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THE INNER LIFE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NSW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS
ATLANTA SAM FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE;
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THE INISTIR LIFE
BY
RUFUS M. JONES, A.M., Lrrx.D.
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HAVERFORD COLLEGE
AUTHOR OF ** STUDIES IN MYSTICAL RELIGION "
*' SPIRITUAL REFORMERS," ETC.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1917
All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, xgi6,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and elcctrotyped. Published October, 1916,
Reprinted January, 1917.
.
J. S. Gushing Go. Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
INTRODUCTION
THERE is no inner life that is not also
an outer life. To withdraw from the
stress and strain of practical action and
from the complication of problems into
the quiet cell of the inner life in order to
build its domain undisturbed is the sure
way to lose the inner life. The finest of
all the mystical writers of the fourteenth
century the author of Theologia Ger-
manica knew this as fully as we of this
psychologically trained generation know-
it. He intensely desired a rich inner life,
but he saw that to be beautiful within he
must live a radiant and effective life in
the world of men and events. "I would
fain be," he says, "to the eternal God
what a man's hand is to a man" i.e. he
seeks, with all the eagerness of his glow-
vi , INTRODUCTION
ing nature, to be an efficient instrument
of God in the world. In the practice of
the presence of God, the presence itself
becomes more sure and indubitable. 'Re-
ligion does not consist of inward thrills
and private enjoyment of God; it does
not terminate in beatific vision. It is
rather the joyous business of carrying the
Life of God into the lives of men of
being to the eternal God what a man's
hand is to a man.
There is no one exclusive "way" either
to the supreme realities or to the loftiest
experiences of life. The "way" which we
individuals select and proclaim as the
only highway of the soul back to its true
home turns out to be a revelation of our
own private selves fully as much as it is a
revelation of a via sacra to the one goal of
all human ' striving. Life is a very rich
and complex affair and it forever floods
over and inundates any feature which we
pick out as essential or as pivotal to its
consummation. God so completely over-
arches all that is and He is so genuinely 4
INTRODUCTION
Vll
the fulfillment of all which appears in-
complete and potential that we cannot
conceivably insist that there shall be only
one way of approach from the multiplic-
ity of the life which we know to the
infinite Being whom we seek.
Most persons are strangely prone to use
the "principle of parsimony." They
appear to have a kind of fascination
for the dilemma of either-or alternatives.
"Faith" or "works" is one of these
great historic alternatives. But this
cleavage is too artificial for full-rounded
reality. Each of these "halves" cries
for its other, and there cannot be any
great salvation until we rise from the
poverty of either half to the richness
of the united whole which includes both
"ways."
So, too, we have had the alternative
of "outer" or "inner" way forced upon
us. We are told that the only efficacious
way is the way of the cross, treated as
an outer historical transaction; and we
have, again, been told that there is no
viii INTRODUCTION
way except the inner way of direct ex-
perience and inner revelation. There are
those who say, with one of George Chap-
man's characters :
"I'll build all inward not a light shall ope
The common out-way.
I'll therefore live in dark ; and all my light
Like ancient temples, let in at my top."
Over against the mystic who glories in
the infinite depths of his own soul, the
evangelical, with excessive humility, allows
not even a spark of native grandeur to
the soul and denies that the inner way
leads to anything but will-o'-the-wisps.
This is a very inept and unnecessary
halving of what should be a whole. It
spoils religious Hfe, somewhat as the
execution of Solomon's proposal would
have spoiled for both mothers the living
child that was to be divided. Twenty-
five hundred years ago Heraclitus of
Ephesus declared that there is "a way
up and a way down and both are one."
So, too, there is an outer way and an
INTRODUCTION ix
inner way and both are one. It takes
both diverse aspects to ezpress the rich
and complete reality, which we mar and
mangle when we dichotomize it and
glorify our amputated half. There is a
tine saying of a medieval mystic: "He
who can see the inward in the outward
is more spiritual than he who can only
see the inward in the inward."
This little book on the "Inner Life"
does not assume to deal with the whole of
the religious life. It recognizes that the
outer in the long run is just as essential
as the inner. This one inner aspect is
selected for emphasis, without any inten-
tion of slighting the importance of the
other side .of the shining shield. Men
to-day are so overwhelmingly occupied
with objective tasks; they are so busy
with the field of outer action, that it is
a peculiarly opportune time to speak of
the interior world where the issues of
life are settled and the tissues of destiny
are woven. There will certainly be some
readers who will be glad to turn from
X INTRODUCTION
accounts of trenches lost or won to spend
a little time with the less noisy but no
less mysterious battle line inside the soul,
and from problems of foreign diplomacy
to the drama of the inner life.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION v
CHAPTER I. THE INNER WAY i
Sec. i. The Momentous Choice i
Sec. 2. Making a Life 9
Sec. 3. The Spirit of the Beatitudes . . 14
Sec. 4. The Way of Contagion ... 23
Sec. 5. The Second Mile .... 30
CHAPTER II. THE KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 39
Sec. i. Bags that Wax not Old ... 39
Sec. 2. Otherism 46
Sec. 3. Scavengers and the Kingdom . . 50
Sec. 4. "The Beyond is Within" . . 56
Sec. 5., The Attitude toward the Unseen . 61
CHAPTER III. SOME PROPHETS OF THE INNER
WAY 70
Sec. i. The Psalmist's Way ... 70
Sec. 2. The New and Living Way . . 77
Sec. 3. An Apostle of the Inner Way . . 82
Sec. 4. The Ephesian Gospel ... 90
xi
xii CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER IV. THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE . 97
Sec. i. Waiting on God .... 97
Sec. 2. In the Spirit 105
Sec, 3. The Power of Prayer . . , m
Sec* 4. The Mystery of Goodness . .116
Sec. 5. "As One having Authority' 1 . .123
Sec. 6. Seeing Him Who is Invisible . . 133
CHAPTER V. A FUNDAMENTAL SPIRITUAL
OUTLOOK . . . .138
CHAPTER VI. WHAT DOES RELIGIOUS EXPERI-
ENCE TELL Us ABOUT
GOD 164
THE INNER LIFE
THE INNER LIFE
CHAPTER I
THE INNER WAY
I
THE MOMENTOUS CHOICE
EVERY scrap of writing that sheds any
light on the life of Jesus, and every in-
cident that gives the least detail about
His movements or His teaching are precious
to us. One can hardly conceive the joy
and enthusiasm that would burst forth in
all lands, if new fragments of papyrus or
of parchment could be unearthed that
would add in any measure to our knowl-
edge of the way this Galilean life was
lived "beneath the Syrian blue." But it
may now probably be taken for granted
that the material will never be forth-
coming and it surely is not now in
hand for an adequate biography of
Z THE INNER LIFE [Cn. I
Him. The lives of Jesus that have been
written in modern times have a certain
value, as suggestive revelations of what
the writers thought He ought to have
been or ought to have done, but biogra-
phies, in the true sense of the word, they
are not. The Evangelists performed for
us an inestimable service, but they did
not furnish us the sort of data necessary
for a detailed biography, expressed in
clock-time language.
Our "sources" are much more adequate
when we turn our attention from external
events to the inner way which His life
reveals, though they still allow for free
play of imagination and for much fluidity
of subjective interpretation. It is possible, -
however, I believe, to look through the
genuine words that are preserved and to
see, with clairvoyant insight, the inner
kingdom of the soul in that Person whose
interior life was the richest of all those
who have walked our earth. There are
curious little playthings to be bought in
Rome. If one looks through a pin-hole
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 3
peep somewhere in one of these tiny
toys, one sees to his surprise the whole
mighty structure of St. Peter's Cathedral,
standing out as large as it looks in re-
ality. Perhaps we can find some pin-
hole peeps in the gospels that in a similar
way will let us see the marvelous inner
world, the extraordinary spiritual life, of
this Person whose outer biography so
baffles us*
Our first single glimpse of His interior
life must be got without the help of any
actual word of His. It is given to us in
the gospel accounts of His discovery of
His mission. How long the consciousness
of mission had been gestating we cannot
tell. What books He read, if any, are
never named. What ripening influence
the days of toil in the carpenter shop may
have had, is unnoted. What dawned
upon Him as He meditated in silence is
not reported. What formative ideas may
have come from the little groups of "the
quiet ones in the land" can only be
guessed at. We are merely told that He
4 THE INNER LIFE [Cm I
increased in wisdom as He advanced in
stature, which is the only conceivable
way that personality can be attained.
Suddenly the moment of clear insight
came and He saw what He was in the
world for.
It was usual for the great prophets of
His people to discover their mission in
some such moment of clarified inward
sight. Isaiah saw the Lord with His
train filling the temple, felt his lips cleansed,
and heard the call "who will go?" Eze-
kiel saw the indescribable living creature
with the hands of a man under the wings
of the Spirit and heard himself called to
his feet for his commission. So here,
there was a sudden invading consciousness
from beyond. The world with its solid
hills appears only the fragment, which it
is, and the World of wider Reality floods
in and reveals itself. The sky seems rent
apart, the Spirit, as though once more
brooding over a world in the making,
covers Him from above, and gives inward
birth to a conviction of uniqueness of Life
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 5
and uniqueness of mission. He feels Him-
self in union with His Father. 1
This experience of the invading Life,
awakening a consciousness of unique per-
sonal mission, brought with it, as an un-
avoidable sequence, the stress and. strain
of a very real temptation. The inner
world of self-consciousness has strange
watershed "divides" that shape the cur-
rents of the life as the mountain ridges of
the outer world do the rivers. No new
nativity, no fresh awakening, can come to
a soul without forcing the momentous
issue of its further meaning, or without
raising the urgent question, how shall the
new insight, the fresh light, the increased
power be wrought into life ? The deepest
issues turn, not upon the choice of " things,"
but upon the choice of the kind of self that
is to be, and the most decisive dramas are
those that are enacted in the inner world
before the footlights of our private theater.
The temptation is described by the Evan-
gelists in su<;h conventional language and
1 Mark I. lo-n.
6 THE INNER LIFE [Ca. I
in such popular and pictorial imagery that
its immense inner reality is often missed by
the reader. This oriental, pictorial way
of presenting the drama of the soul catches
the western mind in the toils of literalism.
The picture is taken for the reality. What
we have here in the temptation, when we
go into the heart of the matter, is the
momentous choice of the kind of Person
that is to emerge. It is the immemorial
battle between the higher and the lower
self within. It was the line of least resist-
ance to accept popular expectation, to go
forth to realize the dream of the age. A
person conscious of divine anointing, fired
with passionate loyalty to the nation's
hopes, gifted with extraordinary power of
moving men to new issues would feel at
once that he had .only to put himself forth
as the expected Messiah in order to carry
the enthusiastic people with him- Let
him but come with the spectacular powers
of the Messiah that was eagerly looked for,
the power to turn stones to bread, to leap
from the pinnacle of the temple without
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 7
injury, to break the Roman yoke and
make Jerusalem once again the city of
God's chosen people and success was
sure to follow. God's ancient covenant
was an absolute pledge to the faithful
that He would in His own time make
bare His arm and deliver His people.
As soon as the anointed one appeared
all the forces of the unseen world would
be at his command and his triumph would
be assured.
The appeal of a career like that is no
fictitious "temptation." It is of a piece
with what besets us all. It is out of the
very stuff of nature. At some such cross-
road we have all stood with the issue
of our inner destiny in unstable equi-
librium.
Over against it, another "way" is set,
another kind of life is dimly outlined,
another type of anointed one is seen to
be possible, another kingdom, totally dif-
ferent from the one of popular expecta-
tion, is descried. This kingdom of His
spiritual vision cannot come by miracle
8 THE INNER LIFE
6r by power; it can come only through
complete adjustment of will to the will
of the Father-God. This anointed one of
His higher aspiration will be no temporal
ruler, no political king, no spectacular
wonder-worker. He will rule only by the
conquering power of love and goodness.
He will venture everything on sheer faith
in the Father's love and on the appeal
of uncalculating goodness of heart and
will. This new kind of life that draws
Him from the line of least resistance is a
life of utter simplicity, which discounts
what the world calls "goods," which
draws upon an unseen environment for
its resources and which expands inwardly,
rather than outwardly, after the manner
of the green bay tree. The new "way**
that opens to His sight, and that beckons
Him from all other ways of glory, is a
way of suffering and sacrifice, a way of
the cross. It offers itself not because
self-giving is a better way than an easy,
happy path, but because it is the only
way by which love in a world like ours
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 9
can reach its goal ; it is the only way by
which the kingdom of God can be formed
in the lives of men like us.
He came forth from those momentous
days of inner struggle with the issue
settled, and with the first step taken in
the way of the Kingdom.
II
MAKING A LIFE
Our present-day age has a kind of
passion for the study of developing pro-
cesses. We do not feel quite at home
with any subject until we can work our
way back to its origin or origins and then
follow it in its unfoldings, explaining the
higher and more complex stages in terms
of the lower and more simple ones.
That method, however, cannot be suc-
cessfully used to unlock the secret of the
gospels. We do not find beginnings here ;
we cannot follow genetic processes; we
are unable to discriminate higher and
lower stages of insight. We must launch
out at the very start in mid-sea. What-
10 THE INNER LIFE [Cta. I
ever words of Christ one begins with
indicate that He has already arrived at
an absolute insight I mean, that He
has found a way of living that is no longer
relatively good, but intrinsically and ab-
solutely good.
It is an inveterate habit with men like
us to estimate everything in terms of
relative results. We are pragmatists by
the very push of our immemorial instincts.
Our first question, consciously or un-
consciously, is apt to be, what effects will
come, if I act so, or so ? Will this course
work well ? Will it further some issue or
some interest ? And this deep-lying prag-
matic tendency this aim at results
appears woven into the very fiber even
of much of the religion of the world.
Sometimes the results sought are near,
sometimes they are remote; sometimes
they are sought for this world, sometimes
they are sought for the next world ; some-
times the pragmatic aim at results is
crudely and coarsely selfish, sometimes it
is refined, or altogether veiled, but religion
CH. I] THE INNER WAY n
has no doubt often enough been an im-
pressive kind of double-entry bookkeep-
ing, the piling up of credits or of merits
which some day will bring the sure result
that is sought.
Just that entire pragmatic attitude
Christ has left forever behind. His inner
way, His interior insight, passes on to a
new level of life, to a totally different
type of religious aspiration and to another
method of valuation. For Him the be-
yond is always within. The only good
thing is a life that is intrinsically good;
the only blessedness worth talking about
is a kind of blessedness which attaches
by a law of inner necessity to the char-
acter of the life itself. It makes no
difference what world one may eventually
be in if only it is still a world of spirit-
ual issues goodness, holiness, likeness
to God, will still constitute blessedness a/
they do in this world.
When once this insight is reached, it
affects all the pursuits and all the valua-
tions of the soul. All "other things" at
12 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. 1
once become secondary, and " entering into
life," "seeking life," "finding life," be-
comes the primary thing. "Making a
life" overtops in importance even "mak-
ing a living" the life is more than
meat, more than raiment, more than
gaining the whole world. It is better to
enter into life halt and maimed with
right hand cut off and eye plucked out
than bend all one's energies to preserve
the body whole and yet to miss life. The
way to life is strait, the entering gate is
narrow. One cannot enter without facing
the stern necessity of focusing the vision
on the central purpose, without getting
"a single eye," without letting go many
things for the sake of one thing.
Sacrifice, surrender, negation, are in-
herently involved in any great onward-
marching life. They go with any choice
that can be made of a rich and intense life.
It is impossible to find without losing,
to get without giving, to live without
dying. But sacrifice, surrender, negation,
are never for their own sake; they are
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 13
never ends in themselves. They are in-
volved in life itself.
X"'
One great spiritual law comes to light
and becomes operative, as soon as the
interior insight is won, as soon as the
inner way is found : The law that the
soul can have what it wants. This law of
the interior life, of the inner way, Christ
affirms again and again in varying phrase.
The inner attitude, the settled trend of
desire, the persistent swing of the will, are
the very things that make life. The
person who cherishes hate in his soul
forms a disposition of hatred and must
live in the atmosphere which that spirit
forms. The person who longs for deeds
that are wrong, and allows desire to play
with free scope is inwardly as though he
did the deed. He is what he wants to be.
And so, too, on the other hand, the rightly
fashioned will is its own reward and has
its own peculiar blessedness. The person
who hungers and thirsts for goodness will
get what he wants. He who seeks, with
undivided aspiration, will always find.
I 4 THE INNER LIFE [Cm. I
He who knocks with persistent desire for
the gates of life to open will see them swing
apart for him to go through to his goal.
He who asks, with the ground swell of
his whole inner being, for the things
which minister to life and feed its deepest
roots, will get what he asks for. The
very pity of the Pharisee's way of life
is that he has his reward he gets what
he is seeking. The glory of the other
way is the glory of the imperfect the
glory of living toward the flying goal of
likeness to the Father in heaven.
Ill
THE SPIRIT OF THE BEATITUDES
In putting the emphasis for the moment
on the inner way of religion, we must be
very careful not to encourage the heresy
of treating religion as a withdrawal from
the world, or as a retreat from the press
and strain of the practical issues and
problems of the social order. That is the
road to spiritual disaster, not to spiritual
power. Christ gives no encouragement
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 15
to the view that the spiritual ideal
the Kingdom of God can ever be
achieved apart from the conquest of the
whole of life or without the victory that
overcomes the world. Religion can no*
more be cut apart from the intellectual
currents, or from the moral undertakings,
or from the social tasks of an age, than any
other form of life can be isolated from its
native environment. To desert this world,
which presses close around us, for the sake
of some remote world of our dreams, is to
neglect our one chance to get a real re-
ligion.
But at the same time the only possible
way to realize a kingdom of God in this
world, or in any other world, is to begin
by getting an inner spirit, the spirit of
the Kingdom, formed within the lives of
the few or many who are to be the "seed"
of it. The "Beatitudes" furnish one of
these extraordinary pin-hole peeps, of which
I spoke in a former section, through which
this whole inner world can be seen. Here,
in a few lines, loaded with insight, the
16 THE INNER LIFE [Ca. I
seed-spirit of the Kingdom comes full into
sight. We are given no new code, no
new set of rules, no legal system at all.
It is the proclamation of a new spirit,
a new way of living, a new type of per-
son. To have a world of persons of this
type, to have this spirit prevail, would
mean the actual presence of the Kingdom
of God, because this spirit would produce
not only a new inner world, but a new
outer world as well.
The first thing to note about the blessed-
ness proclaimed in the beatitudes is that
it is not a prize held out or promised as a
final reward for a certain kind of con-
duct; it attaches by the inherent nature
of things to a type of life, as light attaches
to a luminous body, as motion attaches
to a spinning top, as gravitation attaches
to every particle of matter. To be this
type of person is to be living the happy,
blessed life, whatever the outward con-
ditions may be. And the next thing to
note is that this type of life carries in
itself a principle of advance. One reason
CH. IJ THE INNER WAY 17
why it is a blessed type of life is that it
cannot be arrested, it cannot be static.
The beatitude lies not in attainment,
not in the arrival at a goal, but in the
way, in the spirit, in the search, in the
march.
I suspect that the nature of "the happy
life" of the beatitudes can be adequately
grasped only when it is seen in contrast
to that of the Pharisee who is obviously
in the background as a foil to bring out
the portrait of the new type. The pity
of the Pharisee's aim was that it could
be reached he gets his reward. He has
a definite limit in view the keeping of a
fixed law. Beyond this there are no
worlds to conquer. Once the near finite
goal is touched there is nothing to pursue.
The immediate effect of this achievement
is conceit and self-satisfaction. The trail
of calculation and barter lies over all his
righteousness. There is in his mind an
equation between goodness and prosperity,
between righteousness and success: "If
thou hast made the most High thy habita-
18 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. I
tion there shall no evil befall thee ; neither
shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. 5 '
The person who has loss or trouble or
suffering must have been an overt or a
secret sinner, as the question about the
blind man indicates.
The goodness portrayed in the "beati-
tudes" is different from this by the width
of the sky. Christ does not call the
righteous person the happy man. He
does not pronounce the attainment of
righteousness blessed, because a "right-
eousness" that gets attained is always
external and conventional; it is a kind
that has definable, quantitative limits
"how many times must I forgive my
brother?" "Who is my neighbor?"
The beatitude attaches rather to hunger
and thirst for goodness. The aspiration,
and not the attainment, is singled out for
blessing. In the popular estimate, happi-
ness consists in getting desires satisfied.
For Christ the real concern is to get new
and greater desires desires for infinite
things. The reach must always exceed
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 19
the grasp. The heart must forever be
throbbing for an attainment that lies
beyond aay present consummation. It is
the "glory- cdf going on," the joy of dis-
covering imwcn territory beyond the mar-
gin of each, spiritual conquest.
Poverty of spirit another beatitude-
trait is bound up with hunger for good-
ness as the convex side of a curve is bound
up with the concave side. They are
different aspects of the same attitude.
The poor in spirit are by no means poor-
spirited. They are persons who see so
much to be, so much to do, such limitless
reaches to life and goodness that they
are profoundly conscious of their insuffi?
ciency and incompleteness. Self-satisfac-
tion and pride of spiritual achievement
are washed clean out of their nature.
They are open-hearted, open-windowed
to all truth,, possessed of an abiding
disposition to receive, impressed with a
sense of inner need and of childlike de-
pendence. Jtast that attitude is its own
sure reward, By an unescapable spiritual
20 THE INNER LIFE [Ca. I
gravitation the best things in the universe
belong to open-hearted, open-windowed
souls. Again, in the beatitude on the
mourner, He reverses the Pharisaic and
popular judgment. Losses and crosses,
pains and burdens, heartaches and bereave-
ments, empty chairs and darkened win-
dows, are the antipodes of our desires and
last of all things to be expected in the list
of beatitudes. They were then, and still
often are, counted as visitations of divine
disapproval. Christ rejects the superficial
way of measuring the success of a life by
the smoothness of its road or by its free-
dom from trial, and He will not allow the
false view to stand ; namely, that success
is the reward of piety, and trouble the
return for lack of righteousness. There
is no way to depth of life, to richness of
spirit, by shun-pikes that go around hard
experiences. The very discovery of the
nearness of God, of the sustaining power
of His love, of the sufficiency of His grace,
has come to men in all ages through pain,
and suffering and loss. We always go for
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 21
comfort to those who have passed through
deeps of life and we may well trust Christ
when He tells us that it is not the lotus-
eater but the sufferer who is in the way
of blessing and is forming the spirit of
the Kingdom.
Meekness and mercy and peace-making
are high among the qualities that charac-
terize the inner spirit of the kingdom.
Patience, endurance, steadfastness, con-
fidence in the eternal nature of things,
determination to win by the slow method
that is right rather than by the quick and
strenuous method that is wrong are other
ways of -naming meekness. Mercy is
tenderness of heart, ability to put oneself
in another's place, confidence in the power
of love and gentleness, the practice of
forgiveness and the joyous bestowal of
^sympathy. Peace-making is the divine
business of drawing men together into
unity of spirit and purpose, teaching
them to live the love-way, and forming
in the very warp and woof of human
society the spirit of altruism and loyalty
22 THE INNER LIFE [Cs. I
to the higher interests of the group.
These traits belong to the inmost nature
of God and of course those who have them
are blessed, and it is equally clear that
the Kingdom is theirs. There is further-
more, in this happy way of life, a condition
of heart to which the vision of God in-
herently attaches. He is no longer argued
about 1 and speculated upon. He is seen
and felt. He becomes as sure as the sky
above us or our own pulse beat within us.
We spoil our vision with selfishness, we
cloud it with prejudices, we blur it with
impure aims. We cast our own shadow
across our field of view and make a dark
eclipse.* It is not better spectacles we
need. It is a pure, clean, sincere, loving,
forgiving, passionately devoted heart.;
God who is love can be seen, can be found,
only by a heart that intensely loves and
that hates everything that hinders love.
CH I] THE INNER WAY 23
IV
THE WAY OF CONTAGION
We have seen that religion cannot be
sundered from the intellectual currents,
or from the moral undertakings, or from
the social tasks of the world. It cannot
be merely inward. It can preserve its
inward power only as it lives in actual
correspondence with its whole environ-
ment and becomes also outward. But the
primary thing for Christ, we saw, was the
attainment of an inner spirit, the seed--
spirit of the Kingdom, the spirit of the
beatitudes the attainment of a type
of life to which blessedness inherently
attaches.
The question at once arises, how shall
this inner spirit be spread and propagated ?
How is religion of the inner type to grow
and expand ? There are two character-
istic ways of propagating religious ideas,
of carrying spiritual discoveries into the
life of the world. One way is the way of
organization; the other way is the way of
24 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. I
contagion. The way of organization, which
is as old as human history, is too familiar
to need any description. Our age has
almost unlimited faith in it. If we wish
to carry a live idea into action, we or-
ganize. We select officials. We make
"motions." We pass resolutions. We ap-
point committees or boards or commis-
sions. We hold endless conferences. We
issue propaganda material. We have
street processions. We use placards and
billboards. We found institutions, and
devise machinery. We have collisions
between "pros" and "antis" and stir
up enthusiasm and passion for our
"cause." The Christian Church is prob-
ably the most impressive instance of
organization in the entire history of
man's undertakings. - It has become, in
its historical development, almost in-
finitely complex, with organizations
within organizations and suborganiza-
tions within suborganizations. It has
employed every known expedient, even
the sword, for the advancement of its
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 25
"cause," it has created a perfect maze
of institutions and it has originated a
vast variety of educational methods for
carrying forward its truth.
But great as has been the historical
emphasis on organization, it nevertheless
occupies a very slender place in the con-
sciousness of Christ. There is no clear
indication that He appointed any officials,
or organized any society, or founded any
institution. There are two " sayings" in
Matthew which use the word "Church,"
but they almost certainly bear the mark
and coloring of a later time, when the
Church had already come into existence
and had formed its practices and its
traditions. And even though the great
"saying" at Caesarea Philippi were ac-
cepted as the actual words of Jesus, it is
still quite possible to" see in it the an-
nouncement of a spiritual fellowship,
spreading by inspiration and contagion,
rather than the founding of an official
institution. It is, no doubt, fortunate
on the whole that the Church was or-
26 THE INNER LIFE [Gs. I
ganized, and that the great idea found a
visible body through which to express it-
self, though nobody can fail to see that
the Church, while meaning to propagate
the gospel, has always profoundly modified
and transformed it, and that it has brought
into play a great many tendencies foreign
to the original gospel.
Christ's way of propagating the truth
the way that inherently fits the inner
life and spirit of the gospel of the King-
dom was the way of personal con-
tagion. Instead of founding an institu-
tion, or organizing an official society, or
forming a system, or creating external
machinery, He counted almost wholly
upon the spontaneous and dynamic in-
fluence of life upon life, of personality
upon personality. He would produce a
new world, a new social order, through
the contagious and transmissive character
of personal goodness. He practically ig-
nored, or positively rejected, the method
of restraint, and trusted absolutely to the
conquering power of loyalty and consecra-
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 27
tion. It was His faith that, if you get
into the world anywhere a seed of the
Kingdom, a nucleus of persons who ex-
hibit the blessed life, who are dedicated
to expanding goodness, who rely im-
plicitly on love and sympathy, who try
in meek patience the slow method that
is right, who still feel the clasping hands
of love even when they go through pain
and trial and loss, this seed-spirit will
spread, this nucleus will enlarge and
create a society. If the new spirit of
passionate love, and of uncalculating good-
ness gets formed in one person, by a
silent alchemy a group of persons will
soon become permeated and charged with
the same spirit, new conditions will be
formed, and in time children will be born
into a new social environmentand will suck
in rxew ideals with their mother's milk.
Persons of the blessed life, Christ says,
are the saving salt of the earth. They
carry their wholesome savor into every-
thing they touch. They do not try to
save themselves. They are ready like
28 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. I
salt to dissolve and disappear, but, the
more they give themselves away, the
more antiseptic and preservative they
become to the society in which they live.
They keep the old world from spoiling
and corrupting not by attack and re-
straint, not by excision and amputation,
but by pouring the preservative savor of
their lives of goodness into all the chan-
nels of the world. This preservative and
saving influence on society depends, how-
ever, entirely on the continuance of the
inner quality of life and it will be certain
to cease if ever the salt lose its savor, i.e.
if the soul of religion wanes or dies away
and only the outer form of it remains.
But such lives are more than antiseptic
and preservative; they are kindling and
illuminative. They become "candles of
the Lord." Candles emit their light and
kindle other candles by burning them-
selves up and transmitting their flame.
When a life is set on fire, and is radiant
with self-consuming love, it will invariably
set other lives on fire. Such a person may
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 29
teach many valuable ideas, he may organize
many movements, he may attack many evil
customs, but the best thing he will ever do
will be to fuse and kindle other souls with
the fire of his passion. His own burning,
shining life is always his supreme service.
"The greatest legacy the hero leaves his race
Is to have been a hero."
Such a person will be eager to decrease
that his kindling power may increase.
He will not care to save himself, or to
reap a reward for his service. He may
not even know that he is shining, like the
early saint who "wist not that his face
did shine." But for all that, men will
see the way by his light and will catch
the glory of living because he exhibits it.
He can no more be hid than can a hill-top
city, or the headlight of a locomotive, or
the newly risen sun.
That is Christ's way of spreading the
life of the Kingdom, that is His method
of propagating the inner spirit, and of
producing a society of blessed people.
30 THE INNER LIFE [CH. I
THE SECOND MILE
It may seem to some incongruous to be
writing about an inner way of life in these
days when action is felt by so many to be
the only reality and when in every direc-
tion outside there is dire human need to
be met.
"Leave, then, your wonted prattle,
The oaten reed forbear ;
For I hear a sound of battle,
And trumpets rend the air."
But more than ever is it necessary for
us to center down to eternal principles
of life and action, to attain and maintain
the right inner spirit, and to see what in
its faith and essence Christianity really
means. Precisely now when the Sermon
on the Mount seems least to be the pro-
gram of action and the map of life, is it
a suitable time for us to endeavor to dis-
cover what Christ's way means, by look-
ing through the literal phrases in clair-
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 31
voyant fashion to the spirit treasured and
embalmed within the wonderful words ?
There is one phrase which seems to me
to be, in a rare and peculiar degree, the
key to the entire gospel I mean the
invitation to go "the second mile" :
"If any man compel you to go a mile,
go two miles." It is always dangerous,
I know, to fly away from the literal sig-
nificance of words and to indulge in far-
fetched "spiritual" interpretations. But
it is even more dangerous, perhaps, to
read words of oriental imagery and para-
dox as though they were the plain prose
speech of the occidental mind, and to be
taken only at their face value.
There will probably always be Tolstoys
great or small who will make the
difficult, and never very successful, ex-
periment of taking this and the other
"commands" of the Sermon on the Mount
in a literal and legalistic sense, but to do
so is almost certainly to be "slow of
heart," and to miss Christ's meaning.
Whatever else may be true or false in
3 2 THE INNER LIFE [Cu. I
our interpretations of the teachings of
Christ, it may always be taken for certain
that He did not inaugurate a religion of
the legalistic type, consisting of com-
mands and exact directions, to be liter-
ally followed and obeyed as a way to
secure merit and reward. To go "the
second mile," then, is an attitude and
character of spirit rather than a mere
rule and formula for the legs.
Christ always shows a very slender
appreciation of any act of religion or of
ethics which does not reach beyond the
stage of compulsion. What is done be-
cause it must be done; because the law
requires it, or because society expects it,
or because convention prescribes it, or
because the doer of it is afraid of conse-
quences if he omits it, may, of course, be
rightly done and meritoriously done, but
an act on that level is not yet quite in
the region where for Christ the highest
moral and religious acts have their spring.
The typical Pharisee was an appalling
instance of the inadequacy of "the first-
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 33
mile" kind of religion and ethics. He
plodded his hard mile, and "did all the
things required" of him. In the region
of commands, or "touching the law" he
was "blameless." But there was no spon-
taneity in his religion, no free initiative,
no enthusiastic passion, no joyous abandon,
no gratuitous and uncalculating acts. He
did things enough, but he did them be-
cause he had to do them, not because
some mighty love possessed him and
flooded him and inspired him to go not
only the expected mile, but to go on
without any calculation out beyond mile-
stones altogether. Just here appears the
new inner way of Christ's religion. The
legalist, like the rich young man, "does
all the things that are commanded in
the law," but still painfully "lacks"
something. To get into Christ's way,
to "follow" in any real sense, he must
cut his cables and swing out from the
moorings where he is tied. He must
catch such a passion of love that giving
either of his money or of himself, shall
34 THE INNER LIFE [Ce. I
no longer be for him an imposed duty
but rather a joy of spirit.
The parable of the "great surprise" is
another illustration, a glorious illustra-
tion, of the spirit of the "second mile."
The "blessed ones" in the picture (which
is an unveiling of actual everyday life in
its eternal meaning rather than a por-
traiture of the day of judgment) find
themselves at home with God, drawn
into His presence, crowned with His
approval, and sealed with His fellowship.
They are surprised. They had not been
adding up their merits or calculating
their chances of winning heaven. They
are beautifully artless and naive: "When
saw we Thee hungry and fed Thee?"
They have been doing deeds of love, say-
ing kind words, relieving human need,
banishing human loneliness, making life
easier and more joyous, because they
had caught a spirit of love and tender-
ness, and, therefore, "could not do other-
wise," and now they suddenly discover
that those whom they helped and rescued
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 35
and served were bound up in one insepa-
rable life with God himself, so that what
was done to them was done to Him, and
they find that their spontaneous and un-
calculating love was one in essence and
substance with the love of God and that
they are eternally at home with Him.
The tender, immortal stories of the
woman who broke her alabaster vase of
precious nard and "filled all the house
with the odor," and of the woman (per-
haps the same one) who had been a
sinner and who from her passion of love
for her great forgiveness wet Christ's
feet with her tears, even before she could
open her cruse of ointment, are the finest
possible illustrations of the spirit of "the
second mile." They picture, in subtly
suggestive imagery, the immense contrast
between the spontaneous, uncalculating
act of one who "loves much" and does
with grace what love prompts; and acts,
on the other hand, like that of Simon
the pharisaic host, who offers Jesus a
purely conventional and grudging hos-
36 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. I
pitality, or like that of the disciples who
sit indeed at the table with Jesus but
come to it absorbed with the burning
question, "who among us is to be first
and greatest," not only at the table but
"in the Kingdom!"
What grace and unexpected love come
into action in the simple deed of the
"Samaritan" who, from nobility of na-
ture, does what official Priest and Levite
leave undone! The hated foreigner, spit
at and stoned as he walked the roads of
Judea, under no obligation to be kind or
serviceable, is the real "neighbor," the
bearer of balm and healing, the dispenser
of love and sympathy. He may have
no ordination to the priesthood, but he
finely exhibits the attitude of grace which
belongs in the religion of "the second
mile."
But we do not reach the full significance
of "the second mile" until we see that it
is something more than the highest level
of human grace. What shines through
the gospels everywhere, like a new-risen
CH. I] THE INNER WAY 37
sun, is the revelation that this this
grace of the second mile is the supreme
trait and character-nature of God as
well. How surprising and unexpected is
that extraordinary unveiling of the divine
nature in the story of the prodigal boy!
It is wonderful enough that one who has
wasted his substance and squandered his
own very life should still be able in his
squalor and misery to come to himself
and want to go home ; but the fact which
radiates this sublime story like a glory
is the uncalculating, ungrudging, un-
limited love of the Father, which remains
unchanged by the boy's blunder, which
has never failed in the period of his ab-
sence, and which bursts out in the cry
of joy: "This my son was dead and is
alive again, he was lost and is found/ 5
It is, and always has been, the very
center of our Christian faith that the
real nature and character of God come
full into view in Christ, that God is in
mind and heart and will revealed in the
Person ' whom we call Christ. "The
3 8 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. I
grace," then, "of the Lord Jesus Christ,"
of which we are reminded in that great
word of apostolic benediction, is a true
manifestation of the deepest nature and
character, of God Himself, The Gross
is not an artificial scheme. The Cross
is the eternal grace, the spontaneous,
uncalculating love of God made visible
and vocal in our temporal world. It is
the apotheosis of the spirit of the second
mile.
CHAPTER II
THE KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL
BAGS THAT WAX NOT OLD
THE ancient world found it very diffi-
cult to keep money even after it was got.
There were almost constant wars involv-
ing the dire stripping of the unprotected
country districts, and the siege and devas-
tation of cities. In those times almost
everything was fragile. It was never easy
to discover any form of wealth that was
surely abiding. Even if the besom of an
invading army did not sweep away the
labor of years, still there were other
enemies to be feared. Tyrants were, al-
ways on the watch for ways of relieving
wealthy men of their treasures. There
were robber bands lying in wait for the
traveler, and neighborhood thieves found
39
40 THE INNER LIFE [Co. 11
it a small matter to break into private
houses and to steal hidden money. It
was no uncommon thing for men to dig
in the ground and hide the talent which
they had saved, or to bury the pearl of
great price, or other precious jewel, in a
field. If one invested his wealth in gar-
ments, then another enemy was to be
feared. The moth is as old as clothes,
and he got in even where the thief failed
to break through.
The problem of getting an indestructible
money-bag was, thus, a problem of first
importance. A journey to Jericho might
any day reduce a man to primitive con-
ditions, or a passing army might make
him a beggar, or the visit of a thief might
strip him of all his living, or the silent
work of a brood of moths might ruin the
savings of years. There were no perdur-
able purses, no nonbreakable banks, no
irreducible forms of wealth.
Christ evidently recognized that there
was a value in money. He did not ap-
parently demand from his follower the
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 41
absolute renunciation of ownership. He
expounded no new theory of economics.
But he was profoundly impressed by the
moral havoc and the social calamities
caused by the excessive ambition for, and
pursuit of, wealth. He saw how the mad
rush for money and the overvaluation
of it killed out the noblest fundamental
traits of the soul, and, more than all
else, he felt the tragedy of human lives
being focused with intensity of strain
and fixed with burning passion on the
pursuit of such pitiably fragile treasures
money-bags of all sorts waxing old
and becoming incapable of . holding the
hoard that absorbed the whole life.
Christ, then, proposes a new kind of
purse, an indestructible and immutable
treasure-bag "make for yourselves bags
that wax not old." Such purses are not
on the market, they cannot be purchased,
they must be woven by each person for
himself, and they must be woven, if at
all, out of the stuff of life itself. We here
pass over, as so often in Christ's teaching,
42 THE INNER LIFE [On. II
from extrinsic wealth to intrinsic, from
the .wealth which men merely possess to
the kind of wealth which they can them-
selves, be. We once more find ourselves
brought to an inner way of living, where
the issue is no longer how to accumulate
goods, but rather how to become good.
The problem is the problem of what men
live by* We are called to loosen our
grip on perishable treasures only that we
may tighten our hold on heavenly, i.e.
spiritual, treasure. We are shown the
folly of spending a life building barns for
expanding earthly possessions, while we
are taking no pains to make ourselves
rich in God.
What is it, then, that men live by?
What will prove to be imperishable wealth,
whether we are in this world, or in any
other world of real moral issues ? It is
obviously not money, for men often live
nobly after the money-bag has waxed old
and after the bank has failed, and it is our
most elemental faith that life blossoms
out into its consummate richness after all
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 43
earthly affairs come to a complete close,
and after every penny of visible wealth
has been left forever behind. Money is
plainly not intrinsic treasure; love is,
goodness is, joy is. A beloved disciple,
in a moment of inspiration, announced
the profound truth that love is "of God."
Men wrongly divide love into two types,
"human love" and "divine love/ 5 but
in reality there is only love. Wherever
love has become the nature of the soul,
and it has become "natural" now to for-
get self for others, to seek to give rather
than to get, to share rather than to pos-
sess, to be impoverished in order that
some loved one may abound, there a
divine and Godlike spirit has been formed.
And we now come upon a new kind of
wealth, a kind that accumulates with use,
because it is a law that the more the spirit
of love is exercised, the more the soul
spends itself in love, so much the more
love it has, the richer it grows, the
.diviner its nature becomes. But at the
same time, it is a fact that love is never
44 THE INNER LIFE [Cu. II
complete, never reaches its full scope and
measure until our love takes on an eternal
aspect until we love God in Himself
or love Him in our loved ones. One
reason why love is exalted by death is
that we no longer love our immortal loved
one in any narrow and selfish way; we
love now for pure love's sake, and the
truest of all treasures which can be laid
up in imperishable bags is this stock of
unalloyed love for that which is most
'lovely for God and for souls that are
given to us to bring some of His nature
closer to our human hearts.
Goodness is, of course, notoriously hard
to define. It is never an abstract quality
that can be described by logical concepts.
It is a way of living, a way of acting, a
way of working out relationships. It is,
like love, a cumulative thing. To be
good inherently means to be becoming
better, to be on the way to an unattained
goal of action, or of character. It is the
glory of going on to be perfect like our
Father in heaven. To be rich in goodness
CH I&,|HJN$DOM WITHIN THE SOUL 45
of (h praetor, t^c \*"<*\\ . is to be on the way
to become e^P" richer, however long the
journey laftt^ ^pwever far the spiral winds,
for goodness, Mljke love, is of God, and
steadily asshmij&tes our imperfect human
nature to the j^^ffect divine nature
Joy is, perftjm^j&ot often thought of as
one of the thiags|ften live by, as the soul's
eternal wealth; jyfe is so full of sorrow
and pain that ftifr eems like a fleeting,
vanishing asset. ' fe$t that is because joy
is confused with pleasure. True joy is
not a thing of moods, not a capricious
emotion, tied to fluctuating experiences
It is a state and condition of the soul.
It survives through pain and sorrow and,
like a subterranean spring, waters the
whole life. It is intimately allied and
bound up with love and goodness, and so
is deeply rooted m the life of God. Joy
is the most perfect and complete mark
and sign of immortal wealth, because it
indicates that the soul is living by love
and by goodness, and is very rich m
God.
46 THE INNER LIFE [Ca. II
II
OTHERISM
(Matt. VII. I-I2)
Altruism is an honored word. Other-
ism is only recently coined and has not
yet become widely current in good speech.
We need, however, a word that has more
inward depth than altruism usually carries,
and perhaps otherism wUl eventually take
that vacant place.
Not merely in these days of war, but in
all our human relations all the time we
greatly need to get the interior vision
which enables us to understand from
within those with whom we live and work.
Nobody sees life correctly until he has
corrected his own views by a true apprecia-
tion of the views of others. From the
outside it is impossible to estimate any life
fairly. We have long ago learned that
we can get no true account of any historical
character unless we have a historian who
can put himself in the place of the person
he is describing. He must have imagina-
CH. II] ( K|N^OM WITHIN THE SOUL 47
tion and ifefs^He to see clearly the con-
ditions aif^'i&^es, the influences and the
atmospheli- il M i; 1J(iliich the man lived. The
problems ifijffi&e had to deal with, the
conceptions ;vl$^%overned men's thoughts
i' ' ".f' 1 ' 1 ''f ''''i
when he liv<S^^,||J. these must be under-
stood, before j ;^i'^pn get any estimate of
the man h^^^^j^ The same sort of
imagination iiP'Mcessary to judge the
person who lives next door. We dare
not pronounce upon him until we know
all that he has to face. If we could once
feel his quivering spirit and could see
his inward struggles, we could not set up
our private tribunal and pass our cold
individual judgment upon him. The
real remedy for this hard critical spirit
which breaks society up into independent
units is the spirit of love, the spirit of
otherism.
' The moment we put ourselves in the
place of others, and pronounce no judgment
upon persons until we have seen all the
circumstances of their life, a new state of
things at once appears. Genuine sym-
48 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. II
pathy, clear interior insiglit. into the
personality of others, immediately creates
a new world. The trouble too often is
that we see all the defects in others and
forget our own. We want to take the
mote out of another person's eye while
all the time there is a whole fence rail in
our own. Christ's rule is to make one-
self perfect before one goes to correcting
others. "Let him who is without sin
cast the first stone."
There is another situation also which
would be remedied if we learned to put
ourselves in the other person's place if
we had the spirit of otherism. Christ
sums it up in the proverb about casting
pearls before swine, i.e. giving what is a
misfit. Many of our well-meant charities
are of this sort. We blunder in our efforts
to help poor needy people, because we do
not get their point of view. We do not
live our way into their lives. There is no
fit between our -gift and their need. They
get a stone for bread.
The same thing happens in much of our
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 49
public speaking. Many persons have the
barbarous habit of never imagining the
listeners* point of view. They go on
speaking as unconscious of the condition
confronting them as the hose pipe is when
the water is turned on. The remedy
again is otherism. It is impossible to
help anybody with a message until you
can in some measure share his life.
"The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
In whatso we share with another's need/*
This teaching is all summed up in the
golden rule, "All things that ye would
that men should do unto you do ye also
unto them. 5 * It is clear at once that to do
this one must cultivate both his spirit
of love and his power of imagination. It
is never enough to want to help a person.
We must put ourself in his place and be
able to do what really will help him. It
would appear, therefore, that the most
difficult and at the same time the most
heavenly attainment in the world is
sympathy the spirit of otherism.
S o THE INNER LIFE [Qau II
III
SCAVENGERS AND THE KINGDOM
We no longer expect a world of perfect
conditions to appear by sudden interven-
tion. We have explained so many things
by the discovery of antecedent develop-
mental processes that we have leaped to
the working faith that all things come
that way. We do, no doubt, find un-
bridged gaps in the enormous series of
events that have culminated in our present
world, and we must admit that nature
seems sometimes to desert 'her usual placid
way of process for what looks like a steeple-
chase of sudden "jumps," but we feel
pretty sure that even these "jumps" have
been slowly prepared for and are themselves
part of the process-method.
Then, too, we find it very difficult to
conceive how a spiritual kingdom a
world which is built and held together
by the inner gravitation of love could
come by a fiat, or a stroke, or a jet. The
qualities which form and characterize the
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 51
kingdom of God are all qualities that are
born and cultivated within by personal
choices, by the formation of rightly-
fashioned wills, by the growth of love and
sympathy in the heart, by the creation of
pure and elevated desires. Those traits
must be won and achieved. They cannot
be shot into souls from without. If,
therefore, we are to expect the crowning
age that shall usher in a world in which
wrath and hate no longer destroy, from
which injustice is banished and the central
law of which is love like that of Christ's,
then we must look for this age, it seems to
me, to come by slow increments and gains
of advancing personal and social good-
ness, and by divine and human processes
already at work in some degree in the
lives of men.
Christ often seems to teach this view.
There is a strand in his sayings that
certainly implies a kingdom coming by a
long process of slow spiritual gains. There
is first the seed, then the blade, then the
ear and finally the full corn in the ear.
$2 THE INNER LIFE \ [Cfc, II
The mustard seed, though so min,ute and
tiny, is a type of the kingdom because it
contains the potentiality of a vast growth
and expansion. The yeast is likewise a
figure of ever-growing, permeating, pene-
trating living force which in time leavens
the whole mass. The kingdom is fre-
quently described as an inner life, a
victorious spirit. It "comes" when God's
will is done in a person as it is done in
heaven, and, therefore, it is not a spec-
tacle to be " observed," like the passing
of Caesar's legions, or the installation of a
new ruler. But, on the other hand, there
are plainly many sayings which point
toward the expectation of a mighty sud-
den event. We seem, again and again, to
be hearing not of process, but of apocalypse,
not of slow development, but of a myste-
rious leap. There can be no question that
most devout Jews of the first century ex-
pected the world's relief expedition to come
by miracle, and it is evident that there
was an intense hope in the minds of men
that, in one way or another, God would
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 53
intervene and put things right. Many
think that Christ shared that hope and
expectation. It is of course possible that
in sharing, as He did, the actual life of
man, He partook of the hopes and trav-
ails and expectations of His times. But,
I think, we need to go very slowly and
cautiously in this direction. To interpret
Christ's message mainly in terms of
apocalypse and sudden interventions is
surely to miss its naturalness, its spiritual
vision, and its inward depth. We can well
admit that nobody then had quite our
modern conception of process or our pres-
ent day dislike of breaks, interruptions,
and interventions. There was no difficulty
in thinking of a new age or dispensation
miraculously inaugurated. Only it looks
as though Christ had discovered an ethical
and spiritual way which made it unneces-
sary to count on miracle. There was much
refuse to be consumed, much corruption to
be removed, before the new condition of
life could be in full play, but He seems to
have seen that the consuming fire and the
54 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. II
cleansing work were an essential and in-
herent part of the process that was bring-
ing the kingdom.
When he was asked where men were to
look for the kingdom, His answer was
that they were to find a figure and parable
of it in the normal process of nature's
scavengers. The carcass lies decaying in
the sun, corrupting the air and tainting
everything in its region. There can be
no wholesome conditions of life in that
spot until the corruption is removed. But
nature has provided a way of cleansing the
air. The scavenger comes and removes
the refuse and corruption and turns it
by a strange alchemy into living matter.
Life feeds on the decaying refuse, raises
it back into life, and cleanses the world by
making even corruption minister to its
own life processes. We could not live an
hour in our world if it were not alive with
a myriad variety of scavenging methods
that burn up effete matter, transmute
noxious forms into wholesome stuff, cleanse
away the poisons, and transmute, not by
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 55
an apocalypse, but by a process, death into
life and corruption into sweetness. May
not the vulture, like the tiny sparrow who
cannot fall without divine regard, be a
sign, a figure, a parable ? When we look
for the kingdom, in the light of this sign,
we shall not search the clouds of heaven,
we shall not consult "the number of the
beast" we shall look for it wherever
we see life conquering death, wherever the
white tents of love are pitched against the
black tents of hate, wherever the living
forces of goodness are battering down the
strongholds of evil, wherever the sinner
is being changed to a saint, wherever
ancient survivals of instinct and custom
are yielding to the sway of growing vision
and insight and ideal. It is "slow and
late" to come, this kingdom! So was
life slow to come, while all that was to be
"Whirl'd for a million aeons thro* the vast
Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light."
-So was man slow to come, while fan-
tastic creatures were "tearing each other
56 THE INNER LIFE [Cfc. II
in the slime." So was a spirit-governed
Person slow to come, while men lived in
lust and war and hate. But in God's world
at length the things that ought to come do
come, and we may faintly guess by what
we see that the kingdom, too, is coming.
There is something like it now in some
lives.
IV
" THE BEYOND IS WITHIN "
Among the parables of Christ there is
a very impressive one on the shut door.
It is a story of ten country maidens who
were invited to a wedding. They were to
meet the bridegroom coming from a dis-
tance, as soon as his arrival should be
announced, and with their lighted lamps
they were to guide him and his attendants
through the darkness to the home of the
bride, where the banquet and the festal
dance were to be held.
For many days these simple maidens
had been living in the thrilling expecta-
tion of the great event in which they were
to take a leading part.
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 57
They had been busy with their prepara-
tions, drilling their rhythmic steps, and
talking eagerly of the approaching night.
But five of them foolishly neglected the
critically important part of the prepara-
tion they took no oil to supply their
lamps and at the dramatic moment they
found themselves compelled to withdraw
from the joyous throng and to go in search
of the necessary equipment. When at
length they arrived with their oil, the
illuminated procession was over and the
door of the festal house was shut.
The simple maidens soon discovered
that there was a stern finality to this
shut door. Their blunder had irrevocable
consequences. They may have had other
interesting opportunities as life went on,
but they forever missed this joyous pro-
cession and this wedding feast. "Too
late, too late. Ye cannot enter now."
Christ turns this common, trivial neigh-
borhood incident into a parable of the
Kingdom of God. Those who believe
that He was looking, as so many in His
58 THE INNER LIFE [Ce. II
time were looking, for a sudden shift of
dispensations and for a Kingdom to be
ushered in by a stupendous apocalyptic
event, find in this irrevocably shut door
of the parable a figure of the doom of
those who failed to prepare for the sudden
coming of this crisis, decisive of the* destiny
of men.
But there is another, and, I think, a
truer, way of interpreting this shut door.
There is a stern finality to all opportuni-
ties that have been missed and to all high
occasions that have been blundered and
bungled. All decisions of the will, all
choices of life have, in their very nature,
apocalyptic finality. They suddenly re-
veal and unveil character and they are
loaded with destiny which can be changed
only by a change of character. Other
opportunities may offer themselves and
new chances may indeed come, but when
any choice has been made or any oppor-
tunity has been missed that chance has
gone by and that door is shut.
football player who has had a
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 59
chance in the great game of the year to
make a goal, and instead of doing it
fumbled the ball and lost the opportunity
to score, may just possibly have another
chance sometime, but no apologies and
no explanations can ever change the
apocalyptic finality of that fumble.
Something like that is involved in all
the spiritual issues of life, and our deeds
and attitudes are all the time irrevocably
opening or shutting doors, which prove
to be doors to the Kingdom of God.
Christ may possibly at times have looked
for some sudden revelation of destiny,
but surely for the most part He looked
for the momentous issues of the Kingdom
within the soul itself rather than in a
spectacular event in the outer world.
This principle throws light on all Christ's
sayings about the future. The coming
destiny is not in thd stars, it is not in the
sentence of a Great Assize, it is not in the
sudden shift of " dispensations "; it is in
the character and inner nature, as they
have been formed within each soul. The
60 ' THE INNER LIFE [Cn. II
thing to be concerned about is not so much
a day of judgment or an apocalyptic
moment, as the trend of the will, the atti-
tude of the spirit, the formation of inner
disposition and character. We are al-
ways facing issues of an eternal aspect,
and every day is a day of judgment, re-
vealing the line of march and the issues
of destiny. Conversion crises are 1 for-
tunately possible, when suddenly a new
level of life may be reached and a fresh
start may be made, and in this inner
world of personality, there are always new
possibilities occurring, but, as at oriental
marriage feasts, neglected opportunities
are irreversibly neglected, shut doors are
irrevocably shut, and blunders that affect
the issues of the soul have an apocalyptic
finality about them. New dispensations
may await us; the Kingdom may come
in ways we never dreamed of ; the beyond
may be more momentous than we have
ever expected, but always and everywhere
"the within" determines "the beyond/'
and character is destiny*
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 6 1
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD THE UNSEEN
"Nowhere as yet has history spoken in
favor of the ideal of a morality without
religion. New active forces of will, so
far as we can observe, have always arisen
in conjunction with ideas about the un-
seen." So wrote the great German his-
torian and philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey.
The greatest experts in the field both of
ethics and of religion agree with this view.
Henry Sidgwick and Leslie Stephen are
experts in the field of ethics who cannot
be suspected of holding a brief for religion,
and yet Sidgwick says: "Ethics is an
imperfect science alone. It must run
up into religion to complete itself;" and
Leslie Stephen says : "Morality and re-
ligion stand or fall together." Spinoza,
who was denounced during his lifetime as
an atheist and a destroyer of the faith,
nevertheless makes love of God the whole
basis of genuine ethics, insisting that there
is no morality conceivable without love of
62 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. II
God. St. Augustine's famous testimony
may suffice as a religious expert's view.
He says, "Love God and then you may
do what you please/' meaning, of course,
that you cannot then approve a wrong
course of action or of life.
Nowhere, certainly, are religion and
ethics so wonderfully fused into one in-
dissoluble whole as in the experience and
teaching of Christ. This appears not
only in His supreme rule for religion and
for good conduct: "Thou shalt love God
with all thy powers and thy neighbor as
thyself," but still more does it appear
in the inner steps and processes which
underlie and prepare the way for the
decisions and acts of Christ's own life.
Here, unmistakably, all the active forces of
will arose in conjunction with ideas about
the unseen.
It is the modern custom to talk much
about the ethics of Jesus and to see in the
Sermon on the Mount an ideal of human
personality and a program for an ideal
social order. But a careful reader cannot
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 63
fail to feel in Christ's teaching the com-
plete fusion of His ideal for the individual
and for society with His consciousness of
the world of unseen realities. The new
person and the new society are possible
in His thought, only through unbroken
correspondence with the world of higher
forces and of perfect conditions. The
only way to be perfect is to be on the way
toward likeness to the heavenly Father,
the only moral dynamic that will work
is a love, like that of God's love, which
expels all selfishness and all tendency to
stop at partial and inadequate goods.
If any kingdom of heavenly conditions
is ever to be expected on earth, if ever
we may hope for a day to dawn when the
divine will is to be exhibited among men
and they are to live the love-way of
goodness, it is because God is our Father
and we have the possibilities of His nature.
The ethical ideals of the Kingdom are
inherently attached to the prayer ex-
perience of Jesus. The kind of human
world which His faith builds for men is
64 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. II
forever linked to the kind of God to whom
He prays. Cut the link and both worlds
fall away. We cannot shuffle the cold,
hard, loveless atoms of our social world
into lovely forms of cooperative relation-
ship. The atoms must be changed. In
some way we must learn how to lift men
into the faith which Christ had, that God
is the Father who is seeking to draw us
all into correspondence with His unseen
world of Life and Love. "After this
manner pray ye. Our heavenly Father
of the holy name, thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done on earth as it is in
heaven/' The two faiths make one faith
the faith in a Father-God who cares,
and the faith in the realization of an ideal
society based on cooperative love.
"And as He was praying, the fashion
of His countenance was altered and His
raiment became white and dazzling."
This is a simple, synoptic account of an
experience attaching to a supreme crisis
of personal decision in the life of Jesus.
His so-called ethics, as I have been in-
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 65
sisting, is indivisibly bound up ^ith His
attitude toward the unseen, with His ex-
perience of a realm where what ought to
be, really is. So, too, it is because He has
found His inward relation with God that
He makes His great decision to go forward
toward Jerusalem, to meet the onset of
opposition, to see His work frustrated by
the rulers of the nation, to suffer and to
die at the hands of His enemies. The
Transfiguration has been treated as a
myth and again as a misplaced resurrec-
tion story. But it is certainly best to
treat it as a genuine psychological narra-
tive which fits reality and life at every
point. As the clouds darken and the
danger threatens and the successful issue
of His mission seems impossible, Jesus
falls back upon God, brings His spirit
into absolute parallelism with the heavenly
will and accepts whatever may be in-
volved in the pursuit of the course to
which He is committed. When He pushes
back into the inner experience of relation
with His Father and the circuit of con-
66 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. II
nection closes and living faith floods
through Him and fixes His decision un-
alterably to go forward. His face and
form are transfigured and illuminated
through the experience of union. This
prayer of illumination reported in the
gospels, is not an isolated instance, a
solitary experience. The altered face, the
changed body, the glorified figure, the
radiation of light, have marked many a
subordinate saint, and may well have
characterized the Master as He found
the true attitude of soul toward the unseen
and formed His momentous - decision to
be faithful unto death in His manifesta-
tion of love.
In Gethsemane, as the awful moment
came nearer, once more we catch a glimpse
of His attitude to the unseen. In place
of illuminated form and shining garments,
we hear now of a face covered with the
sweat and blood of agony. Just in front
are the shouting rabble, the cross and the
nails, the defeat .of lifelong hopes and
the defection of the inner fellowship, but
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 67
the triumphant spirit within Him unites
with the infinite will that is steering the
world and piloting all lives, and calmly
acquiesces with it. But to this suffering
soul, battling in the dark night of agony,
the infinite will is no abstract Power, no
blind fate, to be dumbly yielded to. The
great word which breaks out from these
quivering lips is the dear word for "Father "
that the little child's lips have learned to
say : "Abba." The will above is His will
now and He goes forward to the pain and
death in the strength of communion and
fellowship with His Abba-Father. There
may have been a single moment of desola-
tion in the agony of the next day when the
cry escaped, "My God, why hast thou
forsaken me?" but immediately the inner
spirit recovers its connection and its con-
fidence and the crucifixion ends, as it
should, with the words of triumphant
faith, "Father, into thy hands I intrust
my spirit."
The most important fact of this Life,
which has ever since poured Alpine streams
68 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. II
of power into the life of the world, is its
attitude toward the unseen. We miss the
heart of things when we reduce the gospel
to ethics or when we transform it into dry
theology. Through all the story and be-
hind all the teaching is the mighty inner"
fact of an intimate personal experience of
God as Father. To live is to be about the
"Father's business." In great moments
of intercourse there comes to Him a flood-
ing consciousness of sonship, joyous both
to Father and Son: "In Him I am well
pleased/' and in times of strain and
tragedy the onward course is possible
because the inner bond holds fast and the
Abba-experience abides.
It is not strange that a synoptic writer
reports the saying: "No man knoweth
the Father but the Son." The passage as
it stands reported in Matthew may be
colored by later theology, but there is a
nucleus of absolute truth hidden in the
saying. There is no other way to know
God but this way of inner love-experience.
Only a son can know a Father. Only one
CH. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 69
who has trodden the wine-press in anguish
and pain, and through it all has felt the
enfolding love of an Abba-father really
knows. Mysticism has its pitfalls and its
limitations, but this much is sound and
true, that the way to know God is to have
inner heart's experience of Him, like the
experience of the Son.
CHAPTER III
SOME PROPHETS OF THE INNER WAY
I
THE PSALMIST'S WAY
EMERSON'S friend, Margaret Fuller,
coined the phrase, "standing the uni-
verse." "I can stand the universe, 75 was
her brave statement. But long before
Concord was discovered or "the tran-
scendental school" was dreamed of a school
of Hebrew saints had learned how to
stand the universe,
Canaan, with all its milk and honey,
was never a land arranged by preestab-
lished harmony as a paradise for the
idealist. It enjoyed no special millennium
privileges. Whatever rainbow dreams
may have filled the mind of optimistic
prophets were always quickly put to
flight by the iron facts of the rigid world
70
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 71
which ringed them round. The Philis-
tines were pitiless neighbors. Like
Gawain, they were spiritually too blind
even to have desires to see. Coats of
mail, gigantic spear heads, iron chariots,
and Goliath champions were their argu-
ments. How could a nation like Israel
be free to work out its spiritual career
with these crude materialistic Philistines
always hanging on its borders and always
threatening its national existence ? When
the Philistines were temporarily quiet
there were Moabites, or Edomites, or
Syrians ready to take a turn at hamper-
ing the ideals of Israel. And worse still
was ahead. From the time of the battle
of Karkar (854 B.C.) on, the armies of
Assyria had to be reckoned with. Here
was another pitiless foe ; efficient, militant,
inventive, with a culture and religion
suited to its genius, but as ruthless as a
wolf toward everything in its path. It
smashed whatever it struck and in the
course of events Jerusalem was ground
in its irresistible mill.
72 THE INNER LIFE [Cta. Ill
- When a " return 5 ' was granted under the
Persians, and the national and religious
life was restored in Jerusalem, new diffi-
culties swarmed. During the long period
of "restoration* 5 the half-breed peoples
in Palestine with their low ideals threat-
ened to defeat the hopes of the returned
exiles and made their feeble beginnings as
difficult as possible. Then, again, the
new nation was hardly firm in its re-
found life when it had to meet the forces
of Hellenism which rose out of the ex-
pansion policies of Alexander. A culture
incompatible with the ideals and passions
of the Hebrews broke in and surrounded
them. It was a different enemy to any
they had yet met but no less irreconcilable.
Under the Hellenized kings of Antioch
all the hopes and ideals of this long-
suffering race were put in jeopardy, and
the very existence of the chosen nation
was in desperate peril in the period of
the JMaccabean struggle.
But through all these centuries of war-
fare with alien peoples, and during all
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 73
these hard periods of strain and anguish,
there existed a school of saints who were
learning how to stand the universe and
who were teaching the world a way of
victory even in the midst of outward
defeat. "Their "way" was the fortifica-
tion of the soul, the construction of the
interior life; and the literature which
they produced has proved to be one of
the most precious treasures of the race.
The gold dust words of these saints are
scattered through most of the early books
of Israel, for in all periods the poets of
this race were mainly busy with this
central problem of life, the problem of
standing the universe. But it is in the
collection which we call the Psalms that
we find the supreme literature of this
inner way of fortification and victory.
"Thou restorest my soul," is the joyous
testimony of one of these saints, and this
testimony of the best loved member of
this school of saints is the key to the
Psalmist's way of triumph in general.
In the confusion of events and the irra-
74 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. Ill
tionality of things die Ohnmacht der
Natur he felt his way back, like a
little child in the dark feeling for his
mother, until he found God as the rock
on which his feet could stand. The
processes of reconstruction are never
traced out. The logic of this way back
to the fortification of the soul through
the discovery of God is not given in detail.
The moments when we shift the levels of
life are never quite describable. But
somehow when the way outside goes on
into the valley of the shadow of death,
and the table is set in the face of enemies,
the soul falls back upon God and is re-
stored.
"I could not understand," another
Psalmist declares. Everything was baf-
fling. The wicked seemed to prosper and
the righteous to suffer. The world ap-
peared out of joint and the whole web of
life hopelessly tangled; "but," he adds
with no further explanation, "I came into
the sanctuary of God and then I saw."
It is like the final solution in the great
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 75
inner drama of Job. God answers and
Job's problem is solved: "I had heard
of thee by the hearing of the ear, but
now mine eye seeth thee." In the great
phrase of the book, "God turned the cap-
tivity of Job."
These men who gave us our Psalms
had learned how to bear adversity and
affliction without being overwhelmed or
defeated, "All thy waves and thy billows
have gone over me," one of them cries.
He has lost his land and has only the
memory of Jordan and Hermon and Mizar.
His adversaries are a constant "sword in
his bones." They jeer at him and ask,
"Where now is thy God?" but his trust
holds steadily on: "The Lord will com-
mand His loving-kindness in the daytime,
and in the night His song shall be with
me!" Even when the water-spouts of
trouble break over him, when "the waters
roar and are troubled," when the "na-
tions rage and kingdoms are moved,"
when "desolations are abroad in the
earth," God abides for him "a very
76 THE INNER LIFE [On. Ill
present help in time of trouble," "a
refuge and strength" for his soul. Dis-
may and trembling may be abroad ;
pain may come as on a woman in travail,
yet this deep soul can calmly say, "God
is our God forever; He will be our guide
even unto death."
This element of trust and confidence
has never anywhere had grander utter-
ance. The Psalmist has got beyond re-
liance on "horses and chariots," beyond
trust in "riches," "princes," in "the bow
or the sword," or in "man, whose breath
is in his nostrils." He rests his case on
God alone, and builds on naked faith in
His goodness and care : " Thou hast de-
livered my soul from death, mine eyes
from tears, and my feet from falling."
Puzzled he often is with the prosperity
of the wicked, who "flourish like green
bay-trees " ; perplexed he sometimes is
with God's delay in coming to the help
of the poor and needy and oppressed;
but his faith holds on and he does not
"slide." It gives us almost a sense of
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 77
awe as we see a valiant soul, hard pressed,
hemmed around, deep in affliction and
sorrow, "standing the world" and saying
in clear voice : "Oh, give thanks unto the
Lord, for He is good ; His loving-kindness
endureth forever ! "
We understand when we read such words
why this collection of Psalms has held its
place in the religious life of the world-
It contains the living, throbbing expe-
rience of great souls, who cared absolutely
for one thing to find God and to enjoy
Him, and who, having found their one
precious jewel, could do without all else,
and by this inner experience could stand
the world,
II
THE NEW AND LIVING WAY
The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews
declares that Christ has introduced into
the world "a new and living way" to God*
The concrete problems confronting this
writer to a Jewish circle of the first cen-
tury were very different from our own
problems to-day, but he so succeeded in
78 THE INNER LIFE [C H . Ill
seizing an eternal aspect of the issue
that his word about the new and living
way is as vital now as it was then.
His "new and living way," as the tenth
chapter shows, is the way of personal
consecration as a substitute for the old
way of sacrifice. The manner of his ex-
position may seem to us now a little
artificial, but there can be no question
of the religious significance of the con-
clusion. Following his usual line of in-
terpretation, he begins by treating the
great national system of sacrifices as a
"shadow," i.e. a parable, or a figure, or a
symbol, of a true and higher reality.
Then he goes on boldly to declare that
"sacrifices" have become empty perform-
ances it is impossible, he says, that the
blood of bulls and goats works any real
change in the nature or the attitude of
the soul. Next he buttresses his radical
conclusion with a citation of Scripture
to the effect that God has never taken
pleasure in burnt offerings and ritual
sacrifices, and on this Scripture text from
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 79
the Psalms he rises to his new insight,
that Christ has come not to do the sacri-
ficial work of a priest, not to satisfy
God by a sacrifice, but to reveal the
personal power of a life of consecration :
"Then said I, lo, I come to do thy will,
God." This way of dedication to the
divine will, this complete consecration of
self out of love for the will of God, the
writer calls "the new and living way."
Two very important conclusions are
inherently bound up with this transition
from a religion of sacrifices to a religion of
dedication. First, it carries a wholly
new conception of God and secondly, it
involves a complete reinterpretation of
human ministry. If God does not take
any pleasure in sacrifice, then the whole
idea that He is a Being to be appeased
by gifts, by offerings, by incense, by
blood, or by self-inflicted suffering of
any Sort, falls to the ground. These
things are not shadows or symbols; they
are blunders and mistakes. The God for
whom they are intended needs and asks
go THE INNER LIFE [Ce. HI
for no such form of approach. That has
always been the contention of the supreme
prophets of the race, and Christ in His
unveiling of God has made the fact sun-
clear that God is not rightly conceived
when He is thought of as needing any
kind of sacrifice or any inducement to
make Him forgiving or loving. Love is
His nature. The new and living way
leads first of all to this new revelation of
God.
But no less certainly it leads to a new
type of minister. The priest was con-
ceived as an expert in ways of satisfying
God and of appeasing Him. He was
supposed to know what God required
and how to perform the things required.
He was indispensable, because only an
expert, duly ordained, could do the work
that was necessary for bringing God and
man into relation with each other. Under
"the new and living way," however, the
priest has lost his occupation and the
minister becomes an expert in ways of
expanding human life and in bringing
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 8 1
men to a dedication of themselves to the
will of God and to the spiritual tasks of
the world. In accordance with this new
insight, everything that concerns religion
must in some way attach to life. It
must promote, or advance life, increase
life, add to its height and depth, or, in
some manner, make life richer and more
joyous. The minister of the new and
living way may be called, as he no doubt
will be called, to make many sacrifices
of things that are precious, and surrenders
of things as dear as life itself, but there
will be no inherent magic in these sacri-
fices. They will not be efficacious as a
satisfaction to God. They will be only
means toward some larger end of life,
as was the case with Christ's surrenders
and sacrifices. The ascetic temper will
be left forever behind. Whatever is cut
off, or plucked out, will be removed only
for the sake of increasing the quality
of life and the dynamic of it. The final
test is always to be sought in the expansion
of capacity, in the increase of talents, in
G
82 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. Ill
the formation of personality, in dedica-
tion to the task of widening the area of
life.
The true minister will, like the great
apostle, present his body, his entire being,
in living dedication. He will be satisfied
with nothing short of a holy and acceptable
service acceptable, because Christlike
he will endeavor to make all his service
"reasonable service "; that is, intelligent
service, and he will strive earnestly not
to become set into the mold of the world
or into any deadening groove of habit,
but to be transformed by a steady in-
crease of life and a renewing of spiritual
insight, so that he can prove what is the
perfect will of God and so that he can
minister to the growing life of the world.
Ill
AN APOSTLE OF THE INNER WAY
It is always a foolish blunder to take
half when it is just as easy to have a
whole, but the tendency to dichotomize
all realities into halves and to assume
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 83
that we are shut up to an either-or selec-
tion, is an ancient tendency and one that
very often keeps us from winning the full
richness of the life that is possible for us.
Human history is strewn with dualistic
formulations which have sorted men into
either-or groups. Now it is "spirit" and
"flesh" that are sharply antagonistic
and men are called upon to settle which
of these two halves of man's life is to have
their loyalty. Again, it is "this world"
and "the next world" the here and the
yonder that bid for our heart's suffrage.
"The Church" and "the world" ; "faith"
and "reason"; "the sacred" -and "the
secular" are other twin pairs that call for
a sharp decision of allegiance. So, too, it
has been customary to cut apart the
outer life and the inner life and, with a
stern either-or, to put them into rivalry
with one another. One camp insists that
religion is to be sought in deeds and
effects; the other camp asserts that
religion is an inward condition of life
to be is more important than to do. But
84 THE INNER LIFE [Oa. Ill
this method of cutting is like that which
the unnatural mother asked Solomon to
perform upon the living child. It sunders
what was alive and throbbing into two
dead fragments, neither of which is a real
half of the united living whole. In place
of all the either-or formulations that force
a choice between the halves of great
spiritual realities I should put the living
and undivided whole. Instead of select-
ing either-or, I prefer to take both. There
is no line that splits the outer life and
the inner life into two compartments.
Nobody can do without being and nobody
can be without doing. Personality is the
most complete unity in the universe and
it binds forever into an indissoluble and
integral whole the outer and the inner,
the spirit and the deed.
But at the same time it is interesting
to see what a supremely great and many-
sided soul like St. Paul has to say of the
inwardness and interior depth of religion.
That he was a man of action is plain
enough to be seen and nobody can easily
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 85
miss his clarion call to arm cap-a-pie for
the positive, moral battles of life. He
was ethical in the noblest sense of the
word, but there was an inner core of
religious experience in him which is as
unique and wonderful as is his athletic
ethical purpose or his imperial spirit of
moral conquest.
There was for him no kind of " doing "
which could ever be a substitute for the
spiritual health of the soul. Nobody
has ever lived who has been more deeply
concerned than was St. Paul over the
primary problem of life : How can my
soul be saved? To be " saved" for him,
however, does not mean to be rescued
from dire torment or from the conse-
quences which follow sin and dog the
sinner. No transaction in another world
can accomplish salvation for him; no
mere change from debit to credit side
in the heavenly ledgers can make him a
saved man. To be saved for St. Paul
is to become a new kind of person, with
a new inner nature, a new dimension of
86 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. Ill
life, a new joy and triumph of soul. There
is a certain inner feeling here which sys-
tematic theology can no more convey
than a botanical description of a flower
can convey what the poet feels in the
presence of the flower itself. There is no
lack of books and articles which spread
before us St. Paul's doctrines and which
tell us his theory his gnosis of the
plan of salvation. The trouble with all
these external accounts is that they clank
like hollow armor. They are like sound-
ing brass and clanging cymbals. We
miss the real thing that matters the
inner throbbing heart of the living ex-
perience.
What he is always trying to tell us is
that a new "nature" has been formed
within him, a new spirit has come to birth
in his inmost self. Once he was wealc;
now he is strong. Once he was per-
manently defeated, now he is "led in a
continual triumph." Once he was at the
mercy of the forces of blind instinct and
habit which dragged him whither he would
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 87
not, now he feels free from the dominion
of sin and its inherent peril to the soul.
Once, with all his pride of pharisaism, he
was an alien to the commonwealth of
God, now he is a fellow citizen with all
the inward sense of loyalty that makes
citizenship real.
He traces the immense transformation
to his personal discovery of a mighty
forgiving love, where he had least ex-
pected to find it, in the heart of God
"We are more than conquerors through
Him that loved us;" "The life I now
live, I live by faith in the Son of God
who loved me and gave Himself for me/'
Faith, wherever St. Paul uses it to ex-
press the central human fact of the re-
ligious life, is a word of tremendous
inward depth. It is bathed and satu-
rated with personal experience, and it
proves to be a constructive life-principle
of the first importance. Faith works;
it is something by which one lives : "The
life I now live, I live by faith."
'But the full measure the length and
88 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. Ill
breadth^ depth and height of his new
inner world does not come full into view
until one sees how through faith and love
this man has come into conscious relation
with the Spirit of God inwardly revealed
to him, and operative as a resident pres-
\ence in his own spirit. No forensic ac-
count of salvation can reach this central
feature of real salvation, which now ap-
pears as new inward life and 'power.
St. Paul takes religion out of the sphere
of logic into the primary region of life.
There are ways of living upon the Life of
God as direct and verifiable as is the
correspondence between the plant and
its natural environment. To live, in the
full spiritual meaning of this word as
St. Paul uses it, is to be immersed in the
living currents of the circulating Life of
God, and to be fed from within by those
sources of creative Life which feed the
evolving world: "Beholding as in a
mirror the glory of the Lord, we are
transformed into the same image by the
Spirit of the Lord;" "He hath sent
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 89
forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts,
crying Abba;" "The Spirit bears witness
with our spirit that we are sons of God."
With the progress of his experience and
the maturing of his thought upon it,
there came to St. Paul an extraordinary
insight. He came to identify Christ with
the Spirit: "The Lord is the Spirit."
He no longer thought of Him as merely
the historical person of Galilee, but rather
as the eternal revelation of God, first in
a definite form as Jesus the Christ, and
then, after the resurrection, as Christ the
invisible Spirit, working within men, re-
creating and renewing their spiritual lives.
The influence of Christ for salvation was,
thus, with him far more than a moral
influence. It was of the nature of a real
energism a spiritual power cooperating
with the human will and remaking men
by the formation of a new Christ-natured
self within him. The process has no
known or conceivable limits. Its goal
is the formation of a man "after Christ" :
"Till Christ be formed in you." "That
90 THE INNER LIFE [Ce. Ill
you may grow up into Him in all things
who is the Head; 5 ' "Till we all come
to the measure of the stature of the ful-
ness of Christ." The " fruit" of the
Spirit, matured in the inward realm of
man's central being and expressed in
common acts of daily life, is love, joy,
peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, meekness, self-control a na-
ture in all things like that which was re-
vealed in glory and fulness in the face of
Jesus Christ.
IV
THE EPHESIAN GOSPEL
In his fresh, impressive book, The
Ephesian Gospel y Dr. Percy Gardner says
that in the early period of Christianity
no city, save only Jerusalem, was more
influential for the development of Chris-
tian thought than was the city of Ephesus.
It was here in Ephesus, scholars are con-
vinced, some time about the end of the
first century, that the life and message of
Jesus received its most sublime and won-
derful interpretation, and it was through
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 91
this Ephesian interpretation that the
gathered mysticism of Greece and the
other ancient religions of the world was
indissolubly fused with the great ethical
teachings of the Galilean.
It will never be known, with absolute
certainty, who was the profound genius
that made this Ephesian interpretation,
but it will always continue to be called
the gospel "according to John." There
will never be any doubt, in the minds of
those who read appreciatively, that, either
inwardly or outwardly, the writer of it
had "lain on Christ's bosom"; that he
had "received of His fulness," and that
he had "seen with his eyes, and heard
with his ears and handled with his hands
the Word of Life/' He was, we can
almost certainly say, one of St. Paul's
men. He has fully grasped the central
ideas of the apostle who first planted the
truth in Ephesus, and he carries out in
.powerful fashion the Pauline discovery
that Christ has become an invisible, eternal
presence in the world. At the same time
92 THE INNER LIFE [On. Ill
he possesses, either at first or second hand,
a large amount of narrative material for
the expansion of the simple gospel story
as it had come from the three synoptic
writers. But from first to last everything
in this gospel is told for a definite pur-
pose and every incident is loaded with a
spiritual, interpretative content and mean-
ing. He does not undervalue 1 history or
the details of the Life lived in Judea and
Galilee, but he is concerned at every point
to raise men's thoughts to the eternal
meaning of Christ's coming, to cultivate
inward fellowship with Him, and to reveal
the last great beatitude, that those who
have not seen with outward eyes, but
nevertheless have believed, are the truly
blessed ones.
The earliest of our gospel documents
the document now called Q centers
upon the "message," and gives us a col-
lection of simple but bottomlessly pro-
found sayings of Jesus. Another docu-
ment the gospel of Mark hardly less
primitive and no less wonderful, focuses
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 93
upon the person of Jesus and His doings.
Here we have in very narrow compass the
earliest story of this Life, inexhaustible in
its depth of love and grace, which has
ever since woven itself into the very tissue
of human life and thought. But now this
final document, which we have been call-
ing "the Ephesian Gospel/* makes a
unique contribution and carries us up to
a new level of life. It announces that
Jesus who gave the message, the Jesus
who lived this extraordinary personal life
and did the deeds of love and sacrifice,
has become an ever-living, environing,
permeative Spirit, continuing His revela-
tion, reliving His life, extending His sway
in men of faith. He is no longer of one
date and one locality, but is present to'
open, responsive human hearts everywhere
as the atmosphere is present to breathing
lungs, or the sea to swimming fish, or the
sunlight to growing plants. We can no
more lose this Christ of experience than
we can lose the sky.
Christianity is in this interpretation
94 THE INNER LIFE [On. Ill
vastly more than an historical religion,
bound up forever with the incidents of
its temporal origin. It is as much a
present fact and a present power as elec-
tricity is. It is rooted in an inexhaustible
source of Life. It is as dynamic as the
central springs of the universe, and it is
perpetually supplied from within by in*
visible fountains of living energy. But
this triumphant and eternal principle of
the spiritual life is, "according to John,"
no vague, abstract principle of logic, but
instead a warm, tender, intimate, con-
crete personification of Life, Light, and
Love who has definitely incarnated the
Truth and revealed the nature of God and
the possible glory of man.
The great Ephesian makes no division
between history and experience. The
Christ of his faith and of his account is
alike the Christ of history and of ex-
perience. He looks backward, and he
looks inward, and the Christ of his story
is the seamless and invisible product of
this double process. This is wholly in
CH. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 95
the manner of the great apostle who de-
clared "if we have known Christ after the
flesh we know Him so now no more,"
and yet neither the Ephesian disciple nor
the apostolic master discounted the im-
portance of the facts of the Christ after
the flesh. The transcendent truth for
them both is the truth that .the Church
still has its Christ, who is leading it into
all the truth and progressively revealing
Himself with the expanding ages.
Every Christian mystic for nineteen
hundred years has felt the influence of
this great Ephesian prophet, and his
message has become a part of the neces-
sary air we breathe. His gospel and his
brief epistle, loaded with its message of
love, are, as Deissmann has well said,
the greatest monument of the appre-
ciation of the mystical teaching of St.
Paul that has ever been reared in the
world. The man who performed this
immense literary task for us of the after
ages now
"Lies as he lay once, breast to breast with God,'*
96 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. Ill
but his word is still quick and powerful
and he has helped us more than any other
writer has done to interpret our own
experience, and more than any other
prophet this Ephesian has inspired our
faith in the real presence and has given
us the assurance, inwardly verified, that
we are not comfortless and alone, in a
world of pain and loss and death, but are
bound as living twigs in one sap-giving
Vine of Life, participants of the vitalizing,
refreshing, joy-bringing bread and water
of Life, and with open access to the infinite
healing and comfort and fortification of
the Eternal Christ.
CHAPTER IV
THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE
I
WAITING ON GOD
As worship, taken in its highest sense
and widest scope, is man's loftiest under-
taking, we cannot too often return to
the perennial questions : What is wor-
ship ? Why do we worship ? How do
we best perform this supreme human
function? Worship is too great an ex-
perience to be defined in any sharp or
rigid or exclusive fashion. The history
of religion through the ages reveals the
fact that there have been multitudinous
ways of worshiping God, all of them
yielding real returns of life and joy and
power to large groups of men. At its
best and truest, however, worship seems
to me to be direct, vital, joyous, personal
E 97
98 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. IV
experience and practice of the presence of
God.
The very fact that such a mighty ex-
perience as this is possible means that
there is some inner meeting place between
the soul and God; in other words, that
the divine and human, God and man,
are not wholly sundered. In an earlier
time God was conceived as remote and
transcendent. He dwelt in the citadel of
the sky, was worshiped with ascending
incense and communicated His will to
beings beneath through celestial messen-
gers or by mysterious oracles. We have
now more ground than ever before for
conceiving God as transcendent; that is,
as above and beyond any revelation of
Himself, and as more than any finite
experience can apprehend. But at the
same time, our experience and our ever-
growing knowledge of the outer and
inner universe confirm our faith that
God is also immanent, a real presence, a
spiritual reality, immediately to be felt
aiftl known, a vital, life-giving environ-
GEL IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 99
ment of the soul. He is a Being who can
pour His life and energy into human
souls, even as the sun can flood the world
with light and resident forces, or as the
sea can send its refreshing tides into all
the bays and inlets of the coast, or as the
atmosphere can pour its life-giving sup-
plies into the fountains of the blood in
the meeting place of the lungs ; or, better
still, as the mother fuses her spirit into
the spirit of her responsive child, and
lays her mind on him until he believes in
her belief.
It will be impossible for some of us
ever to lose our faith in, our certainty of,
this vital presence which overarches our
inner lives as surely as the sky does our
outer lives. The more we know of the
great unveiling of God in Christ, the
more we see that He is a Being who can
be thus revealed in a personal life that
is parallel in will with Him and perfectly
responsive in heart and mind to the
.spiritual presence. We can use as our
own the inscription on the wall of the
loo THE INNER LIFE [Cn. IV
ancient temple in Egypt. On one of
the walls a priest of the old religion had
written for his divinity: "I am He who
was and is and ever shall be, and my
veil hath no man lifted." On the op-
posite wall, some one who had found his
way into the later, richer faith, wrote
this inscription: "Veil after veil have
we lifted and ever the Face is more won-
derful!"
It must be held, I think, as Emerson
so well puts it, that there is "no bar or
wall in the soul " separating God and man.
We lie open on one side of our nature to
God, who is the Oversoul of our souls,
the Overmind of our minds, the Over-
person of our personal selves. There are
deeps in our consciousness which no
private plumb line of our own can sound ;
there are heights in our moral conscience
which no ladder of our human intelligence
can scale; there are spiritual hungers^"
longings, yearnings, passions, which find
no explanation in terms of our physical
inheritance or of our outside world. We
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 101
touch upon the coasts of a deeper uni-
verse, not yet explored or mapped, but
no less real and certain than this one in
which our mortal senses are at home.
We cannot explain our normal selves or
account for the best things we know
or even for our condemnation of our
poorer, lower self without an appeal
to and acknowledgment of a divine Guest
and Companion who is the real presence
of our central being. How shall we best
come into conscious fellowship with God
and turn this environing presence into a
positive source of inner power, and of
energy for the practical tasks and duties
,of daily life?
It is never easy to tell in plain words
what prepares the soul for intercourse
with God; what it is that produces the
consciousness of divine tides, the joyous
certainty that our central life is being
flooded and bathed by celestial currents.
No person ever quite understands how
his tongue utters its loftiest words, how
his pen writes its noblest phrases, how
102 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. IV
his clearest insights came to him, how his
most heroic deeds got done, or how the
finest strands of his character were woven.
Here is a mystery which we never quite
uncover a background which we never
wholly explore lies along the fringes of
the most illumined part of our lives.
This mystery surrounds all the supreme
acts of religion. They cannot be reduced
to a cold and naked rational analysis.
The intellect possesses no master key
which unlocks all the secrets of the soul.
We can say, however, that purity of
heart is one of the most essential pre-
conditions for this high-tide experience of
worship. That means, of course, much
more than absence of moral impurity,
freedom from soilure and stain of willful
sins. It means, besides, a cleansing away
of prejudice and harsh judgment. It
means sincerity of soul, a believing, trust-
ing, loving spirit. It means intensity of
desire for God, singleness of purpose,
integrity of heart. The flabby nature,
the duplex will, the judging spirit, will
GEL IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 103
hardly succeed in worshiping God in
any great or transforming way.
Silence is, again, a very important
condition for the great inner action which
we call worship. So long as we are con-
tent to speak our own patois, to live in
the din of our narrow, private affairs,
and to tune our minds to stock broker's
tickers, we shall not arrive at the lofty
goal of the soul's quest. We shall hear
the noises of our outer universe and
nothing more. When we learn how to
center down into the stillness and quiet,
to listen with our souls for the whisper-
ings of Life and Truth, to bring all our
inner powers into parallelism with the
set of divine currents, we shall hear tid-
ings from the inner world at the heart
and center of which is God.
But by far the most influential con-
dition for effective worship is group-
silence the waiting, seeking, expectant
attitude permeating and penetrating a
gathered company of persons. We hardly
know in what the group-influence con-
104 THE INNER LIFE [On. IV
sists, or why the presence of others height-
ens the sensitive, responsive quality in
each soul, but there can be no doubt of
the fact. There is some subtle telepathy
that comes into play in the living silence
of a congregation -which makes every
earnest seeker more quick to feel the
presence of God, more acute of inner
ear, more tender of heart to feel the
bubbling of the springs of life than any
one of them would be in isolation. Some-
how we are able to "lend our minds out,"
as Browning puts it, or at least to con-
tribute toward the formation of an at-
mosphere that favors communion and co-
operation with God.
If this is so, if each assists all and all in
turn assist each, our responsibilities in
meetings for worship are very real and
very great and we must try to realize
that there is a form of ministry which
is dynamic even when the lips are sealed.
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 105
II
IN THE SPIRIT
There has surely been no lack of dis-
cussion on the Trinity during the cen-
turies of Christian history! But in all
the welter and turmoil of words there
has been surprisingly little said about the
Spirit. The nature of the Father and
the Son has always been the central
theme, and whatever is said of the Spirit
is vague and brief. The Creeds are very
precise in their, accounts of God the
Father and of Christ the Son, but of the
Spirit, they merely say without explana-
tion or expansion: "I believe in the
Holy Spirit."
The mystics and the heretics have
generally had more to say of the Spirit.
They have almost always claimed for
themselves direct and inward guidance;
they have insisted that God is near at
hand, a presence to be felt, and they have
endeavored to bring in a "dispensation"
of the religion of the Spirit. But they,
106 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. IV
too, have contented themselves with vague
and hazy accounts of the nature and opera-
tion of the Spirit. It has largely remained
a subject of mystery, a kind of "fringe"
with no definite idea corresponding to the
word.
One reason for this haze and vagueness
is due to the fact that the Spirit has
generally been supposed to act suddenly,
miraculously, and "as He lists," so that
no law or principle or method of His
operation can be discovered. He has
been conceived as working upon or
through the individual in such a way that
the individual is merely, an "instrument,"
receiving and transmitting what comes
entirely from "beyond" himself. Con-
sequently to be "in the Spirit" has meant
to be "out of oneself," i.e. to be a channel
for something that has had no origin in,
and no assistance from, our own personal
consciousness. As Philo, the famous
Alexandrian teacher of the first century,
states this view: "Ideas in an invisible
manner are suddenly showered upon me
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 107
and implanted in me by an inspiration
from on high."
There is no doubt that in some cases
in all ages men and women have had
experiences like that of Philo's. But
they are by no means universal ; they
are extremely rare and unusual. God
does sometimes "give to His beloved in
sleep" and He does apparently sometimes
open the windows of the soul by sudden
inrushes of light and power. It is, how-
ever, a grave mistake to limit the sphere
and operation of the divine Spirit to these
sudden, unusual, miraculous incursions.
It is precisely that mistake made by
so many spiritual persons that has kept
Christians in general from realizing the
immense importance of the work of the
Spirit in everyday religious life. The mis-
take is, of course, due to our persistent
tendency to separate the divine from the
human as two independent "realities,"
and to treat the divine as something
"away," "above," and "beyond."
St. Paul, in spite of all his rabbinical
108 THE INNER LIFE [Ca. IV
training and the dualisms of his age, is
still the supreme exponent of the genuine,
as opposed to the false, idea of the Spirit.
Whether the sermon on the Areopagus as
given in Acts is an exact report of an
actual speech, or not, the words, "in
Him we live and move and are," express
very well St. Paul's mature conception
of the all-pervasive immanence of God,
though they by no means indicate the
extraordinary richness and boldness of
his thought. He identifies Christ and
the Spirit " the Lord is the Spirit." 1
The resurrected and glorified Christ, he
holds, relives, reincarnates Himself, in
Christian believers. He becomes the spirit
and life of their lives. He makes through
them a new body for Himself, a new kind
of revelation of Himself. They them-
selves are "letters of Jesus Christ,"
written by the Spirit. He is no longer
limited to one locality of the world or to
one epoch of time. He is "present "
wherever two or three believers meet in
1 II Corinthians III. 17,
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 109
loyalty to Him. He Is revealed wherever
any of His faithful followers are working
in love and devotion to extend the sway
of His Kingdom. The Church, which for
St. Paul means always the fellowship of
believers, living in and through the Spirit,
is "a growing habitation of God."
The "sign" of the Spirit's presence is,
however, no sudden miraculous bestowal
like an unknown tongue or an extraor-
dinary gift of healing. It is just a normal
thing like the manifestation of love. It
is proved by the increase of fellowship,
the growth of group-spirit, the spread of
community-loyalty. When love has come,
the Spirit is there, and when love comes,
those who are in its -spirit suffer long and
are kind; they envy not; they are not
provoked; they do not exalt mistakes;
they bear all things, believe all things,
hope all things, endure all things. Love
constructs, because it is the inherent
evidence of the Spirit, living, working,
operating in the persons who love.
Through them the incarnation of God is
HO THE INNER LIFE [CH. IV
continued in the world, the Spirit of
Christ finds its organ of expression and
life, and the Kingdom of God comes on
earth as it is in heaven. This "body,"
this Church, this community-group of
loyal believers, is "the completion of
Him who through all and in all is being
fulfilled." i
If this Pauline idea of the Spirit is the
true idea and I believe it is then we
are to look for the divine presence, the
divine guidance, the divine inspiration,
not so much in sudden extraordinary
inrushes and miraculous bestowals, as in
the processes which transform our stub-
born nature, which make us loyal and
loving, which bind us into fellowship with
others, which form in us community-
spirit and sympathetic cooperation, and
which make us efficient organs of the
Christ-life and of the growing Kingdom
of God.
1 Ephesians I. 23.
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE III
III
THE POWER OF PRAYER
It seems to me very clear that there is
a native, elemental homing instinct in
our souls which turns us to God^s natu-
rally as the flower turns to the sun. Ap-
parently everybody in intense moments
of human need reaches out for some great
source of life and help beyond himself.
That is one reason why we can pray and
do pray, however conditions alter. It is
further clear that persons who pray in
living faith, in some way unlock reser-
voirs of energy and release great sources
of power within their interior depths*
There is an experimental energy in prayer
as certainly as there is a force of gravita-
tion or of electricity. In a recent in-
vestigation of the value of prayer, nearly
seventy per cent of the persons questioned
declared that they felt the presence of a
higher power while in the act of praying.
As one of these personal testimonies puts
it: prayer makes it possible to carry
THE INNER LIFE [Cn. IV
heavy burdens with serenity; it produces
an atmosphere of spirit which triumphs
over difficulties.
It certainly is true that a door opens
into a larger life and a new dimension
when the soul flings itself out in real
prayer, and incomes of power are ex-
perienced which heighten all capacities
and which enable the recipient to with-
stand temptation, endure^ trial, and con-
quer obstacles. But prayer has always
meant vastly more than that to the saints
of past ages. It was assuredly to them
a homing instinct and it was the occasion
of refreshed and quickened life, but,
more than that, it meant to them a time
of intimate personal intercourse and fel-
lowship with a divine Companion. It
was two-sided, and not a solitary and
one-sided heightening of energy and of
functions. Nor was that all. To the
great host of spiritual and triumphant
souls who are behind us prayer was an
effective and operative power. It accom-
plished results and wrought effects be-
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 113
yond the range of the inner life of the
person who was praying. It was a way
of setting vast spiritual currents into cir-
culation which worked mightily through
the world and upon the lives of men.
It was believed to be an operation of
grace by which the fervent human will
could influence the course of divine ac-
tion in the secret channels of the uni-
verse.
Is this two-sided and objective view of
prayer, as real intercourse and as effective
power, still tenable? Can men who ac-
cept the conclusions of science still pray
in living faith and with real expectation
of results ? I see no ground against an
affirmative answer. Science has furnished
no evidence which compels us to give up
believing in the reality of a personal
conscious self which has a certain area of
power over its own acts and its own
destiny, and which is capable of inter-
course, fellowship, friendship, and love
jffith other personal selves. Science has
discovered no method of describing this
114 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. IV
spiritual reality, which we call a self,
nor can it explain what its ultimate na-
ture is, or how it creatively acts and
reacts in love and fellowship toward other
beings like itself. This lies beyond the
sphere and purview of science.
Science, again, has furnished no evi-
dence whatever against the reality of a
great spiritual universe, at the heart and
center of which is a living, loving Person
who is capable of intercourse and fellow-
ship and friendship and love with finite
spirits like us. That is also a field into
which science has no entree; it is a matter
which none of her conclusions touch. Her
business is to tell how natural phenomena
act and what their unvarying laws are.
She has nothing to say and can have
nothing to say about the reality of a
divine Person in a sphere within or above
or beyond the phenomenal realm, i.e.
the realm where things appear in the
describable terms of space and time and
causality.
Real and convincing intimations have
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 115
broken into our world that there actually
is a spiritual universe and a divine Per-
son at the heart and center of it who is
in living and personal correspondence with
us. This is the most solid substance, the
very warp and woof, of Christ's entire
revelation. The universe is not a mere
play of forces, nor limited to things we
see and touch and measure. Above, be-
yond, within, or rather in a way transcend-
ing all words of space, there is a Father-
God who is Love and Life and Light and
Spirit, and who is as open of access to us
as the lungs to the air. Nothing in our
world of space disproves the truth of
Christ's report. Our hearts tell us that
it might be true, that it ought to be true,
that it is true. And if it is true, prayer,
in all the senses in which I have used it,
may still be real and still be operative.
There is no doubt a region where events
occur under the play of describable forces,
where consequent follows antecedents and
where law and causality appear rigid and
unvarying. In that narrow, limited realm
Il6 THE INNER LIFE [Ca. IV
of space particles we shall perhaps not
expect interruptions or interferences. We
shall rather learn how to adjust to what
is there, and to respect it as the highest
will of the deepest nature and wisdom of
things. But in the realm of personal
relationships, in all that touches the
hidden springs of life, in the stress and
strain of human strivings, in the inter-
connections of man with man, and group
with group, in the vital matters by which
we live or die, in the weaving of personal
and national issues and destinies, we may
well throw ourselves unperplexed on God,
and believe implicitly that what we pray
for affects the heart of God and influences
the course and current of this Deeper Life
that makes the world.
IV
THE MYSTERY OF GOODNESS
We generally use the word " mystery " to
indicate the dark, baffling, and forbidding
aspects of our life-experience. The things
which spoil our peace and mar our har-
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 117
monies and break our unions are for us
characteristically mysteries. Pain, suffer-
ing, and death are the most ancient of
mysteries, which philosophers and poets
have always been striving to solve and
unraveL Evil in all its complicated forms
and sin in all its hideous varieties con-
stitute another group of these dark and
forbidding mysteries, about which the
race has forever speculated. The prob-
lem of evil has been the prolific source
both of mythological stories and of sys-
tems of philosophy.
Every war that has swept the world,
from that of Chedorlaomer to that of
Europe to-day, has driven this mystery
of evil into the foreground of conscious-
ness, wherever the dark trail of ruin and
devastation and myriad woe has lain,
or lies, across the lives and hearts of men.
Now, as always, burning homes, ruined
business, masses of slain, maimed bodies,
the welter of animal instincts, the suffer-
ing of women and little children, and the
hates enflamed between races form the
Il8 THE INNER LIFE [C H . IV
greatest summation of baffling evils that
man has known.
But it is an interesting fact that the
mysteries referred to by the greatest
prophets of the soul are not of this dark
and baffling type. They are mysteries
of light rather than mysteries of darkness.
Christ speaks of "the mystery of the
Kingdom of God." Saint Paul finds the
central mystery to be an incarnational
revelation of a suffering, loving God,
who re-lives His life in us, and the author
of the Epistle to Timothy announces
"the great mystery of godliness." l Love
is put above all mysteries; the gospel of
grace is more "unsearchable" than any
suffering of this present time, and the
real mystery is to be found rather in
resurrection than in death: "Behold I
show you a mystery. We shall not all
sleep, but we shall all be changed and
the dead shall be raised."
1 It is true, no doubt, that the word " mystery" in the
New Testament is generally used with a technical mean-
ing. I sjiall refer later to the true significance of the word,
but for the moment it is not overstraining it to use it as I
have done in the text.
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 119
Science has confirmed this emphasis of
the spiritual prophets. We come back
from the greatest books of the present
time with the same conclusion as this
4
of the New Testament that the prime
mysteries of the world are mysteries of
goodness and not of evil; of light and
not of darkness. We can pretty easily
understand how there should be "evil"
in a world that has evolved under the
two great- biological conditions : (i) Every
being that survives wins out because he
is more physically fit than his neighbors
in the struggle for existence, and (2) there
is a tendency for all inherited traits to
persist in offspring. In order to have
"nature" at all, there must be a heavy
tinge of redness in tooth and claw. The
primitive passions must be strong in
order to insure any beings that can sur-
vive. And if there is to be inheritance
of parental traits, then the tendencies
of bygone ages are bound to persist on,
even into a world of more highly evolved
beings, and there will be inherited "relics* 5
120 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. IV
of fears, of appetites, of impulses, of in-
stincts, and of desires, as there are inherited
"relics" in the physical structure, and
men will continue to do things which
would better suit the animal level. And,
finally, if the world is to be made by evolv-
ing processes, there will of necessity be
an overlapping of "high" and "low."
The world cannot go on without carrying
its past along with the advancing line,
so that in the light of the new and better
that comes, the old and out-passed seems
"evil "and "bad."
We can see plainly enough where the
drive of selfishness came from, where the
passionate fears and angers and hates
that mar our world got into the system.
What is not so clear and plain is how
we came to be possessed of a driving
hunger for goodness^ how we ever got a
bent for self-sacrifice, how we derived
our disposition for love, how we dis-
covered that it is more blessed to give
than to receive. The mystery after all
is the mystery of goodness. The gradual
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 121
growth of a Kingdom of God, in which
men live by love and brotherhood, in
which they give without expecting re-
turns, in which they decrease that others
may increase, and in which their joy is
fulfilled in the spreading of joy that is,
after all, the mystery.
The coming, into this checkerboard
world, of One who practiced love in all
the varying issues of life,
"Who nailed all flesh to the cross
Till self died out in the love of his kind/*
and who Himself believed, and taught
others to believe, that His Life was a
genuine revelation of God and the spirit-
ual realm of reality there is a mystery..
/ That this Life which was in Him is an
actual incursion from a higher, inexhaust-
ible world of Spirit, that we all may par-
take of it, draw upon it, live in it, and
have it live in us, so that in some sense
it becomes true that Christ lives in us
and we are raised from the dead that
is the mystery.
122 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. IV
This word " mystery " or "mysteries"
did not, however, stand in the thought of
the early Christians for something myste-
rious and inscrutable. It stood rather for
some unspeakably precious reality which
could be known only by initiation and
to the initiate. The "mysteries" of
Mithra were forever hidden to those on
the outside; to those who formed the
inner circle the secret of the real presence
of the god was as open and clear as the
sunlight under the sky. So, too, with
the "mysteries" of the gospel. They
could not be conveyed by word of wis-
dom or by proof of logic. Then, and
always, the love of Christ "passes knowl-
edge," "the peace of God" overtops
processes of thought. Love, Grace, Good-
ness, Godliness, Christlikeness breaking
forth in men like us, remains a "mystery"
a thing not "explainable" in terms of
empirical causation and not capable of
being "known" except to those who see
and taste and touch, because they have
been "initiated into this Life." We shall
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 123
no doubt still puzzle over the dark enigmas
of pain and death, of war and its train
of woe, but we shall do well to remember
that there is a greater mystery than
any of these the mystery of the suffer-
ing, yet ever-conquering love of God
which no one knows except he who is
immersed in it.
"AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY**
The word "authority" has shifted its
meaning many times. We do not mean
now by it what churchmen of former
times meant when they used it. Even
as late as the beginning of the twentieth
century a great French scholar, Auguste
Sabatier, wrote an influential book in
which he contrasted "Religions of Au-
thority" with "Religions of the Spirit."
By religions of authority he meant types
of religion which rest on a dogmatic
basis and on the super-ordinary power
of ecclesiastical officials to guarantee the
124 THE INNER LIFE [Ca. IV
truth. However authoritative a religion
of that type may once have been, it is
so no longer, at least with those who have
caught the intellectual spirit of our age,
"Authority" is found now for most of
us where the common people who listened
to Jesus found it in the convincing and
verifying power of the message itself.
We should not now think for a moment
of taking our views on astronomy or
geology or physiology about the cir-
culation of the blood, for instance on
the "authority" of a priest, assuming
that his ordination supplied him with
oracular knowledge on these subjects.
We want to know rather what the facts
in any one of these fields compel us to
conclude, and we go for assistance to
persons who have trained and disciplined
their powers of observation and who can
make us see what they see. Our "au-
thority" in the last resort to-day is the
evidence, of observable facts and legitimate
inference from these facts. A religion of
authority, then, for our generation rests,
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 125
not on the infallible guarantee of any
ordained man, or of any miraculously
equipped church, but on the spiritual
nature of human life itself and on the
verifiable relations of the soul with the
unseen realities of the universe.
I need hardly say it is so plain that
the runner can see it that the so-called
Sermon on the Mount is one of the best
illustrations available of this type of
authoritative religion. Whatever is de-
clared as truth in that discourse is true,
not because a messenger from heaven
brought it, not because a supernatural
authority guaranteed it, but because it
is inherently so, and if any statement
here obviously conflicted with the facts
of life and stood confuted by the testi-
mony of the soul itself, it would in the
end, in the long run as we say, have to
go. The whole message, from the beati-
tude upon the poor-in-spirit to the judg-
ment test of life in action, as revealed in
the figure of the two houses, is a message
which can be verified and tried out as
126 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. IV
searchingly as can the law of gravitation
or the theory of luminiferous ether. All
the results that are here announced are
results which attach to the essential
nature of the soul, and the conditions
of blessedness are as much bound up
with the nature of things as are the con-
ditions of physical health for a man, or
the conditions of literary success for an
author.
Any one who has read William James*
chapter on " Habit " knows how it feels to
be reading something which verifies it-
self and which convicts the judgment of
the reader in almost every sentence. As
one comes toward the end of the chapter
he finds these words: "Every smallest
stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never
so little scar. The drunken Rip Van
Winkle excuses himself for every fresh
dereliction by saying, *I won't count
this time!' Well! he may not count it,
and a kind heaven may not count it;
but it is being counted none the less.
Down among the nerve cells and fibers
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 127
the molecules are counting it, registering
and storing it up to be used against
him when the next temptation comes."
These words have the irresistible drive of
observable facts behind them. We have
come upon something which is so because
it is so. It can no more be juggled with
or dodged than can the fact of the pre-
cession of the equinoxes. The calm au-
thority of that chapter might well be
the envy of every preacher of the gospel
and of every writer of articles on religion.
If either the preacher or the religious
writer expects to speak to the condition
of his age, then he must acquire- this
authoritative way of dealing with the
issues of life, for the other kind of "au-
thority" has had its day.
It is interesting to discover that Ter-
tullian and St. Augustine two men
who, almost beyond all others, helped to
forge this waning type of "authority"
came very near risking the whole case
of religion in their day on the primary
authority of first-hand experience and
128 THE INNER LIFE [On. IV
the testimony of the soul itself. "I call
in," Tertullian wrote, "a new testimony;
yea, one that is better known than all
literature, more discussed than all doc-
trine, more public than all publications,
greater than the whole man I mean
all which is man's. Stand forth, soul,
* . . and give thy witness . . . I want
thy experience. I demand of thee the
things thou bringest with thee into man,
the things thou knowest either from thy-
self or from thy Author. . . . Whenever
the soul comes to itself, as out of a sur-
feit or a sleep or a sickness and attains
something of its natural soundness, it
speaks of God."
Nobody has ever shown more skill and
subtlety in examining the actual processes
of the inner life than has Augustine, nor
has any one more powerfully revealed
the native hunger of the soul for God, or
the cooperative working of divine grace,
in the inner region where all the issues
of life are settled. Take this vivid pas-
sage, picturing the hesitating will, zig-
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 129
zagging between the upward pull and the
tug of the old self just before the last
great act of decision which led to his
conversion.
"Thus was I sick and suffering in mind,
upbraiding myself more bitterly than
ever before, twisting and turning in my
chains in the hope that they would soon
snap, for they had almost worn too thin
to hold me. Yet they did still hold me.
But Thou wast instant with me in the
inner man, with merciful severity, re-
doubling the lashes of fear and shame,
lest I should cease from struggling. . . .
I kept saying within my heart, 'Let
it be now, now 1 ' and with the word I
was on the point of going on to the re-
solve. I had almost done it, but I had
not done it ; and yet I. did not slip back
to where I was at first, but held my foot-
ing at a short remove and drew breath.
And again I tried ; I came a little nearer,
and again a little nearer, and now now
I was in act to grasp and hold it ; but
still I did not reach it, nor grasp it, nor
s
130 THE INNER LIFE [Ca. IV
hold it, ... for the worse that I knew
so well had more power over me than the
better that I knew not, and the absolute
point of time at which I was to change
filled me with greater dread the more
nearly I approached it."
That is straight out of life. The thing
which really matters there is not some
fine-spun dogma or the power of some
mitered priest, but the answer of the soul,
the obedience of the will in the presence
of what is unmistakably divine. "The
whole work of this life," he once said,
"is to heal the eye of the heart by which
we see God." Both these men made great
contributions to the imperial, authorita-
tive church and they were foremost archi-
tects of the immense system of dogma
under which men lived for long centuries,
but the religion by which they themselves
lived was born in their own experience,
and back of all their secondary authority
was this primary authority of the soul's
own testimony.
What our generation needs above every-
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 131
thing, if I read its problems rightly, is a
clearer interpretation of the spiritual capac-
ities and the unseen compulsions of the
ordinary human soul; that is to say, a
more authoritative and so more compell-
ing psychological account of the actual
and potential nature of our own human
self, with its amazing depths and its in-
finite relationships. We have had fifteen
hundred years under the dogma of original
sin and total depravity; now let us have
a period of actually facing our own souls
as they reveal themselves, not to the
theologian, but to the expert in souls.
We shall find them mysterious and bad
enough no doubt, but we shall also find"'
that they are strangely linked up with
that unseen and yet absolutely real Heart
of all things whom we call God. And our
generation also needs a more authoritative
account of Jesus Christ more authorita-
tive because more truly and more his-
torically drawn. We have had centuries
of the Christ of dogma and even to-day
the Church is split and sundered by its
132 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. IV
attempt to maintain dogmatic construc-
tions about His Person. Was He monophy-
site ? Was he diphysite ? Those dead
questions have divided the world in former
ages and still rally oriental sects. Our
problem is different. We want to see
how He lived. We want to discover
what He said. We want to feel the
power of His attractive personality. We
want to find out what His own experience
was and what bearing it has on life to-day.
We need to have Him reinterpreted to
us in terms of life, so that once again He
becomes for us as real and as dynamic
as He was for Paul in Corinth or for
John in Ephesus. The moment anybody
succeeds in doing that, He proves to be as
much alive as ever, and religion becomes
as authoritative as ever. Theology is not
extinct, but it is becoming wholly trans-
formed and the theology of the coming
time will be a knowledge of God builded
not on abstract logic, but on a penetrating
psychology of man's inner nature and a
no less penetrating interpretatio'n of his-
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 133
tory and biography, especially at the
points where the revelation of God has
most evidently shone forth and broken
in upon us.
VI
SEEING HIM WHO IS INVISIBLE
The power "to see the invisible " is as
essential in science, in philosophy, in art,
and in common life as it is in religion.
The world with which science deals is
not made out of " things that do appear.*'
Every step in the advance of science has
been made by the discovery of invisible
things which explain the crude visible
things of our uncritical experience. We
seldom see any of the things the scientists
talk about atoms and molecules and
cells, laws and causes and energies. These
things have been found first, not with
the eyes of sense, but with the vision of
the mind.
Newton found the support that holds
the earth to the sun and the moon to the
earth, but there was no visible cable, no
134 THE INNER LIFE [GEL IV
mighty grooves in which the poles of the
earth's axis spin. There was nothing to
see, and yet his mind discovered an in-
visible link that fastens every particle of
matter in the universe to every other
particle, however remote. One fact after
another has forced the scientist to-day to
draw upon an invisible world of ether for
his explanations of a vast number of the
things that appear. Gravitation, elec-
trical phenomena, light and color vision,
and, perhaps, the very origin of matter,
are due, his mind sees, to the presence of
this extraordinary world within, or be-
hind, the world we see.
One of the greatest advances that has
ever been made in the progress of medicine
was made through the discovery of in-
visible microbes as the cause of contagious
and infectious diseases. The ancients had
also believed the cause of many diseases
to be the presence of invisible agents,
which they called "demons," but they
could hit upon no way of finding the
"demons" or of banishing them. The
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 135
scientific physician "sees" the invisible
microbe and he "sees" what will put this
enemy hors de combat.
The study of philosophy is chiefly the
cultivation of the power to see the in-
visible. Pythagoras is said to have re-
quired a period of a year of silence as an
initiation into the business of philosophy
because there was nothing to talk about
until the beginner had learned how to see
the invisible ! The great realities to which
the philosopher is dedicated are not things
to be found, even with microscopes or
telescopes. Nobody is qualified to enter
the philosophical race at all even for
the hundred-yard dash unless in the
temporal he can see the eternal, and in
the visible the invisible, and in the ma-
terial the spiritual. There can be no
artistic creation until some one comes who
has "the faculty divine" to see
"The gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land/*
Such artistic creations must not be unreal.
136 THE INNER LIFE [Ca. IV
On the contrary, they must be more real
than the scenes we photograph or the
factual events we describe. They must
present to us something that is in all
respects as it ought to be. The artist, the
poet, the musician succeed in making
some object, or some character, or some
series of events or sounds raise us above
our usual restraints of space and time and
imperfection and for a moment give us a
glimpse of something eternal
But we see the invisible in our common
daily life much more than we realize.
The simple cobbler of shoes stitches and
pegs at his little shoe, and makes it as
honestly as he can, for some child whom he
has never seen and perhaps never will see.
The merchant expands his business be-
cause he forecasts the expanding need for
his articles in China, Africa, or South
America. The statesman at every move
is dealing as much with the country of
his inner vision as with the country his
eyes see. So, too, is the parent as he
plans for the discipline and education of
CH. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 137
his child. No one can be a good person
however simple, or however great
without leaving the things that are behind,
i.e. the things that are actual, and going
on to realize what is not yet apprehended,
what exists only in forecast and vision.
Religion, then, is not alone in demand-
ing the supreme faculty of seeing the
invisible. We live on all life-levels by
faith, by assent to realities which are not
there for our eyes. Religion only demands
of us that we see the whole Reality which
this visible fragment of nature implies,
that we see the larger spirit which our
own human spirits call for, that we see
the eternal significance revealed in the
life of Christ and in the conquests of His
spirit through the ages.
CHAPTER V
A FUNDAMENTAL SPIRITUAL
OUTLOOK
THE most important constructive work
just now laid upon us is the serious task
of helping to restore faith in the actual
reality of God and in the fundamental
spiritual nature of our world. There is
no substitute for the transforming power
and inward depth which an irresistible
first-hand conviction of God gives a man.
Carlyle, in his usual vivid fashion, says
that one man with faith in God is
"stronger, not than ten men that have
it not, or than ten thousand, but than all
men that have it not!" A man can face
anything when he knows absolutely that
at bottom the universe is not force nor
mechanism but intelligent and loving pur-
pose, and that through the seeming con-
138
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 139
fusion and welter there is a loving, throb-
bing, personal Heart answering back to us.
The cultivation of this experience is the
greatest prophetic mission laid upon the
spiritual leaders of any age. Isaiah is at
his fullest stature when in a fearful crisis
he calls his nation from a military alli-
ance with Egypt, whose people, he says,
are "men and not God and whose horses
are flesh and not spirit/ 9 to a reliance on
God and on eternal resources : "In return-
ing and rest shall ye be saved ; in quietness
and confidence shall be your strength."
George Fox is most clearly a prophet
when he reports his own experience of
God : " I saw that there was an ocean of
darkness and death, but that an infinite
ocean of light and love flowed over the
ocean of darkness. In that I saw the in-
finite love of God."
If we are to assist in the creation of a
higher civilization than that against which
the hand on the wall is writing "mene,"
we must speak of God in the present
tense, we must live by truths and convic-
140 THE INNER LIFE [Gs. V
tions that are grounded in our own ex-
perience, and we must endeavor to find a
spiritual basis underlying all the processes
of the world. Men have been living for a
generation or at least trying to live
on a naturalistic interpretation of the uni-
verse which chokes and stifles the higher
spiritual life of man. We must help those
who have been caught in this drift of
materialism to find their way back to the
spiritual meaning of the world.
We get a vivid impression of the stern
and iron character of this materialistic
universe from the writings of Bertrand
RusselL Here are two extracts :
"Man is the product of causes which had no
prevision of the end they were achieving; his
origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves
and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental
collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no in-
tensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an
individual life beyond the grave; all the labours
of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all
the noonday brightness of human genius, are
destined to extinction in the vast death of the
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 141
solar system, and the whole temple of man's achieve-
ment must inevitably be buried beneath the debris
of a universe in ruins ail these things, if not
quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain,
that no philosophy which rejects them can hope
to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these
truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding
despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be
safely built." l
"Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and
all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and
dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruc-
tion, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way;
for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-
morrow himself to pass through the gate of dark-
ness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow
falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little
day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of
Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands
have built; undismayed by the empire of chance,
to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny
that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the
irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his
knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a
weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own
ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march
of unconscious power." 2
1 Rertrand Russell's Philosophical Essays, pp. 60, 61.
p. 70,
I 4 2 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. V
Much of the present confusion has been
due to a false interpretation of the doc-
trine of evolution. It has been assumed
not indeed by scientists of the first
rank, but by a host of influential inter-
preters that the basis of evolution, the
law which runs the cosmic train, is com-
petitive struggle for existence, that is to
say the natural selection of the fittest to
survive, and the fittest on this count are
of course the physically fittest, the most
efficient. This principle, used first to
explain biological development, has been
taken up and expanded and used to ex-
plain all ethical and social progress. Any
nation that has won out and prevailed
has done so, on this theory, because it
made itself stronger than those nations
with which it competed. This theory has
contributed immensely toward bringing on
the catastrophe in Europe. It is a breeder
of racial rivalries, it is loaded with emo-
tional stress, it cultivates fear, one of the
main causes of war, and it runs on all fours
with materialism.
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 143
But it does not fit the facts of life and
it is as much a mental construction and as
untrue to the complete nature of things
as were the popular pre-evolution theories.
Here, as everywhere else, the truth is 'the
only adequate remedy, and the truth would
set men free. Biologists of the most
eminent rank have all along been insist-
ing that life has not evolved through the
operation of one single factor ; for example,
the law of competing struggle. Every-
where in the process, from lowest to
highest, there has been present the opera-
tion of another force as primary as the
egoistic factor, namely the operation of
mutual aid, cooperation, struggle for the
life"" dTothers, mother-traits and father-
traits, sacrifice of self for the group, a
love-factor implicit at the bottom but
gloriously conscious and consecrated at the
top. Nature has always been forerunning
and crying in the wilderness that the way
of love will work.
It is impossible to account for a con-
tinuously progressive evolution on any
144 THE INNER LIFE [Cu. V
mechanical basis. As soon as life ap-
peared there came into play some degree
of spontaneity, something unpredictable;
something which is not mechanism. The
future in any life-series is never an equa-
tion with the past. What has been, does
not quite determine what will be. Life
carries in itself a creative tendency a
tendency to exhibit surprises, novelties,
variations, mutations, unpredictable leaps.
We can name this tendency, this upward-
changing drive, "vital impulse," but how-
ever we name it, we cannot explain it.
The variation which raises the entire
level of life is as mysterious as a virgin
birth, or a resurrection from the dead.
There is no help in the word "fortuitous,"
or "accidental," there is no answer when
the appeal is made either to heredity or to
physical environment. There is in favor-
able mutations a revelation of some kind
of intelligent push, a power of life work-
ing toward an end. The end or goal of
the process seems to be an operative
factor in the process. Evolution seems to
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 145
be due to a mighty living, conscious,
spiritual driving force, that is pouring
itself forth in ever-heightening ways of
manifestation and that differentiates itself
into myriad varieties of form and activity,
each one with its own peculiar potency of
advance. Consciousness, in Henri Berg-
son's illuminating interpretation of evolu-
tion, is the original creative cosmic force.
It is before matter, and its onward destiny
is not bound up with matter. Wherever
it appears there is vital impulse, upward-
pointing mutations, free action, and po-
tency. But no' life is isolated or cut
apart. Each particular manifestation of
life is one of the rills into which the im-
mense river of consciousness divides, and
this irresistible river with its onward leaps
seems able to beat down every resistance
and clear away the most formidable ob-
stacles perhaps even death itself.
But it is not merely in the evolutionary
process that we need to reinterpret the
spiritual factor; it is urgently called for
in our dealing with the whole of nature.
146 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. V
We must learn how to interpret the
fundamental spiritual implications in-
volved in the nature of beauty, of moral
goodness, of verifiable knowledge, and of
personality itself.
In an impressive way Arthur Balfour
in his Theism and Humanism has pointed
out that it is impossible to find any ade-
quate rational basis for our experience of
beauty, or for our pursuit of moral ends of
goodness, or for our confidence in the
validity of knowledge or truth, unless we
assume the reality of an underlying spiritual
universe as the root and ground both of
nature without us and of mind within us.
"^Esthetic values," Balfour says, "are in
part dependent upon a spiritual concep-
tion of the world in which we live." 1
"Ethics," again he says, "must have
its roots in the divine; and in the divine
it must find its consummation" 2 and,
finally, he says that if rational values are
to remain undimmed and unimpaired,
1 Arthur Balfour^s Theism and Humanism, p. 87.
* Ibid., p. 134-
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 147
God must be treated as real "He is
Himself the condition of scientific knowl-
edge. ?>1 "We must hold that reason
and the works of reason have their source
in God : that from Him they draw their
inspiration, and that if they repudiate
their origin, by this very act they proclaim
their own insufficiency." 2
Personality carries in all its larger as-
pects inevitable implications of a spiritual
universe. In the first place, it is forever
utterly impossible to find a materialistic
or naturalistic origin for personality.
Whenever we deal with "matter" or
with "nature/' consciousness is always
presupposed, and the "matter" we talk
about, or the "nature" we talk about,
is "matter" or "nature" as existing for
consciousness or as conceived by con-
sciousness. It is impossible to get any
world at all without a uniting, connect-
ing principle of consciousness which binds
fact to fact, item to item, event to event,
into a whole which is known to us through
1 Ibid., p. 273. 2 Ibid.> p. 274.
148 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. V
the action of our organizing consciousness.
Since it is through consciousness that a
connected universe of experience is pos-
sible it seems absurd to suppose that
consciousness is a product of matter or
of any natural, mechanical process. Every
effort to find a genesis of knowledge in any
other source than spirit, derived in turn
from self-existing Spirit, has always failed
and from the logical nature of the case
must fail. There is no answer to the
question, how did we begin to be persons ?
which does not refer the genesis to an
eternal spiritual Principle in the universe,
transcending space and time, life and
death, matter and motion, cause and
effect ^ a Principle which itself is the
condition of temporal beginnings and
temporal changes or ends.
Normal human experience is, too, heavily
loaded with further inevitable implications
of an environing spiritual world. The
consciousness of finiteness with which we
are haunted presupposes something infinite
already in consciousness, just as our knowl-
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 149
edge of "spaces" presupposes space, of
which definite spaces are determinate
parts. That we are oppressed with our
own littleness, that we revolt from our
meannesses, that we "look before and
after, and sigh for what is not," that we
are never satisfied with any achievement,
that each attainment inaugurates a new
drive, that we feel "the glory of the im-
perfect," means that in some way we par-
take of an infinite revealed in us by an
inherent necessity of self-consciousness.
We are made for something which does
not yet appear, we are inalienably kin to
the perfect that always draws and attracts
us. We are forever seeking God because,
in some sense, however fragmentary, we
have found Him.
"Here sits he shaping wings to fly;
His heart forbodes a mystery :
He names the name Eternity.
"That type of Perfect in his mind
In Nature can he nowhere find.
He sows himself on every wind.
150 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. V
"He seems to hear a heavenly Friend,
And through thick veils to apprehend
A labor working to an end/* *
The most august thing in us is that
creative center of our being, that autono-
mous citadel of personality, where we form
for ourselves ideals of beauty, of truth,
and of goodness by which we live. This
power to extend life in ideal fashion is
the elemental moral fact of personal life.
These ideals which shape our life are
manifestly things which cannot be "found"
anywhere in our world of sense experience.
They are not on land or sea. We live,
and, when the call for it comes, we joy-
ously die for things which our eyes have
never seen in this world of molecular cur-
rents, for things which are not here in the
world of space, but which are not on that
account any less real. We create, by
some higher drive of spirit, visions of a
world that ought to be and these visions
make us forever dissatisfied with the world
that is, and it is through these visions that
1 Tennyson's Two Prices.
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 151
we reshape and reconstruct the world
which is being made. The elemental
spiritual core in us which we call con-
science can have come from nowhere but
from a deeper spiritual universe with
which we have relations. It cannot be
traced to any physical origin. It cannot
be reduced to any biological function. It
cannot be explained in utilitarian terms.
It is an august and authoritative loyalty
of soul to a Good that transcends all
goods and which will not allow us to
substitute prudence for intrinsic goodness.
This inner imperative overarches our moral
life, and it rationally presupposes a spirit-
ual universe with which we are allied.
There is, too, an immense interior depth
to our human personality. Only the sur-
face of our inner self is lighted up and is
brought into clear focal consciousness.
There are, however, dim depths under-
lying every moment of consciousness and
these subterranean deeps are all the time
shaping or determining the ideas, emotions,
and decisions which surge up into the
152 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. V
illuminated apex of consciousness. This
submerged life is in part, no doubt, the
slow deposit of previous experiences, the
gathered wisdom of the social group in
which we are imbedded, the residual
savings from unuttered hopes and wishes,
aspirations and intentions,
"All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me.**
But at times our interior deep seems to
be more than a deposit of the past. In-
cursions from beyond our own margin
seem to occur. Inrushes from a wider
spiritual world seem to take place. Vital-
izing, energizing, constructive forces come
from somewhere into men, as though
another universe impinged upon our finite
spirits. We cannot- prove by these some-
what rare and unusual mystical openings
that there is an actual spiritual environ-
ment surrounding our souls, but there are
certainly experiences which are best ex-
plained on that hypothesis, and there is
no good reason for drawing any impervious
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 153
boundary around the margins of the
spiritual self within us.
All attempts to reduce man's inner
spiritual life to the play of molecular
forces have fallen through. Correlation
between mind and brain cortex there
certainly is and spirit, as we know it,
expresses itself under, or in relation to,
certain physical conditions. But it is im-
possible to establish a complete parallel-
ism between mind-functions and brain-
functions. The psychical, that is to say
spirit, seems immensely to outrun its
organ and to use brain as a musician uses
an instrument.
The psychological studies of Henri Berg-
son in France and of Dr. William McDou-
gall at Oxford make a very strong argu-
ment for the view that the higher forms
of consciousness cannot be explained in
terms of brain action and that there is
no well-defined physical correlate to the
highest and most central psychical pro-
cesses. I shall follow in the main the
positions of my old teacher. Dr. Me-
154 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. V
Dougall, as worked out in his Body and
Mind.
One of the most important differences
between human and animal consciousness
comes to light in the appearance of "mean-
ing" which is a differentiating character-
istic of personal consciousness. We pass
"a great divide" when we pass from bare
sensory experience, common to all higher
animals, to consciousness of "meaning"
which is a trait common only to persons.
We all know what it is to hear words
which make a clear impression and which
yet arouse no " meaning." We often
gaze at objects and yet, like Macbeth,
have "no speculation in our eyes" we
apprehend no significant "meaning" in the
thing upon which we are looking. We
sometimes catch ourselves in the very
act of passing from mere sense or bare
image to the higher level of "meaning."
While we gaze or while we listen we sud-
denly feel the "meaning" flood in and
transform the whole content of conscious-
ness. All the higher ranges of experience
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 155
depend on this unique feature which is
something over and above the mere sen-
sory stage. The words, "the quality of
mercy is not strained" remain just word-
sounds until in a flash one sees that mercy
is "not something that comes out grudg-
ingly in drops," and then the mind rises
to "a consciousness of meaning." 1 In
this higher experience, "meaning" stands
vividly in the focus of consciousness and,
in a case, for instance, of grasping a long
sentence, or of appreciating a piece of
music, consciousness of "meaning" is an
integral unitary whole. Now there is no
corresponding unitary whole in the brain
which could stand as the physical corre-
late to this consciousness of "meaning."
The simple sensational experiences corre-
spond in some way to parallel brain pro-
cesses but these elemental experiences are
merely cues which evoke higher forms of
^psychical "meaning," that have no physical
or mechanical correlate in the brain.
This is still more strikingly the case in
1 Titchene/s Beginner's Psychology^ p. 19.
156 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. V
the higher forms of memory. The lower
and more mechanical forms of memory
may be treated as a habit-sequence, linked
up with permanent brain paths. But
memory proper depends, as does "mean-
ing," upon a single act of mental appre-
hension. As McDougall well says : " the
whole process and effect, the apprehension
and the retention and the remembering,
are absolutely unique and distinct from
all other apprehensions and retentions
and rememberings." l The higher kind of
memory involves "meaning" and, the
moment "meaning" floods in, vast and
complicated wholes of experience tend to
become a permanent possession, while
only with multitudinous repetitions can
we fix and keep processes that are mean-
ingless and without psychical significance.
But here once more this higher unitary
consciousness of a remembered whole of
experience has no assignable physical cor-
relate in the brain-processes. Certain sen-
sory cues evoke or recall a synthetic whole
1 Dr. William McDougall's Body and Mind, p. 335.
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 157
of consciousness which has no parallel in
the material world.
Still more obviously in the higher aes-
thetic sentiments and volitional processes
is there a spiritual activity which tran-
scends the mechanical and physical order.
^Esthetic joy depends upon a spiritual
power to combine many elements of ex-
perience to form an object of a higher
order than any object given to sense.
It is particularly true of the highest aes-
thetic joy, for example, enjoyment of poetic
creations where the ideal and intellectual
element vastly overtops the sensuous, and
where the words and imagery really carry
the reader on into another world than the
one of sight and sound. Here in a very
high degree we attain a unified whole of
consciousness that has no physical corre-
late among the brain-processes. It is
further apparent that the higher forms of
pleasure somehow exert an effective in-
fluence upon the physical system itself as
though some new and heightening energy
poured back from consciousness into the
158 THE INNER LIFE [On. V
cerebral processes and drained down
through the system. William James has
given a .very successful account of the way
in which pleasure and pain as spiritual en-
ergies reinforce or damp the physical activi-
ties, so that the personal soul seems to take
a unique part from within in determining
the physical process. Here are his words :
"Tremendous as the part is which pleasure and
pain play in our psychic life, we must confess that
absolutely nothing is known of their cerebral con-
ditions. It is hard to imagine them as having
special centres; it is harder still to invent peculiar
forms of process in each and every centre, to which
these feelings may be due. And let one try as one
will to represent the cerebral activity in exclusively
mechanical terms, I, for one, find it quite impossible
to enumerate what seem to be the facts and yet
to make no mention of the psychic side which they
possess. However it be with other drainage cur-
rents and discharges, the drainage currents and
discharges of the brain are not purely physical
facts. They are psycho-physical facts, and the
spiritual quality of them seems a codeterminant
of their mechanical effectiveness. If the mechanical
activities in a cell, as they increase, give pleasure,
they seem to increase all the more rapidly for that
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 159
fact; if they give displeasure, the displeasure seems
to damp the activities. The psychic side of the phe-
nomenon thus seems somewhat like the applause or
hissing at]a spectacle, to be an encouraging or adverse
comment on what the machinery brings forth." *
The unifying effect and the dynamic
quality of a persistent resolution of will
is another case in point which- seems to
show that the psychical reality in us vastly
overtops the mechanism through which it
works. A fixed purpose, a moral ideal, a
determined intention, work far-reaching
results and in some way organize and re-
inforce the entire nervous mechanism.
The whole phenomenon of attention which
has a primary importance for decisions
of will and immense bearing on the prob-
lem of freedom of will is something which
cannot be worked out in brain-terms.
There seems to be some unifying central
psychical core within us that raises us
out of the level of mechanism and makes
us autonomous creative beings. Once
more I quote William James, whom many
1 William James* Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p.
583.
160 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. V
of us of this generation revere both as
teacher and friend :
"It often takes effort to keep the mind upon an
object. We feel that we can make more or less of
effort as we choose. If this feeling be not de-
ceptive, if our effort be a spiritual force, and an
indeterminate one, then of course it contributes
coequally with the cerebral conditions to the result.
Though it introduce no new idea, it will deepen and
prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable
ideas which else would fade more quickly away.
The delay thus gained might not be more than a
second in duration but that second may be
critical; for in the constant rising and falling of
considerations in the mind, where two associated
systems of them are nearly in equilibrium it is
often a matter of but a second more or less of atten-
tion at the outset, whether one system shall gain
force to occupy the field and develop itself, and
exclude the other, or be excluded itself by the
other. When developed, it may make us act;
and that act may seal our doom. The whole
drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount
of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which
rival motor ideas receive. But the whole feeling
of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our
voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it
things are really 'being decided from one moment to
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 161
another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a
chain that was forged innumerable ages ago. This
appearance, which makes life and history tingle
with such a tragic zest, may not be an illusion.
Effort may be an original force and not a mere
effect, and it may be indeterminate in amount." l
There are thus a number of modes of
consciousness, and I have mentioned only
a few of -them, which have no traceable
counterpart in the physical sphere, and
which presuppose a spiritual reality at the
center of our personal life, and this spirit-
ual reality, as we have seen, can trace its
origin only to a self-existing, self-explana-
tory, environing consciousness, sufficiently
personal to be the source of our developing
personality. If this view is correct and
sound, there is no scientific argument
against the continuation of life "after
death. If personality is fundamentally a
spiritual affair and the body is only a
medium and organ here in space and time of
a psychical reality, there are good grounds
and solid hopes of permanent conservation.
1 James* Psychology (Briefer Course), p. 237.
M
162 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. V
But after all the supreme evidence that
the universe is fundamentally spiritual is
found in the revelation of personal life
where it has appeared at its highest and
best in history, that is in Jesus Christ.
In Him we have a master manifestation
of that creative upward tendency of life,
a surprising mutation, which in a unique
way brought into history an unpredictable
inrush of life's higher forces. The central
fact which concerns us here is that He
is the revealing organ of a new and higher
order of life. I We cannot appropriate the
gospel by reducing it to a doctrine, nor
by crystallizing it into an institution, nor
by postponing its prophesies of moral
achievement to some remote world beyond
the stars. We can appropriate it only
when we realize that this Christ is a
revelation here in time and mutability of
the eternal nature and character of that
conscious personal Spirit that environs
all life and that steers the entire system
of things, and that He has come to bring
us all into an abundant life like His own.
CH. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 163
Here in Him the love-principle which was
heralded all through the long, slow process
has come into full sight and into full
operation as the way of life. He shows
us the meaning and possibility of genuine
spiritual life. He makes us sure that His
kind of life is divine, and that in His
face we are seeing the heart and mind
and will of God. Here at least is one
place in our mysterious world where love
breaks through the love that will not
let go, the love that suffers long and is
kind. He makes the eternal Father's
love visible and vocal in a life near enough
to our own to move us with its appeal
and enough beyond us to be forever our
spiritual goal. We have here revealed a
divine-human life which we can even now
in some measure live and in which we can
find our peace and joy, and through which
we can so enter into relation with God that
life becomes a radiant thing, as it was with
Him, and death becomes, as with Him, a
way of going to the Father.
CHAPTER VI
WHAT DOES RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
TELL US ABOUT GOD
" A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark'd, where, on a little promontory, it stood,
isolated ;
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch' d forth filament, filament, filament, out of
itself;
Ever unreeling them ever tirelessly speeding them.
" And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of
. space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking
the spheres, to connect them ;
Till the bridge you will need, be form*d till the
ductile anchor hold ;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere,
O my soul" _ W ALT WHITMAN.
THERE are many forms . of experience
which in the primary, unanalyzed, unre-
flective stage appear to bring us into
164
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 165
immediate contact with self-transcending
reality. We seem to be nearer the heart
of things, more imbedded in life and in
reality itself when consciousness is fused
and unified in an undifferentiated whole of
experience than in the later stage of re-
flection and description. This later stage
necessarily involves reduction because it
involves abstraction. We cannot bring
any object or any experience to exact
description without stripping it of its
life and its mystery and without reducing
it to the abstract qualities which are un-
varying and repeatable.
There can be no doubt that our ex-
periences of beauty, for instance, have a
physical and describable aspect. The sun-
set which thrills us is for descriptive pur-
poses an aggregation of minute water-
drops which set ether waves vibrating at
different velocities, and, as a result, we
receive certain nerve shocks that are
pleasurable. These nerve shocks modify
brain cells and affect arterial and visceral
vibrations, all of which might conceivably
166 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. VI
be accurately described. But no complete
account of these minute cloud particles,
or of these ether vibrations ; no catalogue
of these nerve shocks, cell changes, or
arterial throbs can catch or present to us
what we get in the naive and palpitating
experience of beauty itself. Something
there in the field of perception has sud-
denly fused our consciousness into an
undifferentiated whole in which sensuous
elements, intellectual and ideal elements,
emotional and conative elements are
indissolubly merged into a vital system
which baffles all analysis. Something got
through perception puts all the powers of
the inner self into play and into harmony,
overcomes all dualisms of self and other,
annuls all contradictions that may later
be discovered, lifts the mind to the appre-
hension of objects of a higher order than
that of sense, and liberates and vitalizes
the soul with a consciousness of possession
and joy and freedom*
The flower of the botanist is an aggrega-
tion of ovary, calyx, petals, pistil, and
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 167
pollen a thing which, can be exactly
analyzed and described. The poet's
flower, on the other hand, is never a
flower which could be pressed in a book
or dried in an herbarium. It is a tiny
finite object which suddenly opens a
glimpse into a world which mere sense-
eyes never see. It gives "thoughts that
do lie too deep for tears." It is something
so bound in with the whole of things that
if one understood it altogether, he would
know "what God and man is."
These experiences, even if they do not
prove that there is a world of a higher
order than that of mechanism and causal
systems, at least bring the recipient
moments of relief when he no longer
cares for proof and they enable him to
feel that he has authentic tidings of a
world which is as it ought to be.
Our world of "inner experience" can in
a similar way be dealt with by either one
of these two characteristically different
methods of approach. We can say, if we
wish to do so, as Professor Leuba does in
168 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. VI
his Psychology of Religion, that "inner
experience belongs entirely to psychology/'
"the conscious life belongs entirely to
science," 1 "we must deal with inner
experience according to the best scientific
methods ;" 2 or we can seize by an interior
integral insight the rich concrete meaning
and significance of the unanalyzed whole
of consciousness, as it lives and moves in
us.
Psychology, like all sciences, proceeds
by analysis and limitation. It breaks up
the integral whole of inner experience.
It strips away all mystery, all that is
private and unique, and it selects for
exact description the permanent and re-
peatable aspects, and ends with a con-
sciousness which consists of "mind-states,"
or describable "contents." Everything
that will not reduce to this scientific
"form" is ousted from the lists as negli-
gible. All independent variables, all as-
pects of "meaning," all will-attitudes, the
1 Leuba's Psychology of Religion, p. 212.
2 Ibid., p. 277-
CH. VI] . EXPERIENCE OF GOD 169
unique feature of personal ideals, the
integral consciousness of self-identity, the
inherent tendency to transcend the
" given " all these features are either
ignored or explained in terms of sub-
stitutes. Psychology confines itself, and
must confine itself, to an empirical and
describable order of facts. It could no
more discover a transcendent world-order
than could geology or astronomy. Its
field is phenomena and the "man" it
reports upon is "a naturalistic man," as
completely describable as the sunset cloud
or the botanist's flower.
What I insist upon, however, is that
this "described, naturalistic man" is not
a real existing, living, acting man possessed
of interior experience. He is a constructed
man. No addition of described "mind-
states," no summation of "mind-contents"
would ever give consciousness in its inner
living wholeness. The reality whose pres-
ence makes all the difference may be
named "fringe," or "connecting prin-
ciple," or "synthetic unity" or anything
170 THE INNER LIFE [Cn, VI
you please "but oh! the difference to
me!" The "psychic elements " of the
psychologist are never really parts. Every
psychical state is in reality what it is be-
cause it belongs to a person, is flooded with
unique life, and is imbedded in a peculiar
whole of personality. Forever psychology
by its method of analysis misses, and must
miss, the central core of the reality. It
can analyze, reduce, and describe the ab-
stract, universal, and repeatable aspects,
but it cannot catch the thing itself any
more than a cinematograph can.
Here in the inner life, if anywhere, we
are justified in seizing and valuing the
unified and undifferentiated whole of ex-
perience in its central meaning. If this
primary experience of integral wholeness
and unity of self be treated as an illusion,
to what other pillar and ground of truth
can we fasten? The object of beauty
always reveals to us something which
must be comprehended as a totality
greater than the sum of its parts. The
thing of beauty takes us beyond the range
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 171
of the method of description. So, too, in
the case of our richest, most intense, and
unified moments of inner consciousness,
we cannot get an adequate account by the
method of analysis. We must supplement
science by the best testimony we can get
of the worth and meaning and implica-
tions of interior insight. We must get,
where possible, appreciative accounts of the
undifferentiated and unreduced experience
and then we can raise the question as to
what is rationally involved in such per-
sonal experiences.
As mystical experience supplies us with
moments of the highest integral unity, the
richest wholes of consciousness, I shall
deal mainly with that type, and I shall
endeavor to see whether it gives any proof
of a trans-subjective reality. There can
be no doubt that this type of experience
brings the recipient spiritual holidays from
strain and stress, that it gives life an
optimistic tone, and leaves behind a fresh
supply of energy to live by, but can it
carry us any farther? Does it supply us
172 THE INNER LIFE [Cta. VI
with a ladder or a bridge by which we can
get " yonder "?
Josiah Royce in The World and the
Individual says that the mystic "gets
his reality not by thinking, but by con-
sulting the data of experience. He is
trying very skillfully to be a pure empiri-
cist." " Indeed," he adds, " I should main-
tain that the mystics are the only
thoroughgoing empiricists in the history
of philosophy." 1 "Finite as we are,"
Royce says elsewhere in the same book,
"lost though we may seem to be in the
woods or in the wide air's wilderness, in
the world of time and chance, we have
still, like the strayed animals or like the
migrating birds, our homing instinct." 2
Now the mystics in all ages have in-
sisted that, whether the process be named
"instinct,," or "intuition," or "inner
sense," or "up rushes," the spirit of man
is capable of immediate experience of God.
There is something in man, "a soul-
1 The World and the Individual, Vol. I, p. 81.
2 Ibid., p. 181.
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 173
center" or "an apex of soul/' which di-
rectly apprehends God. It is an immense
claim, but those who have the experience
are as sure that they have found a wider
world of life as is the person who thrills
with the appreciation of beauty.
Cases of the experience are so well
known to us all to-day that I shall quote
only a very few accounts. It looks to me
as though some of this direct and imme-
diate experience underlay the entire fabric
of St. Paul's transforming and dynamic re-
ligious life. "It pleased God to reveal
His Son in me." "It is no longer I that
live but Christ liveth in me." "God
sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our
hearts, crying Alba, Father." "God who
commanded the light to shine out of dark-
ness hath shined in our hearts." The entire
autobiographical story, wherever it comes
into light, lets us see a man who is able to
face mmense tasks and to die daily because
he feels in some real way that his life has
become "a habitation of God through the
Spirit" and that he is being "filled to all
174 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. VI
fullness with God." St. Augustine in the
same way makes the reader of the Confes-
sions feel that the most wonderful thing
about this strange African who was for a
thousand years to be the Atlas, on whose
shoulders the Church rested, was his ex-
perience of God. He is speaking out of
experience when he says, "My God is the
Life of my life." "Thou, O God, hast
made us for Thyself and our hearts are
restless until they rest in Thee." "I
tremble and I burn; I tremble feeling
that I am unliks Him; I burn feeling
that I am like Him." "I heard God as
the heart heareth." "We climbed in
inner thought and speech, and in wonder
of Thy works, until we reached our own
minds and passed beyond them and
touched That which is not made but is
now as it ever shall be, or rather in It is
neither 'hath been 5 nor 'shall be' but only
*is* just for an instant touched It and
in one trembling glance arrived at That
which is."
Jacob Boehme's testimony is very
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 175
familiar, but it is such a good interior
account that I must repeat it.
"While I was in affliction and trouble, I elevated
my spirit, and earnestly raised it up unto God, as
with a great stress and onset, lifting up my whole
heart and mind and will and resolution to wrestle
with the love and mercy of God and not to give
over unless He blessed me then the Spirit did
break through. When in my resolved zeal I made
such an assault, storm, and onset upon God, as if
I had more reserves of virtue and power ready,
with a resolution to hazard my life upon it, sud-
denly my spirit did break through the Gate, not
without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, and I
reached to the innermost Birth of the Deity, and
there I was embraced with love as a bridegroom
embraces his bride. My triumphing can be com-
pared to nothing but the experience in which life
is generated in the midst of death or like the resur-
rection from the dead. In this Light my spirit
suddenly saw through all, and in all created things,
even in herbs and grass, I knew God who He is,
how He is, and what His will is." l
Very impressive are the less well-known
words of Isaac Penington: "This is He,
this is He: There is no other. This is
1 The Aurora, Chap. XIX, pp. 10-13.
176 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. VI
He whom I have waited for and sought
after from my childhood. I have met
with my God; I have met with my
Savior. I have felt the healings drop
into my soul from under His wings." 1
v Edward Carpenter has given many
accounts of the transforming experience
when he felt himself united in a living
junction with the infinite "including Self."
"The prince of love," he says, "touched
the walls of my hut with his finger from
within, and passing through like a great
fire delivered me with unspeakable deliver-
ance." 2 It brought him, as he himself
says, "an absolute freedom from mortality
accompanied by an indescribable calm and
joy." 3 A nameless writer in the " Atlantic
Monthly" for May, 1916, has given a re-
markable description of an experience
which is called "Twenty Minutes of
Reality." " I only remember," the writer
says, "finding myself in the very midst
of those wonderful moments, beholding
1 Isaac Penington, Works, Vol. I, p. xxxvii.
a Towards Democracy, p. 190.
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 177
life for the first time in all its young in-
toxication of loveliness in its unspeakable
joy, beauty, and importance. I cannot
say what the mysterious change was I
saw no new thing, but I saw all the usual
things in a miraculous new light in
what I believe is their true light. * . .
Once out of all the gray days of my life I
have looked into the heart of reality; I
have witnessed the truth; I have seen
life as it really is ravishingly, ecstati-
cally, madly beautiful, and filled to over-
flowing with a wild joy and a value un-
speakable."
Finally, I shall give a modern Russian
writer's appreciative report of a typical
mystical experience :
"There are seconds when you suddenly feel the
presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained.
It's something not earthly I don't mean in the
sense that it's heavenly but in that sense that
man cannot endure it in his earthly aspect. He
must be physically changed or die. This feeling is
clear and unmistakable; it's as though you appre-
hend all nature and suddenly say, 'Yes, that's
right/ God, when He created the world, said at
N
178 THE INNER LIFE [Cfc. VI
the end of each day of creation, 'Yes, it's right,
it's good.' It ... it's not being deeply moved,
but simply joy. You don't forgive anything be-
cause there is no more need of forgiveness. It's
not that you love oh, there's something in it
higher than love what's most awful is that it's
terribly clear and such joy. In those five seconds
I live through a lifetime, and I'd give my whole life
for them, because they are worth it/' *
It should always be noted that the
number of persons who are subject to
mystical experiences that is to say,
persons who feel themselves brought into
contact with an environing Presence and
supplied with new energy to live by is
much larger than we usually suppose.
We know only the mystics who were
dowered with a literary gift and who could
tell in impressive language what had come
to them, but of the multitude of those who
have felt and seen and who yet were un-
able to tell in words about their experience,
of these we are ignorant. An undeveloped
and uncultivated form of mystical con-
1 Dostoievsky's The Possessed.
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 179
sciousness is present, I think, in most
religious souls, and whenever it is unusually
awake and vivid the whole inner and outer
life is intensified by such experiences, even
though there may be little that can be
put into explicit account in language.
There are multitudes of men and women
now living, often in out-of-the-way places,
in remote hamlets or on isolated farms,
who are the salt of the earth and the light
of the world in their communities, because
they have had vital experiences that re-
vealed to them realities which their neigh-
bors missed and that supplied them with
energy to live by which the mere " church-
goers" failed to find.
I am more and more convinced, as I
pursue my studies on the meaning and
value of mysticism, with the conviction
that religion, i.e. religion when it Is real,
alive, vital, and transforming, is essen-
tially and at bottom a mystical act, a
direct response to an inner world of
spiritual reality, an implicit relationship
between the finite and infinite, between
l8o THE INNER LIFE [Cn. VI
the part and the whole. The French
philosopher, mile Boutroux, has finely
called this junction of finite and infinite
in us, by which these mystical experiences
are made possible, "the Beyond that is
within" "the Beyond/' as he says,
"with which man comes in touch on the
inner side of his nature."
Whenever we go back to the funda-
mental mystical experience, to the soul's
first-hand testimony, we come upon a
conviction that the human spirit trans-
cends itself and is environed by a spiritual
world with which it holds commerce and
vital relationship. The constructive mys-
tics, not only of the Christian communions
but also those of other religions, have ex-
plored higher levels of life than those on
which men usually live, and they have
given impressive demonstration through
the heightened dynamic quality of their
lives and service that they have been
drawing upon and utilizing reservoirs of
vital energy. They have revealed a pecul-
iar aptitude for correspondence with the
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 181
Beyond that is within, and they have ex-
hibited a genius for living by their inner
conviction of God, "of practicing God,"
as Jeremy Taylor called it.
But, are we justified in making such
large affirmations ? Is there anything in
the nature of mystical experience that
warrants us in taking the leap from inner
vision to. existential reality? Can we
legitimately get from a finite, subjective
feeling to an objective and infinite God?
The answer is of course obvious. There
is no way to get a bridge from finite to
infinite, from subject to object, from idea
to that which the idea means, from human
to divine, from mere man to God, if they
are isolated, sundered, disparate entities
to start with. No mere finite experience
of a mere finite thing can be anything but
finite, and no juggling can get out of the
experience what is not in it. If we mean
by "empirical" that which is "given"
as explicit sense-content of consciousness,
then the only empirical argument that
could be would be the statement that we
182 THE INNER LIFE [Qa. VI
experience what we experience. We should
not get beyond the consciousness of inter-
jection "lo !" "voila I"
In this sense of the term, of course no-
body ever did or ever could "experience
God." We are shut up entirely to a
stream of inner states, a seriatim conscious-
ness, "a shower of shot," which can give
us no knowledge at all, either, in Berkeley's
words, of "the choir of heaven" or of
"the furniture of earth" or of "the
mighty frame of the world," or in fact,
of any permanent self within us.
Used in the narrow Humian sense there
are no "empirical arguments" for the
existence of God, but the misery of it is
there are no arguments for anything else
either ! We must therefore widen out the
meaning of the term "empirical" and
include in it not only the actual "con-
tent" of experience, but all that is involved
and implicated in experience. We cannot
talk about any kind of reality until we
interpret experience through its rational
implications. Nobody ever perceives "a
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 183
black beetle" and knows it as "a black
beetle" without transcending "pure em-
piricism," i.e. without using categories
which are not a product of experience.
All experience which has any knowledge-
import, or value, possesses within itself
self-transcendence, that is to say, it appre-
hends or takes by storm some sort of ex-
ternal or objective reality. Nobody is
ever disturbed by the fallacy of subjec-
tivism until he has become debauched by
metaphysics. The fallacy of subjectivism
is always the product of the abstract
intellect, i.e. the intellect which divides
experience, and takes an abstract part for a
whole.
It is further true that all knowledge-
experience possesses within itself finite-
transcendence, Le. it contains in itself a
principle of infinity and could become ab-
solutely rationalized only in an infinite
whole of reality with which the experience
is in organic unity. I agree fully with
Professor Hocking that "it is doubtful
whether there are any finite ideas at all."
184 THE INNER LIFE [Ca. VI
The consciousness of the finite has work-
ing in it the reality of the whole. The
finite can never be considered as self-
existent; it can never be real. There is
forever present in the very heart and na-
ture of consciousness a trope, a nisus, a
straining of the fragment to link itself up
with the self-complete whole, and every
flash of knowledge and every pursuit* of
the good reve-als that trend. Something
of the other is always in the me and how-
ever finite I may be I am always beyond
myself, and am conjunct with "the pulse
beat of the whole system." Either we
must give up talking of knowledge or we
must affirm that knowledge involves a
self-complete and self-explanatory reality
with which our consciousness has connec-
tion. We cannot think finite and con-
tingent things, or aim at goodness however
fragmentary, without rational appeal to
something infinite and necessary. Hu-
man experience cannot be rationally con-
ceived except as a fragment of a vastly
more inclusive experience, always implied
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 185
within the finite spirit, unifying and bind-
ing together into one whole all that is
absolutely real and true. Whether we are
dealing with the so-called mystical experi-
ence or any other kind of experience we are
bound to postulate, or take for granted,
whatever is rationally implicated in the
very nature of the experience on our hands.
No type of consciousness carries the
implication of self-transcendence, or finite-
transcendence, more coercively than does
genuine mystical experience. The central
aspect of "it is the fusion of the self into a
larger undifferentiated whole. It is thus
much more the type .of Aesthetic experience
than it is the type of knowledge-experience.
In both types the aesthetic and the
mystical consciousness is fused into
union with its object, that is to say, the
usual dualistic character of consciousness
is transcended, though of course not
wholly obliterated. A new level of con-
sciousness is gained in which the division
of self and other is minimal. But it is
by no means, in either case, an empty or a
1 86 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. VI
negative state. The impression which so
many mystics have given of negation or
passivity springs, as Von Hugel declares,
from an unusually large amount of actu-
alized energy, an energy which is now
penetrating and finding expression by
every pore and fiber of the soul. The
whole moral and spiritual creature ex-,
pands and rests, yes : but this very rest is
produced by action "unperceived because
so fleet," "so near, so all fulfilling; or
rather by a tissue of single acts, mental,
emotional, volitional, so finely interwoven,
so exceptionally stimulative and expressive
of the soul's deepest aspirations, that these
acts are not perceived as single acts, in-
deed that their very collective presence is
apt to remain unnoticed by the soul it-
self." 1 Wordsworth's account passes al-
most unconsciously from appreciation of
beauty into joyous apprehension of God
and it is a wonderful self-revelation of
fused consciousness which is positively
affirmative.
1 The Mystical Element, Vol. II, p. 132.
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 187
"Sensation, soul and form
All melted into him ; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hours
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power
That made him ; it was blessedness and love."
Tennyson has given many accounts both
in prose and poetry of similar affirma-
tion experiences, sometimes initiated from
within and sometimes from without. This
account from the Memoirs is- a good speci-
men: "I have frequently had a kind of
waking trance this for the lack of a
better word quite up from my boyhood,
when I have been all alone. This has
come upon me through repeating my own
name to myself silently, till all at once,
as it were out of the intensity of the con-
sciousness of individuality, individuality
itself seemed to dissolve and fade away
188 THE INNER LIFE [H. VI
into boundless being, and this not a con-
fused state but the clearest, the surest of
the surest, utterly beyond words where
death was almost laughable impossibility
the loss of personality (if so it ,were)
seeming no extinction, but the only true
life."
Like the aesthetic experience, again, the
mystical experience brings an extraordi-
nary integration, or unifying, of the self, a
flooding of the entire being with joy and
an expansion which, as in the case of the
highest aesthetic experiences, takes the
soul out into a world which "never was
on sea or land," and which, nevertheless, for
the moment seems the only world.
Balfour has finely pointed out in his
Theism and Humanism, that this expan-
sion and joy and infinite aspect which
are inherent in the aesthetic values can-
not be rationally explained except on
the supposition that these values are in
part dependent upon a spiritual concep-
tion of the world the experience must
have a pedigree adequate to account for
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 189
its greatness. We cannot begin with an
experience which gives an absolutely new
dimension of life and a new world of joy,
and then end in our explanation with a
phenomenal play of cosmic atoms "full
of .sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The same thing is true with our mystical
experience. We cannot, of course, say off-
hand that here we experience God as one
experiences an object of sense, or that we
have at last found an infallible and in-
dubitable evidence of the infinite God.
My only contention is that here Js a fojrm
of experience which implies one of two
things. Either there is far greater depth
and complexity to the inmost nature of
personal self-consciousness than we usually
take into account, that is, we ourselves are
bottomless and inwardly exhaustless in
range and scope; or the fragmentary
thing we call our self is continuous in-
wardly with a wider spiritual world with
which we have some sort of contact-
relationship and from which vitalizing
energy comes in to us. It is too soon to
190 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. VI
decide between these two alternatives.
We are only at the very beginning of the
study of the submerged life within our-
selves, and we must know vastly more
about it than we now know before we can
draw the boundaries of the soul or declare
with certainty what comes from its own
deeps _and what comes from beyond its
farthest margins. The studies of Bergson
and still more emphatically the studies of
Dr. William McDougall in Body and
Mind show very conclusively that the con-
sciousness of meaning, the higher forms of
memory, the richer and more subtle emo-
tional experiences and the more significant
facts of attention, conation, and will cannot
be explained in terms of, cerebral activities
pr by any kind of mechanical causation. 1
To arrive at any explanation of the
most central activities of personal con-
sciousness we" must assume that conscious-
ness Ts""a reality existing in its own sphere
and vastly transcending the physical mech-
anism which it uses. If this is a fact
1 This point has been discussed in the previous chapter.
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 191
and McDougalPs argument is the work
of one of the most careful and scientifically
trained of modern psychologists then
there is no reason why what we call the
"soul" might not on occasions receive
incomes of life and spiritual energy from
the infinite source of consciousness. I
can only say that the mystic in his highest
moments feels himself to be and believes
himself to be in vital fellowship with
Another than himself and what is more,
some power to live by does come in from
somewhere. Mystical experiences in a
large number of instances not only per-
manently integrate the self but also bring
an added and heightened moral and spirit-
ual quality and a greatly increased dy-
namic effect.
We are still in the stage of mystery in
dealing with the causes of variations and
mutations in the biological order. Some-
thing surprising and novel, something
that was not there before, something in-
calculable and unpredictable suddenly ap-
pears and a little living creature arrives
THE INNER LIFE [Cn. VI
equipped with a trait wjiich no ancestor
had and by means of which he can endure
better, can see farther or run faster, can
survive longer, and is, in fact, on a higher
life-level. We do not know how the little
midget did it. But some elan vital may
have burst in from an invisible and in-
tangible environment, more real even than
thejenyirqnment we see. THe universe, as
Professor Shaler once said, seems to be "a
realm of unending and infinitely varied
originations." So, too, these flushes of
splendor which break through the " Soul's
east window of divine surprise" may come
from a perfectly real spiritual environment
without which a finite spirit could not be at
all or live at all. I do not know. Our frag-
mentary experiences cannot enable us to
furnish irrefragible proof. It only looks as
though God were within reach and as though
at moments we were at home with Him.
Qilbert Murray's cautious conclusion in
EIs"finr""S"isay"t>ii" 'Stoicism is a good word
with which to close this chapter.
"We seem to find," he says, "not only
CH. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 193
in all religions, but in practically all
philosophies, some belief that man is not
quite alone in the universe, but is met in
his endeavours towards the good by some
external help or sympathy. . . . It is
important to realize that the so-called
belief is not really an intellectual judgment
so much as a craving of the whole nature
[in us], ... It is only of very late years
that psychologists have begun to realize the
enormous dominion of those forces in man
of which he is normally unconscious. We
cannot escape as easily as these brave men
[the Stoics] dreamed from the grip of the
blind powers beneath the threshold. In-
deed, as I see philosophy after philosophy
falling into this unproven ^belief in the
Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I
myself cannot, except for a moment and by
an effort, refrain from making the same as-
sumption, it seems to me that perhaps
here, too, we are under the spell of a very
old ineradicable instinct. We are gre-
garious animals ; our ancestors have been
such for countless ages. We cannot help
194 THE INNER LIFE [Cn. VI
looking out on the world as gregarious
animals do ; we see itjn terms of humanity
and of fellowship. Students of animals
under domestication have shown us how
the habits of a gregarious creature, taken
away from his kind, are shaped in a
thousand details by reference to the lost
pack which is no longer there the pack
which a dog tries to smell his way back to
all the time he is out walking, the pack he
calls to for help when danger threatens.
It is a strange and touching thing, this
eternal hunger of the gregarious animal
for the herd of friends who are not there.
And it may be, it may very possibly be,
that, in the matter of this Friend behind
phenomena, our own yearning and our own
almost ineradicable instinctive conviction,
since they are certainly not founded on
either reason or observation, are in origin
the groping of a lonely-souled gregarious
animal to find its herd or its herd-leader
in the great spaces between the stars.
"At any rate, it is a belief very difficult
to get rid of."
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original sources, free from partisan or sectarian prejudice and with due
historical perspective. The accounts written from the Quaker point of view
do not furnish a critical investigation of Quakerism and its work in the New
World ; while tfiose written from the anti-Quaker point of view are for the
most part one-sided and colored by prejudice, and are obviously lacking in
penetration into the inner meaning of the type of religion which they under-
take to present By avoiding these extremes and by furnishing a critical
investigation of Quakerism both in its outer forms and its inner spirit, Pro-
fessor Jones has produced an excellent piece of work, done in an impartial
and historical spirit and not too brief to admit of "details. The account is
an able and clear treatment of the religious principles of Quakerism, replete
with first-hand knowledge and with concrete details, and thus it presents a
truly historical picture of this great movement which bore no small part in
the early political and religious life of this country.
This volume is divided into five books. Book I. deals with the Quakers
in New England; Book II. with Quakerism in the Colony of New York;
Book III. with the Quakers in tibe Southern Colonies ; Book IV, deals with
the early Quakers in New Jersey, and Book V. with the Quakers in
Pennsylvania.
The work thus admirably assists the man of to-day to visualize the life
history of the Quaker movement on this continent
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 84-66 Kftti Avenue Hew Tori
Studies in Mystical Religion
BYIRUFUS M. JONES, M.A.,
Professor of Philosophy, Haverford College, U.S A.
Cloth, gttt top, 518 pages, $3.00
PRESS. NOTICES
** The book is written with clearness and quiet dignity. It is animated through-
out by breadth of fine and kindly sympathies, and by a sense of the character of
religion as a light and a power that from within control all the social fulfilments 01
our nature." Philosophical Review.
" Such a work as this is not only a contribution of great timeliness in these days
when the thoughts of scholarly men are turning perhaps as not before for centuries
toward religion, but will go far to give mysticism, of which perhaps Quakerism is the
best American illustration, a standing even at the bar of science."
American Journal of Religions Psychology.
" It is a book of wide and conscientious research, solid and steady structure and
noble aim. The style is clear and definite, free of any attempt to dazzle or confuse.
Those who have come to feel that the seat of authority in religion lies in the first-hand
experience of the soul will turn eagerly to it, opening up as it does so many channels
of the spiritual life of the past." North American. Review.
" It is a careful study of subjective religion, from the New Testament down to
modern times. A vast field is covered and covered completely. The writer has made
excellent use of his materials and given a sympathetic study of religion on its subjec-
tive and personal side." New York Times,
" It shows abundant evidence of conscientious research and a careful study of
sources either not easily accessible or generally passed over by the student. Suf-
ficient attention has been given to the analytical investigation of the subject."
The Churchinan..
? /'His study is distinguished by moderation and justice, high intent and reverent
spint. It has a peculiar significance for us, because, in a generation when many are ,
following will-o'-the-wisps and garish lights^ it studies classic and enduring experi-
ences; and because it reminds us of a mystic strain which is our inheritance, and, I
hope, our genius, and which in time will have its own poets, philosophers, and
prophets. If this comes not even in some measure in our own day, it will still be
spteodid to have prepared the way and made straight the path by some such notable
achievement as this study in mystical religion by Professor Jones."
Boston Transcript.
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PntOiihMi 64-66 Fifth Avenu* Sew York
The Gospel of Good Will as Revealed in
Contemporary Christian Scriptures
THE LYMAN BEKCHER LECTURES AT YALE UNIVERSITY FOR 1916
BY WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE
President of Bowdoin College and Author of " The Five Great
Philosophies of Life," etc.
Cloth, i2mo, $1.50
This book goes straight to the heart of the Gospel to be
preached and practiced the Gospel that Christ expects men
to be great enough to make the good of all affected by their
action, the object of their wills, as it is the object of the will of
God. "The Christian," President Hyde writes, "is not a < plas-
ter saint 1 who holds 'safety first 7 to be the supreme spiritual
grace, but the man who earns and spends his money, controls
his appetites, chooses peace or war and does whatever his hand
finds to do with an eye single to the greatest good of all con-
cerned. Sin is felling short of this high heroic aim. ... To
the Christian every secular vocation is a chance to express Good
Will and sacrifice is the price he gladly pays for the privilege.
. . . Christian character and Christian virtues will come not by
direct cultivation but as by-products of Good Will expressed in
daily life. -The church is a precious and sacred instrument for
transforming men and institutions into sons and servants of
Good Will." These extracts indicate in a measure the trend of
President Hyde's theme which he has treated fully and in a
practical way that will appeal to all thinkers.
"A lucid style, a sympathetic treatment of present tendencies,
and a high ideal of Christian service make this a fascinating
volume." Independent.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue Hew York
Three Religious Leaders of Oxford and
Their Movements : John Wycliffe, John
Wesley, John Henry Newman
BY S. PARKES. CADMAN
Cloth, 8vo t $2.50
This book deals with three great Englishmen, great
Christians, great Churchmen, and loyal sons of Ox-
ford, who, in Dr. Cadman's opinion, are the foremost
leaders in religious life and activity that university
has yet given to the world. " Many prophets, priests
and kings/' writes Dr. Cadman, "have been nour-
ished within her borders, but none who in significance
and contribution to the general welfare compare with
Wycliffe, the real originator of European Protestant-
ism; Wesley, the Anglican priest who became the
founder of Methodism and one of the makers of
modern England and of English-speaking nations;
Newman, the spiritual genius of his century, who re-
interpreted Catholicism, both Anglican and Roman."
" It is a great book. The theme is noble and the
execution is masterly - It is the serious book of the
year. Every minister must have it on his table. It
deserves a proud place in the library of every Chris-
tian layman." The Brooklyn Eagle.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth. Avenue New York
