17"
J
BR 121 .K57
1917
King, Henry
Churchill,
1858
1934.
Fundamental
questions
FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
-J^^>^
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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Fundamental Questions
V^^
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
52 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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.
54 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 67
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
68 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
70 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
72 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
74 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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.
76 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
78 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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.
THE QUESTION OF CHRIST 105
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
THE QUESTION OF CHRIST 107
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
no FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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 .'"
112 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
114 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
Ii6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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."
LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 117
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
ii8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
120 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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."
LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 121
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,
124 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 125
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 !
128 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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.
LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 129
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
I30 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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,
LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 131
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
134 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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 ;
LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 135
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
1 66 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
i68 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 169
— 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
I70 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
172 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 173
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
174 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
176 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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,
THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 177
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-
178 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 179
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-
i8o FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
1 82 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 183
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
1 84 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 185
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
1 86 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
1 88 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 189
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
192 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
194 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 195
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
196 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 197
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
198 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 199
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 ?
200 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 201
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,
202 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 203
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
204 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 205
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
2o6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 207
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
2o8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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;
CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 209
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-
2IO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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-
CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 211
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
212
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 213
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
214 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 215
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.
2i6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 217
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
2l8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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-
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 219
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.
220 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 221
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
222 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 223
— 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-
224 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 225
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
226 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 227
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
228 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 229
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-
230 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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-
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 231
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 :
232 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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,
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 233
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.
234 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 235
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
236 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 237
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-
238 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 239
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
240 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 241
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.
242 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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-
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 243
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-
244 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 245
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
246 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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.
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 247
(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 :
248 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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.
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 249
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
250 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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.
CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 251
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
252 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
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.
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