It ought hardly to be necessary to say at all that such a conception is utterly be- side the mark from the Christian point of view. Prayer, for Christ, is no force put simply in man's hands to be measured by the number of prayers or the number of persons or the length of time in prayer. There are no units of compulsive force on God to be so gauged. Prayer is no compulsion or command on God.

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God does not abdicate his throne and simply allow the human will to determine results. Else we should not dare to pray. We are many times clearly aware, even in the case of interests that seem very precious to us, that we simply do not know what results are really best. We dare to pray because we come to one who loves us, and has the infinite wis- dom to express that love as it may best be expressed. If there is prayer at all in the Christian sense, therefore, it is prayer offered always in glad and necessary submission to the wisdom and love of God. So that from the Christian point of view a prayer even for direct results may be "answered" just as truly in the refusal as in the granting of the specific request. And to gauge prayer in this larger sense would require nothing less than infinite wisdom.

There is besides, of course, the practical impossibility of any such test as that pro- posed, since prayer as a spiritual force, as has been suggested, cannot be measured by the number of prayers or the number of persons or length of time in prayer. No measurable test is possible. Spiritually valued, the prayer of one might outweigh the prayer of many. And whatever previous agreements

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER ^-j

were made concerning the patients in a hos- pital that were to be prayed for and those that were not, the dumb desire of the patient himself or of his friends might well be, in the thought of God, as eloquent praying as the most elaborately voiced petitions. If there be a God at all he can be no mere passive mass, subject to the pressure of human deter- mination. He has, himself, infinite purposes of love and wisdom to work out in the world and in relation to men quite beyond our gauging in any possible mechanical fashion.

2. A second difficulty, arising from a false conception of prayer, is sometimes expressed in the form : God knows what I need, why, therefore, should I pray t

It is interesting to see that Christ himself, in his own teaching, seems to argue in exactly the other way : "Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him. After this manner therefore pray." Let one see the real implication of the objection here urged against prayer. God must either know or not know what we need. Would it be a better reason for prayer to reverse the statement of the objector and say : God does not know what I need, therefore I will pray ? Certainly we are not likely to seek help

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from a God who does not know what our needs are.

Christ seems to be really arguing, in his teaching concerning prayer, in Matthew, somewhat in this fashion : We are to pray, not because God is reluctant and because his will must be battered down by incessant repetition — "Use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do." Nor are we to pray as a short cut to things, making prayer largely selfish and material. Our great need in every per- sonal relation is the need of the person himself, not primarily of the things that the relation may carry with it. We need God and com- munion with God. If prayer is to have any reality worth talking about, it must be the reality of a divine association, involving contin- uous mutual self-revelation and answering faith. When prayer is so personally conceived, it is seen to be the achievement and gift of a lifetime, though the simplest of things. But we obviously cannot drift into it. Here, too, the best is a growth — the growing expres- sion of a deep inner life, where the conditions of a satisfying personal relation are ful- filled. Christ seems therefore to be urging with men positively that it is because God knows and loves and cares, that we dare to

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 79

pray and may pray. If he did not know, there would be no use in praying ; and if he did not love and care, we should not dare to pray. In all this, Christ is answering that inherent and inevitable need of prayer to which Professor James referred. Whatever our theories about prayer, we must pray. We cannot help the instinctive cry to the uni- verse, to any God in whom we blindly believe, when we are thinking of the things that deeply concern us. Where work to which we have given our life, where our intrinsic honor, where the friends whom most we love, are concerned, there we must pray. And to this need Christ responds. You may pray.

One who rightly conceives the personal re- lation involved in prayer can hardly fail to realize, too, that the objection we are con- sidering stops in a very shallow conception of prayer. As in any personal relation, God cannot give himself and his best blessings ex- cept to responsive hearts. The deepest self- revelation can be made only to the reverent, and prayer is this response to God, this opening of ourselves to him. As surely as the best gifts of friendship cannot be made avail- able to the purely selfish person, so surely must there be some active response in our

8o FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

human hearts to God's own self-revelation, if he is to bestow all that he would upon us.

Moreover, because respect for the person- ality of another is the deepest condition of right personal relations, we may be certain that God's attitude is always that of reverence for the human personality. He does not thrust himself upon us ; he does not force his way into our lives. He stands at the door of the human heart to knock ; it is for us to open the door. The effective relation between God and men must always be a work of coopera- tion. And prayer is this opening of the door.

It must also be added, of course, that the objection we are now considering seems to think of prayer as purely of the nature of re- quest, and quite ignores the whole great range of personal relations in the communion of spirit with spirit, quite independent of things asked for. Doubtless the thought that God knows my need and has me in his loving care, will keep me from urging with importunate anxiety requests for things concerning whose good I cannot be sure, and therefore may well affect the proportion of prayer to be given to doubtful requests. But it ought not to deter- mine the entire question of what prayer is to be to me.

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER

III

Difficulties from the Supposed Improb- ability OF Prayer

But though certain initial difficulties con- cerning prayer may be thus set aside, the hu- man heart is concerned with the main ques- tion : What, after all, is the probability of effective relations between God and men ? Are we just deceiving ourselves here ? Is prayer a fond delusion ? Are there any spirit- ual forces, any relations of appeal and re- sponse, between God and man ? Ultimately we must be willing fully to face the facts, for it is no gain for any of us that we should be finally deceived. Is it easier, then, to deny the real- ity of prayer ? We live in an age with a "stu- pendous reliance on machinery," in an age of enormous material conquest, in an age in which knowledge of the material world is greatly extended, in a business, commercial, and organizing age. And it is peculiarly easy in such an age that the spiritual factors in life should be somewhat hidden. Let us ask ourselves, therefore, what the probability concerning prayer is. The probabilities of the case can perhaps be briefly summarized.

82 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

1 . In the first place, and for myself, I cannot doubt that we must affirm the inherent prob- ability of prayer. God is ; we are. The in- terrelation of God and the human soul is to be expected. The reasons would need to be very strong that would set aside such inherent prob- ability.

2. Moreover, we need God. All the deeper knowledge of human nature makes us feel that man cannot be satisfied simply with the finite. And Augustine's great word has been so fre- quently quoted just because it answers so completely to the instinctive judgment of men : "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and the heart of man is restless until it finds its rest in Thee." If we are to recognize the exist- ence of God at all, we must believe that he seeks our best good, and that what, therefore, is necessary to our highest development will not be denied us.

3. Nor can we leave out of account the fur- ther fact that all men are impelled to pray. The practically universal fact of religion has everywhere meant prayer. Has this instinct no response ? John Fiske carries one's con- viction when he says :

If the relation thus established In the morning twi- light of Man's existence between the Human Soul and a

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 83

world invisible and immaterial is a relation of which only the subjective term is real and the objective term is nonexistent, then, I say, it is something utterly without precedent in the whole history of creation. All the analogies of Evolution, so far as we have yet been able to decipher it, are overwhelmingly against any such supposition.

*******

The lesson of evolution is that through all these weary ages the Human Soul has not been cherishing in Religion a delusive phantom, but in spite of seemingly endless groping and stumbling it has been rising to the recognition of its essential kinship with the ever-living God. Of all the implications of the doctrine of evolu- tion with regard to Man, I believe the very deepest and strongest to be that which asserts the Everlasting Reality of Religion.^

4. It is probably not too much to say, either, that the best in the race have tended to make the most of prayer. Certainly the great moral and spiritual seers and leaders of the race have given, on the whole, emphatic testi- mony at this point.

5. Christ's own practice and example here are still more convincing to the Christian. The Christian man feels that one might well rest the entire argument for prayer upon this great single fact. For if we are to regard Christ simply as the supreme character of the

^ Fiske, Through Nature to God, pp. 189, 191.

84 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

race, the man of clearest moral and spiritual discernment, we cannot overlook the fact that he was preeminently a man of prayer. Prayer evidently was his one great source of strength, of solace, and of courage. He flees to God. It may well be doubted whether any of his disciples have given sufficient weight to this example of Christ himself. If he needed such recourse to prayer, and found such life in it, we may be very sure that we need it still more. We are not likely to make any mistake in following Christ's example.

It is perfectly plain, moreover, that Christ does not regard this communion with the Fa- ther as something in which he has a part where men have none ; for he encourages and urges and commands prayer on the part of his disci- ples. Christ's unmistakable example and teaching suggest much more than the mere probability of the reality of prayer. Whether the matter of prayer is entirely clear to us or not, it evidently was an unquestioned fact for him. He knew. He felt that he could bear testimony out of his own experience, and the testimony is the expert testimony of a master in the realm of the moral and spiritual. If the revelation of God in Christ means anything, it surely means the reality of prayer.

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 85

IV

Difficulty from the Lack of a Felt Presence and Response in Prayer

Perhaps the difficulty that is most felt by those trying to find their way into the reli- gious life is what they take to be the lack of a felt presence and a definite response from God in prayer, such as they feel that they ob- tain in relation to the outer world or to another person in the body. The complaint is of a sense of seeming unreality, that seems to them quite different from what they ex- perience in these other relations.

Concerning this really comprehensive diffi- culty, it is to be said, first of all, that there is no doubt that God's relation to us is not in- tended to be an obtrusive relation — a rela- tion that forces itself upon us and from the sense of which we are unable to escape. As I have elsewhere argued, the very possibility of moral choice on our part, and of a normal development in the moral and religious life, seems to require that God should sacredly respect our freedom and not make his rela- tion to us an obtrusive or dominating or ines- capable one. We need here imperatively the invisible God. And this consideration

86 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

deeply aifects the whole problem. We shall return to it a little later.

I. Moreover, it is to be said that God must be known like any other personality, through his self-manifestations. If we are right in thinking at all of a God immanent in the whole universe, these self-manifestations must be manifold : in the constitution of nature, in our own natures and experience, in human history, in the touch of other lives, and par- ticularly in the great personalities who have seen and lived most truly.

The religious man may well remind himself that he cannot wholly mistake the working of God in his historical leading of the race, for example, and especially as traced in the Old and New Testaments. If we see reason to believe that God was here in real relation to men, we ought not to find it impossible to be- lieve in his continued on-working through the generations.

The Christian man, too, has reason to be- lieve not only that God has in general ex- pressed himself in the world as a whole, but that men have had the need of concrete, defi- nite, human, unmistakable manifestation already peculiarly and supremely met in the historical life of Jesus. As he puts himself in

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 87

the presence of this historical life of Christ, he is likely to discover that God is able to find him in and through Christ as nowhere else. God knew our need of such a definite and concrete manifestation and met that need. With that need supremely met, the problem becomes one of a life of faith ; but a life of faith based on evidence, not without evidence.

It is to be remembered also that it is hard to appreciate any great character and his work when one stands close to it. It is particularly true that it was impossible for men to see the full significance of the character and the life of Christ as a revelation of God, without the perspective of a longer time and without the testing of history. The full significance of any personality is not to be grasped at once. We may be sure that the law holds in rela- tion to Christ and God's revelation in him. Christ's life has gained, not lost, in signifi- cance, as his weight in human history has be- come plain.

2. Nor is it to be forgotten that the final forces even in external nature, as modern science seems to teach us, are all unseen. They are not as they seem to us in the first testimony of the senses. The real facts con-

88 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

cerning air pressure, the motion of the earth, the atomic constitution of nature, the ether vibrations, and many other similar phenomena, are not present to us in the direct evidence of the senses. They are reached by inference and experiment, and accepted by us on such a basis. Even the material facts, in other words, are not here so immediately given as we are in the habit of thinking.

Moreover, our knowledge of the outer world through sensations is not so different from the knowledge of the spiritual world that comes through the inner data of our psychic life, as we often suppose. There is no immediate knowledge or revelation in either case. Both require a long time in the building up ; both involve comparison, memory, reason. Neither the outer world nor the spiritual meaning of our inner experiences can be given to us outright. There is certainly no literal transfer of definite thoughts from external nature to the minds of men. Their own inner activity, reflection, and inference are re- quired even there. And if there, we need not be surprised to find the same law holding in the realm of the spirit.

3. Even in the closest personal intercourse, it is well to notice that there is no literal trans-

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 89

fer of thought or feeling from one mind to the other. The self-revelation of one person to another cannot be made by words only, how- ever carefully and accurately words are used by the revealing personality. The words at best are but signs of inner mental processes, which the other must interpret out of a some- what different experience. There must be, thus, a creative, cooperative activity on both sides, and the result is quite certain to be the production in the second person, not of an exact replica of the mental state of the first, but only a measurable approximation to that state. This necessity for active cooperation on our part in any personal revelation sug- gests how impossible the common conception of an absolutely passive reception of a personal revelation from God must be. We are thus often expecting, in relation to God, what oc- curs nowhere else in our experience, not even in the closest personal relations. It is, in- deed, in this way that a truly living revelation from God is possible — a revelation that changes and grows with our growth. There must be, in any case, in revelation from God, active cooperation on our part ; and we need not be disturbed to find this true. It is in line with a true understanding of all our ex-

90 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

perience. Even if we thought of God as speaking to us in definite words, these would require interpretation. The active interpre- tive element in religion is thus unavoidable.

4. Moreover, if there be a God at all, and religion have any genuine justification, God can be no merely incidental and occasional factor in the life of men. If the reason of the case and men's needs are to be truly met, God's cooperation and guidance must be con- stant, not simply here and there by some marked intervention ; just as there can be no adequate and fundamental religious interpre- tation of evolution that does not recognize that God is essentially active at every stage and not alone at certain apparent breaks in the evolutionary series. A God who is only occasionally needed is no God at all. Our conception of divine revelation and relation to God, therefore, must be consistent with some thought of his constant activity in hu- man life ; though this does not mean that all stages of revelation are to be put on a dead level, any more than we are to deny the exist- ence of certain critical points in the evolution process.

5. But, while men need the sense of God's constant relation to human life, it is still true,

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 91

as was implied at the beginnning of this sec- tion, that the best association even between men for character and happiness is not an obtrusive one. It should be constant, indeed, and intimate, but should still guard most jealously our freedom and our individuality, never desiring to force its way or its will. Every personal relation requires such care on the part of the stronger personality. It is preeminently necessary that this should be the case in God's relation to us. If our free- dom is not to be quite overridden and true moral character made impossible for us, God must even take pains to hide his working, as would a wise, strongly influential friend. This consideration is fundamental in its bearing on our problem.

': It is thus literally true to say that we need an invisible God. We are to walk by faith, not by sight. The fact seems to be that, as we mount higher in any sphere, our life is and must be increasingly one of faith. In the intellectual, the aesthetic, the moral, the religious life, we have our occasional times of clear vision of our goal, followed by longer periods when we have to go forward in faith in the goal once seen. As Rendel Harris says, we cannot avoid "the dark night of

92 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

faith, when every step has to be taken in ab- solute dependence upon God, and assurance that the vision was truth and no lie." We have to learn to believe in the unseen spiritual forces, in the constant working of the invisible God. This unobtrusiveness of God seems then to be necessary to our spiritual training. There would else be such excess of motive as would virtually annul our freedom and our character. We need to learn fidelity to the lesser light.

6. Another consideration deserves atten- tion. It is worth while for one to make clear to himself just what kind of answer he really wants to his prayers, when he thinks the matter through. He may find his need here quite other than he first imagined it to be. For if one is truly praying for the fulfilment of Christ's supreme purposes concerning him- self and other men, if he is truly praying the Lord's Prayer, the answer plainly must be found chiefly in life, in character. It cannot possibly be given simply in any kind of emo- tional experience, though such an experience in a given case may be a useful help to char- acter. The best and completest answer to a truly Christian prayer means time, growth, and many human choices of the right. Our

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 93

point of view as to prayer is quite too likely to be low, too personal, too selfish, too much concerned with things and with pleasant experiences, instead of with the final goal of "union with the will of God." So that we may fail to give due weight to the most direct and important answers of all.

We are, then, perhaps not looking in the right direction for the answers to our prayers, for evidence of real relation to God. Are there no indications that God has been at work in our lives, not only at the time of prayer and in conscious feelings that we seemed able to connect with the prayer, but in more constant and fundamental ways ? Have there not been the thousand different quickenings, glimpses, times of vision, and *' sober and strenuous moods .^" Have there been no leadings, no changed attitudes and longings, no altered purposes, no growth, no increasing assurance of spiritual things and of Christ's supreme significance, no enlarging place in our lives for the motives coming from Christ's life and teaching, no deepening of unselfish sympathy and enthusiasm for the great social goals of the Kingdom ^ Is the relation to God not coming to mean more and more as we go on ? The fruit of the Spirit

94 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

is the best evidence of the working of the Spirit of God.

A word should be added concerning the difficulty many feel about intercessory prayer. It is not possible to doubt Christ's practice of intercessory prayer. The demand for it too is grounded in our very natures. We simply cannot help praying for those whom we love. Is there any peculiar difficulty involved in intercessory prayer ? As I have dealt with this question somewhat at length elsewhere/ I may very briefly say here that intercessory prayer seems to me only to carry to its legiti- mate conclusion the well-recognized condition of a moral world — that we are members one of another. We do, as a matter of fact, condition one another's lives at multiplied points. May I through God in prayer continue to count for good in the life of my friend, even when distance or misunderstanding separates us ? It would seem a very impotent and inadequate God who would not make that true. And that it should be true would be only to carry through to the end the common law of the moral universe, of our constant mutual influence. If this be true, intercessory prayer seems to involve no peculiar intellectual difficulty.

* Theology and the Social Consciousness, pp. 164-167.

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 95

In the question of suffering and sin, we were facing a fundamental problem for every ideal view ; in the question of prayer, a funda- mental problem for any religious view of the world. We turn now to the central problem of the Christian religion — the question of our conception of Christ.

CHAPTER III

THE QUESTION OF CHRIST — THE CENTRAL FACT OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION: HOW ARE WE TO THINK ABOUT CHRIST ?

There is no intention, in this chapter, to go into an elaborate apologetic concerning Christ ; but rather to state as simply and directly as possible how the Christian man naturally thinks of Christ.^

We who call ourselves Christians take the name precisely because we mean to be, first and foremost, disciples of Jesus Christ. And we take this purpose on, just because, in turn, we believe that Christ is the supreme per- sonality of history, — so supreme that we do not know how better to describe the ideal life than to say, that it should be a life that steadily learns of Christ.

1 The background of the line of thought here presented may be found in the author's Theology a^id the Social Consciousness, pp. 184-201, and Religion as Life, pp. 1 16-133. Cf. also Letters on the Greatness and Simplicity of the Christian Faith, pp. 179-199.

96

THE QUESTION OF CHRIST 97

The Best Life

First of all, we believe that in Christ we have the best life that the world has ever seen. It seems to us that the great historian Ranke simply states the common conviction of men when he says, "More guiltless and more powerful, more exalted and more holy, has naught ever been on earth than his conduct, his life, and his death. The human race knows nothing that could be brought even afar off into comparison with it." Let one who is in earnest to reach for himself the highest character, ask himself to what other life he could turn for a more perfect example of what the highest living should be. It is an unspeakable gift, that there should simply have been such a life, and that a sufficient record of it should have come down to us through men inspired by him, so that we can still feel the majesty and the drawing power of his life. If only this one thing could be said about Christ, it would still justify the men who are in dead earnest for character in count- ing themselves, first and foremost, disciples of Christ, and in associating themselves to-

98 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

gether that the Christlike life might more and more prevail among men. The Christian man then is first of all to think about Christ as the best life that the world has seen. And that is a most significant fact.

II

The Best Ideals and Standards

But it would hardly be possible that Christ should have been the best life, and that he should not at the same time have shown to men the best ideals and standards, whether for the life of the individual or the life of the group or nation. Life is so inevitably one, that it is hardly possible to dissociate a man's life from his ideals and standards. The best life can be the best life only if it have the best ideals and standards. Jesus' conception of God as Father — as endless self-giving, sacri- ficial love — contains in itself the highest con- ceivable ideal for character, an ideal that can- not be denied, and one which men must regard as the goal for all life, individual and social. It is the application of this single great ideal and standard of Christ's that is so infinitely needed in all the relations of life. The Christian man may well emphasize, in the second place,

THE QUESTION OF CHRIST 99

therefore, in his witness to Christ, that Christ presents incomparably the best ideals and standards of life.

Ill

The Best Insight into the Laws of Life

And the best life and the best ideals and standards naturally carry with them the best insight into the laws of life. We are coming to understand in our own time that the es- sential thing for conquest in any realm, whether of nature or of human nature, is that one should understand the laws involved, should know the conditions involved in those laws, and then by the fulfilment of those conditions should gain mastery of the forces in the realm concerned. It is thus that mod- ern science has made its conquest over the forces of nature ; it is thus that victories must be won in the difficult problems of human society. Our great social surveys are simply an earnest attempt to apply this scientific method, so successful in the realm of nature, to the realm of society. In like manner, in the realm of one's own individual life, for the highest victory, one needs to know the laws both of body and of mind, — the laws of

lOO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

the spiritual life where our final victory must be won.

Nothing is more wonderful about the teach- ing of Jesus than the sureness of his insight into the fundamental laws of life, even when measured by the best that modern knowledge has to give. He is no one-sided fanatic. He knows the complexity of life. He has clear discernment of the unity of man's spirit, and of the certainty with which failure at one point invites failure at every other, and vic- tory at one point helps to victory at every other. He sees as clearly as the modern psy- chologist the central importance of the will and action, and consequently never allows his conception of religion for an instant to luck ethical quality. He knows that the great reality in the world is persons and personal life. And just because this is true, he knows that the one all-inclusive law will be the law of unselfish love in all these relations. The method of his kingdom, therefore, is the method of the contagion of the good life through mental and spiritual fellowship. But the good life must be genuinely good. It must be sound and have inner integrity. He sees, therefore, just as clearly that besides mental and spiritual fellowship there must

THE QUESTION OF CHRIST loi

be also mental and spiritual independence on the part of the individual. These are simple illustrations of Christ's insight into the laws of life. The world simply does not know any moral teacher to whom it can go with such certainty of unerring insight at this most vital of all points. It brings great assurance to the learner of Christ, that he can believe that Christ offers also the best insight into the laws of life.

IV

The Best Convictions

It is perhaps to say essentially the same thing in different words — though it seems to me worth saying in this different fashion — when one says that Christ offers to men the best convictions. Because great and vital decisions do not spring up out of vacancy; they must inevitably root finally in great convictions. The measure in which a man may finally count with his fellows goes right back to the strength and depth and signifi- cance of his convictions. And man has no more imperative need than the need of first- hand grip on realities ; that he should be able to believe with all his soul in something worth

I02 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

believing. Now, it has been already implied that Christ stands for the mightiest convic- tions for which a man can stand : the con- victions of the love of God and of the life of love. Within these convictions are contained the highest ideals and hopes that men can cherish. There is a great new tie between a man and Christ when he perceives that Christ offers to men the priceless gift of the best convictions.

V

The Best Hopes

Moreover, because Christ brings to men the best life, the best ideals and standards, the best insight into the laws of life, and the best convictions, he can bring also the best hopes. It is no accident that the highest hopes which the human race cherishes are knit up so indis- solubly with the life and teaching of Jesus. Just because the character of Christ is so majestic and so convincing, we give and can give to his teaching a weight not otherwise conceivable. Christ does not simply tell us of beautiful dreams and visions, but he does much more : he makes us able to believe in these highest hopes ; he makes us able to

THE QUESTION OF CHRIST 103

believe in the immortal life — in endless growth into the life and work of love, both here on earth and in the life to come; he makes us able to believe in the continually deepen- ing acquaintance with the inexhaustible God. The human imagination simply cannot rise higher in its conceptions than the hopes that Christ has made possible to us. This, too, then is a part of humanity's testimony to Christ: that he makes possible to men the best hopes.

VI

The Best Dynamic for Living

And the person who offers us all this — the best life, the best ideals and standards, the best insight into the laws of life, the best convic- tions, and the best hopes — inevitably thereby brings to us at the same time the best dynamic for a like life. For those vital decisions in which character consists root unfailingly, as we have seen, in great inspiring convictions and hopes and associations, and these in the highest degree Christ offers. We know no surer road to character than the road of persistent per- sonal association, upon which, as we have seen, Christ everywhere counts. There is no cheaper

I04 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

way. As I have had occasion often to say, we become Inevitably like those with whom we constantly are, to whom we look in admiration and love, and who give themselves unstintedly to us. The supreme dynamic of life, therefore, will necessarily be association with the best life, with its best ideals and insight and convic- tions and hopes. We simply do not know, even in our modern times, any surer road for any man into the highest character than that he should put himself persistently in the pres- ence of Christ in the Gospels and allow the Spirit of God to reach him through that life ; to feel thus its drawing power until it becomes second nature to think about life as Christ thought about it, to feel as he felt, and to take his great purposes upon him in a contin- ually increasing response to his spirit. Be- yond all doubt, the world knows, in the experience of the centuries, no dynamic for the production of character in common men and women, for an instant to be compared with the influence of Christ. Least of all, therefore, may the Christian man forget that Christ has proved himself beyond all doubt the best dynamic for character.

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VII

The Best Revelation of God

Just because Christ is all that I have already said, he bears, as no other character or religion for an instant can bear, the severest rational and ethical tests of even the modern world. His teaching is thoroughly rational, and his teaching is unmistakably ethical through and through. We have no occasion to correct either his conception of life or his conception of God. And he becomes thus inevitably for us the surest revelation of God, and the great- est persuasive of the love of God. If we are to find light upon the character of God, we must find it in the greatest facts of the world. Unquestionably the great facts of the world are persons, and the greatest facts are the greatest persons ; and the supreme fact of the world must be the supreme person of history. And if even a part of what I have been saying concerning Christ is true, he is, among these greatest facts, beyond all doubt the supreme world-fact and person, and thereby the surest revealer of God.

It is difficult to overstate the value of the simple fact that there has appeared among

io6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

men a man in whom we can feel that God su- premely reveals himself ; so that we have our best conception of the character of God in saying that God, it seems to us, must be like Christ, and that to have a God with a charac- ter like Christ would be to have a God in whom the human spirit could rest. Here again, we know no surer road, even for the modern man, to come to the certainty of God and to rest in him, than to put himself with honest heart in the presence of the life of Christ, to allow that life to make upon him its natural, legitimate impression. In no way more surely may a man come to certainty of God and of relation to him, to find growing upon him the conviction of God and of the spiritual world, to feel that he finds God and God finds him.

It is this great simple fact of Christ as the supreme revealer of God that we teach con- cerning Christ when we teach his divinity. God is like Christ. Now, we give Christ this supreme place only when we clearly recognize that he is to be made supreme within the Bible as well as without the Bible. No man is truly voicing the divinity of Christ who puts others — however great — on a level with him as revealers of God. The great

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confession of Christ, therefore, may be ex- pressed in Luther's words: "For if we are certain of this : that what He thinks, speaks, and wills, the Father also wills, then I can defy all that may fight and rage at me. For here in Christ I have the Father's heart and will." Above all else, therefore, the Christian man will prize the fact that Christ is the su- preme revealer of God and the supreme per- suasive of the love of God.

We call ourselves Christians, therefore, be- cause even in this modern time, — nay, partic- ularly in this modern time, for no age has ever needed Christ so much, — the most practical and certain way to righteousness of life, to fruitful service, to strength and beauty of spirit, to sacrificial love, to God, is Christ.

These, then, are the great outstanding claims of Christ upon the love and loyalty of men : that in him we have the best life, the best ideals and standards, the best insight into the laws of life, the best convictions, the best hopes, the best dynamic for character, the surest revealer of God, and the greatest persuasive of the love of God ; and, therefore, "the most precious fact in history, the most precious fact our life contains."

io8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

If we may count upon a fundamental pur- pose of love in the world, upon the reality of prayer, and upon the priceless significance of Christ, we are prepared to face with suffi- cient light the practical questions of life's fundamental decision, and of life's fundamen- tal paradox.

CHAPTER IV

THE QUESTION OF LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION

In writing of life's fundamental decision, I have in mind those great essential decisions that themselves make and form character — the decisions without which life largely loses all meaning and value whatever. A man has no right to forget, either for himself or for all those whom he loves, the significance of these crisis decisions. For we certainly shall not drift into large achievements in life and work. Nervelessly waiting for something to turn up works no better in the realm of the spirit than in the realm of economics. We simply cannot live great lives in petty bits to which only our moods stir us. There must be great embracing decisions that cover large tracts of our lives, indeed that finally cover the whole expanse of life. As surely as the student needs the general purpose to attend all his classes, as over against the futile rais- ing of the question of attendance concerning

109

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every hour, so surely in all significant living must there be great ultimate choices as over against the smaller proximate choices of life.

It becomes, thus, a very serious matter for any man that he should not be looking out on life without the grip of an all-embracing pur- pose. It supremely concerns him that the preparatory years of education should not have closed upon him without a clear, con- scious, avowed determination to follow the highest life he knows. There is no safety nor promise for a drifting life. It is of these undergirding decisions, therefore, that I wish to write, clearly conscious that a man will be worth little to himself or to the world without this fundamental decision of char- acter.

What are the two kinds of lives between which all must choose ? It is significant that the experience of the race has so variously crystallized its expression of these two kinds of lives. For it shows how inevitable some fundamental decision is. It is as inescapable as the omnipresence of God. It pursues man to his last covert, and compels him to own, "Whither shall I flee from thy presence?"

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION iii

Drifting or Steering

In the first place, as I have already instinc- tively implied, men have quite naturally and universally compared the two kinds of lives to drifting and steering. They have virtually asserted here the necessity that a man should either hold or surrender the helm of his life — should either have adopted some real goal, or have allowed himself aimlessly to drift. And the latter form of life has seemed to men essentially frivolous, the former, essentially earnest. That is simply to say that the first great decision of the earnest life must be to have decision in it. As Professor James says :

If the "searching of our heart and reins" be the purpose of this human drama, then what is sought seems to be what effort we can make. He who can make none is but a shadow ; he who can make much is a hero. The huge world that girdles us about puts all sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Some of the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the questions we answer in articulately formu- lated words. But the deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of the will and tightening of our heart-strings as we say, " Yes, I will even have it so .'"

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Put, now, in contrast with this dumb de- termined will, that common constant ''eva- sion of life's proof" to which we all are tempted, that cowardly skulking around the call for decision, that instinctive refusal to be alone, quietly to think, and squarely to face life's facts. Life requires a choice.

II

Domination by Feeling or by Rational Purpose

What does it mean, psychologically, to drift or to steer one's life ? It may be said prob- ably to be the difference between allowing one's life to be dominated by momentary feeling or by rational purpose. The man who is willing to let his course be decided in every case by his passing mood has evidently given up any rational guidance of his life. He may boast himself of his freedom, but he is really a slave of his circumstances ; for the feeling which he allows to determine his course is the immediate response to the circumstances. The man for whom it is sufficient reason al- ways to say ''I don't feel like it," thereby gives up a man's life, and accepts the destiny of a chip on the waters. Moods or rational pur- pose ? that is the inevitable alternative.

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 113

III

Loyalty or Disloyalty

Or one may put the contrast between the two kinds of lives which men have always recognized as the contrast between loyalty and disloyalty ; between fidelity and treach- ery to the best one knows. And the distinc- tion cuts deep. One may find his friend very faulty, very imperfect, even vacillating, and still maintain his friendship ; but the one thing that a personal relation cannot stand is ulti- mate treachery and disloyalty. Whatever one's ideal, whatever his professed friendship, if he is at bottom disloyal to it, if in it he has proved a traitor, he has thereby passed under the judgment of his own eternal con- tempt ; he has committed the sin, as Profes- sor Royce says, which is essentially unpar- donable. For even if God can forgive it, the man cannot forgive himself.

What I point out (Professor Royce writes) is that, if a man has won practically a free and conscious view of what his honor requires of him, the reverse side of this view is also present. This reverse side takes the form of knowing what, for this man himself, it would mean to be willfully false to his honor. One who knows that he freely serves his cause, knows that he could, if he I

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chose, become a traitor. And if indeed he freely serves his cause, he knows whether or no he could for- give himself if he willfully became a traitor. Whoever, through grace, has found the beloved of his life, and now freely lives the life of love, knows that he could, if he chose, betray his beloved. And he knows what esti- mate his own free choice now requires him to put upon such betrayal. Choose your cause, your beloved, and your moral ideal, as you please. What I now point out is that so to choose is to imply your power to define what, for you, would be the unpardonable sin if you committed it. This unpardonable sin would be betrayal.

There is no evading the contrast between fidelity and betrayal.

IV

Following One's Conscience or Not

Men have more commonly characterized the two types of life as the life of following one's conscience or not following it. It may be a very imperfect conscience that one has ; his sense of obligation may lack in enlighten- ment, in breadth and depth and delicacy of perception ; nevertheless, if he is utterly true to the best he knows, he is living a life dia- metrically opposed to the life of the man who, with keener sense of duty, deliberately turns his back upon it. The finally testing question

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 115

in life is not whether you measure up to some other's conscience for you, but simply whether you measure up to your own conscience, to your own vision of duty. One's own unful- filled vision ! — this it is that condemns.

The Surrender or Not, to the Scientific Spirit

Or one might put the difference between the essentially earnest and the essentially frivolous life by saying it is like the difference between the all-round surrender or not, to such a demand as the scientific spirit makes — the demand for a passion for reality, a passion for truth, and for utter fidelity to it. No generation has had this decision thrust upon it more imperatively than our own. The great achievements of modern science are just so many individual and detailed demonstra- tions that the universe belongs to the men who will face the facts, who are determined to find the truth, and equally determined to do the truth. No other generation ever had so little excuse for cherishing prejudice, and for turning aside from the path of utter intellec- tual integrity. And in the end such a decision

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must carry with it all the achievements of man's higher moral and religious life. Man's whole nature is so intrinsically a unity that a genuine passion for the truth cannot fail to affect the entire life.

VI

The Larger Life or the Lesser Good

Or, once again, one may say that the deci- sion for which life calls is the decision between the determination to seek the larger life, the utmost of which we are capable, even under the guise of self-denial, or constant content with the lesser good. This is perhaps, as I have elsewhere pointed out,^ the special form of temptation to which our own peculiarly complex and distracted age is subject. Our times offer the choice of so many lesser and yet considerable goods, that we find it peculiarly easy to sacrifice the highest to what is, after all, only indifferently good. It mightily con- cerns the earnest man that he should have overcome for himself this deadly peril of the lower attainment.

1 See Religion as Life, Chap. I, on " The Peril of the Lesser Good."

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VII

Wilful or Obedient

From a little different point of view, men have often characterized the two types of life by the words "wilful" and "obedient." The words represent, no doubt, in part, the differ- ence between two natural temperaments — the temperament of self-assertion, and the temperament of self-surrender. And so far as it is only this contrast that is in mind, we have no right to say that the true life lies in either the one direction or the other. All true living involves both self-assertion and self-surrender; both individual independence and fellowship with other men. But back of the terms "wilful" and "obedient," there lies a more fundamental ethical distinction — the distinction between the selfishly wilful life and the life which is willing to subordinate its own selfish "want" and will to the larger considerations of the general good. An es- sentially wilful life is one to which many of us find ourselves greatly tempted, but it is not the less indubitably a life essentially wrong and unworthy. It concerns the man who is am- bitious for the best, to make certain that he is not leading a simply wilful life; that he is

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not mistaking his own selfish obstinacy for conscientious scruples. "Great and sacred," says Martineau, "is obedience; he who is not able, in the highest majesty of manhood, to obey, with clear and open brow, a Law higher than himself, is barren of all faith and love; and tightens his chains, moreover, in struggling to be free."

VIII

Following Duty or Pleasure

Lowell phrases the contrast, in his poem "The Parting of the Ways," as the contrast between the following of duty or the following of pleasure. Doubtless this contrast, too, has often been used in a false and unwarranted fashion. In a universe that is the creation of a righteous God, it cannot be that duty and happiness shall always be dissociated. And unquestionably there has been much false reasoning upon this seeming contrast. But Lowell himself illustrates in his poem how pleasure followed for its own sake proves wholly disillusioning, and how duty followed in indifi"erence to pleasure gives the unex- pected and great reward of happiness. And the old contrast has still its great element of

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 119

truth. For he who makes pleasure his aim will certainly live an unworthy life. And he who is in dead earnest, on the other hand, to find out what the call of duty, ^' stern daughter of God," is, and to obey it, will live not only a life of worthiness, but will find in it the deep- est satisfaction that life can give. To make duty grim and sour is doubtless a kind of implicit blasphemy, for it denies that God's will is a loving will. But one must just as straightly and squarely recognize that for a full-orbed man to devote his life to the pur- suit of pleasure is essential failure. For duty means the call of a man's own highest ideal. When he fails to follow that, he fails indeed.

IX

Taking on or Refusing the Will of God

This implies the contrast, that the religious man is in the habit of making, between taking on or refusing the will of God as the supreme law of one's life. If there be such a God at all as Christ reveals, there can be no broader or more fundamental way than this, of putting the contrast between the lives of men. Men of the religious spirit have instinctively felt that a true man ought to be able to say, after

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Christ, " I am come, not to do mine own will but the will of him that sent me" ; and that it belongs to the very essence of life so to choose the will of God, "with that stoop of the soul which in bending upraiseth it too." Let a man, now, make clear to himself what the mere presence of such a ruling purpose in his life would do. If I truly have just one aim in every situation — the aim to know and to do the will of God — how certainly will the entire atmosphere of my life be affected by this ruling purpose. As I have elsewhere pointed out, such a supreme purpose to know and do the will of God, utterly taken on, thereby lifts the life above personal caprice and prejudice. It inevitably clears one's judgment. It makes a sure road to the knowledge of all needful vital truth. It brings singleness and simplicity — the very secret of greatness — into the soul. Such single- minded devotedness to the one duty in hand gives great power of work as well, and great relief from anxious responsibility. And so far as one has thrown himself with all his soul into line with the eternal plans of God, so far he may know that the permanence and triumph of the divine purpose are his. For "he that doeth the will of God abideth for- ever."

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Speak, History ! who are life's victors ?

Unroll thy long annals and say — Are they those whom the world called the victors, who

won the success of a day ? The martyrs or Nero ? The Spartans who fell at

Thermopylae's tryst, Or the Persians and Xerxes ? His judges or Socrates ?

Pilate or Christ ?

X

Deep-going Ethical Decision, even with- out Religious Faith

Even when one's religious conviction is seriously clouded, a deep-going ethical deci- sion that confronts the two kinds of lives and chooses with all one's power the right, not only solves the central issue of life, but may bring as well a great new sense of relation to God, as in Dr. Bushnell's own case. Dr. Bushnell's sermon upon "The Dissolving of Doubts" was the outcome of his own experience. In the year 183 1 he was a tutor in Yale College.

The winter was marked by a religious revival. (I quote his life.) What, then, in this great revival was this man to do ? and what was to become of him .? Here he was in the glow of his ambition for the future, tasting keenly of a new success, his fine passage at arms in the editorial chair of a New York daily, ready to be admitted to the bar, successful and popular as a College

122 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

Instructor, but all at sea in doubt, and default reli- giously. That baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire compassed him all about. When the work was at its height, he and his division of students, who fairly worshipped him, stood unmoved apparently, when all beside were in a glow.

It was in the chapel of Yale College, appro- priately, that Dr. Bushnell, years after, in the sermon mentioned above, drew the sketch of his own experience, as that of another.

A kind of leaden aspect overhangs the world. Till, finally, pacing his chamber some day, there comes up suddenly the question, "Is there then no truth that I do believe ?" "Yes, there is this one, now that I think of it; there is a distinction of right and wrong that I never doubted, and I see not how I can ; I am even quite sure of it.'* Then forthwith starts up the ques- tion, "Have I then ever taken the principle of right for my law ? I have done right things as men speak ; have I ever thrown my life out on the principle to become all it requires of me?" "No, I have not, consciously, I have not. Ah ! then, here is something for me to do ! No matter what becomes of my questions — nothing ought to become of them, if I cannot take a first prin- ciple, so inevitably true and live in it." The very sug- gestion seems to be a kind of revelation. It is even a relief to feel the conviction it brings. "Here then," he says, "will I begin. If there is a God, as I rather hope there is, and very dimly believe, he is a right God. If I have lost him in wrong, perhaps I shall find him In right. Will he not help me } or perchance, even be

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 123

discovered to me?" Now the decisive moment is come. He drops on his knees, and there he prays to the dim God, dimly felt, confessing the dimness for honesty's sake, and asking for help that he may begin a right life. He bows himself on it, as he prays, choosing it to be henceforth his unalterable, eternal endeavor. It is an awfully dark prayer in the look of it ; but the truest and best he can make, the better and the more true, that he puts no orthodox colors on it; and the prayer and the vow are so profoundly meant that his soul is borne up, into God's help, as it were, by some unseen chariot, and permitted to see the opening of heaven, even sooner than he opens his eyes. He rises, and it is as if he had gotten wings. The whole sky is luminous about him. It is the morning, as it were, of a new eternity. After this, all troublesome doubt of God's reality is gone, for he has found him ! A being so profoundly felt, must inevitably be.

The light would not, in all cases, come at once, so clearly and fully as here ; but it will come ! To bow oneself with all one's soul on this basic decision to do the right, this is the challenge. All else can wait.

XI

The Love of the Father or the Love of THE World

Far back in the history of Christianity, in the strong sense of the conflict of the spirit of the new faith with the old spirit in the world,

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there arose another way of putting this con- trast between lives — the love of the Father and the love of the world. "Love not the world," wrote the old Christian pastor, "neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the vain glory of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof ; but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever." Jesus put the same essential contrast in his words, "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." "No man can serve two masters." It seems an old-fashioned phrasing to us now, and yet it never concerned any generation more than ours. How perennial and how modern the antithesis still is, Mrs. Comer's recent story, "The Massey Money," illustrated. Old Jabez Massey is nearing his end, and giving his last instructions to his niece, Jane Dreer, whom he means to make his heir.

"When you come to die, you must pick and choose as I am doing. I lay it on you that you find me a lady for your heir!"

"Your notion of a lady, now, — what is it, Jabez ?" He tottered to his feet again and lifted his hands

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to heaven. His face was terrible. I seemed to see something hard and avaricious tearing its way up from the bottom of his soul, as though it were an evil spirit going out of him.

"On<? whom the dollar doesn^t dominate, by God!^' he cried, and fell back in his chair.

"I lay it on you, Jane," and he bent forward as he spoke, dragging his words as if they weighed a ton, his sharp old eyes boring into mine like gimlets all the while, "I lay it on you, Jane, that from this hour you watch yourself until you see what the Massey money does with you. When you come to your end of days, tell some one, whom you will, what it has been to you and done to you. Tell them the very truth ! It is just common money, like that of other men, no better, not much worse — but I have seen it work. I watched my father and my mother, I watched my brothers and my sister. Most of all I watched — myself," said he. "No use to tell you what I've seen — no use ! But I lay it on you that you watch and see."

And now Jane Dreer, near the end of her own days, is recounting to Mayannah, the widow of her son Harold, her own experience with the Massey money.

"These women we know are like you and me, Mayannah, cumberers of the ground ! It used to make me furious some nights in those Southern hotels, the way you could hear 'em spatting on the cold cream all down the corridor, from room to room. And yet

126 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

there's no harm in cold cream. It's only that the women are all so fat and idle and pampered, and never thinking of a thing except to spend. I came to spending too late, I suppose. I can't help thinking with Jabez that there must be other things to a lady, though I don't claim there's been much else for twenty years to me. I can look back and see how I had the money and I spent it, but it never made me really rich. I've been an idle, discontented, luxury-loving old woman, rest- less, and craving I don't know what. If anybody's been the better for my being alive since Harold died, I don't know who it is.

" I suppose you want the Massey money as much as I did, and plan as I did what fine things you are going to do with it." . . . "But I tell you, Mayannah Dreer, you aren't Jabez Massey's lady and the money will not go to you!" . . . She looked at the silent figure across the room for a response, and as she looked Mayannah literally flashed to her feet. . . .

"Mother Dreer," said this Mayannah swiftly, "there are a few things I simply have to tell you if I die for it. I am tired of turning the other cheek. It's true I've lived with you for the last ten years, and you've grown more discontented every year. / can tell you what the money has done for you, — it has blinded you to the very thing you are trying to find ! You will never find a lady while you look for her with Jane Dreer's eyes 1 I know a dozen women like the one you have been hunting. So do you, but, don't you see, they can't show that side of themselves to you. You don't call it out, and you can't see it when it shows itself. It has got to be in you before you can know it is in them ! — And that is Gospel truth, and it is the worst thing the

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 127

Massey money has done for you. Why, you wouldn't know heaven itself if you saw it with those eyes !"

And then Jane Dreer, in reaction from her first hot and sudden anger, finally sees more clearly and dictates her will :

I give and bequeath all property, both real and personal, of which I may die possessed, to Mayannah Dreer, once wife, now widow, of my son.

And this I do in fulfilment of a private compact between myself and Jabez Massey, whose heir I was, to the effect that his wealth should pass into a "lady's" hands. I have searched this land and Europe for such an one as he described to me, but my eyes were holden, for I found not one among the people who fed me at their tables and broke bread at mine.

At last I saw the woman I was seeking, sitting at my hearth. I have despised her parentage, but her heart is higher than my heart. She is gentle, simple, and tender; she is fearless, patient, warm of heart. She knows neither guile nor greed. She was the wife of my son, and she worshipped him. To whom should I give this wealth if not to her } It cannot curse her, for she is beyond the domination of the dollar.

The word of judgment ever is :

Thy choice was earth ; thou didst attest

'Twas fitter spirit should subserve

Flesh, than flesh refine to nerve

Beneath the spirit's play.

. . . Thou art, shut

Out of the heaven of spirit ; glut

Thy sense upon the world ; 'Tis thine

Forever — take it !

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XII

Selfish or Unselfish

Our age of the social consciousness feels even more strongly the contrast between lives as selfish or unselfish. It knows something at least of the vital difference between the life of ingrained selfishness, on the one hand, and the life of love and service on the other. The great commandment of love was never more at home in the thought of any age. It feels the appeal of Christ's solemn word, "Inas- much as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me." No modern man can quite excuse himself, thus, from avowedly choosing between the essentially friendly and the essentially un- friendly life. And the essentially friendly life must be the life of universal good-will that draws no lines of race prejudice.

Prone in the road he lay, Wounded and sore bested ; Priests, Levites, passed that way, And turned aside the head. They were not hardened men In human service slack : His need was great : but then His face, you see, was black.

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XIII

Disciple of Christ or Not

This whole point of view is so essentially Christ's that it inevitably suggests the pe- culiarly Christian statement of the contrast between lives — counting oneself a disciple of Christ or not. Is there any better or surer way of putting the vital test to lives ? Even John Stuart Mill could say : "Not even now, could it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve of our life." This contrast between the man who counts himself first and foremost a dis- ciple of Christ, and him who does not, will include all that is true in the other contrasts already considered. And as Mill's own word would suggest, it makes the righteous life real and concrete and vital and personal and spirit- ual, and at the same time gives to the moral life the religious basis of the surest relation to God. We know, in fact, no touchstone of character so sure as the spirit of Christ's own life. As surely as the magnet draws the iron filings out of the sand, so surely, it seems to us, does the character of Christ, where it is truly

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seen, appeal to the truest in character every- where. He is the great master of the art of life. The race has no heritage so rich as that it has in its priceless inheritance from his life. Here, as we have already seen, in his teaching and living is the best insight into the laws of life. Here is the highest in character. Here are the supreme ideals and standards for in- dividual and community and nation. Here are the world's crowning moral convictions and hopes. Here, too, is the supreme dynamic for true living. And, just because of all this, here, too, are the surest revelation of God, and the greatest persuasive of the love of God — a life able to call out absolute trust. How can a man be dead in earnest to get the best insights, the best character, the best ideals and standards, the best convictions and hopes, the best dynamic and the best revelation of God, and not put his life into the closest possible relation to the life of this master of all life ^ Is there conceivable any better way of making the great life decision for which all our existence calls, any better way of seeking the largest life, any surer way to God, than by taking on determinedly and avowedly the discipleship of Christ ?

Life's crucial questions, then, are insistent,

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and are such as these : Are you to drift or steer? Is there to be for you that dumb turning of the will and tightening of your heart- strings as you say — ''Yes, I will even have It so!" or Is all decision to be lacking? Are moods to rule your life or an all-pervading rational purpose ? Are you to be fundamen- tally loyal to your own best vision, or disloyal with the disloyalty you yourselves can never forgive ? In a scientific generation have you given the passion for the truth full course with you, or has It seemed a small matter ? Have you defeated for yourselves the perpetual peril of the lesser good, or have you yielded to It ? In the depths of your Inner life are you wilful or obedient ? Are you following duty or pleas- ure ? Have you taken on the will of God as the supreme law of your life, or have you re- jected it ? Have you ever bowed yourselves, like Dr. Bushnell, with all your souls on the basic decision to do the right as God gives you to see the right, and let Its divine light In on your lives ? In this age of stupendous material resources, are your lives to be dominated by the dollar or emancipated from It ? Have you committed yourselves to the unmistak- ably friendly life or to the unfriendly life ? Do you count yourselves first and foremost

132 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

determinedly and avowedly disciples of the Master of Life, or has his heroic sifting call found small response in you ?

These, in the experience of the race, we may well believe, are life's searching testing ques- tions.

And It Is essentially one decision which a man makes in answer to them all, — life's fundamental decision. It gives a new sense of the unity of all earnest living, to see how alike and how inevitable these decisions are. And a man will be helped in making and carry- ing through his life's fundamental decision by a better understanding of life's fundamental paradox, to which we next turn.

CHAPTER V

THE QUESTION OF LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX — THE QUESTION OF LIBERTY AND LAW: THE LAW OF LIBERTY

The Fundamental Nature of the Problem

We turn to another fundamental question, both theoretical and practical, a perennial problem, a problem that has occupied men since they began to ponder spiritual issues ; a problem with which great thinkers in phi- losophy and morals and religion have been engaged ; a problem that still has to do with the very essence of life for every earnest man; and a problem peculiarly demanding to be rethought, just now — the problem of liberty and law.

Our theme — The Law of Liberty — states a paradox ; but it is a paradox that men have always to solve. How can I have liberty without license ? How can I enthrone the law of righteousness in my life without legal- ism ? How can I accept the redemption of

133

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religion, of divine grace, and still keep a character genuinely my own ? These are questions both profound and intensely prac- tical.

How difficult men have found the solution of this problem, the whole spiritual history of the race bears witness. It is the problem of prophet and priest in Judaism ; the prob- lem of faith and works and antinomianism in the New Testament ; the problem of justifica- tion by faith in the Reformation ; the prob- lem of the Ethics of Kant, with its insistence on self-legislation ; the problem of Nietzsche — to name no other; the problem of "free lovers" of all kinds and times; and, in one form, the problem of democracy itself — the problem of self-government. It is the great life problem that Christ believed himself to have solved.

We may well take our start from the New Testament ; for all the elements of the prob- lem are there illustrated : Judaistic legalism and antinomianism ; the beginnings of medie- val asceticism and mysticism ; the anxieties of those who have seen the doctrines of the free grace of God and of salvation by faith abused ; the other anxieties of those who see Christianity becoming only another legalism ;

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and, soaring above all, the expression of the abounding life of free children of the Heavenly Father.

No fewer than five books of the New Testa- ment are directly and primarily occupied with this theme : Galatians and Romans, whose watchword is "For freedom did Christ set us free ; stand fast therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage"; James, which sounds the warning, "Faith, if it have not works, is dead in itself"; and Second Peter and the curious little book of Jude, that are warning against a licentious antinomianism.

The authors of James, Second Peter, and Jude have seen the great doctrines of justifi- cation by faith, of salvation by grace, of the free forgiveness of God, and of Christian liberty, made an excuse for licentious absence of character, and are calling men back to the insistent ethical test in religion: "Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deluding your own selves."

Paul in Galatians and Romans has seen all freedom and joy, not only, but all inner righteousness, and all grace and beauty of character, so sapped by a hard and haughty legalism, that he glories in the deliverance

136 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

that Christ has brought from legal bondage; and his great words are, inevitably, faith, and love, and grace, and forgiveness, and liberty. These were ideas too great for his generation rightly to grasp, and their abuse produced a reaction to a new legalism that tainted Chris- tianity for dreary years. But to Paul it was inconceivable that faith, and love, and grace, and forgiveness, and liberty should mean license. The trust and the love called out by the matchless gracious personal revelation of God in Christ stirred new powers in him, and held him to a grateful and quenchless am- bition for such a life as Christ's, and brought him victory where before he had failed. The free grace and forgiveness of a holy God, such as Christ's life portrayed, could but mean that God was pledged to cooperate with him in the attainment of a life worthy of a child of God. Like Christ, he himself found his highest liberty in devotion to his Father's will. No man, he was sure, could really be drawn to Christ and not become like him — not by painful legal performances, but by the healthful contagion of Christ's own spirit. Paul had caught, thus, a new vision of God's purpose concerning men. He had come to see that men were not made to be

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 137

petty egoists, shut up within the narrow walls of their own separate selves, but that they were created on so large a plan that they could not come to their best independently either of one another or of God, — that they were made in every fiber of their beings for such fellowships. To hold back from these fellowships was to insure defeat. It was an utterly false and mistaken pride, therefore, that in one's struggle for character shut the door on other lives, human and divine, which were really part and parcel of one's self.

II

Why this Problem Constantly Recurs

Let us stop a moment to make plain how absolutely essential both freedom and char- acter, both law and liberty, are, and how vital to all satisfying life is the inner meaning of both contentions.

What, in the first place, is law at bottom — all law that ultimately a man ought to obey ? It is intended, evidently, to secure a society united in the pursuit of certain great common goods ; it is a way of life ; — a way that the experience of the race indicates that it is desirable for the common good of all

138 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

that all men follow ; a way so good that it is felt to be embodied in our natures as the will of our Creator for us, and therefore a way of life.

When human law or custom becomes some- thing else ; when it serves no common good ; when it will not bear the test of racial experi- ence ; when we cannot believe it represents a true ought or a true interpretation of the will of God, it thereby loses all authority as law, and the ethical law in the true sense abrogates the law falsely so called. Not all revolt against existing law, therefore, is law- lessness. Many a smug but dire injustice is hidden under law.

The insistent and eternal demand for char- acter is the demand for obedience to a law that can be conceived to be the will of an all- loving God. Now to try to get away from that law is to flee from life, for it is an attempt to get away from one's own highest ideal. That is not to come into larger life, but ulti- mately to take all self-respect and dignity and worth out of living. The demand for liberty too frequently forgets that some sphere of order and law is essential to give freedom itself any value, and so it turns its revolt against a law into a revolt against law itself;

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 139

its revolt against a particular form of order into a revolt against all order. There is a widespread menacing tendency in all spheres of our modern life — the tendency to forget that self-control is a prime condition of every- thing worth while in life. "Letting oneself go" is a good road to nothing except insanity. There is much talk of so-called "personal liberty," that really means liberty to debauch the community, liberty to make conditions far harder for both personal and social progress.

But the very fact that conceptions of law can so change ; that imperfect, developing men can at one stage find the preservation of a common good in a law that later seems to them a hindrance to growth and to larger life, itself illustrates and justifies the perennial demand for liberty. Conditions change. Men develop. New ideals arise. Readjust- ment is imperative. What adjustment, is always the question.

All men agree that in seeking to attain a common good there must be no unnecessary interference with the freedom of the individual. Institutions, the state, the law itself, all ulti- mately exist for the greater good of individual citizens. Too heavy a price in individual

I40 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

freedom may easily be paid for a well-recog- nized common good.

But the justification of the demand for liberty lies much deeper than this. The one thing that the individual has to give to the common good is himself, his fully realized possibilities. But this complete self-realiza- tion is also his own individual highest good. From both points of view, therefore, there is required the freedom for the individual to develop his largest possibilities, and this re- quires something more than selfish self-will. And law — the expressed will of the whole community — must often come in, not to hinder, but to preserve this freedom of the individual, his full initiative — to protect the individual against the unwarranted aggres- sions of others. The community suffers wher- ever any individual citizen has not the liberty to make his full contribution to the common life. From this angle it is hardly too much to say that law itself exists to insure the highest and largest liberty to the individual.

But the demand for liberty has a still deeper source. A man is not truly a man unless he has an inner life of his own ; freedom of thought, freedom of investigation, freedom to be himself in his inmost life. Character

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 141

cannot be laid upon him from without. He must see for himself and choose for himself. A fundamentally good society, therefore, is not a society in which every wrong act is forbidden by law and prevented by an omnis- cient and omnipotent police force, but a society in which men choose for themselves obedience to the highest ideals they have seen. But this requires liberty at every step, as well as the developing power of law. The great aim of human life and society is to develop free men who choose the right, not to get a certain sort of external conduct. God, him- self, counts this free choice of the right so infinite in value as to be worth the terrible price of all the sin and suffering which the abuse of men's freedom has brought into the world. He has given men no play freedom, but a freedom terribly real. And human society in all its lawmaking may never forget the eternal need of freedom.

In the solution of this constant paradox of liberty and law, men must therefore learn patience with men ; patience with the blunderers of the race ; patience with its born legislators ; patience with its born rebels ; patience with its common men fighting their way slowly to character; patience with its

142 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

genuises and prophets, with their new and sudden visions ; for both law and liberty must be kept, both character and freedom.

The constant recurrence of the problem of liberty and law will be understood also when we see that this problem is at bottom the problem of the radical and the conservative, and the problem of "absolute natural right," on the one hand, and of ''historic legitimate right," on the other ; the problem of justice to the past and of justice to the present and future. And all are represented at any time in society by the members of three genera- tions. But just as a sphere of law is neces- sary to give meaning to freedom, and just as the preservation of freedom of initiative must be the very aim of law; so the radical and conservative at bottom have similar goals. The radical does not wish to root up all the past, but only the evil and the ineffective for good as he conceives it; but he recognizes that in thus rooting up the faulty he is cer- tain to sacrifice much else. The conservative does not wish to preserve all the past, but only all the good of the past; but he recog- nizes that in preserving all of the good he is certain to keep, in the structure of society, much evil also. Each believes he preserves

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 143

a balance of good by his method; and this balance of good is the real aim in both cases.

Like the differences between the advocates of law and liberty, the differences between the radical and the conservative are to a large extent temperamental. They go back finally, probably, to the fundamental paradox of the inner life — docility and initiative, self-sur- render and self-assertion. Character in the large sense, as I have elsewhere said, "re- quires both self-assertion and self-surrender, both individuality and deference, both the assertion of a law for oneself and the reason- able yielding to others, both loyalty to con- viction and open-mindedness, both free inde- pendence and obedience."

And for all social progress, in like manner, both temperaments represent indispensable human needs. For any solid and enduring social progress there must be historical con- tinuity, on the one hand, and constant read- justment on the other. We do not live in a static world ; we are not static beings. We are always in process. A blind conservatism and a blind radicalism are both therefore im- possible. To keep even the good of the past in new conditions requires adjustment. To get rid of even the most certain evils of the

144 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

past requires that the new method or custom shall be fitted into what men have already attained. Free spontaneity in obedience to constantly bettering ideals, — this must be the goal of both radical and conservative ; of defenders both of liberty and of law.

Ill

The New Testament Solution of the Problem

Have we modern men of the twentieth cen- tury any better solution ^ All five of those New Testament books, which are occupied with the problem of law and liberty, seek to show how one may attain character and avoid legalism ; how he may keep freedom of life and be true to the highest standards. They aim to point the way to definite growth in character, as necessarily involved in the very idea of the Christian life. Can we penetrate their solution ?

Our theme suggests the lines on which this paradox of the moral and religious life may be solved. The passage in James that con- tains the theme runs, you will remember, in this fashion : ''But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deluding your own selves.

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 145

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a mirror : for he beholdeth himself, and goeth away, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But he that looketh into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and so continueth, being not a hearer that forgetteth but a doer that worketh, this man shall be blessed in his doing" (James i : 22-25). Here, plainly, there has come to the writer an illuminating insight into the meaning of any true law of God. It is a law of a man's own being, a revealing to him of the lines along which life lies. The perfect law is a law of liberty, because it is the law of one's own being truly discerned and stated. In obeying this inner law of his own nature one has liberty, the only true liberty, and is "blessed" thereby. Such a law simply states the true self which we are to realize. We can have freedom only in de- veloping toward the goal involved in our in- most natures. Here is freedom to follow the most fundamental trends of our natures, and here, too, is the character that grows out of fulfilled ideals. The conception is identical with the new conception which modern science suggests of the laws of nature, as not hin-

146 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

drances to life but as ways to conquest and larger life.

James here starts from the side of law, but Paul, starting from the side of the inner free- dom, reaches essentially the same conclusion. ''For in Christ Jesus," he says, "neither cir- cumcision availeth anything, nor uncircum- cision ; but faith working through love." "For ye, brethren, were called for freedom; only use not your freedom for an occasion to the flesh, but through love be servants one to another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this : thou shalt love thy neigh- bor as thyself." Paul, too, shows that he has had a flash of illumination lighting up the whole paradox of law and liberty to its depths. No external law, he insists, can set free the inner man. But the great revelation of God in Christ can call out supreme trust and love, can appeal at once to the inmost in man. Only a great trust can thus profoundly call us out, we getting such a vision of the fatherly will of God in Christ that we can but trust him, and God so trusting us that we cannot be unworthy of that trust. Such a trust or faith is bound to "work"; it will " out " ; it cannot help expressing itself in a reflection of the great personality that has

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 147

aroused it to such trust and love; — "faith working through love," inevitably expressing Its love to God in a sharing in his life of self- giving love for men. Such a love has the very essence of all true law in itself. It ful- fills all law. Such a faith, just because it springs from within and works through love, will be free and spontaneous, all its outer con- duct prompted by an inner spirit. Liberty here insures law.

How surely this must follow on any true conception of Christianity; how surely the grace of God in Christ carries one on to a life like God's own; how surely the freedom of religion insures an ethical life, can be very briefly put from various angles.

In the first place, the Christian is a learner of Christ, and hence of course makes the ideal of Christ's life that of his own.

Or, the religious man seeks above all, in the very passion of his religious desire, to share in the life of God himself, and the God whom Christ reveals is in his very essence self-giving love. One cannot share that life and not give himself in loving service to men.

Naturally, therefore, and again, the New Testament came to conceive of a truly ethical life as the inevitable fruit of the religious

148 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

acceptance of Christ. Or, as James puts it, the inner spirit is conceived as a fountain out of which all external expression comes.

Or, through a deeper conception of law, as we have seen, God's law is felt to be only a loving hint of the line of life for us ; the ethical command itself, therefore, becoming a revelation of the love of God, so that we see that in obeying the ethical command we are simply following the laws of life into a steadily enlarging life.

IV

The Relation of the Christian Solution OF THE Paradox to Other Theories of Life

This conception is so true to Christ's own thought of the will of God as a Father's will, as well as to that of James and Paul, and to that of the scientific conception of law, that we shall do well to try to think it through a little further, and see its relation to other theories of life.

A large part of the appeal of selfish pleas- ure, for example, lies in its seeming promise of larger liberty, of further life. "I want to do as I like ;" ''I want to see life," the pleas-

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 149

ure-seeker urges. "Live while you live," he exhorts. And even the lowest selfish sense pleasures doaiford some emotional experiences, that give temporarily a new sense of freedom and elation and interest, and so some seem- ing immediate extension of life. Now men have a right to expect from life freedom and interest and enlargement. And this natural cry of the pleasure-seeker shows that con- tenders for the ideal may not lightly surrender Christ's idea of religion as giving abundant life, but must steadily insist on a conception of goodness that can be permanently interest- ing. One cannot hope to succeed in con- stantly whipping his soul back from all that he counts of interest and of real value. Men need at this point constant enlightenment. No virtue is safe that is not both intelligent and militant.

And the clear-sighted man has now come to see that to think of moral laws as hin- drances to liberty and life is a great mistake. He now conceives them rather as formulating the outcome of the experience of the race. They state, that is, the ways in which we can best satisfy the whole man, the ways in which we get the most out of these natures of ours, the ways in which our beings were

I50 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

meant to act. To refuse to obey such laws written in our constitutions is as absurd as it would be to refuse to obey the directions of the manufacturer for the running of a superb automobile. The directions are not to hamper us, but to enable us to get the utmost out of our machine. Only a fool would ignore them and pride himself meanwhile on his liberty. In fact, one gets no real liberty in the use of a machine until its laws have become like inner laws for him, and it is second nature and auto- matic for him to obey them. It is exactly so concerning the laws of our bodies and minds. If we ignore the fact that we are made for action, for heroic achievement, for fine per- sonal relations, we shall thereby gain neither freedom nor larger life, but make, rather, the largest life impossible to us. When men so act, they are turning back to lower and cor- rupt ends, to ends abandoned in the upreach- ing of the race.

Indeed, religion itself is probably rightly conceived as growing out of men's constantly extending claim on life, men's persistent re- fusal to be satisfied with the finite. "Noth- ing," says Johanna Ambrosius, "is so insa- tiable as the human heart. If it has enough to eat and drink, it longs for costly vessels for

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 151

the food to be served in, and once it possesses these it would ask for the blue heavens as a tablecloth." Men have unquenchable thirsts for extending experience, for permanent out- looks and hopes, for constantly enlarging life, in a word, for love ; — thirsts that God alone can satisfy. The highest law and the largest liberty here again come together. The constant seeming antinomy between pleasure and duty, between the religious and the irreligious life, and the frequent feeling that duty and religion limit rather than en- large life, are, consequently, usually due to false conceptions both of happiness and of religion.

On the one hand, the pleasure-seeker is usually thinking of an immediate and partial and selfish satisfaction; forgetting the "long run," forgetting the whole personality, and forgetting all others. And the fleeting, un- satisfying nature of much that is called pleas- ure, and sought as such, is so explained. "Man shall not live by bread alone." In the first place, he is a creature of memory and anticipation; he cannot live simply in the immediate pleasure of the passing moment. In the second place, he is a creature not of appetites only, but of imagination, and reason

152 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

and conscience; he has his whole nature always to reckon with. In the third place, his life is knit up indissolubly with other lives ; they are part and parcel of himself. He is so made. He cannot, therefore, think simply of himself and have largeness of life. In all these ways a false conception of happiness misleads. The deceptive nature of alcohol, as shown under the cold analysis of scientific experiment, precisely illustrates the misleading nature of the appeal of the immediate and partial and selfish pleasure.

On the other hand, the claim of the moral and religious life may also be misconceived. Sometimes, with a false asceticism, it is made to deny the body's legitimate place. Some- times its goodness is conceived only nega- tively and legalistically, and so robbed of interest and spontaneity, as a mere emptying of life, or a hard, disagreeable, and useless task arbitrarily imposed. But such a con- ception has nothing to do with Christ's thought of a steadily advancing, intelligent, and unselfish entrance into the loving will of God for all men. That carries with it all great causes, all high ideals, all inspiring devotions and enthusiasms, and alone holds the promise of a permanently satisfying life.

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 153

V

Modern Examples of the Paradox

How urgently our own time is demanding that we rethink this whole problem of liberty and law, violently opposed tendencies show.

On the one hand there is the host of re- formers who are seeking to write into law all kinds of imaginable human gains, for- getting too often the imperative necessity, if civilization is really to advance, that men be brought to an inner choice of all real goods. For it is well to remember, as President Had- ley puts it, that "it is easier to pass a radical measure that is going to be evaded than to secure obedience to a conservative one." All of us need to take deeply to heart that advanced legislation is in itself no proof of progress, if there do not accompany it willing- ness to obey the law that expresses the higher ideal. We are not to forget that democracy is no mere matter of form of government or kinds of legislation ; but that democracy goes forward in just the proportion in which self- discipline accompanies it, as Dr. Jacks so incisively reminds us :

The central problem of democracy is the problem of educating the citizen. This, indeed, is a common-

154 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

place ; but there is reason to think that the kind of education required by the citizen, whether as subject or legislator, to qualify him for the new part he has to play, has not been sufficiently considered. What he needs is not merely instruction in political science. He does need that; but he needs something else far more ; something without which all the political science in the world will carry him but a little way. He must learn to obey : and the lesson will be all the more diffi- cult for him to learn because hitherto democracy has been too closely associated with the spirit which prompts him to seek escape from authority. Of all modern democratic governments, with scarcely one exception, it may be said that they were conceived in disobedience and born in rebellion. Their watchword has ever been "liberty"; but "liberty" interpreted in a sense which has obscured its sterner implications. But now that democracy has taken up the task of social reform those sterner implications are coming into view. None but a thoroughly disciplined community can effectually deal, through its Government, with social reform. The idea, too prevalent in certain quarters, that the restraints of social reform will fall exclusively on the rich, the idle, the privileged, is a fond illusion. Every man of us will be put under restraints such as we have never dreamed of; such as few men have ever asked themselves whether they were willing, or even able, to bear. It is well that we should all realize this truth — for it is irrefutable — as we listen to the daring programmes and the glowing promises of political orators.

We must learn to obey. We must gird our-

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 155

selves for that increasing self-discipline that is demanded by advancing social aims.

As opposed to these who are seeking to write all reform into law, and are satisfied therewith, stand the violent emancipators of various classes, like the syndicalists and the militant suffragettes, who imagine that force of itself can bring emancipation to their re- spective classes. Let it be perfectly clear here that there is much of injustice to protest against. It cannot be justly claimed that women have a fair representation in organized society to-day. It cannot be justly claimed that industrial workers in general are fairly sharing in the joint product of labor and capi- tal. The shameless record of the mining cor- porations of Colorado, in the debauching of all the forces of law and justice, is but one piece of evidence. How certainly the selfish lawlessness of the capitalistic class fruits either in the selfish lawlessness of other classes, or in the determination to bring all business under state control, was witnessed some time ago by the conservative Railway Age-Gazette, commenting on current phenomena before the reorganization of the New Haven road : "The real leaders of Socialism in this country are such men as Charles S. Mellen, B. F. Yoakum,

156 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

and the directors of the New Haven, Frisco, and other roads who are too crooked, cowardly, indolent, or incapable to perform the duties of their positions."

Nevertheless, selfish force cannot bring the emancipation of any class. Not even if they could be certainly successful in the use of force, could the emancipation so come. We are learning that the unspeakable folly of war is that it settles nothing ; that after all the fighting is over, the real solution must be reached in other more rational ways. Let the Balkan wars bear witness : intolerable slaughter and suicide of nations, and abso- lutely nothing of value accomplished ! The greater European War seems likely to give a like demonstration. Any cause is safe in just the degree in which it has really won the con- viction of men. The real victory of a cause, therefore, absolutely requires education, per- suasion, and the free choosing of the new goal. The forced victory, even if possible, thus, is a cheap and insecure victory ; the more fundamental and difiicult task still re- mains. A selfish, lawless class victory, that willingly ignores all other human interests, just because it is selfish and lawless, cannot abide. "Nothing is settled until it is settled

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 157

right," is still good doctrine, and more clear now than ever. These causes of the syndi- calist and of the militant suffragette com- plain, not without justification, as we have seen, that society is not doing them justice. But will treacherous use of force remedy that ^ Can men counsel and practice treachery and violence and spread this disease through society, and reap the fruit of loyalty and fair dealing, and not rather make society itself impossible ? Syndicalism is seeking to remedy the selfish lawlessness of the capitalistic class by a like selfish lawlessness on the part of the working class. It is the old fallacy of lynch law. Outrage of humanity cannot be cured by further outrage. Militant suffragism is seeking to win long delayed justice in giving women a fair share in government, by a selfish lawlessness that would set all government at naught. It has not observed even the decen- cies of civilized warfare. It is using mob violence and it is increasingly provoking mob violence. Democracy, we may not forget, means not only ^^//-government but self- government. Those who are to share in that may not appeal to the mob. Nothing is so terrible in human society as fundamental lawlessness, and it was, therefore, that Kant,

158 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

who was no believer in character laid on from without, still felt compelled to say: "If law ceases, all worth of human life on earth ceases too." Set your face like a flint against selfish lawlessness for any cause.

And it is in this same direction that we are to look for the fallacy of "free lovers" of all sorts, who find in the strength of uncontrolled passion its own excuse for being. Their doc- trine is having, just now, a strange recru- descence, and they would fain persuade men that the race has, so far, learned nothing con- cerning the relations of the sexes. That there are many diflicult questions here; that our conventions have not all been justified ; that there have been some strong moral grounds for the extension of divorce; that much that has been written of a revolutionary character has been written in moral earnestness ; that some relations classed legitimate are really less justified, in the sight of God, than some counted illegitimate — all this need not be questioned.

But, on the one hand, where a real ideal has been seriously set up, as by Mrs. Key, for example, it is an ideal much more tenuous and more difficult of realization both by the individual and by society, and hence less

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 159

practicable, and it is fraught with many- dubious consequences that make the ideal itself exceedingly doubtful. It is very diffi- cult to believe that such theories do justice either to the sober lessons of evolution, or to the experience of the race in marriage. When one prominent Feminist can say, — ''Per- sonally I am inclined to believe that the ulti- mate aim of Feminism with regard to mar- riage is the practical suppression of marriage and the institution of free alliance," — one cannot help feeling that there is here disclosed a bland indifference both to experience and to one whole side of the paradox of liberty and law. The race will wisely go slow in giving to wild speculation so great weight in the most important moral questions. Marriage will fail, just as any other institution will fail, when men bring to it only selfish passion. That is a failure, in truth, however, not of an institution, but of men.

But for the most part, these free lovers are not truly concerned with great moral ideals at all. They are thinking of selfish pleasure, and chafe under any permanent obligations. They simply are not willing to pay their part of the price of a decent civilization. And they are pointing to the old, easy, often-

i6o FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

traveled road of selfish indulgence, allowing to impulse supreme control, whatever this may cost some one else. It would be pathetic, if it were not so shameful and so self-contra- dictory, to see how these landers of passion persuade themselves with each new relation that here is a real affinity, here one may find ideals realized, here vow eternal fealty, such as they have just belied in utter treachery in another relation. The very fact that they cannot get away from such idealizing shows how surely any love that is to be at all satis- fying even to a selfish soul, must be thought of as having abiding loyalty. And so long as cause and effect exist in the moral world, treachery, we may be sure, cannot yield the fruits of loyalty; and fine human relations cannot be built up out of a series of infideli- ties. Hateful, mean, selfish treachery — that is what these free lovers are trying to gild. The truth is, that such lives surrender the helm of will to feeling, and give up in these relations moral values altogether. And this is finally to prove traitors to the race's task of an even tolerable civilization.

The careless indifference, too, with which entire classes of society, in their devotion to the pleasure of *'week ends," are willing to

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX i6i

jeopardize the whole great institution of the Sabbath, is simply another illustration of selfish lawlessness. One needs to be no ascetic to see that the conversion of our Sundays into simple pleasure seeking, however innocent in itself, is an immense loss to all the deeper forces that go to the making of any ciliviza- tion deserving the name. Educated men and women, at least, may be asked to do thinking enough not heedlessly to barter one of the great spiritual achievements of the race for a couple of days of house parties and auto riding and golf. Are we going to lose all sense of proportionate values ?

The weekly harvest of death through auto speeding, the like perpetual sacrifice of life and limb and childhood through preventable accidents and bad Industrial conditions, the reputation of American tourists In Europe as souvenir thieves, the shameless way in which supposed respectable people display their thefts from hotels and other sources, the fre- quent heedless disregard of others' rights to property and to quiet by so highly privileged a class as college students — these are all alike symptoms of the old and new disease of selfish lawlessness.

As civilization goes forward It becomes, like

1 62 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

the evolution of animal life, more and more complex and delicate in its adjustments. The forces employed, too, are increasingly powerful/ The ability of the selfish lawlessness of a few to work widespread discomfort and disaster is thereby steadily increased, and the demand for individual self-control in the same meas- ure enlarged. How a whole nation can be terrorized by the selfish lawlessness of a few was demonstrated in Great Britain by the militant suffragettes, and is being demon- strated anew by the growing frightfulness of the European War. One selfish boy and a paint pot can give discomfort to a community for months and even years. A few students regardless of the property rights of surround- ing communities may seriously diminish the privileges of an entire student body and blacken their reputation.

Selfish self-will in any realm, let us be sure, is no true liberty; rather is it a sure road to cutting short our largest liberties. We must rather be able to say with Goethe : "I learned that the unspeakable value of true freedom consisted not in doing what we please, or all that circumstances allow, but in the power of doing at once and without restraint whatever we consider right."

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 163

VI

The Achievement of True Freedom

This true freedom the New Testament not only clearly conceives, but it points the one eternal way to reach it.

Religion itself remains, — what Professor James called it, — the one great unlocker of men's powers, — the one great emancipator of the human soul. Our absolute human dependence still bears witness, how inevitably we are made for God, how certainly we need to become "partakers of the divine nature," if we are to fulfill the purpose of our creation. As surely as man is made capable of religion, so surely is the largest life not possible to him until he opens his being to the tides of the divine life, to the in-working of the Spirit of God. The New Testament emphasis, there- fore, upon the doctrine of the Spirit, is an inevitable emphasis. And the so-called "new thought" of our time is only a less rational putting of the sense of our absolute depend- ence on the Spirit of God. That the New Testament should insist that we are to be born of the Spirit, that we are to walk in the Spirit, that we are to have in us the witness of

i64 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

the Spirit, means, not that there is the magical application to us of some thing or patent process, but the bringing in of a great new personal relation that becomes the source of all else in life, — a new force, a new capacity, a new hope. And this new force of life coun- terworks the forces of death. In the moral as in the physical life, the only real protection against disease and decay is abounding life. And in the light of the doctrine of the Spirit, God's free forgiveness is seen to mean, not the magical setting aside of the consequences of our evil choosing, but the counterworking of those consequences by a new tide of life with its own consequences of further life.

It is only to put the same great method of life in slightly different form, when it is in- sisted, with Paul and with Drummond, that men's greatest need is persistent association with Christ. And it is no outworn way of life, which is so suggested even to the man of the twentieth century. For that simply means that acquaintance with God, as with any other person, must be obtained through his greatest and most significant self-manifes- tation. It is because men have felt that they found just this in Christ that he has come to have for them such supreme significance.

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 165

That this is a real experience and not a vision (says Professor Drummond), that this life is possible to men, is being lived by men to-day, is simple bio- graphical fact. From a thousand witnesses I cannot forbear to summon one. The following are the words of one of the highest intellects this age has known, a man who shared the burdens of his country as few have done, and who, not in the shadows of old age, but in the high noon of his success, gave this confession to the world: "I want to speak to-night only a little, but that little I desire to speak of the sacred name of Christ, who is my life, my inspiration, my hope, and my surety. I cannot help stopping and looking back upon the past. And I wish, as if I had never done it before, to bear witness, not only that it is by the grace of God, but that it is by the grace of God as mani- fested in Christ Jesus, that I am what I am. I recog- nize the sublimity and grandeur of the revelation of God in His eternal fatherhood as one that made the heavens, that founded the earth, and that regards all the tribes of the earth, comprehending them in one universal mercy ; but it is the God that is manifested in Jesus Christ, revealed by His life, made known by the inflections of His feelings, by His discourse, and by His deeds — it is that God that I desire to confess to-night, and of whom I desire to say, ' By the love of God in Christ Jesus I am what I am.' ... In look- ing back upon my experience, that part of my life which stands out, and which I remember most vividly, is just that part that has had some conscious associa- tion with Christ. All the rest is pale, and thin, and lies like clouds on the horizon. Doctrines, systems, measures, methods — what may be called the necessary

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mechanical and external part of worship; the part which the senses would recognize — this seems to have withered and fallen off like leaves of last summer; but that part which has taken hold of Christ abides."

"Can anyone hear this life-music," Profes- sor Drummond adds, "with its throbbing re- frain of Christ, and remain unmoved by envy or desire ? Yet, till we have lived like this we have never lived at all."

In such a vital personal relation to God, through his great self-revelation in Christ, the free grace of religion becomes the natural root of law-abiding character. For only so does the personal fully replace the legal ; only so does solid hope come in ; only so, satisfying freedom and a permanently enlarging life. For as soon as the moral command is seen to be the loving father's will for his children, so soon it is seen to be in itself not only a promise of life, but a way of life, and law and liberty are forever reconciled.

The circumstances of our time are such as almost to compel thoughtful men to try to think through again this fundamental para- dox of liberty and law. For we are living in a world of unusually disturbed standards and values ; though it really holds no problem

LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 167

essentially new. We are all being vehemently- urged to take various one-sided positions, as though a totally new light had just dawned on the world.

But in this fundamental paradox we can- not be true to the ideals of any adequate education, and be one-sided. For we have learned, we may hope, the psychological necessity of both self-assertion and self- surrender. We have learned the scientific lesson of victory and liberty through insight into law and obedience to it. We have learned the historic lesson of the constant necessity of both historic continuity and re- adjustment. We have learned the esthetic lesson that even Art, that seems the freest expression of the human spirit, has its inevi- table element of self-restraint.

Therefore, for our individual lives, we are not, on the one hand, to lose law out of our life. We do not want to make our lives a chaos, but a cosmos. On the other hand, we are not to lose freedom out of our life, the freedom of children of God, the freedom of self-realization, the freedom of utter truth to our own individuality and to our own highest vision. We are to be both true and free. And we shall be both true and free if, in the

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spirit of Jesus, we do always and only what a genuine, all-inclusive love requires.

In the task of social reconstruction, too, that is pressing upon our generation, we can- not evade the double demand of the law of liberty.

On the one hand, social life cannot advance, nor even exist, in a lawless world. Our task on this side will be three-fold : to help to make it steadily more true, first, that the laws of our community and state and nation are just and righteous laws, which do not count things more sacred than persons, which allow for the necessary constant adjustments to changing conditions, and which so deserve the support of all good men ; second, that by the patient and persistent processes of educa- tion and moral enlightenment, the principles embodied in the laws are enthroned in the reason and conscience of the community ; and third, that so there may not fail that steady self-discipline and free self-control and obedi- ence which can alone make laws of any final avail.

On the other hand, social life is not worth living without freedom. At the foundation of all rational society, therefore, there must be basic reverence for the individual personality

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— respect for his liberty and for the sanctity of his inner person. But the enormities of unrestrained selfishness have been so many; and the frightful effects of vast inequalities in material conditions so plain, that it now seems certain that society has before it a series of attempts inordinately to regulate the individual, which are certain to provoke in turn a reaction to an equally exaggerated liberty. But neither extreme should shut our eyes to the fact that we cannot make a life worth living without freedom ; and that, as Hobhouse puts it, ''the true opposition is between the control that cramps the personal life and the spiritual order, and the control that is aimed at securing the external and material conditions of their free and unim- peded development"; and with clear dis- crimination we must fight the first kind of control, and stand for the second. Only so can the largest liberty come.

In these deeper questions of the personal and social life rules cannot be given. Prin- ciples alone avail. Just how, in the perplex- ing individual situations which we are all to confront, these principles are to be applied no man can tell. And it is well that it is so. For our own growth and enlargement are

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themselves to be found in the solving and re- solving of this perpetual paradox of human life — the paradox of liberty and law.

A further fundamental question of great practical import confronts the Christian ideal- ist, — the increasingly pressing question of Christian unity. For the conflicts within Christian ranks cannot but cast doubt upon the adequacy of the Christian ideal. How is that Christian unity to be conceived and sought ?

CHAPTER VI

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY — THE CONFESSION OF CHRIST

In our efforts for the union of all Christians, is there already a unity that we are trying more adequately to express, or are we seeking to create, out of hand, a unity that is now quite non-existent ? If we did not believe there was already a real and vital unity of spirit, should we be seeking a closer union ? What, then, is the unity of spirit which alone keeps all our efforts for closer union from being utterly vain and futile ?

The One Uniting Word is Christian

Doubtless it is true, as a recent theological treatise says, that union cannot come "by alleging 'unity of spirit' as an excuse for acquiescence in actual disunion"; but it is even more to be feared that such under- estimation of the significance of unity of

171

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spirit as seems here implied, will make actual union impossible. It is simply and solely that unity of spirit, which makes it worth while to talk about union at all. What, then, is that unity of spirit ^ We are plainly seeking, are we not, the more manifest union of Christendom ; that all the Christian forces of every name may present a united front to the world. We are seeking the union of all believers in Christianity, of all Christian people, of all who think Christianity the highest and final religion, of all who believe Christ to be the supreme revealer of God, of all those who find the great source of their spiritual life in God's revelation of himself in Christ, of all who count themselves, first and foremost, learners of Christ. The one uniting word is Christian. We are seeking the union of all confessors of Christ. This is our real unity : that we all, with loyal devotion, con- fess Christ. This is what touches our hearts and makes us long for mutual understanding and for union. This other's loyalty to Christ is like my own ; — that is the great moving consideration. And this is a far deeper and more significant thing, we may not forget, than any union of effort or plan or creed or organization that might grow out of that

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unity of spirit, highly desirable as that closer union is. But we shall not make headway toward a valuable union by putting the second- ary and derivative in place of the primary and original — by making external union more than unity of spirit.

Let us glory, then, in the unity that is already ours, nor fail to appreciate its sig- nificance. For nothing conceivable can give such actual and genuine unity as common loyalty to a person. The greater that person- ality, the more significant the resulting unity. Where that person is the supreme personality of history, and believed by his confessors to be the supreme revelation of God himself — the personality that has redeemed their life — the unity of spirit is the greatest attainable. No uniformity of creed, of ritual, of institu- tion, of concerted plan, of government, could possibly bring so meaningful a unity.

Doubtless the very oneness of human nature, body and mind, insures that the spirit requires embodiment ; that every idea must have some mechanical presentment, some answering means, some organization, some institution. But the body is not thereby made of equal importance with the spirit. The significance lies nevertheless in the spirit back of all. We

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need to recall both sides of Lotze's funda- mental philosophical thesis and see "how abso- lutely universal is the extent and at the same time how completely subordinate the sig- nificance of the mission which mechanism has to fulfil in the structure of the world." Doubtless Christianity must have some exter- nal embodiment of creed, of ritual, of worship, of organization ; but no single particular em- bodiment is essential, and all are completely subordinate in significance.

II

Temperamental Differences

In every form of expression of our unity of spirit in loyal devotion to Christ, individual temperamental differences will manifest them- selves, and ought to manifest themselves. To insist on uniformity in any of these expressions is to make real union impossible. As unity is more and other than union, so is union more and other than uniformity. Even the "Lambeth Quadrilateral," supposing that all could agree in all four of its points, is still an altogether unsatisfactory basis of union, for one reason, just because it looks to too great uniformity, and tends to conceive the union

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 175

as thereby accomplished. As surely as it is not compromise but comprehension which is needed, and as surely as we are all more likely to be right in the affirmations that mean most to us, rather than in our negations of things that do not appeal to us ; so surely the road to any union worth while must not be a pre- scription of some upon others of favorite ex- pressions of any kind. If others find a cer- tain means really helpful in the expression of their devotion to Christ that we do not find helpful, they must have liberty to use that means, or lack of means, but not to prescribe it upon any others. Liberty to use but not to prescribe is essential. However certain it is that differences in psychological tempera- ment must be taken into account in religion, and that these differences are often wide — like the so-called "Catholic" and "Protes- tant" temperaments — we still must see with absolute clearness that the truly essential thing is not this or the other of the different ways of approach to God in Christ, but the desire and purpose so to approach God, and the evidence in life that the soul has found God and been accepted of him. We have to get back of all these differences of tempera- mental expression to that unity of spirit that

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makes it possible to call both types of people Christian ; that makes them able to recognize in each other unmistakable loyalty to Christ.

Ill

A True Organic Unity

The truth is that we have been very slow in coming to recognize in religion — what has been long recognized in philosophy and social theory — what a true unity is ; that unity should be indeed organic, though in a different sense from that often meant; and that true organic unity presupposes differences, not uniformity. Uniformity gives only a sand- heap of identical atoms, but no true unity. Paul's epoch-making figure of the body of Christ with many different members and many different offices must not be allowed to slip from our minds. We cannot get this higher unity of an organic body without dif- ferent members and different functions. These very differences are necessary if the parts of the body are to be members one of another, and are to be bound together into the more significant unity of the whole organic body. Paul's figure of the organism, thus, that became so influential later in philosophic,

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ethical, and social thinking, thinks of a true unity, but nowhere of uniformity.

IV

Uniformity Not Desirable

Can we make it plain to ourselves that uni- formity is in no sense the true aim of our efforts for a union of all Christians ? No doubt, back of all the essential unity of spirit there must be certain implications of creed, of worship, of government, of organization. But our age ought certainly to be able to come to this problem of Christian union in all these respects, with a different vision than that of preceding centuries.

Even with reference to the underlying creedal statements, it should be remembered, we are, in the first place, not seeking for all Christians the kind of compromise statement that would be involved, for example, in a modern Westminster Confession. Readers of history may not shut their eyes to the fact that there were considerable divergences of view in the gathering out of which came that creedal statement; and that the statement finally reached did not mean that all these divergences had disappeared (though some-

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thing of that may well have happened), so much as that ingenious men had found, upon the disputed points, language sufficiently vague and ambiguous to allow all parties to read their own views into it. Now, such a compromise creed is not destitute of value ; — it means some real gain in agreement and it may give a new sense of unity to those accept- ing it. But its value is often mistakenly con- ceived, and may turn into a positive damage, if the creed be used as a universal prescription, or if it be thought to mean real uniformity of detailed belief. Most creeds have wrought untold damage in this direction.

It should be equally clear to the modern man, in seeking some basal statement of belief, that it is no mere average of ideas which is sought. Such an average is like the abstract average of the statistician which cor- responds to no real concrete fact. It is like the statue of an abstract virtue : it lacks the convincing reality of the concrete living thing. One may reach in that way a creed, that is not the living creed for any one of all who subscribe to it — a creed that is not for any of them a natural expression of their own vital faith.

Still less should the basic confession of faith

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be the barest minimum of belief in which all might conceivably agree. The religious ex- perience of the Christian ought rather to express itself with increasing richness, and reach out in many directions. The psycho- logical law is, that that which is not expressed dies. And religious experience needs clear and thoughtful expression in significant state- ments as well as in life. It is no underesti- mate of the value of creedal statements that IS here involved ; rather, it is so alone that its true place is given to the creedal statement. We ought to see that just because of different temperaments, different environments, and different modes of education there will be different reflections of the Christ that we confess, different expressions of what the life he has called out in us means. And the organic unity which is to be positively sought is that which recognizes and preserves these differences ; that contends for the value of every such honest reflection of the life of Jesus, rather than seeks a deadening identity of expression. The New Testament itself con- sists of a series of such reflections of Christ.

It is true that Christianity looks to life, and that Christian doctrine must bear on life, and that the differences between one Chris-

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tian statement of belief and another are likely to lie more in the realm of the philosophies than in the realm of life. It is true that we may well put our emphasis on the strictly religious and practical purpose of the Bible as intending to reveal to us God and to give inspiration to some real sharing in his life. And it is true that the one thing in which we may all agree is that Christ is the ultimate appeal. We can all agree in the confession that we wish to make our thinking in this sense truly Christian. Any way of life, too, has inevitably some corresponding convictions that call for thoughtful expression. Yet we cannot do justice to a true conception of the organic unity of Christians without seeing clearly that complete uniformity of belief and statement is both impossible and undesirable.^

Complete Uniformity of Belief and Statement Impossible

Complete uniformity of belief and state- ment is impossible, in the first place, because

1 The discussion of this point, it should be said, is rather closely parallel to that in my Theology and the Social Consciousness, pp. 167- 177, though the present treatment is somewhat fuller. But the argument here requires recurrence to these considerations.

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY i8i

it is difficult indeed for any of us to tell our real inner creed. That creed is the creed that finds expression in life. It is the state- ment of those assumptions that are implied in deeds and spirit. The will, thus, has its creed as well as the intellect, and the truths of religion must be wrought out rather than merely thought out. And the intellect can formulate only very imperfectly the truth that the will has wrought out. How com- paratively empty and flat the greatest truths sound from one who does not seem to have lived them into existence ! On the other hand, how significant the simplest truths become when they are backed by a great life. Now the truth which so lives for a man is his real creed, and that real creed he can better state at the end of his complete experience than at the beginning. It is still more impossible for another's formulation completely to shadow forth this whole life-experience.

This is not at all to join the company of those who wish to ''rule the doctrinal element out of their religion." It is quite a different thing from that to insist that only the whole mind can reach the essential meaning of things ; that all Christian doctrine looks directly to life, means something for life and

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grows directly out of life ; that no series of propositions can possibly set forth the whole meaning of the Christian life ; and that the acceptance of any set of propositions is not the acceptance of Christianity. Thinking there must be, earnest and hard, and every possible attempt to express the fullest results of this thinking in ordered statement of doc- trine — to reach a comprehensive intellectual unity that shall bring our religious beliefs into relation to all the rest of our thinking. All this is highly important and helpful. But even so, doctrine is means, not end ; an expression of life rather than life itself. The intellect serves life but may not dominate it.

Complete uniformity of belief and statement therefore is impossible, first of all, because we are none of us really able to make an accu- rate statement even of our own creed. It is impossible also because if two persons should agree in adopting the same formula of words, even these same words must be interpreted out of diif erent inheritances, training, environ- ment and experiences, and the emphasis and meaning will change accordingly; and they will change even in the same individual from time to time. Unalterable doctrine is thus impossible. Any true acceptance of a creed

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involves every time a kind of creative activity on the part of the individual affirming the confession. This means that the different temperament, the different point of view, and the different emphasis cannot help affect- ing every man's creed. It is true of a man's creed as of his environment that the only effective portions are those to which he attends ; and the points of attention vary from time to time.

VI

Complete Uniformity of Belief and Statement Undesirable

But it is not only true that complete uni- formity of belief and statement is impossible, it is equally true that, were it attainable, it would be undesirable. We are dealing with those truths that have to do with the infinite God himself, and with human relations to that infinite God. We can only approximate to the infinite truth so sought by seeking from every soul the most honest expression of his experience and so sharing our experiences with each other. The situation is like that illus- trated by Leibnitz's figure of the mirrors sur- rounding the market-place. Each mirror gives

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its reflection from one point of view, and it is only by combining all these reflections that the complete view of all the aspects of the market-place could result. We need indis- pensably the supplementing help that comes from sharing in the best vision of other souls. And when one thinks how it is that the truth makes progress in the world, he finds another reason for not desiring uniformity of statement in religious belief. For the truth comes, in any case, not by all the others giving way to some single authoritative state- ment, but by each bringing honestly and care- fully his own matured conviction, in order that out of all these presentations there may come a larger result than any one brought to the conference. Any one of us can hope to make progress in the truth only so far as he can increasingly supplement his own view by some participation in those of others. From this point of view, the union of Christians, so far as creedal statements are concerned, should be much like that of a group of scien- tific workers ; they are united in the pursuit of the truth. The one essential is loyalty to the truth — utterly honest observation and report, with no careless echoing of another. Such agreement as then results has genuine

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significance. But it in turn is regarded as no final goal. These scientific workers seek a series of progressively successful attempts to formulate the world they study. Their union is in this one aim. Should not the union of Christians, so far as their creedal statements are concerned, be similarly conceived ?

And in the realm of morals and religion it IS peculiarly important that uniformity should not be sought, because in this realm, above all, we cannot and we must not simply repeat one another. My confession of my faith must be honestly and vitally my own. Re- ligious doctrines are an expression of life already present, and they are of value only so. If my creedal statement is not an honest expression of conviction growing out of life, it is a hindrance rather than a help, even to my own life; for, as a great German theologian has said, "conscious untruth tends to drive from Christ." And every untrue testimony of such a kind tends also to mislead others.

For every one of these reasons, it is not desirable to check the expression of religious faith in constantly revised statement of belief, nor to forbid theories. If the fellowship of the united church is to be highly significant and capable of growing enrichment, it must be

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honestly representative of the full sweep of the growing experience of all Christians. It can be this only if it refuses to prescribe uni- formity, and admits to its fellowship the differ- ing members and differing functions, and so realizes Paul's ideal of us all as members one of another.

VII

Our Real Unity in Our Common Life in Christ

It becomes, thus, increasingly clear where our real unity lies ; namely, in the common life we share, in the common experience we have, in the common revelation of God in Christ, and in the common surrender to it. The best analogy of our religious faith is to be found in what the same great personality may mean to different people. Our entire emphasis, therefore, is to be laid on the word Christian. Our solution of Christian fellowship even in the realm of creedal statement is thus not by abstraction but by concreteness ; not by false simplicity, but by living fullness ; not by rela- tion to propositions, but by relation to facts. All our confessions of faith must come back to an experience like that that Paul had in mind when he wrote : "When it was the good

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 187

pleasure of God to reveal his Son in me." The revelation is of God, it is through Christ, and it is in me. This, in some form, is re- flected in every Christian experience and in every Christian confession of faith. It is the primal confession, that comes out in the primi- tive baptismal formula and benediction of the New Testament. We shall come together, as we more and more truly confess Christ, as our creedal statements conform more and more perfectly to his spirit and to his em- phases. One of the greatest reasons, thus, for a persistent unwillingness to give decisive weight in the union of Christians to any his- torical creed, however important as historical it may be, is because, as Fairbairn puts it, "the church, so long as it believes in the divinity of its Founder, is bound to have a history which shall consist of successive and progressively successful attempts to return to him. He can never be transcended ; all it can ever be is contained in him ; but its ability to interpret him and realize his religion ought to be a developing ability."

Our basis, thus, as Christians is everywhere in the common life in Christ, in that personal relation to God in Christ that includes the whole man. But loyalty in such a concrete

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personal relation is a far higher test even of belief than any series of propositions can be. The simple question — ''How would Christ be likely to think and to speak upon this point ?" — may do more to clarify and steady a man's expression of his faith than anything else. No question is so deep-going, so reveal- ing. Even in the realm of the conception and statement of our faith, the most stimulating and truly conserving of all influences is the love of Christ. "No man can say, Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit." We confess Christ. "Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." And just as in our statements of belief we are to seek not uniformity but liberty and comprehension for the very sake of a larger faith and a larger life, that shall lead in turn to statements still more adequate, and more truly reflecting Christ; so in worship, in organization, in forms of government, in life, and in active service we must give the largest liberty, and bring all back continuously and increasingly to the test of the spirit of Christ, in the hope once again of a series of successive and progressively successful attempts to ex- press Christ in these ways, too. It is hopeless to expect the Christian world to be satisfied

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with any union of Christian people, that definitely excludes from its fellowship those whose desire to be loyal disciples of Christ cannot be doubted. Where Christ has already received, the church cannot reject. We are to bear honest and faithful testimony our- selves to what seems to us most Christian in these realms of worship and organization and life, and we are to be willing to heed with open mind the similar witness of other Chris- tians, that out of all something more truly Christian than any of us have conceived may come. In other words, our Christian union must be as wide as our Christian unity of spirit. In life, in statement of belief, in worship, in institutions, in form of govern- ment — in all alike — the one essential is that we should confess Christ. This is the one great primal confession. Less than this is not Christian ; more than this is exclusive. This question of Christian unity naturally leads on to the still greater fundamental ques- tion — the question of Christianity as a world religion. That question may be appropriately faced from two points of view : the point of view of oriental civilization, and the point of view of the needs of the modern world, as seen in the present world-shaking war.

CHAPTER VII

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION I: CHRISTIANITY THE ONLY HOPEFUL BASIS FOR ORI- ENTAL CIVILIZATION

From the point of view of the missionary- propaganda, it is most important, as others have pointed out, that the claims of Chris- tianity to be the absolute and final religion should be clearly recognized. But there is another less drastic inquiry that greatly con- cerns alike both missionaries and Oriental nations ; and that is this : Does any other religion than Christianity give promise of being able to furnish a sufficient spiritual basis for civilization in the Orient, even in its most advanced nation, Japan ? This question is fairly forced upon the thoughtful traveler, whether interested in missions or not. He knows that the world is becoming smaller and more unified every year. He sees much of Western civilization inevitably spreading over the earth. And he cannot help asking him-

190

CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 191

self : In the increasing contacts between East and West, and under the constant pressure of Western education, can the earlier religious bases of Oriental civilizations suffice or even continue ? This is not primarily a question of missionary propaganda at all. It is not a question of an absolute religion. It is rather a question to be looked at from the point of view of the Eastern nations themselves — a question of any enduring national basis. And there are not lacking indications that many Oriental leaders themselves deeply feel the seriousness of the problem here raised.

I

The Need of an Adequate Spiritual Basis for Any Civilization

The need of an adequate spiritual basis for an enduring and progressive national life, the Orient will hardly deny. And the more the Occidental thinks of it, the more evident the need becomes. Modern psychology, with its insistent emphasis on the unity of man, will hardly allow that the spiritual in man's nature can be safely isolated. So surely as man is "incorrigibly religious," so surely must he ultimately have a religion capable of some

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reasonable adjustment to conclusions he has been forced to reach in other departments of his life. Both the individual and the nation alike must live finally some kind of unified life. Their historical and scientific and ethical findings cannot be permanently at war with their religious beliefs.

This is all the more true since religion, just because it is religion, must voice convictions of ultimate and universal sources and values. Where it cannot do that, it has ceased to exist as religion, and remains only as incongruous superstition or vague misgiving. There must be, therefore, a spiritual basis for any sig- nificant national life. Every nation worth the while has had some conviction of divine calling and mission, some deeply underlying even where unuttered sense, therefore, of responsibility and accountability. And its life has thus consciously taken on a meaning and value not otherwise conceivable. These essentially religious convictions have entered like iron into the blood of the nations, to make them capable of what else had been impossible.

The very fact that whenever men have gotten out of the savage stage, they feel im- pelled to go quite beyond the mere satisfac-

CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 193

tion of the sense appeal, to the building up of historic, scientific, esthetic, sociologic, and ethical interests, is itself evidence of such ideal thirsts in men, as can find their natural cul- mination only in religious faith, which alone can unify and justify them all. No nation can throw itself with all its soul into a national task, without at least some half conscious faith that the work so undertaken is not to be allowed vainly to disappear, but will be caught up into the enduring life of the world. No nation can set itself whole-heartedly to the all-round betterment of its moral life, with- out faith that "the universe is on the side of the will" in this endeavor. Convictions, thus, intrinsically religious, logically underlie all the ideal achievements and endeavors of the nation as well as of the individual. Eucken is only expressing a widely prevalent and growing faith, when he insists that, how- ever far advanced the externals of a civiliza- tion may be, there are needed, as indispen- sable, great spiritual convictions if the life, whether of individual or of nation, is at all to have real meaning and value. And Troeltsch has recently voiced his matured belief that, even in the very midst of the most developed Western civilization, the inner spiritual faith

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of Protestantism is required to preserve even there a true and free individualism.

II

The Increasing Sense of Need of a New Spiritual Basis for Oriental Civili- zation

This much, perhaps, it has been worth while to say regarding the imperative need of a spiritual basis for any civilization worthy the name. That many of the most thoughtful in the Oriental nations share this conviction is manifest. Multitudinous religious adjust- ments in modern Hinduism in India, and evidences of religious unrest and of waning faith in the older religions in China and Japan, bear witness. Count Okuma's testimony in a recent number of the International Review of Missions, and the calling of the Conference of the three religions by the Japanese Minister of Home Affairs, particularly show how press- ing the religious problem is felt to be in Japan, where Western education has been most fully welcomed. It Is fitting, therefore, that we should have Japan especially in mind as we further face the question of this chapter.

It is beyond all peradventure clear that

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Japan's older civilization, like that of all an- cient exclusive states, had a distinct religious basis that was definitely avowed, was for the time singularly effective, and was of the very essence of the nation's life. What Mommsen says of the ancient exclusive states of Europe was even more emphatically true of Japan. Japan is perhaps unique in having kept this peculiar kind of religious basis down to the present day. This very fact makes Japan's problem all the more critical ; for she has been attempting to bring over into this age of modern science, of historical criticism, and of the social consciousness, the naive faith in divine progenitors that characterized the far different ancient world. Is it possible that such a religious basis should remain effective or even continue at all ?

Nothing seemed to the writer so infinitely pathetic in the Orient, as to see a gifted and powerful nation like Japan trying to build its national life upon the foundation of the Em- peror cult. The faith had to have an element of the hysterical in it, to make it seem real at all. A man of Western training simply can- not persuade himself that the attempt can finally prove anything but futile. The foun- dation is already honeycombed. It can even

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seem to continue only by insisting on the divine inspiration of the imperial rescript on education and similar pronouncements of the Emperor, and by practically forbidding Japa- nese historians to speak the truth about early Japanese history. And it attempts, more- over, a spiritual basis for Japanese national life that can, in the nature of the case, have no appeal outside of Japan itself. Now no modern nation, with the present unifying of the world, can rest in a religion that contains no possibility of becoming universal. A re- ligion that does not fit man as man can have no future. It can only remain a wonder that there has continued so long even a semblance of spiritual foundation for Japanese civiliza- tion in the Emperor cult. Thoughtful Japa- nese have not awakened too soon to the im- perative religious need of their national life.

For the outstanding fact in the Orient is that Western education is inevitably pressing in upon the East. That Western education brings irrevocably at least three things : modern science, historical criticism, and some measure of the social consciousness of the Western world. Every one of these necessa- rily tends steadily to disintegrate the present religious basis of Japanese national life. Here

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are involved new standards and new tests that nothing in the present-day world can wholly evade. In the end the pressure of Western education upon the leaders of Japan's national life must mean either the giving up of any really spiritual basis for their national civilization, or the insistent demand for a religion that can squarely and unequivocally meet these tests of modern science, of his- torical criticism, and of an awakening social consciousness.

At this point, it should not be forgotten that there has never been a concerted move- ment to introduce into the Orient, Western civilization as a whole. That civilization has spread into the East, along two widely sepa- rated lines — the commercial and the mission- ary. It was originally introduced into Japan for commercial ends and by force, and so, as it were, only incidentally and very partially. The missionary movement supplemented the commercial movement for the unselfish end of sharing its religious best with the Orient. Under the commercial pressure, the Orient, and Japan especially, were forced to take on Western education in at least its technological features or suffer indefinite exploitation from the West. The Western education so taken

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on, has tended, thus, almost inevitably to be not only purely secular, but to be largely devoid of any of the more ideal elements of Western civilization, as Hearn strikingly tes- tifies. The effect upon religious faith has tended to be all the more disintegrating. The missionary influence has helped those whom it has reached to some knowledge of the essentially spiritual factors in Western civilization. But it has naturally not been able to give to the Japanese as a nation a really unified conception of Western civiliza- tion as a whole. The total result is that Western civilization in its entirety can hardly be said yet to have been naturalized in Japan. Its most essential and basic spiritual factors are appreciated and welcomed, it must be feared, by comparatively few.

From the point of view simply of civiliza- tion, therefore, one must rejoice that the mis- sionary movement has accompanied the com- mercial in the advance of the West on the East; for it insures at least that Western civilization shall not be quite misrepresented, and shall not wholly fail to share its best with the East. From the same point of view, too, the West can hardly shake off a keen sense of moral obligation to the East. It has

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forced upon the Orient the lower and material side of its civilization ; it has brought an education that has increasingly tended to dis- integrate the older religious faiths, and so to cut under the former religious foundations of the State ; it has pressed questions that Orien- tal religions cannot answer. Now for these very reasons, it is bound to do all it can, to make good the damage. It must share with the Orient its highest as well.

Ill

The Necessary Threefold Test of the Religious Basis of a Modern Civili- zation

The religion that is to meet the need of the Orient, and especially of Japan, in the crisis brought upon her by this forced contact with Western civilization, must be that religion that is best able to meet these new tests of the scientific spirit and method, of historical criticism, and of the social consciousness. What are the probabilities that any other religion than the Christian can meet this need ? Can any of the older faiths do it ? Can the Emperor cult or Shinto as a whole, or Bud- dhism or Confucianism, do it ^ Can a modern syncretism do it ?

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1. It seems plain, for the reasons already given, that the Emperor cult is doomed, so far as its ability to furnish a religious basis for Japan's national life is concerned. The re- ligious efforts now making in Japan them- selves indicate growing conviction upon that point. Can a return to Shinto as a whole do more ? The Japanese government has itself pronounced judgment, in view of issues pre- viously raised by Japanese Christians, that Shinto is not itself strictly a religion, so far as the government has employed it, nor to be so interpreted. Such a pronouncement could be possible at all, only because the religious ele- ment in Shinto was so generally felt to be exceedingly tenuous. When one adds Aston's deliberate judgment, that Shinto has had "hardly anything in the shape of a code of morals," one would have to deny to Japan any modern consciousness at all to believe that she could remain satisfied with such a religious basis. Japan's intense race loyalty may give seeming vitality to such a basis in its native religion for a time, but it were an insult to Japan to believe that this basis can long prove satisfactory.

2. Can its borrowed religions, Buddhism and Confucianism, satisfy the need ? And

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that question means, it is to be remembered once more, Can they be wrought into any consistent and organic unity with those fea- tures of Western education that in some degree Japan has felt obliged to accept — with the scientific spirit and method, with historical criticism, and with the social consciousness ? For, although it is quite true that these features of Western education have hardly penetrated the mass of the Japanese people, the educated leaders have felt them, in many cases deeply, and they cannot ignore or evade their demands. No religion, certainly, is going to furnish a safe spiritual basis for a nation's life that cannot command the whole-hearted intellectual and moral respect of its educated leaders.

Can Confucianism or Buddhism do that ? One may confess a hearty admiration for the high ethical quality of Confucianism, and yet be confident that it cannot furnish a sufficient re- ligious basis for Japan's civilization. By all means let the full value of its ethical inheritance be retained by the Japanese ; but a religious basis for its national life Confucianism cannot give. For it has become increasingly clear in recent years that in the mind of Confucius himself, it was not in any strictness a religion, but a system of ethics, and a system of ethics,

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moreover, rather narrowly adapted to the Chinese. Confucianism has never satisfied China's rehgious needs. It gives still less promise of satisfying the religious needs of another nation.

May it be hoped that Buddhism could suc- ceed better? It has had a large place in Japan's life. It is alive and active. It has shown some capacity for ethical adjustment to the modern world. It has in Buddha him- self one of the world's outstanding personali- ties. Nevertheless, it is hardly too much to say, that the native ideals of Buddhism, whether original or later, are precisely those not adapted to form the foundation of the civilization of a modern state. Buddhism is at bottom so completely pessimistic, other- worldly and antisecular in its ideals, that it cannot naturally provide the motives for a progressive modern state. Some adjustment it can make. Certain important virtues it can emphasize. But it must remain un- naturalized in any truly modern civilization. And all this, quite independent of the havoc that historical criticism and modern science must make in its traditions, its abandonment of original Buddhism, and its world view.

3. Can, then, a new religious syncretism

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avail ? The history of such attempts does not encourage hope of a successful issue. One may most deeply sympathize with those earnest Japanese leaders who are seeking eclectically to build up some new religious basis for their national religious life, and yet doubt whether the movement can succeed, if the attempt is to be to make a really new religion. One feels that a religion that is to abide must have the vitality of an organic growth, and can hardly be manufactured to order. But in another sense — as an honest Japanese interpretation of essential historical Christianity — it is quite possible that the movement may attain a large and genuine success.

If the Japanese do not intend to insist on inventing a new religion for themselves, there would seem to be every reason for building deliberately and thoughtfully on historical Christianity. If Japan's taking on of modern civilization and its basic educational ideas is justified at all, the natural corollary is the adoption of that religion that so permeates the best of Western civilization and has made no small part of its intellectual, economic, and humanitarian conquests possible, through its emphasis on freedom of conscience and so on

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freedom of initiative and freedom of inves- tigation. We call it naturally a Christian civilization.

In a very true sense, the Christian religion may be said to have proved to be a survival of the fittest. It has already been thoroughly tested out in the Occident, in the face of all the questions now raised in Japan. It has amply proved its ability, not merely to exist in the modern world, and not merely to adjust itself to such a world, but to furnish foundation, motives, standards, and ideals, in- dispensable to any enduring civilization. It is a religion, the best born in the East, and the best that the West could embrace, and it remains the best the West in turn has to offer to the East. It would seem the part of plain wisdom for Japan to take advantage of the results of this long historical testing out of Christianity in the Occident, with its civiliza- tion now spreading over the world, and not to insist on attempting instead a new experiment necessarily much more limited in every way.

Moreover, a religious syncretism is doomed to failure at the most vital point. Men need to be able to believe concerning their religion that it is not a mere man-made product. They need indubitable assurance that God

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has been at work in the world, that he has not left himself without witness, but has so revealed himself as to call out irrevocable love and trust. An historical religion has here a priceless advantage, if its historical facts are certain enough and great and sig- nificant enough. For men need to be sure that they are seeking not merely a God of their own dreams and imaginings and specu- lations, but the God of the real world, con- cretely, indubitably revealed.

IV

Only Christianity Can Meet these Tests AND Furnish an Adequate Spiritual Basis for the Modern Civilization OF THE Orient

Now, it is because of what Christianity has here to offer in the life and teaching and per- sonality of Jesus, that it has a matchless claim on the attention of thoughtful men seeking a real religious basis for their own lives and for their nation's civilization. The great facts of the world are the great persons of the world. No other facts can throw such light upon the nature of the Power back of the world. The personality of Jesus is great

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enough, and alone great enough, to give an adequate and final religious basis to life, per- sonal or national. Christianity's greatest riches lie just here.

And Christianity has proved its ability to meet specifically the tests of modern education already mentioned. It has learned, in the first place, that it has no possible quarrel with modern science, so long as it remains science, and does not undertake — what lies quite outside its self-imposed realm — the interpretation of ultimate meanings. Chris- tianity can even rather rejoice in the way in which modern science has enormously in- creased the resources of power and wealth and knowledge available for ideal ends ; in the challenge that it thus brings to all the ideal forces ; in the better vision it has brought of a world enlarged, unified, evolving, and law abiding; in its gift of a method of scientific mastery of fields of endeavor, and so of the hope of mighty achievements for the better- ment of humanity ; and in the bringing in of the scientific spirit itself, with its demand in this whole most impressive field of modern thought for a fundamental moral quality — that of utter open-minded honesty. In all this, Christianity can earnestly rejoice ; for it

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would be difficult to find anywhere in history so close a parallel to the modern demand for the scientific spirit as in Jesus' persistent call to absolute inner integrity of life. The passion for reality is indubitably his. And Christianity welcomes the light modern science is throwing upon the laws of nature and of human life, as light upon the methods and purposes of the Creator, and as pointing to the ways in which men may intelligently and unselfishly cooperate with God in his all- embracing plans for men.

In the second place, although Christianity as an historical religion has naturally been sensi- tive to the movements of historical criticism, and in some of its representatives has often protested against the whole attempt thus to scrutinize sources and origins ; still its clearest- sighted leaders have certainly now learned that the movement that at first sight seemed so threatening, has in the end greatly helped it to use its own Scriptures more intelligently, to make an indispensable discrimination be- tween the temporary and the permanent, and so saved it from forcing incongruities of various kinds on modern trained minds. Seventy-five years of the most searching criticism, too, have made it clear that the

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life of Jesus cannot be taken away from the world, nor its vital significance diminished. A single indication of this can be found in Professor Loof's recent book, What is the Truth about Jesus Christ? Christianity is able, thus, both to meet the tests of historical criticism, and to use to its own great ad- vantage all its justified methods. In so doing. It only makes more possible the fulfil- ment of its mission as a religion for all men of all races and for all time.

It needs even less argument to show that Christianity can meet the test of the social consciousness of our time. Jesus' constant sense of the priceless value and sacredness of the Individual person, and his insistence upon an active ministering self-giving love, that applies the test of service to all Indi- viduals and societies and institutions. Indicate rather the standards and ideals which the social consciousness itself Is trying to express. The social consciousness, and the true de- mocracy to which it looks, are of the very essence of the spirit of the teaching of Jesus.

Nor Is It true of Christianity that It simply meets the tests the modern age brings to It. Rather, as has been already suggested, In Its emphasis on the humble open-minded spirit;

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in its passion for reality, so far as it is true to the spirit of Jesus ; in its faith in God as a faithful Creator revealing his will in the laws of nature and in the inner laws of man's being ; in its insistence on freedom of con- science ; and in its demand for self-forgetting service ; — in all this, it is not only thoroughly akin to all the best in modern civilization, but it furnishes spiritual foundations for its structure, motives for its rational develop- ment, ideals and standards to which it must conform. The real roots of the best in Western civilization are Christian. This is what is really offered Japan for the spiritual basis of its civilization.

Now Christianity is all the better able to furnish this needed spiritual basis for civili- zation in the Orient, and so to meet what Japan is seeking, because its fundamental spirit really demands such a presentation of Christianity as shall call out the freedom and initiative of those to whom it goes, as shall reverently respect and cherish the best in them, and as shall thus not simply prescribe for the Orient all the Occidental ways of stating and interpreting Christianity. A careful unhackneyed study of the teaching of Jesus will show that he was above all con-

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cerned to call out in men insight and decision that were truly their own. He makes con- stantly the inner appeal to reason and con- science. He so respects men's wills and per- sons that he will not simply dominate them, and he knows that nothing moral would be really accomplished if he did. He still stands at the door of men's hearts and knocks ; he will not force the door. We cannot be true to his spirit, and feel that it is for us simply to prescribe according to Western models, all the forms and ways of Japan's reaction on the facts of historical Christianity. Do moral initiative and freedom of conscience mean so little to us ?

Doubtless the West in its own experiences with Christianity has achieved much in its interpretations of the Christian religion that may prove of permanent worth for all men. But in the course of Christian history there have been doctrinal changes too profound to allow us to assume that it remains for the Orient simply to take over full-fledged any one of the Western interpretations of Chris- tianity. Rather are the facts of Christ and of historical Christianity so great that they need for their full evaluation the honest re- actions of all races. In such a humble, open-

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minded, but utterly honest, reaction on the facts of historical Christianity, and in the resulting interpretation of its own of Chris- tianity — profiting by all that other men have felt that they have found — Japan could hardly fail to find a satisfying spiritual basis for its individual and national life, and at the same time have no mere imitation of the religious experience of other peoples. It would both preserve its own best, and be perfectly loyal to Christ, and it would have chosen the best in religion that the world has to offer.

The question of Christianity as a world- religion not only arises naturally in Chris- tianity's missionary self-extension into the Orient, but is also pressed upon all thoughtful men anew in the world-crisis brought on by the European War. Is Christianity to prove able to inspire a new, a better, a more Chris- tian civilization than the world has yet seen, even within what is called Christendom ?

CHAPTER VIII

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION II: CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION

The present critical times remind one in- stinctively of Christ's words : "Take ye heed to yourselves " ; for those words were spoken at a time of world crisis, when a new civi- lization was dawning, with new ideals and standards rooting in Christ's revolutionary sense of the value of every man. The coun- sel therefore was no crass exhortation to "look out for number one," but rather: Be sure that you possess the qualities that are needed in the new civilization, the qualities which will help to bring on that new civiliza- tion apace. "Take ye heed to yourselves," therefore. Don't mistake the seriousness of the crisis. Don't sell out to the old forces. Don't just let things drift. Don't lose faith in the world's better possibilities. Be citi- zens of a new civilization.

In like manner, we can hardly mistake the conviction that we too are now living at a

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world crisis, in the midst of a war incom- parably the most terrible the world has ever seen, when great changes impend. A trained American historical scholar wrote me re- cently : ''All my historical study convinces me that we are living through one of the crucially decisive ages in world history, and that old things are passing away and all things are becoming new." To like effect the distinguished Italian historian Ferrero testifies to the presence of "one of those grand crises in history which from time to time devastate a part of the world and modify the march of civilization ; one of those crises which cut with one violent blow the Gor- dian knot of difficulties that have been accu- mulating little by little for generations, and that have become otherwise insoluble by their complexity."

Now, if anything like this be true^^ it mightily concerns all who have any care for humanity, any care for a better civilization, any care for some true realization of the Kingdom of God on earth, that, so far as in them lies, the monstrous and heart-breaking price of this scientifically demoniacal war shall not have been paid in vain. We have no right to become calloused to the ugliness

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and frightfulness of this worst of wars, nor to the immeasurable toll it is demanding, in physical suffering and mental anguish on the part of both combatants and non-com- batants — women and little children ; in the dire maiming of body and mind for untold thousands — 50,000 French soldiers, for example, blinded for life ; in the blotting out of fathers and husbands and sons, until one becomes sick in the reckoning ; — nor this alone, but also — in the striking down of divinely endowed leaders in scientific inves- tigation, in art and music and poetry, in every field of human endeavor and progress ; in the slaughter of the choicest youth of all the belligerent nations, and of the small picked number of university trained men, from whom the leaders of the nations natu- rally come (11,000 such men have gone out from Oxford alone) ; in the brutalizing of men through the unexampled ferocity of the fighting ; in the breaking down of national morals and international ideals; in the de- liberate nursing of national suspicions and hatreds not to be effaced in a generation.

If a man estimates that toll, and still thinks that it is to be taken as a matter of course that a like war should soon recur, and

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that its sole or chief lesson for a nation is the building up of huge armaments, he thereby proclaims himself an enemy of mankind, however patriotic be the words in which he veils his thought. For the simple fact is, that our generation must count itself bank- rupt in both brains and morals, if it do not succeed in finding some better way to the settlement of questions between nations than by such a world-desolating war as that through which Europe is now passing. It is the reductio ad absurdum of the deification of force.

Make real to yourselves a single count in the indictment of this war — the fearful slaughter of the choicest trained youth. Just because of this, the most threatening factor in the situation after the war is, that the direction of the nations is likely to re- main so largely in the hands of comparatively old men, saturated with old notions, not ashamed to praise and glorify war, without large vision, and incapable of daring and genuinely humane ideals, who will assume that things must go on in much the same damning way, and will be contented to have it so. It was General Gordon who said : ^'England was never made by her Statesmen.

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England was made by her Adventurers." And upon this text one has written :

They sit at home and they dream and dally,

Raking the embers of long-dead years — But ye go down to the haunted Valley,

Light-hearted pioneers. They have forgotten they ever were young,

They hear your songs as an unknown tongue, . . . But the Flame of God through your spirit stirs,

Adventurers — O Adventurers !

It is a tragic thing that a continent's young leaders should be blotted out. For youth has sensitiveness and imagination and vision and faith and initiative and dynamic. And the world never needed these qualities so much as it needs them now. One can hardly help, therefore, making especial appeal, to- day, to youth, to trained youth, to American youth. For this undreamed-of slaughter of the youthful leaders of Europe lays on Amer- ican youth a double load of responsibility.

I

Faith in the Possibilities of a New Civilization

And my first appeal to American youth is that they exercise the right of youth, and with all their souls believe in the possibilities

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of a new civilization, and throw their whole selves into the struggle for its on-coming. The one thing that may not be forgiven to youth is cynicism and standpattism. Are you to forget that the very meaning of the progress of civilization has been the replac- ing of the rule of violence by the reign of law ? Because delicate questions of reason and justice cannot conceivably be settled by such an arbiter as force. And are you to assume that the race's ideal triumphs along this line lie all in the past ^ As American youth are you to be satisfied, that your nation should enormously profit financially by this brutalizing war, and count its further duty done by military preparedness of the Euro- pean sort ? Is this titanic conflict — a single incident of which two years ago would have sent a thrill of horror through the whole world — to mean no more than that for the life of America ? And are you contented that it should be so ? Is this world crisis to bring no deep heart-searching to America as well as to Europe ^

The disheartening thing to the lover of humanity in America just now is, that our vociferous advocates of preparedness, our Navy and Security Leagues, are content by

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every device to cultivate a militaristic hys- teria, but give no evidence of world vision, no evidence of seeing the possibility of a new civilization, or of caring for it. This is what so stirs any rational pacifist, as The New Republic says :

What the pacifist sees is not a table of figures show- ing the miHtary weakness of America. He sees a world in ruins, brought to its ruin by the very same kind of talk and calculation now being used so glibly by the advocates of preparedness. He sees that Europe thought in terms of rights, honor, armament, expansion, and the result horrifies him. He wishes to know whether we too are doomed to enter that same deadly circle of conscription, national assertion, diplomatic intrigue for which Europe is tortured. He says that the preparedness agitation is an old and bloody story, a hideous repetition of the very thing which prepared Europe for disaster. That is what inspires the pacifist, and that is why sneers leave him unmoved. He feels that there has got to be a new deal in the world, and it terrifies him to think that among those who are loudest for armament there is no hint of a better vision.

Perhaps no better vision is possible, but the pacifist is not yet ready to admit that counsel of despair. What makes the whole preparedness movement hateful to him is that it has come to scorn a better vision. That Is what makes the talk cold and alien to him. If he felt that American militarists were really rebellious against the system which has made this war, if he felt some response in them to the need of a more coopera-

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tive world, if he felt that in their hearts they cared above all other things for a different order among na- tions, his antagonism would be infinitely reduced.

But we may well hope that upon the sober heart of common humanity, the lessons of this terribly desolating war are not to be lost ; that its satanic ugliness and frightfulness, and its essential futility as well, will have been so unmistakably dis- closed that no nation can rush lightheartedly into It again for selfish aggression ; that the belligerents themselves will become so deathly sick of war that they will be planning at least for a far more permanent peace, and for the coming of a civilization worthy of such untold sacrifices as have been made.

Even the probable inconclusiveness of the struggle may be a ground of hope, as Mr. Wells argues :

I believe that this war is going to end, not in the complete smashing up and subjugation of either side, but in a general exhaustion that will make the recru- descence of the war still possible, but very terrifying. The thought of war will sit like a giant over all human affairs for the next two decades. It will say to us all : "Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will certainly come again. I have taken all your men between eighteen and fifty.

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and killed and maimed such as I pleased — millions of them. I have wasted your substance contemptu- ously. Now you have multitudes of male children between the ages of nine and nineteen running about among you, delightful and beloved boys. And behind them come millions of delightful babies. Of these I have scarcely smashed and starved a paltry hundred thousand perhaps. But go on muddling, each for himself and his parish and his family, and none for all the world, go on in the old way, stick to your rights, stick to your claims, each one of you, make no conces- sions and no sacrifices, obstruct, waste, squabble, and presently I will come back again and take all that fresh harvest of life — all those millions that are now sweet children and dear little boys and youths — and I will squeeze it into red jam between my hands, and mix it with the mud of trenches and feast on it before your eyes, even more damnably than I have done with your grown-up sons and young men. And I have taken most of your superfluities already ; next time I will take your barest necessities." So — war; and in these days of universal education the great mass of people will under- stand plainly now that that is his message and intention. Men who cannot be swayed by the love of order and creation may be swayed by the thought of death and destruction.

To defeat, then, this giant's threat, and for the sake of a new and better civilization, we are to take heed to ourselves, to discern the times, to get out of our selfish absorptions — individual, community, or national. We

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are to think discriminatingly, and to be ashamed not to think in world terms, in terms of humanity. For if the world is not to lose this priceless opportunity for a great forward step in civilization, it will need every ounce of help from every unselfish man and woman, especially in America. For the energy and will of Europe will have been disastrously sapped.

II

The Special Obligations Now Resting UPON America and America's Youth

And how can the lover of America help wishing that she may do something worthy of herself in this world crisis, — may fully recognize the special obligations now rest- ing upon America and America's youth ? For this war already involves the larger part of the earth's surface and America cannot help being mightily concerned in the outcome. She is the chief neutral. She is the chief and oldest republic, holding in peculiar degree the trust of the democratic ideal and trend. Almost alone among the nations she has been standing in some degree at least for the maintenance of international

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law. She is not immediately involved m Europe's conflicting interests, and so can view them with some measure of dispassion- ateness. The probably rather indecisive end- ing of the war would give her a special oppor- tunity to insure a more cooperative and better world. And is it not certain that we cannot longer stand aloof from the world's problems ? For our own life, and for the life of the world, we must join with other nations in seeking with all possible energy a great constructive issue out of the present col- lapse of civilization. No mere negation, or evasion, or runaway attitude will suffice.

At one point in particular, America has a great and unmistakable obligation in this devastating war. Americans can at least share generously by their gifts in the relief of the suffering and starving, and in the later reconstruction of European life. Look at the facts for a moment as set forth by the Federal Council of Churches : three million destitute people in Belgium ; two millions in northern France ; five millions in Servia "deprived of their living and of a chance to make it"; in Poland "eleven millions of homeless wandering peasants, mostly women and children"; a million Armenian refugees

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— the wreck of a whole nation. Facts like these plainly call for millions of dollars where thousands have been given. So far Amer- ica, though enormously profiting at certain points by the war, has given only seven cents per capita to Belgian relief, for example, while New Zealand, besides bearing its own war burdens, has given a dollar and a quarter per capita. It is obvious that America has by no means yet measured up to her obliga- tion here. Ambassador Morgenthau sug- gests five hundred millions as not more than could reasonably be expected from America. For our own life's sake we need to give greatly. Much of the enormous war profits ought to go to this work of relief and recon- struction.

And when we are thinking of the larger interests of the world and of the Kingdom of God, we cannot doubt that trained American youth must gird themselves to do what in them lies to make good the loss of the trained youth of the European nations.

Because, then, of these special obligations upon America and America's youth, once more they are to be urged, to be prepared with an adequate preparedness for a new age, to be citizens of the new dawning civi-

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lization. It mightily concerns a man that he should ask himself: Am I going to be able to measure up to the demands of the new age ? Under the law of moral conse- quences — of reaping what I am sowing, shall I be ready to take my part in the new civilization ? Shall I be a help or a load ? Have I the qualities of a citizen of the new civilization ?

Ill

The Demands of the New Civilization

Can we anticipate in some measure the demands of this new civilization and so learn the great lessons that God would teach us by this world-devastating war ?

I. In the first place, the new age, we cannot doubt, will have a new sense of the inescapable grip of the laws of God in the life of nations as well as of individuals. Be not deceived : God is not mocked : for whatsoever man or nation soweth, that shall man or nation also reap. To this all the belligerent nations bear witness, whether they will or no. This war has demonstrated that a nation cannot break its solemnly plighted word and not reap the reward of

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universal distrust ; that it cannot sow fright- fulness and not reap a growing barbarism; that it cannot sow the seed of an absolute national selfishness and not reap the harvest of the enmity of the nations. The two greatest glories of the war, the splendid way in which the colonies of Great Britain — especially South Africa — have come to the aid of the mother country, and the unshaken loyalty of Germany's working classes to the government, — both alike go back to a fairly Christian regard for fairness and justice. Because on the whole England has been just and tolerant and generous in her dealing with her colonies ; because the German govern- ment had given unmistakable evidence that it had been studying the needs of the laboring classes and paternally caring for them (even though absolutism was served thereby), these results could be. Both nations were reaping what they had sown.

In like manner, Germany's two greatest peaceful triumphs, — the large measure of scientific leadership which was hers, and the enormous growth of her commerce, — both go back in great degree to the painstaking practice of certain moral qualities, — the patient willingness open-mindedly to master

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the facts, to learn the languages of the peoples whom they would serve, and to ad- just to their needs and desires. This is not the entire explanation. There have been less noble reasons for Germany's commercial expansion that are now reacting against her ; but fundamental moral laws have been at work along both lines. On the other hand, the lack of the scientific spirit in her historians under the pressure of Prussia and the HohenzoUern dynasty, through the forced education of the last fifty years, has afi'ected disastrously the whole spirit of her people and led to the virtual repudiation of much of what is most glorious in her heritage. It is a German, Dr. Edward Stilgebauer, who says in substance, that ^'it is in the deaden- ing grip of a mechanism of Prussian make, that German intellect, and mind, and indi- vidualism, and love of freedom, and criticism, all treasures of which the closing eighteenth century have been so proud, are now pining away. A nation which has let go these gifts becomes the easy prey of unscrupulous rulers." The taking of Alsace and Lorraine, too, by Germany, after the Franco-Prussian war, seemed no doubt an advantageous thing to do, but, added to the enormous indemnity

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demanded from France, it gave to France such a bitter rankling sense of injustice as to make those provinces a thorn in the side of Germany, a source of constant weakness, and a perpetual root of national dissension.

On the side of the Allies, that England has not been able to count upon her working classes as Germany has upon hers, it must be recognized, is the natural fruit of long neglect, and of lack of a just and comprehen- sive national policy for her laboring men. So, too, so friendly a critic of England as The Nation feels that it must say :

It is a severe indictment of British policy in Ireland that ever since Cromwell's day there have been bands of Irishmen ready to risk all in striking at England. This inveterate and inherited national hatred, this settled and sullen distrust, this smouldering desire for wild and blind vengeance, are the bitter fruit of mis- taken statesmanship, persisting through the centuries.

That almost alone among the belligerents, and at a time of supreme national peril, England has been able to do so little to restrict its liquor traffic, also is again the legitimate result of great abuses long con- tinued. That France has been able to count upon the devoted loyalty of her colored troops, even of her pure blacks, is directly due to

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such considerate and friendly treatment as no other nation has equalled. That France, too, has grown so steadily in the esteem of the world during the war, is clearly due, as Ferrero contends, not to merely quantita- tive elements that statistics could measure, but to an inner spirit, "a feeling of right, of honor, and of justice," which the world hardly believed her to possess, but which, "in a great historical crisis, formed a neces- sary element of equilibrium and of safety."

And that this war could come at all is evidence that the nations as a whole had not sown peace. They had not steadily and honestly and earnestly sought friendly rela- tions, nor been willing to fulfill the conditions that make such friendly relations possible.

These are a few illustrations which tend to show that this war has been a daily demon- stration, that nations as well as individuals may not escape the grip of the laws of God, but reap what they sow for good and for ill. That deep conviction should first of all characterize the new civilization that is to be. For no small part of the horror of the present war and its most threatening danger have grown out of the utterly pagan theory that nations were above morality and not

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responsible to God. The new civilization we may trust, therefore, will be a humbled and repentant civilization.

2. Because it has a new sense of the grip of the laws of God in the life of nations, the new age will demand in the second place that there is just one road to national great- ness, — stern self-discipline in obedience to those laws, leading to a reinvigoration of the life of the nations in its entire range, physical, political, economic, intellectual, moral, and religious. For these ends we are to search our hearts here in America and to repent of our sins. Less than that is no true preparedness for the new age.

It is not creditable to America, in the first place, that degenerative diseases are sapping her life to a degree not true of the Scandinavian countries or even of England. Neither public nor private hygiene has done for us yet anything like what they may do. No spasmodic training in a few military camps will meet the physical need of the nation. It goes back to individual and com- munity ideals, to many-sided self-control, to a passion for physical fitness and surplus nervous energy, and — it may not be for- gotten — to just and humane economic con-

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ditions, not less. Are we willing to pay this price of national physical fitness ?

This in turn demands a political reinvigo- ration, for failure here vitiates seeming suc- cess elsewhere. It is not a pleasing reflec- tion that in recent years civil service reform in America has pretty steadily lost ground. Are you satisfied that your nation's political leaders of both parties should appropriate two hundred and forty millions for increased armaments, and look not one pace beyond, — take no single step to eliminate the mil- lions of waste and graft In present army and navy conditions and In the pork-laden river and harbor and public buildings bills, and have no time or heart for social measures looking to an honester and juster and fairer America ? Is there any evidence here that we are adequately facing a national crisis ? "What has happened," says one of America's most far-sighted editors, "to almost all the recent attempts at social and political re- construction both in state and nation," is this : "They are vitiated In practice either by crude administrative arrangements or by actual administrative lethargy or disloyalty." "This Is the profoundly and perennially dis- couraging aspect of American politics. Amer-

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leans fight a series of battles over candidates and policies ; they celebrate their victories and mourn over their defeats ; but they never sufficiently realize that the battles are shams, and that the real and the only vic- tors are the local politicians of both parties." We are simply not holding our political rep- resentatives to any decent account. Can that result be regarded as any true prepar- edness of America for a new age with new standards .^

Even from the single standpoint of national defense are we fulfilling steadily, faithfully, thoughtfully, the conditions upon which we can count upon a united and devoted people ? Is America giving her less favored classes great and constant reason to love her, and so calling out their undying devotion ? Can this be true when fifty-one per cent of the fami- lies of America have an annual income of less than eight hundred dollars ? Let us be cer- tain that we insure a united and devoted people, only when we lay deep and strong the foundations of economic and social justice for all classes. In copying Germany's elaborate military plans, let us be sure that we do not fail to learn from her a more important element of national strength. As Dr. Devine says :

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Her political institutions were inferior to those of England, and her culture more primitive than that of France, but she had advanced further than either in that process of social integration which made every German feel that he was an integral part of the nation, that his affairs were the continuing concern of the body politic.

But if America is to keep her democracy, she needs a radically different kind of army from that ordinarily conceived. We need not deny the necessity of an army of reason- able proportions, but we must keep our hatred of militarism, and our determination not to be stampeded into militarism of the European sort. Perhaps no one has better stated the ideal of such a new kind of army than Presi- dent James A. B. Scherer, in his book on '^The Moral Equivalent of War," and Mr. Harry G. Traver of the Society of Construc- tive Defense. Dr. Scherer thus states his plan :

I believe in a working army. Make the present Army and Navy efficient, and then take a leaf from the wise little book of economical Switzerland. Under the civil control of the Government why should we not organize upon the slopes of our mountains, in the wastes of the desert, and along the flood-threatened valleys great camps of a constructive army of peace, trained to the conservation of resources, inured to wholesome hardship, and drilled also sufficiently in military tactics,

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so that they would find a noble moral substitute for war in saving life and husbanding the bounty of nature, thus serving the State as "soldiers of the common good," yet ready also for defense whenever defense may be required ? Not a dollar of their pay would be wasted, but every cent permanently invested. Use the present military posts as training schools for officers, convert your new army of experienced engineers into a great band of reservists after a limited service, substituting an earned home on reclaimed lands for a pension, and you have gone far toward solving our twofold national problem of conservation and defense.

And Mr. Traver sums up the advantages of this new army system as follows :

It will :

1. Provide an adequate standing army.

2. Provide a suitable trained reserve.

3. Improve the morale of the soldier.

4. Build up our great public works.

5. Fit the soldier for conditions of war.

6. Provide for surplus labor in hard times.

7. Relieve one of the causes of depression.

8. Retain the self-respect of the unemployed.

9. Give the American people value received for every dollar spent on the army.

Such a plan would go far toward a really constructive preparedness, and give America an army in whose morale and value we might steadily rejoice.

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And on the side of intellectual reinvigora- tion, are we content to have it true that one can count almost on the fingers of one hand the American political leaders and political journals that give evidence that they are thinking in world terms, and are thinking through in any adequate fashion the present problems of humanity ? Fortunately there are many men and women all over the world to-day, and scores of organizations, — too generally sneered at by the politicians, — who are thinking in world terms, who are definitely forecasting a new civilization and its demands, and are willing to sacrifice for it. Are we willing to come to intellectual grips with humanity's problems at this critical hour ? Are we willing to do a little hard close thinking, in order to see with such clearness and definiteness that we may make sure that every ounce of strength we possess is thrown into the scale for the new civili- zation ?

This in turn all goes back to the necessity of a thorough reinvigoration of our moral spirit and of our religious faith. At the bottom of our national and international perils lies the old scandal of individual and class and national selfishness. This is what

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makes a change in our political control avail nothing for a sounder and decenter national life. This is what makes it seem a normal and justifiable thing that the attempted ap- plication of Christian principles to national and international aifairs should be scouted as preposterous. But we may not so easily escape the laws of human nature, which are the laws of God. This war, in fact, is a kind of scientific demonstration and vindication of the teachings of Christ in the larger national and international problems. For no even decent civilization is possible, with- out at least some return to Christian prin- ciples, — without truth and trust and co- operation. And no significant peace and greatly worth while civilization can come, without a deepening of our Christianity and such an honest application of it to the nations as the world has never yet seen. Some sense of this seems already dawning upon the world. As Mr. Wells puts it:

While we have been talking of the decline of faith, faith has so grown as to burst all its ancient formulas ; while we have talked of decadence and materialism, a new spirit has been born under our eyes. How can this spirit be best defined ? It is the creative spirit as distinguished from the legal spirit ; it is the spirit of

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courage to make and not the spirit that waits and sees and claims ; it is the spirit that looks to the future and not to the past. It is the spirit that makes Booking forget that it is not Braintree and John Smith forget that he is John Smith, and both remember that they are England. For every one there are two diametrically different ways of thinking about life : there is individual- ism, the way that comes as naturally as the grunt from a pig, of thinking outwardly from oneself as the center of the universe ; and there is the way that every religion is trying in some form to teach, of thinking back to oneself from greater standards and realities. There is the Braintree that is Braintree against England and the world, giving as little as possible and getting the best of the bargain ; and there is the Braintree that identifies itself with England and asks how can we do best for the world with this little place of ours, how can we edu- cate best, produce most, and make our roads straight and good for the world to go through.

3. Such a moral and religious remvigora- tion implies a third demand of the new age — a new grasp upon the principle of the organic view of truth and of human society. Truth comes by the honest interaction of many minds. And all human social values require a like cooperation. Scientific co- operation on an enormous scale has been forced upon the belligerents on both sides, and, as already implied, is likely to be so forced after the war to a degree never before

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true. Within individual nations, and within allied groups of nations, the inevitable grip of the principle is already recognized and driven home. Is it for an instant conceiv- able that the application of the principle can stop there, without inherent self-contra- diction ? Any full and rational cooperation between human beings goes back to a fun- damental moral and Christian principle, — the demand for "mental and spiritual fellow- ship among men, and mental and spiritual independence on the part of the individual." Both sides of the demand are equally essen- tial. For the most fruitful cooperation im- plies that men need one another, and need the best and most that each can give. Men must have fellowship, and the best must be called out from each.

It may be fairly said, I think, that of the two groups of belligerents the Teutonic Allies on the whole have put their main emphasis upon fellowship, — the closest scientific co- operation, though within a restricted range; the Entente Allies, especially England and France, have put their emphasis upon mental and spiritual independence on the part of the individual. Both emphases are essen- tial. Only together do they adequately ex-

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press the moral law for both individuals and nations. Each group has much to learn from the other. On the one hand, we may not go our antagonistic, wasteful, selfish ways with impunity, as individuals or com- munities or nations. We must scientifically cooperate — and to the limits of humanity. On the other hand, we need to secure the freest initiative and the fullest contribution from each individual and class and nation and civilization. No nation or civilization is so rich as to afford to blot out or to ignore the contributions of the rest. To attempt to apply the principle of cooperation in a spirit of insular, provincial, or arrogant na- tional selfishness is self-contradictory, and is to go back two thousand years in a virtual return to the exclusive state of antiquity, with its absolute domination of the indi- vidual and its utter denial of any obligations outside the state.

Certainly no new civilization will be worthy the name, or command the loyalty of humanity that does not definitely seek to combine the gifts and graces of all the nations and civilizations, whether English or German or French or Austrian or Russian or Belgian or Japanese or Polish. It is inspiring to

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think that the great conference of the rep- resentatives of the Allies at Paris was " really a legislative Parliament of eight nations," and dealt with many questions outside the war, such as an international patent office, laws con- cerning stock companies and business failures, and telegraph, telephone, and postal rates. The Allies thus afforded, as The Nation said, "an admirable example of how easy it is for the peoples of a large section of the globe to legislate in a Parliament of nations. Who shall say that this gathering may not in the years to come be recognized as the first prac- tical step toward a World Congress ?" For the nations represented constitute, it is to be noted, more than one-half of both the total area and population of the globe. If co- operation on that scale is already possible, our faith should strengthen in cooperation of a still greater and more ideal sort.

4. What has already been said involves a fourth demand of the new age, — that its civilization shall be frankly, definitely Chris- tian, in a more consistent, thorough, and deep-going fashion than any nation has yet achieved.

(i) First of all, I cannot shake off the con- viction that in this world-shaking war, God

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is sifting out the true from the false Chris- tianity. His ''fan is in his hand and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing floor." Once more "He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat." And it is being forced home upon the reasons and consciences of men to-day that a primarily theological Christianity, a primarily emotion- ally mystical Christianity, a primarily cere- monial Christianity, a Christianity that adopts God as a kind of national perquisite, and an Old Testament kind of Christianity, — have all alike failed to stand the test of these crucial days.

"It is altogether too rashly assumed," says a modern writer on the war, "by people whose sentimentality outruns their knowledge, that Christianity is essentially an attempt to carry out the personal teachings of Christ. It is nothing of the sort, and no church authority will support that idea. Chris- tianity . . . was and is a theological reli- gion." Now so far as that is true, it must cease to be true. That kind of Christianity is being shaken to its base. All these kinds of Christianity, in fact, have been readily harmonized in all the belligerent nations in this war with a bitterness and hatred and

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ferocity utterly un-Christlike. They simply are not Christian. The only kind of Chris- tianity that can be said to have come out of this war unscathed is a Christianity that is a true reflection of the spirit and teachings of Christ, that is consequently ethical through and through, not tribal but universal in its appeal, and with an ethics capable of ap- plication as truly to nations and national relations as to individuals and individual relations. The Christianity of the new civilization must certainly learn the lesson which Edith Cavell learned. It is an English humorist, Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote of her :

The finest thing she did, not only for her country but for the men and women of all lands, was when she put aside all hatred, all bitterness. "Standing as I do in view of God and eternity, I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone." We, too, are standing before God and eternity, and His judgment is awaiting us. For us, too, patriotism is not enough. Our victory must be not only over the Germans but over ourselves. We must have no hatred, no bitterness. By no other means will peace be "conclusive."

The Young Women's Christian Associa- tion of Boston have been having some inter- national social gatherings during the year.

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At a recent gathering, some one asked, writes the Secretary reporting,

Whether we could not sing something together.

"Why," I exclaimed, "how can we? There is no language all of us speak."

"But," suggested a French girl, "tunes are the same, and there ought to be a tune we all know, even if we have to sing different words."

"Everybody knows 'Holy Night,'" said a woman of large musical ability, born in Russia, of English and German parentage, with own cousins in each of the three armies.

She sat down at the piano and began to play the song. An American concert singer with a rare voice, invited in for the occasion, stood by her and led. One after another the others joined, till French, Swiss, German, Austrian, Belgian, Pole, Russian, and Italian were all singing together the same message to the same music — but each in her own tongue.

If all start from Christ, the nations can come into harmony, even though each sings in its ov^n tongue.

(2) It should not be less clear that, if the nevv^ civilization is to be genuinely Christian, there must be in it an utter abandonment of the philosophy of the state as a law to itself and as above the claims of Christian morality. I believe that no issue in this terrifying war is so transcendent as this. For the possibil-

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ities for evil of this philosophy are simply limitless. Nothing can be so frightful that this view cannot justify it. I do not see, therefore, how I can honestly discuss the problems of these crucial days and refuse to face this issue also. For, so far as I can see, this doctrine of the state is paganism pure and simple, and makes any nation avowing it intrinsically and just so far, whether it will or not, an enemy of civilization, of mankind, of Christianity. It concerns every interest of humanity of every race, that this demo- niacal philosophy of the state should perish beyond power of resurrection. It is not by accident that the most terrible expressions of hatred and of unmeasured arrogance, and that the most ruthless destruction of non- combatants, including the unspeakable Ar- menian massacre, have come from those Powers that have more or less definitely avowed this philosophy of the state. It behooves us all to see with vividness and concreteness, just what this theory of the state is capable of; and for that purpose only, and with reluctance, I quote the terrible "Hymn of the German Sword," produced in a University town — Leipsic — and running within a week or so into half a dozen edi-

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tions. I do not and cannot for an instant believe that it truly reflects the general German mind, but it certainly ought to stir every true German and every true lover of the German people to determine utterly to destroy every vestige of the hellish doctrine of the state, out of which these lines are born :

It is no duty of mine to be either just or compassion- ate ; it suffices that I am sanctified by my exalted mis- sion, and that I blind the eyes of my enemies with such streams of tears as shall make the proudest of them cringe in terror under the vault of heaven.

I have slaughtered the old and the sorrowful ; I have struck off the breasts of women ; and I have run through the body of children who gazed at me with the eyes of the wounded lion.

Day after day I ride aloft on the shadowy horse in the valley of cypresses ; and as I ride I draw forth the life blood from every enemy's son that dares to dispute my path.

It is meet and right that I should cry aloud my pride, for am I not the flaming messenger of the Lord Almighty ^

Germany is so far above and beyond all the other nations that all the rest of the earth, be they who they may, should feel themselves well done by when they are allowed to fight with the dogs for the crumbs that fall from her table.

When Germany the divine is happy, then the rest of the world basks in smiles ; but when Germany

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suflfers, God in person is rent with anguish, and, wrath- ful and avenging, He turns all the waters into rivers of blood.

The language is the exalted language of reli- gion, but the spirit we cannot mistake. As another has said, it is "the genuine brew of hell." Men of all nationalities, on both sides, may well unceasingly pray that one of the chief accomplishments of this terrible war may be the absolute annihilation of this unspeakable philosophy of the super-state as well as of the super-man. There can be no conceivable peace between that philoso- phy and Christianity.

No, if Christianity be true and divine at all, the principles of Christ are applicable to nations as well as to individuals. As Presi- dent Wilson puts it, "It is clear that nations must in the future be governed by the same high code of honor that we demand of in- dividuals." As surely as the individual must respect the person of other individuals, the nation must respect both its own individual citizens and other nations. As surely as truth is demanded in individual relations, so surely is it demanded between nations. As surely as a man must put his honor above his life, so surely must a nation, as Belgium

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gloriously proved. A current cartoon of the time represented the Kaiser as saying to King Albert, "So, you see — you've lost every- thing." "Not my soul," replies the King. As surely as individuals are called to unselfish helpfulness, so surely nations, if the world is ever to be the brotherhood of men it ought to be, must not proceed on selfish principles. They can no more escape the blighting con- sequences of such a course in their own life than can the individual.

The whole philosophy of selfishness is self- defeating, whether for the individual or for the nation. For the laws of God are laws of life ; and in God's universe there is no such source of enlarging life as unselfish love, and the man or the nation that would be first of all must be first in service. Even from a merely commercial point of view, to destroy another nation economically, is just so far to destroy at the same time that nation's power to be a profitable customer. Legitimate com- merce is built on mutual benefit. To follow the present war with a hardly less bitter economic war — as many are proposing — is folly unspeakable, and would be once more to sow the seeds of inevitable and self-destroy- ing strife.

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(3) As an early step to that more Chris- tian world that ought to be, some form of a League of Nations to Enforce Peace is prob- ably imperative. America, as well as other nations, must give up the mad idea of arma- ments so gigantic as to defend herself in iso- lation against the world. She must definitely welcome such a creed and policy as President Wilson outlined :

We believe these fundamental things.

First, that every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live. . . .

Second, that the small states of the world have a right to enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty and for their territorial integrity that great and power- ful nations expect and insist upon.

And, third, that the world has a right to be free from every disturbance of its peace that has its origin in aggression and disregard of the rights of peoples and nations.

So sincerely do we believe in these things that I am sure that I speak the mind and wish of the people of America when I say that the United States is willing to become a partner in any feasible association of nations formed in order to realize these objects and make them secure against violation.

(4) Looking still farther into the future, Dr. Jordan thus sums up plans for a perma- nent peace :

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All of the intelligent constructive propositions for lasting peace, thus far proposed, with others crowding to the front in practically every nation, agree in essential demands. They unite in the petition for democratic control of governmental action ; for the use of law instead of force in the adjustment of international dis- putes — though some feel that a force, police in its character, should stand behind the world court as a support or sanction. They demand the interposition of difficulties in the way of declarations of war, taking these declarations out of the hands of any single man or any small group acting in secret. All have the demand of a concert of peoples, instead of non-repre- sentative diplomats known as the "concert of Powers."

These propositions call not only for a permanent court of arbitration, but also for a permanent council for the investigation of facts of international interest. All ask for disarmament to some degree, and most of them for the national ownership of armament-manu- facturing plants and the abolition of private profits in armament-making. Most of them would have the Hague Conferences revived and strengthened, would call for immunity of private property at sea and for international neutralization of the channels of com- merce. Most of them deny the right of conquest, and ask that no arbitrary changes of boundary be made without the consent of the people immediately affected. Those who refer to indemnities are opposed to them under all circumstances as being in the nature of high- way robbery.

In general, all seem to realize that militarism will not put an end to militarism, and the reduction of the military control must lie with the people themselves.

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They assume that the people are a more potent as well as a more rational force in public affairs than are armies and navies.

All over the world these constructive plans for lasting peace are being formed.

But a Christian civilization cannot be satisfied simply to avoid war or to secure an abiding peace. It must look to great con- structive cooperative enterprises that shall bring in justice and righteousness and mutual helpfulness among all the nations : — it must look, that is, to something like a genuine Parliament of the Nations, to a true civiliza- tion of brotherly men. Christian men and women certainly must do more than accept this as an abstract goal. They must believe in it, and hold themselves pledged perpetually and sacrificially to back every practicable step toward that goal. They are to take heed, therefore, to themselves, that they be ready to be citizens of this new civilization.

IV

The Appeal to American Youth

When I think of this new civilization which I must believe lies ahead, I am not anxious for our national physical safety, but I am

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anxious for our moral life. I am anxious that America take a part worthy of her in that new civilization, and in bringing it to pass. That will depend most of all upon American youth. I bring back to them especially, therefore, once more, Christ's challenge at a like world crisis : "Take heed to yourselves."

First of all, with all your souls believe in the possibilities of the new civilization, and throw your whole selves into the struggle for its on-coming. Do not be cynics nor stand- patters.

In the second place, accept your special obligations as Americans to-day. Be intel- ligent, thoughtful, unselfish American citi- zens, with world vision, ashamed not to think in world terms, in terms of humanity. So thinking, you will remember that no generation since the world began has ever witnessed such a destruction of youthful leaders as has yours. That tragic fact lays hands of solemn consecration upon your heads in this hour.

In the third place, forecast with all the help you can obtain from the clearest-sighted and farthest-sighted social prophets of our time, the demands of the new age, that you may dedicate yourselves wholly to them.

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Be sure, therefore, first, that the new age will have a new sense of the inescapable grip of the laws of God in the life of nations as well as of individuals ; and keep it in remem- brance for your own nation, as you do what in you lies to guard her seed-sowing.

Be sure, second, that the nation that means to be ready to play its full part in the new civilization, must, with stern self-disci- pline, thoroughly reinvigorate the whole range of its life, — physical, political, economic, social, intellectual, moral, and religious. The time for slovenliness of national life in any realm is gone. "Take heed to yourselves," therefore, for the higher glory of your own nation.

Be sure, third, that you keep your vision of the organic view of truth and of human society, and so preserve a lively sense of the value of the contribution of every man and class and nation and civilization, in that new dawning world of cooperating, mutually re- specting nations.

Be sure, finally, that your Christianity is the Christianity of Christ, of no make-believe and ineffective type, but purged clean of shallowness, of hatred and of arrogance, capable of application to the whole life of

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nations no less than of individuals, and capable, above all, of the sacrificial spirit.

He was shot, my last boy (said a French officer to Mr. Frank H. Simonds), up near Verdun, in the begin- ning of the war. He did not die at once and I went to him. For twenty days I sat beside him in a cellar waiting for him to die. I bought the last coffin In the village that he might be burled In It and kept it under my bed. We talked many times before he died, and he told me all he knew of the fight, of the men about him and how they fell. My name Is finished, but I say to you now that In all that experience there was nothing that was not beautiful.

Its beauty was the awful, the sanctifying, the consecrating beauty of self-sacrifice. Its ter- rible price the fathers and sons, the mothers and daughters, the age and youth of more than half the nations of the world are still steadily paying, in the name, they believe, of something more than a selfish patriotism. Is this sifting searching world-crisis to pass, and bring no like sacrificial baptism to your country and mine ? This is our threatening danger. For its forefending there must be the high beauty of sacrifice for the tran- scendent aims of the Kingdom of God on earth. We must be genuine citizens of the new civilization. Only so can Christianity prove itself Indeed a world-religion.

Printed in the United States of America.

INDEX

Ambrosius, Johanna, quoted, 150. America, obligations resting upon,

221. Animals, suffering of, 7 ff.

Bergson, referred to, 14. Bowne, on error, 15. Browning, quoted, 22, 127; re- ferred to, 71. Buddhism, 200 ff. Bushnell, quoted, 1 21-123.

Cavell, Edith, quoted, 241.

Christ, light from, on the problem of sin and suffering, 54 ff. ; help from suffering of, 55 ff, ; help against sin from the suffering of, 61 ff. ; on prayer, 77 ff. ; ex- ample in prayer, 83 ff. ; how we are to think about him, 96 ff. ; the best life, 97 ; the best ideals and standards, 98; the best insight into the laws of life, 99 ; Ranke on, 97; the source of the best convictions, loi ; the source of the best hopes, 102; the best dynamic for living, 103 ; the best revelation of God, 105 ; significance of dis- cipleship of, 129 ff. ; Drum- mond quoted on, 165 ff.

Christianity, as a world religion, I90ff., 2i2ff. ; the only hopeful basis for Oriental civilization, 190 ff.; alone can meet the tests of an adequate spiritual basis for the modern civiliza-

tion of the Orient, 205 ff. ; defective kinds of, 240-241.

Christian unity, question of, 171 ff.

Civilization, the need of an ade- quate spiritual basis for, 191 ff. ; Oriental, increasing sense of need of a new spiritual basis for, 194 ff. ; necessary threefold test of religious basis of a mod- ern, 199 ff. ; citizens of a new, 212 ff. ; faith in the possibilities of a new, 216 ff. ; new, the demands of, 224 ff.

Comer, Mrs., The Massey Money, 124-127.

Common deeper life of men, help from, 23 ff.

Confucianism, 200 ff.

Conscience, fidelity to, 1 14.

Conservative and radical, 142.

Darwin, on animal suffering, 8.

Decision, life's fundamental, 109 ff. ; Jameson, iii; signifi- cance of ethical, even without religious faith, I2I ff.

Degenerative diseases, 229.

Devine, quoted, 232.

Drifting or steering, iii ff.

Drummond, referred to, 164; quoted, on Christ, 165 ff.

Duty, or pleasure, 118.

Eliot, George, on pain, 52. Emperor cult, the, 200.

253

254

INDEX

Eucken, referred to, 14; on

meaning and value of life, 68. Evolution, "dramatic tendency"

in, 29; as pointing to prayer,

70. Experiment in Altruism^ An,

quoted, 50-51.

Federal Council of Churches, quoted, 222 ff.

Feeling, domination by, 112.

Feminism, 158 ff.

Ferrero, quoted, 213, 228.

Fiske, John, on meaning of evolu- tion, 9; on the omnipresent ethical trend of the universe, 30; on the reality of religion, 82-83.

Freedom, Goethe on, 162; the achievement of true, 163 ff.

Galatians, referred to, 135 ff. German Sword, Hymn of the, 244-

245-

God, known through his self- manifestations, 86 ff. ; relation to, unobtrusive, 91 ff.; refusing the will of, 119.

Goethe, on true freedom, 162.

Good, the lesser, 116,

Gordon, General, quoted, 215.

Hadley, President, quoted, 153. Harris, Rendel, quoted, 91-92. Hastings, Elizabeth, quoted, 50-

51-

Hebrews, referred to, 55. Herrmann, on prayer, 73. Hinton, Mystery of Pain, quoted,

60, 62. Hobhouse, on true freedom, 169.

Immortality, help of faith in, 31 ff.

Jacks, quoted, IS3-IS4-

James, Book of, referred to,

135 ff. ; and Paul contrasted,

146. James, referred to, 14, 79, 163 ;

on sin, 15; on the prophet, 57;

Is Life Worth Living, quoted,

58-59; on psychology of

prayer, 71; on decision, iii. Jerome K. Jerome, on Edith

Cavell, 241. Jordan, David Starr, on plans for

a permanent peace, 248-249. Jude, referred to, 135 ff.

Kant, referred to, 39, 134.

Law, universality not uniformity of, 66 ; and liberty, life's funda- mental paradox, 133 ff.

Lawlessness, selfish, 159 ff.

Laws, need of, 20; no eternal self-existing, 67; of God, grip of the, in the life of nations, 224 ff.

League of Nations to enforce peace, 247.

LeConte, referred to, 21.

Le Gallienne, quoted, 31.

Leibnitz, referred to, 18.

Liberty and law, life's funda- mental paradox, 133 ff. ; why this problem constantly recurs, 137 ff . ; the New Testament solution of the problem, 144 ff. ; relation of the Christian solu- tion of the paradox to other theories of life, 148 ff. ; modern examples of the paradox, 153 ff.

Loofs, referred to, 208.

Lord's Prayer, as standard of prayer, 92.

Lotze, referred to, 4, 10, 16; on problem of evil, 26-28; on

INDEX

255

need of opposition, 47; on pain, 52. Loyalty, 113.

Man's vision, smallness of, 25 ; nature. Christian implications of, 43 ff. ; made for action, 45 fF.

Marriage, as an institution, 158-

159;

Martineau, quoted, 21. Matheson, on sacrifice, 60. Moral character, prerequisites of,

12 if.; universe, the demand

for, 18 ff.

Nation, The, on England's Irish

policy, 227 ; on a Parliament of

Nations, 239. National defense, conditions of,

231 ff. Nature, final forces in, unseen, 87-

88. New Republic, The, quoted, 218. Nietzsche, referred to, 134.

Organic view of truth and human society, 236 ff.

Pain, George Eliot on, 52; Lotze on, 52; Hinton's Mystery of Pain, quoted, 60, 62.

Paradox, life's fundamental, 133 fi".

Paul and Book of James con- trasted, 146.

Paulsen, referred to, 4; quoted, 45-46; on vicarious suffering,

54-

Peace, League of Nations to enforce, 247; David Starr Jordan on plans for a perma- nent, 248-249.

Personal intercourse, no literal transfer of thought in, 88 ff.

Peter, i, referred to, 55; 2, referred to, 135 ff.

Pfleiderer, on fellowship with God, 69.

Pleasure or duty, 1 18.

Political reinvigoration, need of, 230-231.

Prayer, diflftculties concerning, 66 ff. ; difficulties connected with supposed scientific view- point, 66 ff. ; James on the psychology of, 71 ; scope of, 72 ff. ; Herrmann on, 73 ; difficulties from a false concep- tion of, 75 ff. ; gauge, 75 ff. ; Christ on, yy ff. ; difficulties from the supposed improbabil- ity of, 81 ff.; Christ's example in, 83 ff. ; difficulty from the lack of a felt presence and response, 85 ff. ; Lord's Prayer as standard of, 92 ; most signifi- cant answers to, 93-94; diffi- culty of intercessory, 94-95.

Problem of evil, the universality of, 5 ; Lotze on, 26-28.

Psychology, false animal, lo-ii.

Radical and Conservative, 142. Railway Age Gazette, quoted,

155 ff.

Ranke, on Christ, 97.

Reality, three realms of, the is, the must, the ought, 4,

Religion, John Fiske on the reality of, 82-83.

Religious basis of a modern civili- zation, necessary threefold test of, 199 ff.

Revelation, referred to, 55.

Romans, referred to, 135 ff.

Royce, on loyalty, 11 3-1 14.

Sabbath, the values of, 160-161. Scherer, James A. B., quoted,

232-233.

256

INDEX

Scientific spirit, surrender to, 115. Self-assertion and self-surrender,

143- Self-discipline, in national life,

229 if. Selfish lawlessness, 159 ff. Selfishness, 128. Self-surrender and self-assertion,

143-

Shinto, 200.

Simonds, Frank H., quoted, 252.

Sin and suffering, light from Christ on problem of, 54 ff.

Sky Pilot, The, quoted, 58.

Socialism, the real leaders of, 155.

Spiritual basis for civilization, the need of an adequate, 191 ff. ; increasing sense of need of a new spiritual basis for Oriental civilization, 194 ff. ; for the modern civilization of the Orient, Christianity alone can meet the tests of an adequate, 205 ff.

Stilgebauer, Dr. Edward, quoted, 226.

Story, quoted, 121.

Stowe, Mrs., Uncle Tom, 57.

Suffering, in the animal world, 7 ff. ; four views of, 34 ff. ; in the Book of Job, 34 ff. ; as punishment, 35-36; as dis- cipHne, 36 ff. ; as defense against prudential selfishness, 38 ff. ; in the light of the great- ness of God, 41 ff. ; in personal relations, 47-48; as redemp- tive, 48-49; fellowship in, as a help to love, 51; problem of

sin and, light from Christ on, 54 ff. ; vicarious, 58 ff.

Suffragism, militant, 157 ff.

Syncretism, a new religious syn- cretism inadequate for Japanese civilization, 202 ff.

Syndicalism, 157.

Temperamental differences, bear- ing on Christian unity, 174 ff.

Thomson and Geddes, on meaning of evolution, 9.

Traver, Harry G., quoted, 233.

Trumbull, referred to, 74.

Tyndall, referred to, 75.

Uniformity in creedal statement not desirable, 177 ff. ; complete uniformity of statement and belief impossible, 180 ff. ; un- desirable, 183 ff.

Unity, Christian, question of, 171 ff. ; a true organic, 176; our real unity in our common life in Christ, 186 ff.

Wallace, on animal suffering, 8.

Warfield, quoted, 128.

Wells, H. G., quoted, 219-220;

on a new creative spirit in

national life, 235-236. Wilfulness, 117. Wilson, President, quoted, 245,

247. World, love of the, 123 ff. Wundt, referred to, 4.

Y. W. C. A. of Boston, interna- tional social gatherings of, 241- 242.

Printed in the United States of America.

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