1148 00318 1419
The Double Search
Studies in Atonement and Prayer
Other Books by the Same Author
ELI AND SYBIL JONES : THEIR LIFE ANB
WORK.
I2mo, 300 pages. (1889)
PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY.
ismo, 206 pages. (1899)
A DYNAMIC FAITH.
I2mo, 105 pages. Cipoi)
A BOY'S RELIGION FROM MEMORY.
i6mo, 145 pages. (1902)
GEORGE Fox; AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
ismo, 2 vols., 584 pages. Illus-
trated. (1903)
SOCIAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD.
Studies in Human and Divine
Inter-r elationsli ip .
ismo, 272 pages. (1904)
THE
DOUBLE SEARCH
STUDIES IN
ATONEMENT AND PRAYER
BY
RUFUS M. JONES, A.M., Litt.D.
Professor of Philosophy in Have IT ford College
1906.
PHILADELPHIA,
THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1906
BT THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 9
CHAPTER I
THE HISTORICAL AND INWARD
CHRIST 21
CHAPTER II
THE ATONEMENT . . . . 57
CHAPTER III
PRAYER 89
Introduction
*' We are always gathered around the Divine
Centre of our being; and, indeed, if we could
withdraw from it, our being would at once be
dissolved away, and we should cease to exist
at all. But, near as it is to us, often we do
not direct our eyes to it. When, however, -we
do so direct our gaze, we attain to the end of
our desires and to the rest of our souls, and
our song is no more a discord, but, circling
round our Centre, we pour forth a divinely in-
spired chorale. And in the choral dance we be-
hold the source of our life, the fountain of our
intelligence, the primal good, the root of the
soul."
Plotinus, Ennead VI.
INTRODUCTION.
THERE Is a famous myth In Plato's
Symposium told to explain the
origin of love. This myth says that
primitive man was round, and had four
hands and four feet, and one head with
two faces looking opposite ways. He
could walk on his legs if he liked, But he
also could roll over and over with great
speed if he wished to go anywhere very
fast.
Because of their fleetness and skill
these " Round people " were dangerous
rivals in power to Zeus himself and he
adopted the plan of weakening them by
cutting each one of them In two. In re*
meuibrance of the original undivided
9
io DOUBLE SEARCH
state each half, ever since unsatisfied and
alone, seeks eagerly for the other half.
Each human being is thus a half a
tally and love is the longing to be
united. The two halves are seeking to
be joined again in the original whole.
Such in briefest compass is the myth.
But as the dialogue advances love Is
traced to a higher source. It is discov-
ered to be a passion for the eternal, a
passion which rises in the soul at the
sight of an object which suggests the
eternal, from which the soul has come
into the temporal. The soul is alien
here and its chief joy in the midst of
the shows of sense is joy at the sight of
something which reminds it of its old
divine home. Thus, again, Plato tells
us that love has its birth in the division
INTRODUCTION n
of what was once a whole. We yearn
for that from which we have come.
" Though inland far we be
Our souls have sight of that Immortal
sea
That brought us hither,"
We may ignorantly stop at some mid-
way good and miss the homeward path,
but our real search, our master passion,
is for that divine Other to whom we
belong. So at last Plato poetizes.
We have discovered through other
lips, what he could not tell us, that the
search is a double search. We have
learned that the Divine Other whom we
seek is also seeking us. The myth, told
at the beginning, is more suggestive than
it seemed. It may perhaps do for a
parable of the finite and the Infinite, the
12 DOUBLE SEARCH
soul and its Father. May they not once
have been in union? May not our birth
in time be a drawing away into individ-
uality from the Divine whole? And
then may not the goal of the entire
drama of personal life be the restoration
of that union on a higher spiritual level?
May it not be, that we are never again
to fuse the skirts of self and merge into
a union of oblivion, but rather that we
are to rise to a love-union in. which His
will becomes our will a union of con-
scious cooperation? So at any rate I be-
lieve. But this little book is not a book
of speculation. It is not written to urge
some fond belief.
We have learned, I say, that life re-
veals a double search. Man's search for
God is as plain a fact as his search for
food. He has, beyond question, blun-
INTRODUCTION 13
dered at It and frequently missed the
trail, but that man in all lands and in all
times has maintained some kind of
search for an invisible Companion is a
momentous fact.
The other half of the story is, I think,
still more momentous. It is full of
pathos and tragedy, but laden with the
prophecy of final triumph. I have tried
to tell again this story, surely aa old, old
story, but always needing to be retold
in the current language and the prevail-
ing conceptions of the time. The main
feature of this book is its insistence on
the facts of experience. Its terms are
not those of theology, but those of life,
or if I have used theological words I
have endeavored to re-vitalize them. I
shall assume that my readers are familiar
with the idea of the conjunct life which
i 4 DOUBLE SEARCH
I have expounded at length In a former
book. 1 It is now well known that " Iso-
lated " personality is impossible. He
who is to enjoy the rights and privileges
of personality must be conjunct with oth-
ers. He must be an organic member in
a social group, and share himself with
his fellows, while at the same time he
receives contributions from them. This
principle of the conjunct life reaches be-
yond the finite social fellowship in which
a man forms and expresses his personal-
ity. God and man are conjunct. The
ground for this position will not be gone
over here. It has been sufficiently pre-
sented elsewhere.
I believe, however, that no psycho-
logical discovery has ever thrown so
*" Social Law in the Spiritual World," Phila-
delphia, 1904.
INTRODUCTION 15
much light upon the meaning of atone-
ment and prayer as this fact of the con-
junct life does, and I hope that many
others may come to feel the freshness
and reality of these deepest religious
truths as I have felt them.
la touching these two subjects we are
touching the very pillars of religion- If
atonement God's search for us
and prayer -our search for Him
are not real, then religion has no per-
manent ground of reality. But there
can be no question that our age has wit-
nessed a serious weakening of faith in
both these central aspects of religion.
The doctrine of the atonement does not
grip men as it did once, and there are
persons all about us who are perplexed
about the place and efficacy of prayer.
It is no frivolous questioning. It is not
i 6 DOUBLE SEARCH
the result of a lazy attitude of mind. It
is stern and serious. There is only one
way to change this condition. We must
make men feel again the reality of the
atonement and the reality of prayer.
That is the task which lies before those
of us who believe. The day for dog-
matic assertion is past It rolls off most
minds now as water rolls from oiled silk.
The truths which march with power are
the truths which are verified by, and but-
tressed with, facts. We must, then,
learn how to carry the laboratory meth-
od into our religious teaching and ground
our message in actual reality.
This slender book is an attempt to ap-
proach these two subjects atonement
and prayer in this spirit and by this
method. We can never get the tele-
scope or microscope turned upon the ob-
INTRODUCTION 17
jects of spiritual experience and we can-
not use the mathematical method which
has worked such wonders in the phys-
ical realm. There will always be some
who cannot see the evidence. But it is
worth while to show that these two pil-
lars of religion do- rest not on air
but on experience which can be verified
and tested ; that they rest in fact on the
elemental basis of life, upon which we
live our common social life together.
I trust it will help some to find the
trail, and that it will convince some per-
plexed, though honest, readers that how-
ever their own quest has fared there is
another search beside their own, the
quest of a Divine Companion who spares
no pain or cost to bring us all into a fel-
lowship with Him.
Haverford, Pennsylvania,
New Year 1906.
The Historical and the
Inward Christ
"All who since Jesus have come into union
with God have come into union with God through
Him-. And thus it is confirmed in every way
that, even to the end of time, all wise and intelli-
gent men must bow themselves reverently before
this Jesus of Nazareth; and that the more wise,
intelligent and noble they themselves are, the
more humbly will they recognize the exceeding
nobleness of this great and glorious manifestation
of the Divine Life."
Fichte's " Way Toward the Blessed Life" p. jpi.
"Christ is the Eternal Humanity in the life
of the Infinite."
George A. Gordon's" The Christ of Today," p. 136.
"The word of God is continually born anew in
the hearts of holy men."
Epistle to Diognetus, A. D, 125.
2O
THE HISTORICAL AND THE
INWARD CHRIST,
THERE was once a widespread fear
that exact methods of historical
research would deprive us of that lumi-
nous divine Figure toward whom the
world had reverently turned its face for
more than eighteen centuries. Some
suspected that our records of His life
were crowded with myth and legend,
others believed that the singular story
which had so profoundly touched the
world's heart was the creation of high-
ly wrought enthusiastic disciples. To-
day, after more than half a century of
critical sifting and acute probing, this
luminous Life is more firmly established
22 DOUBLE SEARCH
as the central fact of history than ever
before.
" That one Face, far from vanish, rather
grows
Or decomposes but to recompose
Becomes my universe which loves and
knows."
It is not my purpose at present to retell
the story, or to point out how much
criticism has left unshaken. I want
rather to show how the historical Christ,
as a revelation of God, fits into a cosmic
system of evolution and how He is re-
lated to the Spirit that witnesses with
our spirits and is the inward life of the
Saints of all ages and lands,
I shall not use the language or the
methods of theology. I shall feel my
way along the great arteries of human
THE INWARD CHRIST 23
experience and try to throw light and
suggestion rather than to establish some
final and complete dogma. To be-
gin at once with the problem before
us, how shall we think of Christ? Was
He man? Was He God? Was He
some miraculous union of two essentially
unrelated natures? Here are the ques-
tions which have split the Christian!
world up into camps and which have
busied schoolmen in all the centuries,
The difficulty in almost all the theo-
logical discussions on .the subject has
been that they started with God and
man isolated, separated, unrelated. No
true revelation of such a God ever could
be made through a human life, for di-
vinity and humanity on this theory are
conceived as two totally diverse natures.
Modern psychology and recent studies
24 DOUBLE SEARCH
of social life have made us familiar with
a deeper view of human personality and
have prepared for a more adequate
study of Divine personality than was
possible when the historic creeds were
formulated. We know that God and
man are conjunct and that neither can
be separated absolutely from the other.
There never has been any doubt of man's
need of God, but we now know that God
also needs us and that our lives are mu-
tually organic. Every clew which leads
us to God shows Him to us as a spiritual
and social Being in no sense solitary
and self-sufficient. Our own self-con-
sciousness, our own ideals, our passion for
the unrealized, imply and involve more
than an impersonal energy at the heart of
things. There must be a spiritual ma-
trix for this living, throbbing, growing
THE INWARD CHRIST 25
social organism, in which personal life
is formed. Our own experience carries
in itself the implication of a genuinely
spiritual Person at the heart of the uni-
verse of whom we all partake. The
spiritual history of the race has forever
settled this elemental fact, at least for
all who feel the full significance of life*
It is not an assumption, it is not a mere
belief it is involved in all we feel and
know and are. But a spiritual, personal
Being must reveal Himself. An unmani-
f ested God unknown and unknowable
is no God at all. He would be ab-
stract and unreal* The least human,
person who poured his life out into those
about him who loved and suffered for
the sake of another would be a higher
being than an infinite God shut up in the
closed circle of His own self life. It is
26 DOUBLE SEARCH
a law as old as the morning star that
one must lose himself to find himself,
must give to get, must go forth bearing
precious seed in order to come again
with sheaves of harvest. The moment
It Is settled that there is a divine Per-
son as the ultimate reality of the universe,
it Is also settled that He will reveal Him-
self, that He will put His Life into
manifold manifestations and that He
will find His joy in " working all things
up to better," to use Clement's phrase.
So long as the processes of evolution
were confined to the plant and brute there
could be no revelation of anything but
force; or at most there could be only
dawnlngs of anything higher. The
forms of life which won In the struggle
and survived were manifestations of
power they hardly Implied anything
THE INWARD CHRIST, 27,.
more. The tough spine and the strong
jaw and the sharp claw were all that mat-
tered. Everything that appeared was
pushed into existence by a force from be-
hind. There wa.s no sign or hint of
freedom, or of life formed under the
sway of a vision or an ideal. Things
moved " for a million aeons through the
vast, waste dawn " toward a goal, but
the goal was never in sight and it played
no part in the process.
John Fiske has, somewhere, denied the
truth of the proverb that " nature ab-
hors leaps," and he has given a beauti-
ful illustration from the cutting of a cone.
If you pass a plane parallel to the base
of a cone you cut a circle. If you tilt
the plane slightly the curve becomes an
ellipse. The ellipse grows more eccen-
tric as the tilting increases and finally
28 DOUBLE SEARCH
without any warning your plane cuts a
parabola whose sides curve off into in-
finity and never touch ends again. Some
such mighty leap appears in the process
of evolution. Up to a certain point life
evolved by forces working a tergo^
There is a slight tilt in the system and a
being appears capable of selecting a goal
for himself and of acting to attain it, a
being who could live in some degree for
a world as it ought to be. 2
This is what in America we call " the
great divide 1 ' the watershed which
determines the streams of a continent.
As soon as there was a being who could
1 The term a tergo causation means that what
happens is produced entirely by the push or the
pull of forces. There is an exact equation the
antecedent determines the consequent.
2 It is not true, of course, that there is an abso-
lute "break" in the upward processes of life.
Even in the lower forms of life there are hints of
THE INWARD CHRIST 29
select ideals and live for conscious ends
a new kind of evolution began. The
other side of " the divide," evolution
had been physical, body, and body
function had been the goal. This side
" the divide," it was spiritual and social,
and the goal was the evolution of the
man within man. The things which
mattered now were love, sacrifice, serv-
ice, goodwill rather than " tooth and
claw." Before, nature's goal had been
along the line of least resistance. Now,
the line of march set straight against in-
stinct and along the line of greatest re-
sistance. There could be advance on
higher possibilities. There is an elemental strug-
gle for the life of others which has in it the
potentiality of love and sacrifice. But there is no
" sign " on the lower levels before self-con-
sciousness dawned of any capacity for an ideal,
or of any power to develop by the forecast and
vision of the goal.
3 o DOUBLE SEARCH
this side " the divide/ 5 only as the ideal
became clearer and its sway more coer-
cive.
Ever since man was man he has tran-
scended the actual and lived by vision,
which means, I think, that finite and in-
finite are not sundered and that we always
partake of more than just ourselves,
Beyond the edge of what we are there Is
always dawning a farther possibility
that which we ought to he the a fronte
compulsion. 1 This is one of God's ways
of revealing Himself. It is a man's
chief glory the glory of the imper-
fect,
" Growth came when, looking your last
on them all
1 The term a fronte compulsion means the com-
pelling power of an ideal which influences by an
attraction from in front
THE INWARD CHRIST 31
You turned your eyes inwardly one fine
day
And cried with a start what if we so
small
Be greater and grander the while than
they?
Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of
stature ?
In both, of such lower types are we
Precisely because of our wider nature;
For time, theirs ours, for eternity.
Today's brief passion limits their range;
It seethes with the morrow for us and
more,
They are perfect how eke? They
shall never change*
We are faulty why not? We have
time in store. 1 ' 1
1 Browning's " Old Pictures in Florence."
32 DOUBLE SEARCH
This slow unveiling of the ideal, of the
goal, is, I believe, the divine method of
making man, and it makes us feel at once
how nearer than near God is and how all
the way on and up He is in the -very
tissue and fabric of our lives no for-
eign creator who moulded us out of clay
and left us to run, or to ran down, like
a clock.
For centuries man won his slender
spiritual victories, cultivated his rugged
virtues, sloughed off some marks of ape
and tiger and formed habits of altruism
under the influence of ideals which the
highest personal types of the race re-
vealed. These types of men were focus
points, manifesting in some feeble meas-
ure the ultimate reality and casting out
hints of the line of march. Sometimes
they were conscious that they were or-
THE INWARD CHRIST 33
gans of a larger Life which used them,
sometimes they were girded, like Cyrus,
for a divine mission, though they knew
not Him whom they served. Thus the
unbroken revelation of the infinite was
slowly made, as the age could bear it
" God spake at sundry times and in di-
vers manners. 51
Strangely enough the loftiest men of
the pre-Christian period were always
vaguely or dimly forecasting a diviner
life than any ordinary type of man re-
vealed. The human heart was always
groping for an unveiling of God which
would set the race to living on a new
level. This longing rose among the He-
brews to a steady passion which burned
brighter as the clouds in their national
sky grew blacker. There was a Christ
ideal centuries before Christ actually
34 DOUBLE SEARCH
carne In the flesh, though this ideal was
always deeply tinged and colored by the
age which gave it birth. But even so,
it lighted the sky of the future and gave
many a man heart and hope through long
periods of dreary pessimism. When lo,
a tilting of the plane, and the ellipse be-
comes a parabola with infinite stretch of
curve!
" IB fullness of time God sent forth
His Son." How shall we think of Jesus
that is called the Christ? Speaking first
in the terms of evolution, / think of Him
as the type and goal of the race the
new Adam, the spiritual norm and pat-
tern, the Son of Man who is a revelation
of what man at his height and full stat-
ure is meant to be; and this is the way
Paul thought of Him: "Till we all
come in the unity of the faith, and of the
THE INWARD CHRIST 35
knowledge of the Son of God* unto a
perfect man, unto the measure of the
stature of the fullness of Christ.'* Eph.
IV, 13. " Whom he did foreknow, he
did predestinate to be conformed to the
image of his Son that He might be the
first born among many brethren.' s Rom.
vin, 29. "The expectation of the
whole creation is waiting for the mani-
festation of sons of God*" Rom. vra,
19.
The actual fact is that this Life has,
profoundly or remotely, touched every
personal life in Europe for a thousand
years and has been the goal and standard
for all aspiring souls. He is the pattern
in the mount, the a fronts force which
has drawn the individual and the race
steadily up to their higher destiny. On
the spiritual side of " the great divide SJ
3 6 DOUBLE SEARCH
the goal is in sight and the goal is an
efficient factor in the process of the evo-
lution of the man within man.
But this pattern-aspect of the Christ
life is only one aspect, and we must not
raise it out of due balance and perspec-
tive. Christ is God humanly revealed*
As soon as we realize that personality is
always a revelation of the ultimate reality
of the universe there are no metaphys-
ical difficulties in the way of an actual
incarnation of God. It is rather what
one would expect. There is no other
conceivable way in which God could be
revealed to man. If He is a personal
being; if He is love and tenderness and
sympathy, and not mere force, only a
Person can show Him. And if we are
not kindred in nature, if we have not
something in common, in a word if we
THE INWARD CHRIST 37
are not conjunct, then it is hard to see
how any revelation of Him could be
made which would mean anything to us.
But if we are conjunct, as our own self-
consciousness implies, then an incarna-
tion, a complete manifestation in Per-
sonality, or as Paul puts it, " in the face
of Jesus Christ," is merely the crown
and pinnacle of the whole divine process.
If we are wise we shall not bother our-
selves too much over the metaphysical
puzzles which the schoolmen have for-
mulated. We no longer have the puz-
zle which was so urgent with them, how
two natures, pole-wide apart, could be
united in one Person, for we now know
that divinity and humanity are not pole-
wide apart. There is something human
in God and something divine in man and
they belong together.
38 DOUBLE SEARCH
We shall not, again? be over-anxious
about the question of nativity. Note the
grandeur and the simplicity of Paul's text
about it: " God sent forth His Son
born of a woman," and there he stops
with no attempt to furnish details. John
is equally lofty: "The Word became
flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld
His glory." There is no appeal to curi-
osity. There is no syllable about the
how. Two synoptic gospels have given
us a simple story of the nativity which
has profoundly impressed men in all ages
and which will always appeal to the deep-
est instincts in us. But the method of
Christ's coming, embodied in these two
accounts, must not be forced. The de-
vout soul must be free, as both Paul and
John were free, to leave the how
wrapped in mystery. That He came out
THE INWARD CHRIST 39'
of our humanity we shall always believe.
That He came down out of the highest
divinity we shall equally believe. That
He was a babe and increased in wisdom,
that He learned as He grew, that He
was tempted and learned through temp-
tation, are all necessary steps, for there
is no other path to spiritual Personality
and He must have been " made perfect
through sufferings," or He could not
have been the Captain of salvation.
Speculations and dogmas have taken
men's thoughts away from verifiable
facts. Here was a life which settled
forever that the ultimate reality is Love*
He brought into focus, or rather He
wove into the living tissue of a personal
life, the qualities of character which be-
long to an infinitely good being and with
40 DOUBLE SEARCH
quiet simplicity He said, "If you see
me yon see the Father.' 5
I have spoken, perhaps, as though the
revelation of the human goal ? and the
unveiling of the divine Character were
two different things. Christ does both,
but both are one. If you bring a dia-
mond into the light you occasion a dou-
ble revelation. There is a revelation of
the glorious beauty of the jewel. While
it lay in the dark you never knew Its
possibilities. It was easily mistaken for
a piece of glass. Now it flashes and
burns and reveals itself because it has
found the element for which it was
meant* But there is also at the same
time a revelation of the mystery of light.
You discover now new wonders and new
glories in light itself. Most objects ab-
sorb part of its rays and imperfectly
THE INWARD CHRIST 41
transmit it to the eye. Here is an ob-
ject which tells you its real nature. Now
you see it as it is. So Christ shows us
at once man and God. In a definite his-
toric setting and in the limitations of a
concrete personal life, Christ has unveiled
the divine nature and taught us to say
" Father " and He has, in doing that,
showed us the goal and type of human
life. The Son of God and the Son of
Man is one person.
Now comes our second question how
shall we think of the inward, the spirit-
ual, the eternal Christ? The first inter-
preters, notably Paul and John, early in
their experience, came to think of Christ
as a cosmic Being. They read the uni-
verse in the light of His revelation and
soon used His name to name the entire
manifestation of God: " In Him," says
42 DOUBLE SEARCH
Paul, " all things consist 5 ' " All things
were made by Him," says John, " and
without Him was not anything made that
was made. In Him was life and the life
was the light of men." John i, 2, 3.
It was through Him that they first
learned that God is Spirit, it was through
Him that their own spiritual life was
heightened and that they became con-
scious of a Spirit surging into their own
souls and they connected this whole wider
manifestation of God with Him. They
were right too in doing so. Christ's rev-
elation of God had produced such spir-
itual effects upon them that they could
now find Him within themselves, for
God's spiritual presence in us is always
proportioned to our capacity to have Him
there. And then, too, they were now
for the first time able to interpret that
THE INWARD CHRIST 43
which they felt within themselves. If
they found God, it was because they had
found Christ.
But they were right in a deeper sense.
If we think of the historical Christ, as I
have tried to set forth, as the manifesta-
tion of the Divine and the human in a
single personal Life then wherever man
finds God humanly revealed he properly
names the revelation with the historic
name. The historic incarnation was no
final event. It was the supreme instance
of God and man in a single life the
type of continuous Divine-human fellow-
ship. God's, human revelation of Him-
self is not limited to a single date. As
Athanasius so boldly said: He became
man that we might become divine.
Christ is the prophesy of a new human-
ity a humanity penetrated with the life
44 DOUBLE SEARCH
and power of God and this continued
personal manifestation of God through
men is Christ inwardly and spiritually
revealed.
It is a primary truth of Christianity
that God reaches man directly. No per-
son Is insulated. As ocean floods the
inlets, as sunlight environs the plant,
so God enfolds and enwreathes the finite
spirit. There is this difference, how-
ever, inlet and plant are penetrated
whether they will or not Sea and sun-
shine crowd themselves in a tergo. Not
so with God. He can be received only
through appreciation and conscious ap-
propriation. He comes" only through
doors that are -purposely opened for
Him. A man may live as near God
as the bubble is to the ocean and yet not
find Him, He may be " closer than
THE INWARD CHRIST 45
breathing^ nearer than hands or feet,"
and still be missed. Historical Chris-
tianity is dry and formal when it lacks
the immediate and inward response to
our Great Companion ; but our spirits are
trained to know Him, to appreciate Him,
by the mediation of historical revelation.
A person's spiritual life is always
dwarfed when cut apart from history.
Mysticism is empty unless it is enriched
by outward and historical revelation.
The supreme education of the soul comes
through an intimate acquaintance with
Jesus Christ of history. ' One who
wished to feel the power of beauty would
go to some supreme master of color and
form who could exhibit them on canvas
and not merely lecture about them. One
who- desired to feel the power of harmony
would go, not to the boy with his har-
46 DOUBLE SEARCH
monica, but to the Beettiovens or Mo-
zarts of the race who have revealed what
an instrument and a human hand can do.
So he who wishes to realize and practice
the presence of God must inform himself
at the source and fount, must come face
to face with Him who was the highest
human revelation of God. No one of
us can interpret his own longings or pur-
poses until he reads them off in the light
of some loftier type of personality. That
person understands himself best who
grows intimate in fellowship with some
noble character. And any man who
wishes to discover the meaning of the in-
ward voice and to Interpret the divine
breathings which come to human souls
needs to be informed and illuminated by
the supreme revelation of the ages.
With perfect fitness, then, we speak of
THE INWARD CHRIST 47
the inward Presence as the spiritual
Christ. It is the continuation of the
same revelation which was made under
the " Syrian blue."
The procession of the Holy Ghost is
a continuous revelation and exhibition of
Christ within men. Whether we use the
expression Holy Spirit or Christ within
or spiritual Christ, we mean God opera-
ting upon human spirits and consciously
witnessed and appreciated In them.
" The Lord is the Spirit," cries Paul
when, with unveiled face, he discovers
that he is being transformed into His
image from glory to glory. " Joined to
the Lord in one Spirit," is another testi-
mony of the same sort.
Unfortunately the doctrine of the
Christ within " the real presence "
has generally been held vaguely, and it
48 DOUBLE SEARCH
has easily run Into error and even fanat-
icism. The most common error has
come from the prevalent view that when
the Spirit the inward Christ comes
In, the man goes out. It has been sup-
posed that the finite is suppressed and
the infinite supplants it and operates In-
stead of It. This view Is not only con-
trary to Scripture, but also contrary to
psychological possibility. What really
happens is that the human spirit through
its awakened appreciation appropriates
into its own life the divine Life which
was always near and was always meant
for It. The true view has been well put
by August Sabatier 1 : " It is not enough
to represent the Spirit of God as com-
ing to the help of man's spirit, supply-
ing strength which he lacks, an associate
1 Sabatier, " Religions of Authority/' p. 307-
THE INWARD CHRIST 49
or juxtaposed force, a* supernatural aux-
iliary. Paul's thought has no room
for such a moral and psychological
dualism, although popular language eas-
ily permits it. His thought is quite
otherwise profound. There Is no simple
addition of divine power and human
power in the Christian life. The Spirit
of God identifies itself with the human
me into which It enters and whose life It
becomes. If we may so speak, it is In-
dividualized In the new moral person-
ality which It creates. A sort of meta-
morphosis, a transubstantiation, if the
word may be permitted, takes place in
the human being. Having been carnal
it has become spiritual. A " new man "
arises ftom the old man by the creative
act of the spirit of God. Paul calls
Christians wreu/xan/cot, properly speak-
50 DOUBLE SEARCH
ing, " the inspired." They are moved
and guided by the Spirit of God. The
spirit dwells in them as an immanent vir-
tue, whose fruits are organically devel-
oped as those of the flesh. Supernatural
gifts become natural, or rather, at this
mystical height, the antithesis created by
scholastic rationalism becomes meaning-
less and is obliterated." That Is pre-
cisely my view and if I had not found
it here so well said I should have put
the same idea into my own words.
There are no known limits to the pos-
sible translation of the Spirit of God
the Eternal Christ into human per-
sonality. There are all degrees and
varieties of it as there are all degrees
and varieties of physical life. One
stands looking at a century-old oak tree
and he wonders how this marvelous thing
THE INWARD CHRIST 51
ever rose out of the dead earth where
its roots are. As a matter of fact It did
not A tree is largely transformed sun-
light. There is from first to' last an
earth element to be sure, but the tree is
forever drawing upon the streams of sun-
light which flood it and it builds the in-
tangible light energy into leaf and blos-
som and fibre until there stands the old
monarch, actually living on sunshine!
But the little daisy at its feet, modest
and delicate, is equally consolidated sun-
shine, though it pushes its face hardly
six inches from the soil in which it was
born. So one spirit differs from another
spirit In glory. Some have but feebly
drawn upon the Spiritual Light out of
which strong lives are builded, others
have raised the unveiled face to the su-
preme Light and have translated it into
52 DOUBLE SEARCH
a life of spiritual beauty and moral fibre.
Thus the revelation of God in the flesh
goes on from age to age. The Christ-
life propagates itself like all life-types
the last Adam proves to be a life-giving
spirit He is the first born among many
brethren. The actual re-creation, the
genuine identification of self with Christ
may go on until a man may even say
" Christ lives in me; JJ " I bear in my
body the marks of the Lord Jesus ; " " It
has pleased God to reveal His Son In
me."
" See if, for every finger of thy hands,
There be not found ? that day the world
shall end
Hundreds of souls, each holding by
Christ's word,
That He will grow incorporate with all,
THE INWARD CHRIST 53
With me as Pamphylax, with him as
John,
Groom for each bride ! Can a mere man
do this?
Yet Christ salth, this He lived and died
to do.
Call Christ, then, the Illimitable God."
I DO.
The Atonement
" Merely to repeat His words is not to con-
tinue His work; we must reproduce His life,
passion and death. He desires to live again in
each one of His disciples in order that He may
continue to suffer, to bestow Himself, and to
labor in and through them towards the redemp-
tion of humanity, until all prodigal and lost
cHildren be found and brought back to their
Father's house. Thus it is that, instead of being
removed far from human history, the life and
death of Ckrist once more take their place in
hisjory, setting forth the law that governs it,
and, by ceaselessly increasing the power of re-
demptive sacrifice, transform and govern it, and
direct it towards its divine end."
August? Sabatier, "The Atonement" p. 134,
THE ATONEMENT.
IT is a bold and hazardous task to say
anything on this subject and I must
tread with bare, hushed feet, for it is a
holy realm which we are essaying to en-
ter. It must be understood from the
first that I am not going to thresh over
a heap of theological straw. I am not
going into that realm of abstract meta-
physics where one can always prove any
thesis one may happen to assume at the
start. I shall keep close to human ex-
perience, The pillars of our faith must
be planted, not on some artificial con-
struction of logic, but deep down in the
actual experience of Life. There are
external principles of the spiritual Life
57
5 8 DOUBLE SEARCH
which are as Irresistible and compelling
as the laws of physics or the propositions
of Euclid. The task of the religious
teacher is to discover and proclaim these
elemental truths, but we always find it so
much easier to fall back on dogma and
theories which have been spun out of
men's heads! In the Gospels and in
Paul's letters the laboratory method pre-
vails the writers ground their asser-
tions on experienced facts, they tell what
they have found and verified, and they
always ask their readers to put their
truths to the test of a personal experi-
ence like their own. Our modern meth-
od must be a return to this Inward labora-
tory method.
No one can carefully study the theories
of the atonement which have prevailed
at the various epochs of Christian history
THE ATONEMENT 59
without discovering that there has been
In them a very large mixture of pagan-
ism. They have been deeply colored by
mythology and by the crude ideas of
primitive sacrifice. They start, not with
the idea of God which Christ has re-
vealed, but with a capricious sovereign,
angry at sorely tempted, sinning man,
and forgiving only after a sacrifice has
satisfied Him. They treat sin not as a
fact of experience,, but as the result of
an ancestral fall, which piled up an in-
finite debt against the race. They all
move in the realm of law rather than in
the domain of personality. They are
all, more or less, vitiated by abstract and
mathematical reasoning, while sin and
salvation are always affairs of the in-
ward life, and are of all things personal
and concrete. The first step to a coer-
60 DOUBLE SEARCH
clve conception of the atonement is to get
out of the realm of legal phrases Into
the region of personality.
Sin is no abstract dogma. It is not a
debt which somebody can pay and so
wash off the slate. Sin is a fact within
our lives. It is a condition of heart and
will. There is no sin apart from a sin-
ner. Wherever sin exists there is a con-
scious deviation from a standard a sag
of the nature, and it produces an effect
upon the entire personality. The per-
son who sins disobeys a sense of right.
He falls below his vision of the good.
He sees a path, but he does not walk in
it. He hears a voice, but he says " no n
instead of " yes." He is aware of a
higher self which makes its appeal, but
he lets the lower have the reins. There
is no description of sin anywhere to com-
THE ATONEMENT 61
pare with the powerful narrative out of
the actual life of the Apostle Paul, found
in Romans vn : 9-25. The thing which
moves us as we read it is the picture here
drawn of our own state. A lower na-
ture dominates us and spoils our life.
" What I would I do not; what I would
not that I do."
The most solemn fact of sin is its ac-
cumulation of consequences in the life of
the person. Each sin tends to produce
a set of the nature. It weaves a mesh
of habit. It makes toward a dominion,
or as Paul calls it, a law of sin in the
man "Wretched Man, 9 ' who sees a
shining possible life, but stays below,
chained to a body of sin. Sin, real sin,
and not the fictitious abstraction which
figures in theories, is a condition of per-
sonal will and action much more than a
62 DOUBLE SEARCH
debt to be paid or forgiven. The prob-
lem is far deeper. The only possible
remedy here is to get a new man, a
transformation of personality. Relief
from penalty will not stead. Forgive-
ness is' not enough. Relief from pen-
alty, forgiveness alone, might spoil us,
and make us think too lightly of our own
sin. No, it is not a judicial relief which
our panting, sin-defeated hearts cry out
for. We want more than the knowl-
edge that the past is covered and will
not count on the books against us. We
want blackness replaced by whiteness, we
want weakness replaced by power, we
want to experience a new set of our in-
nermost nature which will make us more
than, conquerors. We seek deliverance
not from penalty and debt but deliv-
THE ATONEMENT 63
erance from the life of sin Into a life of
holy will.
There is still another aspect to sin
which must be considered before we can
fully appreciate the way of salvation
which the Gospel reveals. Sin not only
spoils the sinner's life and drags him
into slavery. It separates him from God.
It opens a chasm between him and his
heavenly Father, or to vary the figure
it casts a shadow on God's face. God
seems far away and stern. The sense
of warmth and tenderness vanishes.
The sinner can see God only through
the veil of his sins. This Is a universal
<*-'
experience. The same thing happens in
our relations with men. As soon as we
have injured a person, treated him un-
fairly, played him false, a chasm opens
between our life and his. We transfer
64 DOUBLE SEARCH
our changed attitude to him. We dislike
to meet him. We have no comfort in
his presence. We interpret all his ac-
tions through the shadow which our deed
has created. Our sense of wrong-doing
makes us afraid of the person wronged.
The conduct of little children offers
a good illustration of this subjective ef-
fect of sin, because in them one catches
the attitude at its primitive stage before
reflection colors it. Some little child
has disobeyed his father and discovers,
perhaps for the first time, that he has
" something inside which he cannot do
what he wants to with," as a little boy
said. When he begins to think of meet-
ing his father he grows uncomfortable.
It is not punishment he is afraid of, he
has no anticipation of that. He is con-
scious of wrong doing and It has made
THE ATONEMENT 65
a chasm between himself and his father.
He reads his father's attitude now in the
shadow of his deed. He has no joy or
confidence in meeting him. Something
strange has come between them.
What does the little fellow do? He
instinctively feels the need of some sac-
rifice. He must soften his father by
giving him something. He breaks open
his bank and brings his father his pen-
nies, or he brings in his hand the most
precious plaything he owns, and acts out
his troubled inward condition. He
wants the gap closed and he feels that it
mil cost something to get it closed. 1
*I am aware that this feature of child life
will seem to some of my readers to be overdrawn.
Some Mothers say that no such tendency was
observed in their own children. That is quite
likely. All children do not express their subtle
^nd complex emotions in the same way. I do
66 DOUBLE SEARCH
That is human nature. That feeling is
deep-rooted in man wherever he is found.
He is conscious that sin separates and
he feels that something costly and pre-
cious is required to close the chasm. Sac-
rifice is one of the deepest and most per-
manent facts of the budding spiritual
life. Its origin is far back in history.
The tattered papyrus, the fragment of
baked clay, the pictorial inscription of
the most primitive sort, all bear witness
to this immemorial custom. It is as old
as smiling or weeping, as hard to trace
to a beginning as loving or hating. It
is bound up with man's sense of guilt,
not mean to imply that every child expresses a
need of sacrifice when he does wrong. But care-
ful observers of children have frequently noted
the facts which I have emphasized in the text,
and I have often met them in my own experience
with children.
THE ATONEMENT 67
and was born when conscience was born.
Dark and fantastic are many o which is
in Christ Jesus our Lord." Sacrificing
love, the Divine Heart suffering over sin,
God Himself taking up the infinite bur-
den and cost of raising men like us into
sons of God like Himself; this Is the
revelation in the face of Jesus Christ.
The heart that can stand that untouched
can stand anything.
78 DOUBLE SEARCH
The power unto salvation, the dynamic
of the Gospel Is in the cross, which ex-
hibits in temporal setting the eternal fact,
that God suffers over sin, that He takes
upon Himself the cost of winning sons
to glory and that His love reaches out to
the most sin-scarred wanderer, who
clutches the swine husks in his lean
hands.
But the appeal of love and sacrifice is
not the whole of the truth which this
word atonement covers. We have been
seeing, in some feeble way, how God in
Christ enters into human life, identifies
Himself with us, and reveals the energy
of Grace. But we cannot stop with
" what has been done for us without us."
Sin, as has been already said, is an affair
of personal choice it is a condition of
inward life. It is not an abstract entity,
THE ATONEMENT 79
In a metaphysical realm. It Is the atti-
tude of heart and will in a living, throb-
bing person who cannot get free from the
lower nature in himself. So too with
Salvation. It cannot be a transaction in
some realm foreign to the Individual him-
self. It is not a plan, or scheme. It is
an actual deliverance, a new creation.
It is nothing short of a redeemed Inward
nature. Such a change cannot be
wrought without the man himself. It
cannot come by a tergo compulsion. It
must be by a positive winning of the will.
A dynamic faith in the man, must cooper-
ate with that energy from God. Some-
thing comes down from above, but some-
thing must also go up from below. Paul,
who has given the most vital Interpreta-
tion of both sides of the truth of re-
demption the objective and the sub-
8o DOUBLE SEARCH
jective that has ever been expressed s
uses the word " faith " to name the hu-
man part of the process.
Faith, In Paul's sense of it, means an
identification of ourselves with Christ, by
which we re-live His life. As He iden-
tified Himself with sinning humanity, so,
by the attraction of his love, we identify
ourselves with His victorious Life. We
go down into death with Him a death
to sin and the old self and we rise
with Him Into newness of life, to live
henceforth unto Him who loved us.
There is no easy road out of a nature
of sin Into a holy nature. It is vain to
try and patch up a scheme which ..will
relieve us of our share of the tragedy of
sin or to- put it another way, the tra-
vail for the- birth of the sons of God.
The Redeemer suffers, but He does not
THE ATONEMENT 81
suffer. io,,ourj$.teadL He.- suffers In- our
behalf , .X&rep not. oj/rij, He makes His
appeal of love to us to share His life
as He shares ours. It is Paul's goal
a flying goal, surely " to know Him
and the power of His resurrection, and
the fellowship of His sufferings, being
made conformable unto His death. 1 *
The boldest word which comes from, his
pen was: " I rejoice in my sufferings on
your behalf; and fill up that which is
lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my
flesh, for His body's sake, which is the
Church." (Col. l % 24.) It is not re-
peating His words that saves us, it is re-
living His life, co-dying, and co-rising
with Him, and entering with a radiant
joy, caught from Hk face, into the com-
mon task of redeeming a world of sin to
a kingdom of love and holiness.
82 DOUBLE SEARCH
. In that great book of spiritual symbol-
ism the Book of Revelation those
wh rf o overcome are builded, as pillars? into
the Temple of God, and He writes His
new name upon them. The new name
is Redeemer. Those who have come up
through great tribulation and have
washed their robes in the blood of the
Lamb are bullded in as a permanent part
of the Temple, where God reveals Him-
self, and they share with Him in the
great redeeming work of the ages.
Whatever it has meant in the past, in
the ages when the races were sloughing
off their paganism, In the future the
atonement must be vital and dynamic.
It must be put in language which grips
the heart, convinces the mind, and car-
ries the will. It will name for us the
Divine-human travail for a redeemed hu-
THE ATONEMENT 83
manity. It will cease to signify a way
by which God was appeased and it will
come to express, as it did In the apostolic
days, the identification of God with us in
the person of Christ, and the identifica-
tion, by the power of His love, of our-
selves with Him. We shall pass from
the terms which were inherited from
magic and ancient sacerdotal rites and
we shall use instead the language of our
riper experience. We shall abandon
illustrations drawn from law courts and
judicial decisions and we shall rise to
conceptions which fit the actual facts of
Inward, personal experience where higher
and lower natures contend for the mas-
tery. The drama will not be in some
foreign realm, apart from human con-
sciousness, It will rise In our thought into
the supreme drama of history the
84 DOUBLE SEARCH
tragedy of the spiritual universe the
battle of holiness with sin the blood
and tears which tell the cost of sin and
create in response a passion for the Di-
vine Lover who is our Father. It will
stop at no fictitious righteousness which
is counted unto us, as though it were
ours. We shall demand an actual re-
demption of the entire self which has be-
come righteous, because it lives, in
Christ's power, the life which He lived.
We shall learn to tell the story in such
a way that the cross will not seem to be
brought in, as an afterthought, to repair
the damage wrought by an unforeseen
catastrophe. It will stand as the consum-
mation of an elemental spiritual move-
ment and It will be organic with the en-
tire process of the making of men.
With charm and power, Ruskin has told
THE ATONEMENT 85
how the black dirt that soils the city
pavement is composed of four elements
which make, when they follow the law of
their nature, the sapphire, the opal, the
diamond and the dew drop. The glory
and splendor do not appear in the black
dirt, but the possibilities are there.
When the law of the nature of these ele-
ments has full sweep the glory comes
out. Man was not meant for a sinner,
and to live a dark, chaotic life. There
are far other possibilities In him. He is
a potential child of God. The full na-
ture has broken forth in one life and
men beheld its glory. " To as many as
receive Him, to them gives He power to
become the sons of God."
Prayer
By prayer, I do not mean any bodily exercise
of the outward man; but the going forth of the
spirit of Life towards the Fountain of Life, for
fullness and satisfaction: The natural tendency
of the poor, rent, derived spirit, towards the
Fountain of Spirits.
Isaac Penington.
" I, that still pray at morning and at eve,
Loving those roots that feed us from the past,
And prizing more than Plato things I learned
At that best Academe, a mother's knee,
Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed,
Thrice, stirred below my conscious self, have felt
That perfect disenthralment which is God."
Lowell's "Cathedral."
"The aim of prayer is to attain to the habit
of goodness, so as no longer merely to have the
things that are good, but rather to be good."
Clement of Alexandria,
PRAYER.
WE come now to the human search
for a divine fellowship and
companionship. Its complete history
would be the whole story of religion.
In this little book I shall speak only of
certain definite human ways of seeking
fellowship with God, namely, of prayer.
Prayer is an extraordinary act. The
eyes close, the face lights up, the body
is moved with feeling, and (it may be in
the presence of a multitude) the person
praying talks in perfect confidence with
somebody, invisible and intangible, and
who articulates no single word of re-
sponse. It is astonishing, A#4 yet it is
89
90 DOUBLE SEARCH
a human custom as old as marriage, as
ancient as grave-making, older than any
city on the globe. There is no human
activity which so stubbornly resists being
reduced to a bread and butter basis.
Men have tried to explain the origin of
prayer by the straits of physical hunger,
but it will no more fit into utilitarian sys-
tems than joy over beauty will. It is an
elemental and unique attitude of the soul
and it will not be " explained " until we
fathom the origin of the soul itself !
But is not the advance of science mak-
ing prayer impossible? In unscientific
ages the universe presented no rigid or-
der. It was easy to believe that the
ordinary course of material processes
might be altered or reversed. The
world was conceived as full of invisible
beings who could affect the course of
PRAYER 91
events at will, while above all, there was
a Being who might interfere with things
at any moment, in any way.
Our world to-day is not so conceived.
Our universe is organized and linked.
Every event is caused. Caprice is ban-
ished. There is no such thing in the
physical world as an uncaused event. If
we met a person who told us that he had
seen a train of cars drawn along with no
couplings and held together by the mu-
tual affection of the passengers in the
different cars we should know that he was
an escaped lunatic and we should go on
pinning our faith to couplings as before.
Even the weather is no more capricious
than the course of a planet in space.
Every change of wind and the course of
every lying cloud is determined by pre-
vious conditions. Complex these combi-
92 DOUBLE SEARCH
nations of circumstances certainly JL^ S
but if the weather man could get data
enough he could foretell the storm, the
rain, the drought exactly as well as the
astronomer can foretell the eclipse.
There is no little demon, there is no tall t
bright angel, who holds back the shower
or who pushes the cloud before him ; no
being, good or bad, who will capriciously
alter the march of molecules because it
suits our fancy to ask that the chain of
causes be interrupted. What is true of
the weather is true in every physical
realm. Our universe has no caprice in
it. Every thing is linked, and the
forked lightning never consults our pref-
erences, nor do cyclones travel exclusive-
ly where bad men live. As of old the
rain falls on just and unjust alike, o-n
saint and sinner. The knowledge of this
PRAYER 93
iron situation has had a desolating effect
upon many minds. The heavens have
become as brass and the earth bars of
iron. To ask for the interruption of the
march of atoms seems to the scientific
thinker the absurdest of delusions and
all fanes of prayer appear fruitless.
Others resort to the faith that there are
" gaps 5J in the causal system and that in
these unorganized regions the do-
mains so far unexplored there are
realms for miracle and divine wonder.
The supernatural, on this theory is to be
found out beyond the region of the
" natural/ 5 and forcing itself through
the " gaps. 15 Those of this faith are
filled with dread as they see the so called
" gaps M closing, somewhat as the pious
Greek dreaded to see Olympus climbed.
There are still others who evade the
94 DOUBLE SEARCH
difficulty by holding that God has made
the universe, is the Author of its " laws, 51
is Omnipotent and therefore can change
them at Will, or can admit exceptions in-
their operation. This view is well illus-
trated in the faith of George Miiller,
who writes : " When I lose such a thing
as a key, I ask the Lord to direct me to
it, and I look for an answer; when a per-
son with whom I have made an appoint-
ment does not come, according to the
fixed time, and I begin to be inconven-
ienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased
to hasten him to me, and I look for an
answer; when I do not understand a pas-
sage of the word of God, I lift up my
heart to the Lord that He would be
pleased by His Holy Spirit to instruct
me, and I expect to be taught.*'
This view takes us back once more
PRAYER 95
into a world of caprice. It introduces
a world in which almost anything may
happen. We can no longer calculate
upon anything with assurance. Even
our speed, as we walk, is regulated by
the capricious wish of our friends. But
that is not all, it is a low, crude view
of God a Being off above the world
who makes u laws " like a modern legis-
lator and again changes them to meet a
new situation, who is after all only a big-
ger man in the sky busily moving and
shifting the scenes of the time-drama as
requests reach him.
None of these positions is tenable*
The first is not, for prayer is a necessity
to full life, and the other two are not,
because they do not fairly face the facts
which are forced upon those who accept
scientific methods of search and of
96 DOUBLE SEARCH
thought. This physical universe is a
stubborn affair. It is not loose and ad-
justable, and worked, for our private
convenience, by wires or strings at a cen-
tral station. It is a world of order, a
realm of discipline. It is our business
to discover a possible line of march in
the world as it is, to find how to triumph
over obstacles and difficulty, if we meet
them not to resort to " shun pikes "
or cries for " exception in our particular
case."
The real difficulty is that our genera-
tion has been conceiving of prayer on
too low a plane. Faith is not endan-
gered by the advance of science. It is
endangered by the stagnation of reli-
gious conceptions. If religion halts at
some primitive level and science marches
on to new conquests of course there will
PRAYER 97
be difficulty. Bist let us not fetter sci-
ence, let us rather promote religion.
We need to rise to a truer view of God
and to a loftier idea of prayer. It is
another case of " leveling up, n On the
higher religious plane no collision be-
tween prayer and science will be found.
There will be no sealing of the lips in
the presence of the discovery that all is
law.
The prayer which science has affected
is the spurious kind of prayer, which can
be reduced to a utilitarian, u bread and
butter," basis. Most enlightened per-
sons now are shocked to hear " patri-
otic " ministers asking God to direct the
bullets of their country's army so as to
kill their enemies in battle, and we all
hesitate to use prayer for the attainment
of low, selfish ends, but we need to
98 DOUBLE SEARCH
cleanse our sight still farther and rise
above the conception of prayer as an easy
means to a desired end.
It is a fact that there are valid prayer
effects and there is plenty of experimental
evidence to prove the energy of prayer.
It is literally true that " more things are
wrought by prayer than this world
dreams of." There are no assignable
bounds to the effects upon mind and
body of the prayer of living faith.
Some of those particular cases of George
Miiller's are quite within the range of
experience. The prayer for the lost key
may well produce a heightened energy of
consciousness which pushes open a door
into a deeper stratum of memory, and
the man rises from his knees and goes
to the spot where the key was put. So
too with the passage of Scripture. No
PRAYER 99
doubt many a man has come back from
his closet where the turmoil of life was
hushed and where all the inward currents
set toward God, many of us I say, come
back with a new energy and with cleared
vision and we can grasp what before
eluded us, we can see farther into the
spiritual meaning of any of God's reve-
lations. There is perhaps never a sweep
of the soul out into the wider regions of
the spiritual world which does not
heighten the powers of the person who
experiences it. Profound changes in
physical condition, almost as profound
as the stigmata of St. Francis, have in
our own times followed the prayer of
faith and many of us in our daily prob-
lems and perplexities have seen the light
break through, as we prayed, and shine
out, like a search light, on some plain
ioo ' DOUBLE SEARCH
path of duty or of service. There is un-
mistakable evidence of incoming energy
from beyond the margin of what we usu-
ally call " ourselves.'*
We have not to do with a God who is
" off there " above the sky, who can deal
with us only through " the violation of
physical law." We have instead a God
" in whom we live and move and are,"
whose Being opens into ours, and ours
into His, who is the very Life of our
lives, the matrix of our personality; and
there is no separation between us unless
we make it ourselves. No man, scien-
tist or layman, knows where the curve is
to be drawn about the personal " self."
No man can say with authority that the
circulation of Divine currents into the
soul's inward life is impossible. On
the contrary, Energy does come in. In
PRAYER
our highest moments we find ourselves In
contact with wider spiritual Life than
belongs to our normal me.
But true prayer is something higher.
It is immediate spiritual fellowship.
Even if science could demonstrate that
prayer could never effect any kind of
utilitarian results, still prayer on its loft-
ier side would remain untouched, and
persons of spiritual reach would go on
praying as before. If we could say
nothing more we could at least affirm
that prayer, like faith, is itself the vic-
tory. The seeking is the finding. The
wrestling is the blessing. It is no more
a means to something else than love is.
It is an end in itself. It is its own ex-
cuse for being. It is a kind of first fruit
of the mystical nature of personality.,
The edge of the self is always touching
102 DOUBLE SEARCH
a circle of life beyond itself to which it
responds. The human heart is sensitive
to God as the retina is to light waves.
The soul possesses a native yearning for
intercourse and companionship which
takes it to God as naturally as the home
instinct of the pigeon takes it to the place
of its birth. There is in every normal
soul a spontaneous outreach, a free play
of spirit which gives it onward yearning
of unstilled desire.
It is no mere subjective instinct no
blind outreach. If it met no response,
no answer, it would soon be weeded out
of the race. It would shrivel like the
functionless organ. We could not long
continue to pray in faith if we lost the
assurance that there is a Person who
cares, and who actually corresponds with
us. Prayer has stood the test of expe-
PRAYER 103
rience. In fact the very desire to pray
is in itself prophetic of a heavenly
Friend. A subjective need always car-
ries an implication of an objective stimu-
lus which has provoked the need. There
is no hunger, as Fiske has well shown,
for anything not tasted, there is no search
for anything which is not in the environ-
ment, for the environment has always
produced the appetite. So this native
need of the soul rose out of the divine
origin of the soul, and it has steadily
verified itself as a safe guide to reality.
What is at first a vague life-activ-
ity and spontaneous outreach of inward
energy a feeling after companion-
ship remains in many persons vague
to the end. But in others it frequently
rises to a definite consciousness of a per-
sonal Presence and there comes back into
104 DOUBLE SEARCH
the soul a compelling evidence of a real
Other Self who meets all the SouPs need.
For such persons prayer is the way to
fullness of life. It is as natural as
breathing. It is as normal an operation
as appreciation of beauty, or the pursuit
of truth. The soul is made that way,
and as long as men are made with mys-
tical deeps within, unsatisfied with the
finite and incomplete, they will pray and
be refreshed.
Vague and formless, in some degree,
communion would always be, I think,
apart from the personal manifestation of
God in Jesus Christ As soon as God
is known as Father, as soon as we turn
to Him as identical in being with our
own humanity, as suffering with us and
loving us even in our imperfection, this
communion grows defined and becomes
PRAYER 105
actual social fellowship which is prayer
at its best. Paul's great prayers of fel-
lowship rise to the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, the God whom
we know, because He has been humanly
revealed in a way that fits our life. We
turn to Him as the completeness and re-
ality of all we want to be, the other Self
whom we have always sought. The
vague impulse to reach beyond our iso-
lated and solitary self gives place to an
actual experience of relationship with a
personal Friend and Companion and this
experience may become, and often does
become, the loftiest and most joyous ac-
tivity of life. The soul is never at its
best until it enjoys God, and prays out
of sheer love. Nobody who has learned
to pray in this deeper way and whose
prayer is a prayer of communion and fel-
106 DOUBLE SEARCH
lowship, wants logical argument for the
existence of God. Such a want implies
a fall from a higher to a lower level.
It is like a demand for a proof of the
beauty one feels, or an evidence of love
other than the evidence of its experience.
Prayer will always rise or fall with
the quality of one's faith, like the mer-
cury in the tube which feels at once the
change of pressure in the atmosphere.
It is only out of live faith that a living
prayer springs. When a man's praying
sinks Into words, words, words, it means
that he is trying to get along with a dead
conception of God. The circuit no
longer closes. He cannot heighten his
prayer by raising his voice. What he
needs is a new revelation of the reality
of God. He needs to- have the fresh
sap of living faith in God push off the
PRAYER 107
dead leaves of an outgrown belief, so
that once more prayer shall break forth
as naturally as buds in spring.
The conception of God as a lonely
Sovereign, complete in Himself and in-
finitely separated from us " poor worms
of the dust," grasshoppers chirping our
brief hour in the sun, is In the main a
dead notion. Prayer to such a God
would not be easy with our modern ideas
of the universe. It would be as difficult
to believe in its efficiency as it would be
to believe in the miracle of transubstan-
tiation in bread and wine. But that
whole conception is being supplanted by
a live faith in an Infinite Person who is
corporate with our lives, from whom we
have sprung, in whom we live, as far as
we spiritually do live, who needs us as
we need him, and who Is sharing with
io8 DOUBLE SEARCH
us the travail and the tragedy as well as
the glory and the joy of bringing forth
sons of God.
In such a kingdom an organic fel-
lowship of interrelated persons prayer
is as normal an activity as gravitation
is in a world of matter. Personal spirits
experience spiritual gravitation, soul
reaches after soul, hearts draw toward
each other. We are no longer in the net
of blind fate, in the realm of impersonal
force, we are in a love-system where the
aspiration of one member heightens the
entire group, and the need of one even
the least draws upon the resources of
the whole even the Infinite, We are
in actual Divine-human fellowship.
The only obstacle to effectual praying,
in this world of spiritual fellowship,
would be individual selfishness. To
PRAYER 109
want to get just for one's own self, to
ask for something which brings loss and
injury to others, would be to sever one's
self from the source of blessings, and to
lose not only the thing sought but to
lose, as well, one's very self.
This principle is true anywhere, even
in ordinary human friendship. It Is
true too, in art and in music. The artist
may not force some personal caprice Into
his creation. He must make himself
the organ of a universal reality which
is beautiful not simply fo-r this man or
that, but for man as man. If there is,
as I believe, an inner kingdom of spirit,
a kingdom of love and fellowship, then
It is a fact that a tiny being like one of
us can impress and influence the Divine
Heart, and we can make our personal
contribution to the Will of the universe,
no DOUBLE SEARCH
but we can do it only by wanting what
everybody can share and by seeking
blessings which have a universal impli-
cation,
So far as prayer is real fellowship, it
gives as well as receives. The person
who- wants to receive God must first
bring himself. If He misses us, we miss
Him. He is Spirit, and consequently
He is found only through true and genu-
ine spiritual activity. In this corre-
spondence of fellowship there is no more
" violation of natural law" than there
is in love wherever it appears. Love is
itself the principle of the spiritual uni-
verse, as gravitation is of the physical;
and as in the gravitate system the earth
rises to meet the ball of the child, with-
out breaking any law, so God comes to
meet and to heighten the life of anyone
PRAYER in
who stretches up toward Him in appre-
ciation, and there is joy above as well as
below.
All that I have said, and much more,
gets vivid illustration in the " Lord's
prayer," which Christians have taken as
a model form, though they have not al-
ways penetrated its spirit. It is in every
line a prayer of fellowship and co-opera-
tion. It is a perfect illustration of the
social nature of prayer. The co-opera-
tion and fellowship are not here con-
fined, and they never are except in the
lower stages, to the inward communion
of an individual and his God. There
Is no / or me or mine in the whole
prayer. The person who prays spiritu-
ally Is enmeshed In a Iwmg group and
the reality of his vital union with per-
sons like himself clarifies his vision of
ii2 DOUBLE SEARCH
that deeper Reality to whom he prays.
Divine Fatherhood and human brother-
hood are born together. To say Father
to God involves saying " brother " to
one's fellows, and the ground swell of
either relationship naturally carries the
other with It, for no one can largely
realize the significance of brotherly love
without going to Him in whom love is
completed.
" Hallowed be thy name " is often
taken in a very feeble sense to mean
" keep us from using thy name in vain,"
or it is thought of as synonymous with
the easy and meaningless platitude,
" Let thy name be holy. 1 ' It is in reality
a heart-cry for a full appreciation of the
meaning of the Divine name, L e., the
Divine character. It is 'an uprising of
the soul to #n apprehension of the holi-
PRAYER 113
ness of God and the fullness of His life
that the soul may return to its tasks with
a sense of infinite resources and under
the sway of a vision of the true ideal.
This Lord's prayer begins with a word
of intimate relationship and social union
" Our Father." It then goes out be-
yond the familiar boundaries of experi-
ence to feel the Infinite sweep of God's
completeness and perfectness and to be-
come penetrated with solemn awe and
reverence which fit such companionship,
" Our Father of the holy name."
This is the prelude. The true melody
of prayer, If I may say so, begins with
the positive facing of the task of life:
" Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven." Here again
we have the loftiest Fellowship. The
person who prays this way is linked with
ii 4 DOUBLE SEARCH
God in one mighty spiritual whole. The
last vestige of atomic selfishness is
washed out. There are those who say
these words of prayer with folded hands
and closed eyes, and then expect the de-
sired kingdom to come by miracle; they
suppose that if the request is made often
enough a millennium age will drop out
of the skies. Ah, no 1 If God is Spirit
and man is meant to be spiritual, such a
millennium is a sheer impossibility.
This prayer involves the most strenuous
life that ever was lived. To pray seri-
ously for the coming of the kingdom of
heaven means to contribute to its com-
ing. It has come in any life which is
completely under the sway of the holy
Will and which is consecrated to the task
of making that holy Will prevail in soci-
PRAYER 115
ety. It is no " far off Divine event."
It is always coming.
" For an ye heard a music, like enow
They are building still, seeing the city
is built
To music, therefore never built at all
And therefore built forever/'
In a plain word, it is the total task of
humanity through the ages. It is the
embodiment in a temporal order of the
eternal purpose. It is the weaving in
concrete figure and color of the Divine
pattern. It is the slow and somewhat
painful work of making an actual Divine
society out of this rather stubborn and
unpromising potential material. But it
is our main business, and this prayer is
the girding of the loins for the sublime
task of helping God make His world.
n6 DOUBLE SEARCH
" Man as yet is being made, and e'er the
crowning age of ages,
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch
him into shape ?
All about him shadow still, but, while
the races flower and fade.
Prophet eyes may catch a glory, slowly
gaining on the shade,
Till the people all are one and all their
voices blend in a choric
Hallelujah to the Maker, 4 It is finished ;
man is made.' "
Fellow laborers with God In truth we
are. Prayer ends in labor and labor
ends in prayer. But it is not & cry for
miracle. It is an inward effort at co-
operation.
There is a beautiful mingling of the
great and the little, the cosmic and the
PRAYER 117
personal. The universal sweep of Di-
vine ends does not swallow op, or miss,
the needs of the concrete individual.
While the spiritual universe is building,
men must have daily bread and they
must constantly face the actual present
with its routine and monotony. Here
again prayer is no miraculous method of
turning stones into bread. It is no easy
substitute for toil. It is the joyous in-
sight that in the avenues of daily toil,
God and man are co-operating and that
in very truth the bread for the day is
as much God given as it is won by
the sweat of brow. The recently dis-
covered " saying of Jesus " best inter-
prets this prayer. " Wherever any man
raises a stone or splits wood, there am
I. 1 * He consecrates honest toil.
Next we come to the profound word
n8 DOUBLE SEARCH
which shows how completely our lives
are bound together in organic union,
above and below: " Forgive us as we
forgive." What a solemn thing to say.
Dare we pray it! And yet few words
have ever so truly revealed the nature
of prayer. It is, one sees, no easy, lazy
way to blessings. Once more, it is co-
operation. " Forgiveness is not a gift
which can fall upon us from the skies,
in return for a capricious request The
blessing depends on us as much as it
does on God. A cold, hard, unforgiv-
ing heart can no more be forgiven than a
lazy, slipshod student can have knowl-
edge given to him. Like all spiritual
things, forgiveness can come only when
there is a person who appreciates its
worth and meaning. The deep cry for
forgiveness must rise out of a forgiving
PRAYER 119
spirit. It is always more than a trans-
action, an event. It is an inward condi-
tion of the personal life, and the soul
that feels what it means to love and for-
give is so bonnd into the whole divine
order that love and forgiveness come in
as naturally as light goes through the
open casement, or the tide into an inlet.
The next word is surely to be thought
of as a human cry: " Take us not into
testing." It is the natural shrinking of
the tender, sensitive soul, and it is the
right attitude. Most of us know by
hard experience that trial, proving, test-
ing, yes, even actual temptation, have a
marvelous ministry. No saint is made
in the level plain, where the waters are
still and the pastures green.
120 DOUBLE SEARCH
" Never on custom's oiled grooves
The world to a higher level moves,
But grates and grinds with friction
hard
On granite boulder and flinty shard.
The heart must bleed before it feels,
The pool be troubled before it heals. 51
All this we know. We know that the
stern battle makes the veteran. But this
prayer is the childlike cry, the shrinking
fear, which are always safer than the
bold dash, the impetuous plunge. It is
the utterance of an instinctive wish to
keep where safety lies, and, humanly
speaking, it is right, though, in a world
whose highest fruit is character, we may
expect that bitter cups and hard bap-
tisms will be a part of our experience.
Like all that has gone before, it is an
PRAYER 121
effort at co-operation. It is a sincere as-
piration for green pastures and still
waters joined with a readiness to be fed
at the table in presence of the enemy, if
need be, readiness for the perilous edge
of conflict, for " high strife and glorious
hazard."
Last of all there rises the cry for de-
liverance from the power of evil. Once
more we realize that this is not an oc-
casion for magical interference, no call
for a fiery dart out of the sky to pierce
a black demon who is pushing us into
sin. The drama is an inward one and
the enemy, called of many names, is a
part of our own self. Each soul has
its own struggle with the immemorial
tug of brute inheritance the sag of
lower nature.
122 DOUBLE SEARCH
" When the fight begins within himself,
A man's worth something. God
stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up between his feet both
tug
He's left, himself, 1' the middle: The
soul wakes
And grows."
But here supremely appears our prin-
ciple of co-operation. Prayer for deliv-
erance from evil cannot end on the lips.
There is no conquest of the flesh, no
killing out of ape and tiger, until we our-
selves catch at God's skirts and rise to
live for the Spirit and by the Spirit.
There is no deliverance till the soul says,
" I will be free " and God and man tug
on the same side. Wherever any citadel
of evil is battered God and man are
PRAYER 123
there together. God finds a human or-
gan and man draws on the Inexhaustible
resources of God.
Prayer, whether it be the lisp of a
little child, or the wrestling of some
great soul in desperate contest with the
coils of habit or the evil customs of his
generation is a testimony to a divine-
human fellowship. In hours of crisis
the soul feels for its Companion, by a
natural gravitation, as the brook feels
for the ocean- In times of joy and
strength, it reaches out to its source of
Life, as the plant does to the sun. And
when it has learned the language of
spiritual communion and knows Its
Father, praying refreshes It as the greet-
ing of a friend refreshes one in a for-
eign land. We ought not to expect that
prayer, of the true and lofty sort, could
i2 4 DOUBLE SEARCH
be attained by easy steps. It involves
appreciation of God and co-operation
with Him. One comes not to it in a
day. Even human friendship is a great
attainment. It calls for sacrifice of pri-
vate wishes and for adjustment to the
purposes of another life. One cannot be
an artist or a musician without patient
labor to make oneself an organ of the
reality which he fain would express. He
must bring himself by slow stages to a
height of appreciation. Prayer is the
highest human function. It is the utter-
ance of an infinite friendship, the expres-
sion of our appreciation of that complete
and perfect Person whom our soul has
found. " Lord, teach us how to pray."
The United States a
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