")
BR 121 .B7 1912
Brierley, Jonathan, 1843-
1914.
The life of the soul
THE LIFE OF THE SOUL
THE
LIFE OF THE SOUL
BY
J. BRIERLEY
AUTHOR OF "life AND THE IDEAL, "ASPECTS OF THE SPIRITUAL,
** SIDELIGHTS ON RELIGION," "OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE," ETC
BOSTON: THE PILGRIM PRESS
LONDON : JAMES CLARKE & CO.
1912
PREFACE
I HAVE given this book the title it bears because it
describes, as accurately as any other, the main idea
and contents of it. The topics discussed are varied,
but they are all gates into the same field. They
come back, like radii from a circumference, towards
one centre. The object sought in them all has been,
starting from these different standpoints, to pene-
trate the mystery of the soul ; of its life, its faculties,
its possibilities, its relation to God, man and the
universe. I offer no reasoned philosophy of the
theme ; far less a theology. The most I can hope
for is that my readers may find here some material
for both ; material for suggestion if nothing more.
I have written under the conviction that there is
nothing that is happening in the crowded field of
modern life but finds its explanation in our spiritual
condition ; that no one of our pressing problems,
whether of labour unrest, of religious difficulty, of
social reorganisation, but must seek its solution in
the recesses of the soul.
J.B.
London, 1912.
CONTENTS
I. THE PROBLEM OF FORCE .
11. CHRISTIANITY AND LIFE
III. EQUIVALENTS IN RELIGION
IV. OF SEEKING AND FINDING
V. THE LIVING PAST .
VI. OF DEAD PERFECTIONS
VII. OUR PERSONAL FORTUNES
VII L THE PRESSURE OF LIFE .
IX. OF SPECIAL PROVIDENCE
X. PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION
XI. IS CHRISTIANITY PASSING ?
XII. RELIGION AND FEELING .
XIII. OF HAVING AND GETTING
XIV. THE DEEPENING OF LIFE
XV. THE HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS
XVI. OF NEW INTERESTS
XVII. OF JUDGMENT
XVIII. OF LIFE VALUES
XIX. CO-OPERATION
XX. FROM BELOW — UP .
7
Contents
PAGE
XXI.
life's music
. 190
XXII.
AMALGAMS IN RELIGION .
• 199
XXIII.
THE CULT OF IDLENESS .
. 206
XXIV.
THE LACK OF GREATNESS
. 214
XXV.
CONCERNING BIG THINGS
. 224
XXVI.
THE DEEPER REASON
. 234
XXVII.
RELIGION AS INWARDNESS
. 242
SCXVIII.
THE UNORGANISED FORCES
• 250
XXIX.
THE PRICE OF FEAR
. 258
XXX.
OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE .
. 266
XXXI.
ON DOING THINGS . . . .
. 276
XXXII.
THE LIFE BEYOND
. 286
THE LIFE OF THE SOUL
THE PROBLEM OF FORCE
The problem of force — the ethic of it if you will —
has of late been very vividly before us. We have
seen capital in arms against labour ; each side
reckoning up its striking power ; labour counting
its numbers, its capabilities of offence and resistance ;
authority calling up its effectives, estimating its
reserves. The position means a dozen different
things ; but unquestionably one of the most pro-
minent of them is a trial of strength. We are not yet
at the final end, but that end, whatever it is to be,
will have this factor for one gf its largest determinants. J
In these circumstances, it should be well for us
all to ask ourselves some questions about force —
what it really means, what part it plays in the system
of things, what it can and cannot do, how it is related
to a true morality. We are apt to disparage force,
— to speak of it as opposed to idealism, as a mere
brutality. " Force is no remedy," said John Bright,
on a memorable occasion ; and, as he meant it, the
word rang true. We shall come to that later. But
we need here to know what we are talking about
and to use our phrases with a full recognition of the
facts.
Let us remember, in the first place, that it is in
force, and by means of force, that we live, move, and
9
The Life of the Soul
have our being. It is by it that our universe came
into existence, and that it is kept going from hour
to hour. We live by the sun's energy, by the exact
adjustment of it to our physical need. Let that
energy increase or decrease by ever so little, and we
should have no problems on this subject ; we should
cease to exist. What this energy is ultimately no
man knows ; equally ignorant are we as to how one
shade or phase of it passes into another. What we
are aware of is that the whole system of things around
us is just one stupendous manifestation of sheer
power — of power that we did not create, that we
cannot by the smallest fraction add to or take
from, that seems eternal and indestructible. Our
progress as human beings, our progress in living,
in civilisation, is a progress in learning its ways, in
yoking it to our purpose. Our locomotives, as they
tear across continents, our Lusitanias conquering
ocean with their superb enginry, are triumphs of
force ; they are mind's power yoked to nature's
power ; the rude, elemental energies of wind and
wave outside mastered by these vaster, subtler
energies within.
The social order rests on power. In the family,
in the school, discipline in the last resort depends on
who is strongest. A State exists by the ability to
enforce its enactments. Its imperative is an armed
imperative. The magistrate has behind him the
policeman, and behind the policeman the soldier.
There may be vast modifications in these directions
in the coming years, but no possible condition of
human affairs will ever dispense with the use of force
in some form or other. The same thing obtains in
the loftiest, in the most spiritual of our experiences.
10
The Problem of Force
Influence is force, much of which could be translated
into terms of mechanics. When an inspired prophet
sways men with heaven's own message, how much of
his power is purely physical ? Diminish at that
moment the action of his heart, the flow of blood to
his brain, and what would become of his inspiration ?
The tides of life that are flowing out of him are
elemental energies as much beyond his volition to
create or increase as are the winds that sweep over the
Altantic, as the waves that roll beneath. To what-
ever side of life we turn, we find ourselves, then, in
a realm of force — a force which begins us, keeps us
alive, and in due time ends us, answering meantime
no question of ours as to its why or wherefore.
In what has been said, however, we have already
made a vast discrimination. Force is everywhere,
but in different kinds and qualities. And the lower
is everywhere, in the long run, obedient to the higher.
The Lusitania conquers the ocean because there is
more mind in the Lusitania than in the ocean. We
shall never probably be able to define the difference
between mind and matter, nor the way in which one
works upon the other. But we know one thing — that
mental force is higher than material, and, given free
play, will always assert its sovereignty. A single
idea, formed in one tiny skull, will chain your
Niagara, turn its wild rush into a humble factory-
worker. A chemical discovery will supersede any
quantity of limb and muscle energy. And in the
mental region itself the lower mind is always beaten
by the higher mind. That is why the mob will never
be master. Your Xerxes with his million is no
match for your Miltiades with his few thousands.
In a rising your crowd is powerful — for a day or two.
II
The Life of the Soul
It is powerful to destroy. But because it cannot get
bread, nor weave clothes, nor build houses by mere
destroying ; because its violence, while mighty at
pulling down, is helpless to create, it must needs call
out in the end for the maker, the organiser, the man
with a brain. Your French Terror ends in a Napoleon.
Your thinker, even if he be despot and tyrant, is
so much better than your crowd of no-thinkers, and
that by the verdict of the crowd itself. After that
leaderless stampede, what a relief to them to find
themselves once more on the march, with a real
thinking-piece at the head of them !
Mind is the force that rules matter ; but what
is the force that rules mind ? For mind has its own
compulsions, working as surely, as inevitably, as
steam in your engine, as gravitation on the whirling
planets. But the compulsion is of a different kind;
and it has been one of the tragedies of history that
men, through so many ages, and up to our own time,
have failed to note the distinction. People have
tried to make the mind act as they would make a
machine act — by mere physical pressure. They
might as well try to set Queen Anne's statue walking
down Ludgate Hill by a push from behind. It is
amazing, in this long history of mental coercion,
how blind men have been to the simplest psycho-
logical facts. When Augustine, quoting the text,
" Compel them to come in," advocated persecution
as a means of spreading the Gospel ; when Gregory
the Great ordered his agents in Sicily to " persecute '*
the tenants on his estate there, and so " reclaim
them to the Catholic faith " ; when he wrote to a
Sardinian bishop : " If any tenant is obstinate, his
rent is to be increased till he is compelled to hasten
12
The Problem of Force
to the right way " ; when Charlemagne offered the
conquered Franks the choice between an immediate
acceptance of the faith or of having their throats
promptly cut — they were proceeding on the suppo-
sition that these were legitimate and practicable ways
of creating faith. One wonders that these strong
minds did not see that if the endeavour had been
legitimate it was utterly impracticable. They
might as well have attempted to construct a watch
by lighting a bonfire. The process had no relation
whatever to the result they wanted. Belief is,
indeed, a matter of compulsion, but not of this com-
pulsion. The force that creates it is the force of
facts, of evidence, and of the laws of the human
mind in relation to these. The sword or the rack
may produce fear, submission, or a hypocritical
assent ; but belief, or love, never. Force of this
kind is indeed " no remedy." Cromwell, who had
a considerable acquaintance with force of various
sorts, saw clear in this matter. Witness that word of
his to Mr. Speaker Lenthall : " And for brethren in
things of the mind we look for no compulsion but
that of light and reason." A proper psychology,
which we are at last coming in sight of, will make it
for ever impossible to repeat these ghastly blunders
of the past. Men will realise that, as Schopenhauer
puts it, " Faith is like love ; it cannot be forced."
We have here reached two grades of force ; first
that of the brute elements, of the mechanical energies,
of the inherent qualities of things ; and second,
that of the intellect, which, in proportion to its height
and strength, exercises an ever growing control over
the material realm. But ours would be a very poor
world were it left to these compulsions alone. Our
13
The Life of the Soul
reasoning power is good for much, but it is not good
enough to make us good. The human consciousness
on this subject has been sufficiently expressed in the
belief, at the bottom of all the religions, which makes
the devil a very clever fellow. You may handle the
material forces with consummate skill and turn them
to the most infernal uses. And our planet has had,
so far, a very considerable experience of this kind of
ability. Its gospel has been expressed with admirable
succinctness in that devil's gospel, " The Prince "
of Macchiavelli, where the men in power are taught
all the ways of using it in the interest of their
ambitions and of their selfishness. The modern
world has seen no clearer intellect than that of
Napoleon, and no greater or more mischievous
perversion of its power. The mind can be as ruthless
as a tornado, and with the destructive force of ten
thousand tornadoes. The history of commerce in
our time, on both sides of the Atlantic, has shown
us how the sheer calculating faculty, urged by the
lust of aggrandisement, can become the most
tyrannous and devilish of powers ; has shown us
how forlorn and hopeless were the condition of our
species unless some other power, higher than that of
the elements, higher than that of mere mentality,
can be called in to redress the balance.
There is one. We come here upon another of the
world's forces, exercising a compulsion different from
any of these others, the story of which opens up
another and far more cheering prospect for us. It is
the story of conscience, of the moral sense, of the
spiritual faculty. This force is the latest to arrive,
and at present the weakest, the most intermittent,
the least conspicuous in its manifestations. And
14
The Problem of Force
that of necessity ; that because of its position in the
world movement. For it could not appear before
long preparation had been made. The brute came
before the man ; and the brute in the man came
before the man in him. Before morality there had
to be animality and mentality. The root is before
the flower. Men pessimise because they do not
appreciate the leisureliness of the divine order.
But its very slowness is the guarantee of its sureness.
The immense, age-long process of the foundation-
work, instead of stirring our impatience, should make
us surer of the solidity of that upper structure which
is rising upon it.
This spiritual sense, so slowly emerging upon our
world, is also, we say, a compulsion. But, compared
with these others, how different its operation !
Compared with them it is as radium is to pitchblende,
an essence endowed with such subtler, such mightier
powers. As intellect controls the material energies
so this controls the intellect. Where it rises to any
height in a man it becomes an imperative. Luther's
" I can no other " expresses its note of command.
And its force lies in its independence of force, of those
lower ones. What a power ! which bids the strong
man not to use his strength ; which tells the muscled
arm not to strike back ; which strips its soldiers of
their weapons of violence, of anger, of craft and
cunning , and clothes them instead with forgiveness,
with trust, with love ! Does not this seem insanity
in such a world as ours ? It is the same insanity
as that which leads man, accustomed to travel on
solid earth, to launch himself in the air. It is the
trial of his forces in a new element, where he will
have many falls, but in which finally he will fly where
15
The Life of the Soul
once he walked. What is the real meaning of for-
giving your enemy, of using trust instead of cunning,
of loving instead of hating ? It is no insanity.
The method has a perfect rationale of its own. It is
nothing less than the bold appeal of the spiritual in
a man to the spiritual in his fellow. " I have this
compulsion in me. Have you the answering com-
pulsion in you ? This force which is acting on me
from some upper realm is a force which must be acting
from that realm on other minds. Is it not acting
on yours ? My trust in you is a belief that it is so
acting."
That is the real meaning of Christianity, the
meaning which assures its position as an eternal
religion. The significance of Jesus, more than any
other significance, is in this — that His life and utter-
ance were the proclamation of this new order of
things, of this new force by which man wa.s to be
ruled. When, unarmed and defenceless, He said to
the Roman power, " My kingdom is not of this
world," He spoke the word of inauguration. Over
the kingdom of the elemental forces, over the king-
dom of the animal, over the kingdom of the intellect,
He beheld rising, with Himself as prophet and
embodiment, that kingdom of the spiritual whose
forces should be those of purity and sacrifice, love
and trust, obedience and service. It is the last of
the kingdoms because it is highest. Latest and
highest, it will be the most enduring, for there is
nothing that can take its place.
This spiritual imperative will rule on earth because
it rules in heaven. It is the heart of God. In pro-
portion as we find it in ourselves, we feel the surer of
Him. What a blindness in that old theology which
i6
The Problem of Force
made it possible for its exponents to think of God
as using His power in any other way than love
dictates ; which pictured Him as inflicting on His
enemies — who were His helpless creatures — Indian
slow fire tortures, and that for all eternity ! Were
that so, heaven, in its selectest quarters, would be
more in need of Christian missions to teach it ele-
mentary religion than Central Africa, or a Liverpool
slum. Against all that we say, with Emerson,
" No God dare wrong a worm."
We are, as we have seen, under a reign of forces,
They are all there at work, the elemental, the animal,
the rational, the spiritual. We note the order of
their coming, and the place they occupy. The
history of them assures us of their final arrangement.
Mind rules the lower world, and love is eventually
to rule the mind. This because the infallible wisdom
is governed by the eternal love. Our present unrests,
our strifes, our up-risings and repressions are marks
of the present stage of our evolution. In that
evolution the spiritual is only at its beginning. But
as surely as mind has mastered matter, so surely
will character master mind. The final, compelling
force will be, not the clash of swords, the thunder
of guns, the issue of edicts, but the still small voice
of the purified soul.
17
II
CHRISTIANITY AND LIFE
Within the lifetime of many of us a revolution has
taken place, in the sphere of religion, greater than
any that has happened since the introduction of
Christianity. The ancient foundation of it has
dropped clean away, leaving it, like the planet itself,
resting on empty space. Or shall we say, changing
the figure, that the entire system of ideas into
which it was fitted, as a picture in a frame, has
vanished, leaving it naked, as it were, in a new,
strange surrounding ? The Christianity under
which we grew up was not simply a Christology ; it
was a system which filled heaven and earth, time and
space, the world's past history, its future fate. It was
an easily measurable and quite water-tight, air-tight
system. It was the Bible view of things— a view
which placed earth as the centre of the universe,
in the centre of events. Heaven above and hell
beneath were within convenient distances, and
readily accessible. The sun and stars were there
to lighten us, to give us day and night. As to history,
the world was some six thousand years old, and its
end was rapidly approaching. To some of the more
active spirits among us in those days there was
already, in this closely-knit arrangement, a sense
of stifling, a suppressed longing for some force to come
that would break holes in it, to let in air, to open a
wider prospect.
iS
Christianity and Life
That force has since come with a vengeance !
There seems, indeed, to-day too much air, too wide a
prospect. We are apt now to shiver in the cold, to
feel ourselves lost and homeless in the immensity
that has opened round us. The space walls, the time
walls, have both dropped. Instead of being at
the centre of things we find ourselves dwellers on a
tiny speck of a planet, revolving round a minor star,
that is one of thirty million stars telescopically
visible to us, with an infinity of others beyond.
Instead of an earth history of six thousand years,
we are descendants of a race that has dwelt here for
hundreds of thousands of years, while the earth itself
is old by immeasurable millions. Where, in these
conditions, is heaven ? Where is hell ? Where,
indeed, is religion ? Talk of revelation ! There has
surely been no religious revelation comparable to
this. It is a revelation which in itself is also a
revolution.
Not less wonderful, not less portentous, has been
the religious revelation which has opened by the
birth in us of the historic sense, and its application
to the Scripture narratives. For long ages and right
into our own time, devout men had read the Bible,
drawing from it inestimable values of faith and
holiness, yet without the faintest suspicion of the
evidence about its own growth, its place in world
literature, which it contained within itself. Instead
of being an infallible production, dictated word by
word to writers who were simply the pen used by
invisible hands, we find it a work developed under
homely human conditions, a collection of writings
representing various grades of knowledge and
morality, containing early mythologies, folk lore,
19
The Life of the Soul
history, edited and re-edited at various periods by
writers who idealised the story in accordance with
their own prepossessions, with their own ideas of
religious edification. We are able to estimate the
value of the history from the history itself. The
Pentateuch, for instance, we know was brought into
its final form by priestly scribes after the return from
the exile. They gave an account of the beginnings
of Israel conformed to the views of their own time.
How far it conformed to fact may be easily
ascertained by anyone who takes the trouble to read,
say, Leviticus and Joshua, and to compare their
accounts with the Book of Judges. In Joshua we
get a terrifying story of the miraculous destruction
of the Canaanites by the divinely-led Jewish people.
They are annihilated, exterminated root and branch.
We turn to Judges, describing the succeeding period,
and behold ! these annihilated Canaanites are still
there — in their lands, their walled cities, with their
civilisation, their gods, all alive and flourishing !
It is a marvellous resurrection ! More, in Leviticus
and elsewhere in the Pentateuch we read of the
establishment of a full-blown ecclesiastical system,
with a tabernacle, sacrifices, an elaborate ritual, a
high priest and a subordinate priestly hierarchy, a
day of atonement ; in fact, a church machinery of
the completest kind. We turn again to Judges,
to find, in what is supposed to be the immediately
succeeding period, absolutely no trace of all this.
Instead, a primitive reHgion, with no high priest,
no tabernacle, but a simple, barbarous cult, where
laymen offer sacrifices in their own way and in any
place that suits them. We see what has happened.
The priestly scribes of the post-exilic period have
20
Christianity and Life
transferred the church system they had themselves
elaborated back to the beginning of the Jewish
history. And they did this in entire good faith, for
the modern conception of what constitutes history
was yet unborn. So naive was their view of it that,
happily for us, they left that earlier material of Judges
side by side with their own, and thus supplied us with
the evidence for a reconstruction of the entire
story.
We have had, we say, in these last years, a real
religious revelation, a revelation about revelation.
It has shown us that whatever Divine teaching has
reached our race has reached it through man himself ;
taking him, at each stage, just as he is, with all his
limitations, his ignorance, his varying moral stages ;
acting upon him, in fact, in accordance with his
receptive faculty. It has reached him, not to supply
him with supernatural knowledge, but as a reinforce-
ment of his inner life, a heightening of its quality.
This, which we see in the Old Testament, is exactly
what we find in the New. The New Testament is
just as full of the purely human elements as we find
to exist in the Old. A more accurate research is
continually exploding myths as to its formation and
its contents. One of the latest of these, still strongly
contended for by influential writers, is as to the
absolutely unanimous apostolic testimony on the
person and work of Christ. There is no such unan-
imity. The unique phenomenon of Jesus is a life
fact which brought about in those who first looked
upon it an adoring bewilderment and a vast variety
of interpretation. The actual apostles of the Master,
those who companied with Him in His earthly
career, had one view. What it was is shown us by
21
The Life of the Soul
their conduct and teaching. They dwelt in
Jerusalem, were the pillars of the Jerusalem Church.
That Church, under their influence, was the chief
opponent of St. Paul. It was from Jerusalem that
the emissaries came who dogged his footsteps in
Galatia and elsewhere, denouncing him as a false
apostle, and against whom his own fiercest words
were written. It has recently been contended that
the differences here were slight, having affair only
with matters of ecclesiastical procedure. Let anyone
who thinks so read over again the apostle's letter
to the Galatians. It is evident the writer does not
think so. The difference to him is vital ; is an
affair of his status as an apostle, of the validity of his
commission, of the reality or non-reality of the
Gospel he preached. We see the vast gulf that
divided the two schools. The one at Jerusalem held
the Church to be a revised Judaism, the Christ a
Messiah of the Jews, that the Christian salvation was
a Jewish salvation. St. Paul, on the contrary, saw
in Christ the breaker of the wall of partition, the
Saviour, not of a race, but of a world. It is a
tolerably wide distinction.
Was, then, the one apostle all right, and the others
all wrong ? Not at all. St. Paul was full of ideas
that have long since been outgrown. His thought
about the world and the human race was according
to the ideas , the knowledge of his time. His universe
was geo-centric, of the pre-Copernican order. A
School Board teacher of to-day, by a series of
elementary lessons, would have revolutionised his
ideas about world history and human history. Could
he come amongst us again, in this twentieth century,
he would be the first to recognise that the Christianity
22
Christianity and Life
he preached, so far as it related itself to scientific
knowledge, would require a complete re-setting.
How far would that re-setting have gone ? It is
here, indeed, we come upon the question of questions,
that of the relation of Christianity to life. It is,
we venture to say, when we confront fairly that
question — confront it in the light of all the knowledge
that has since come to us — that we find the solution
of all our Biblical difficulties ; difiiculties both of the
Old Testament and the New.
The Bible, from first to last, is nothing less than the
story of evolution ; of the evolution of the spiritual
life in man. All the evidence goes to show that this
story is full of a divine, we will say, of a super-
natural element. But the supernatural is of a
different order, working in another way, from that
which an earlier stage conceived. When Matthew
Arnold said, " Miracles do not happen," he would
have brought the saying nearer to accuracy if he had
said, " The miracles recorded by rabbis and
monkish chroniclers do not happen." We know
the part which the mythopoeic faculty has played in
all the world's sacred books. When, for instance,
the modern rationalist, commenting on the birth
and other miracle stories of the Gospels, reminds us
of similar histories elsewhere — of the account given
by Suetonius of the birth of Augustus as son of
Apollo ; of the immaculate conception of Buddha
from Maya ; of Bacah in Yucatan, as after his death,
rising after three days and ascending to heaven ;
of the resurrection of the slain Dionysus, and his
festival in spring ; and of the Scandmavian Baldur
as rising again after forty days — when our rationalist
recounts all this, we acknowledge his right to be
23
The Life of the Soul
heard. There are mythologies in all the early faiths,
and they are not absent from the Bible. They arise
out of a common mental state ; they are the product
of a common stage in mental evolution. It is
assuredly not from them we get our belief in the
supernatural, the supernatural in the Bible and in
Christianity.
Where, then, and what, is this supernatural ? We
find it in the very last place where some of our con-
servative brethren would go to look for it— in the
evolution of life, and, above all, of the spiritual life.
That evolution is the ultimate fact of world move-
ment, the one and only way of it, should be suffi-
ciently evident to anyone who will take the trouble
to look for a moment into himself, and take note of
what he finds there. Let him ask how any idea
forms Itself in his mind. It shall be any idea you
choose, whether in architecture, or painting, or music,
or some simple household subject. It works, we say,
always in one way — from below upwards. It begins
in a dimness, a confusion, a nebula ; and from that
it moves towards clearness, towards articulation,
towards completeness. It begins, in short, as a
mental foetus going through various foetal stages, till
it is ready to bring to the birth. Always from below
up, from confusion to order. That is how every-
thing begins, and how everything goes on. Now
this, which happens in you, has happened to the
world. It has been that order for the soul of man.
That it is a divine, supernatural order is shown from
the fact that the evolution has always worked in one
direction ; the upward direction ; the lower to some-
thing higher ; the crude good to the succeeding
better. How is it that things did not stand still,
24
Christianity and Life
or that moving they should have moved upwards
rather than downwards ? That is where direction
comes in ; where God comes in. Darwin, and still
more the later evolutionists, saw this. The one
thing they could not explain on any naturalistic
hypothesis, was in variation ; in the fact that things
should start changing, and changing upwards. Why
should life beget a better life ? There is no answer,
except in a power behind life, greatei than its present
expressions, a power which is moving it to greater
ends.
And this is the miraculous as we now know ; it is
the upward push of life to some new, nobler mani-
festation. No force of mere mechanism can explain
it. It is a result of energy from another sphere.
And this which we find in nature, which a De Vries
exhibits to us in botany, is exhibited on its
grandest scale on the field of history, and, above
all, in that history which the Bible discloses to
us. We see there a Bedouin tribe from the
Arabian desert, whose god is one of many, a tribal,
hill god, brought through the ages to a sense of an
all holy, righteous, redeeming God. We see this
people producing out of the old savage, warrior caste
men of another mould, prophets of a new order, men
willing to sacrifice their all for the true and the good.
And, finally, in the New Testament time, we have a
birth as truly miraculous as that of the beginning
of life on the earth, as the appearance on it of the first
man ; that truly of a Beginner, the First Born of
many brethren. You need no birth mythologies to
maintain the supernaturalness of Christ. It is
there in Him ; in His word, His life. And it is
precisely because He represents a new, unique order
25
The Life of the Soul
of being ; because He exhibits a fresh spiritual order
of life, that we find explanation of those varying
accounts of Him which have so puzzled the later
interpreters. If half a dozen grades of intellect
give half a dozen descriptions of a beetle, what shall
we expect of half a dozen men, all various in
temperament, in brain power — call them apostles,
evangelists, or what you will — who endeavour to
explain to us the miracle of Jesus ! And yet amid
all those varieties of statement — the statements of
the synoptists, of the Johannine tradition, of the
Jerusalem school, of St. Paul himself — we find one
startling, all-suggestive unity. Their varying
points of view lead all back to one centre ; to the
feeling that in Jesus was a new life, a life which He
had communicated to themselves. The Fourth
Gospel expresses it in those wonderful words : ** I
am come that they might have life, and have it more
abundantly." St. Paul's gospel is essentially that
of a higher life that had come into and mastered his
own ; the sense of Christ being born in him the hope
of glory, the knowledge that the life he lived was no
longer his own, but an existence, dominated in its
inmost recesses by One who " loved him and had
given Himself for him." And the synoptic Gospels
are the exhibition of what that life was, revealed in a
teaching which has revolutionised the world, in a
career of spotless beauty, of completest sacrifice.
With all this before us how, in this twentieth
century, does Christianity stand ; how stands revela-
tion ? The two things stand indeed, as we have seen,
in a vastly different framework from that presented
by the old, the pre-scientific ages. But the chief
difference between them is that, whereas the old
26
Christianity and Life
conceptions have been proved false and untrust-
worthy, the newer one has placed both Christianity
and revelation on a foundation that is for ever im-
pregnable. It is the spiritual application of what
all science is teaching. Evolution is the doctrine of
a perpetual new creation. Christianity is the doc-
trine of new creatures in Christ Jesus. The Bible
revelation is seen as that of the Divine Idea ex-
pressing itself in humanity ; showing there first in
lowly forms, in childish conceptions, but rising ever
into greater clearness, until in Christ we see it
blazing forth as that of a redeeming purpose, whose
end is in the perfecting of man, his body, soul and
spirit. And thus we have in Christianity an eternal
Gospel, since it is the Gospel of an eternal life.
27
Ill
EQUIVALENTS IN RELIGION
HoFFDiNG, in his " Philosophy of Religion,'* has
an arresting utterance which may serve as an intro-
duction to what we have here to say. ** We cannot,"
he observes, " live on residues. Protestantism is a
residue, and this is even truer of Pietism and Rational-
ism. But neither can we live on substitutes. We
must have equivalents. And the great question here
is whether equivalents are possible." The problem
which Hoffding here propounds is one which is
everywhere profoundly exercising the modern mind.
It is stated even more strongly, and much more
despairingly, by Maeterlinck, where he says : " Until
now men passed from a crumbling temple into one
that was building ; they left one religion to enter
another. Whereas we are abandoning ours to go
nowhither. That is the new phenomenon, with
unknown consequences, wherein we live." In both
these passages the general idea is that, so far as
religion is concerned, we have lost something ; that
the modern soul has had certain possessions taken
out of it that used to belong there. The question
that remains is as to the value of what has gone ;
and whether we have discovered anything as good
to put in its place.
It may be useful here, following Hoffding's line, to
ask what it was that Protestantism offered in place of
28
Equivalents in Religion
the Romanism which it had left, and then to see how
in still later developments, this profit and loss account
has been balanced. The grand outstanding feature
of Catholicism, in the day of its supremacy — and it
was a grand, yes, a magnificent feature — was that it
proposed of itself to fill and satisfy the entire mind
and soul of man. It gave a religious account of life
and of the universe which had the merit of com-
pleteness. Its creed embraced the beginning and the
end of things, and all that was between. The
" Summa " of Aquinas, which even to-day is regarded
by Rome as the standing exposition of its doctrine,
contained all the science and philosophy of the time.
That was for the intellect ; and it sufficed then for
its needs. But that was only a part, a small part,
of the appeal. The mediaeval man did not want
much in the way of abstract thinking. His highway
of approach was through the senses, and Rome has
always known that road well. By her buildings,
her pictures, her images, her processions, her music,
her incense, she entered all the gates of the soul.
The eye, the ear, the feeling of movement, the very
sense of smell, all were assailed ; made the captive
of her charms. Even God Himself was materialised.
In the tremendous ceremony of the Mass she
presented to the awestruck multitude what she
declared to be God — God to be seen, handled, tasted.
Her very doctrine was a material presentation, an
appeal to the senses. Heaven and hell were places
close at hand, one above, the other beneath. Both
were stocked with the things they saw and felt
around them. Heaven was a palace and a summer
garden ; hell a torture-dungeon of the same sort as
their own, only much worse. When you add to this
29
The Life of the Soul
Rome's far-reaching Church discipline, and her
confessional system, which probed the secret thoughts
of the heart, you have here a rehgion which might
fairly claim to cover the whole of life.
We have now to ask how the early Protestantism,
in its breach with Catholicism, offered an equivalent.
Let us remember, first of all, that the breach was a
very partial one. The Reformers, setting up
business on their own account, took over a large
proportion of the Romanist stock-in-trade. Their
views of creation, of Biblical inspiration, of the
Trinity, of heaven and hell, of the fall and human
depravity, of the Atonement, of election and pre-
destination, were largely those of the old faith.
Luther and Calvin were in these matters the heirs
of Augustine. The difference between the systems
lay, for one thing, in the great gap which Protestant-
ism, of set purpose, had left open in that region,
which Rome had so lavishly occupied, the region of
the senses. The worship of the Reformed congre-
gations was, as we know, of the severest simplicity.
The old buildings had been stripped of ornament,
the new ones were bare conventicles. There was the
pulpit, the black-gowned preacher, the open Bible,
the psalm, the preached Word. That, so far as the
outward was concerned, was all. It was enough,
and more than enough, for those on whom the
reformed doctrine had taken genuine hold, but there
is no question that for the general, uninformed
multitude the loss of the outside ceremonial was
severely felt. In the Anglican homily on " The
Place and Time of Prayer," there is quoted the
remark of a woman to a neighbour, which expresses
what was doubtless a widely-spread feeling among
30
Equivalents in Religion
the masses : " Alas ! gossip, what shall we do now
at church since all the saints are taken away, since
all the goodly sights we were wont to see are gone,
since we cannot hear like piping, singing, chanting,
and playing upon organs that we had before ? "
That there was here a loss on a certain side of the
religious hfe, especially in its relation to the less
thoughtful of the community, need hardly be
questioned. That Protestantism has since recognised
the fact is shown in the efforts now made among all
its Churches, by architecture, by music, and in other
ways, to give a place to the senses in its religious
appeal. And it will do more in that direction yet.
The senses are as much of God as the intellect. They
are a part of His kingdom in man, meant to be
trained and used for glorious issues in His service.
All this notwithstanding, it is safe to say that
early Protestantism, in the sphere of its spiritual
operation, offered more than an equivalent to
Catholicism as a religious force. If we regard the
religious value as a value for character, for the
making of life, we have only to examine its results
here to be assured of this. Amongst its adherents
it removed the priest, to put in his place an awakened
conscience and the sense of the immediate presence
of God. To the reformer, the Puritan, the unseen
was the true real. These men walked in a light
which revealed, and which also searched. They
felt their inmost soul as open and naked before Him
with whom they had to do. Their faith put a
supreme value on the individual. And that idea
was the germ of a whole new development. It meant,
for one thing, freedom. The man, responsible to
God for his character, for the betterment of his
31
The Life of the Soul
nature, must, to that end, have room to grow in,
Hberty to seek the truth, and be estabUshed in it.
Cut loose from the priest, he must exercise his own
judgment, stand on his own feet. What that has
meant for the race the subsequent history of the
Protestant nations has sufficiently revealed. The
progress of the world has been the progress of these
peoples. It is the progress of Germany, of Great
Britain, of the United States, of Canada, of the
English-speaking races. The movement of other
nations has been the following of their lead. On the
whole. Protestantism, as a system of life, has shown
a more than full equivalent for what it has lost.
There opens here, however, another chapter.
The early Protestantism, in common with the
Catholicism from which it came out, possessed
among its motive powers a host of ideas and beliefs
which modern science and criticism have tended to
dissipate. The Copernican astronomy uprooted some
of the deepest religious conceptions. Melanchthon
felt all this when he denounced the views of Coper-
nicus as an impious and dangerous heresy. The
doctrine that our earth, which had been regarded as
the centre of things, with heaven above, and hell
beneath, was simply the minor planet of a minor star,
lost in an immensity of other worlds, was a staggerer
to faith. Where was heaven now ? Where hell ?
There was no longer an " up " and a " down."
To go up in England and in Australia, would be to
move in opposite directions. Then came geology,
which revolutionised time as astronomy had
revolutionised space. It put back the world's
existence, from the few thousand years of the old
belief, back to immeasurable seons. Evolution
32
Equivalents in Religion
finished the process by giving us a doctrine of man,
his origin and history, frankly at issue with that of
the old theology. All this has brought religion to
the cross roads. It is in the presence of a revolution,
which, throughout Christendom, has brought masses of
people, of all ranks, outside its organisations. They
have, as Maeterlinck puts it, left the old temple,
with no new one ready to receive them.
Observe now what has happened. Amongst the
intellectuals the first result of the new teaching was
a rebound to scientific materialism. The super-
natural was gone, and was to be replaced by
naturalism. The world we live in was the only world
we knew. We were under a reign of matter and
force, and had to make our terms with that. Our
business was to master the facts around us, to
ascertain the laws of them, and to live accordingly.
But the few decades which have passed since the
starting of this regime have served to prove its
utter inadequacy as an equivalent for the old faith.
It was ascertained that it ignored the most clamant
needs of the soul. In France we see intellectuals
like Brunetiere, Huysmans, Bourget, Coppee, going
over to Catholicism, because they were convinced of
" the utter bankruptcy of science," as of itself an
inspirer of life. Meantime, in Germany and amongst
other Continental peoples, we see the working classes,
embracing an anti-Christian Socialism, as for them
the one saving faith.
It is here worth noting — the point is, indeed, to
us one of profound significance — that the way in
which Rome won her victories among the rude
peoples of the dark ages, is, with a difference, the
very way in which Socialism is gaining the masses
33
The Life of the Soul
in modern Europe. It is by the appeal to the senses.
Rome pushed her rehgion by materiahsing it. She
offered it through the eye and the ear ; through
hopes and fears of physical pleasures and pains.
True, she had something higher behind that, and
here is the difference between her faith and that of
the Socialist. The prophets of the latter cult appeal
to the senses and the appetites as the beginning and
the end. The " things behind," the invisibles
of dogmatic religion they declare are an illusion.
Their followers are to concentrate on the only real
things ; the goods of the present life ; the things
they can see, hear, taste, touch and handle. The one
object of their striving is to have all these good
things properly shared up. The world of the present
life is the cake, of which some few are getting an
inordinate slice. Let there be a redistribution,
by which everyone shall have his mouthful, and the
human problem is solved.
This is what is proposed, and accepted by millions
of working men, as the equivalent for the old faith,
the old religion. It is safe to say that only the
intense absorption of both leaders and followers in
the business of getting there, of realising their
programme, can explain the blindness which it
exhibits to life's actual facts. Do these people
suppose that a sufficiency — nay, an utmost surfeit —
of this world's goods can bring content and happiness
to man ? The briefest glance at the classes who
possess these things should prove to them the con-
trary. To be well fed, to be well leisured, to be well
amused ; is that all ? The moment our Socialists
reached that position would be the moment of their
disillusion. For it is to reckon without the human
34
Equivalents in Religion
position, without the human soul. For man,
however well fed, cannot get away from the infinite,
from the eternal. Whatever his creed, or no creed,
these surround him, and claim their part in him.
He cannot get away from the question, '' What
am I, whence came I, whither go I ? " He cannot
get away from the immense pressures of conscience,
of the moral sense, of sin, of suffering, of bereave-
ment, of death. He cannot get away from the
pressure of the ideals which haunt him, ideals which
spring out of the very nature of his soul. He cannot
get away from the pursuit of happiness, nor from
the fact that happiness is found, not in the senses nor
the appetites, but in a spiritual condition. When
Socialism has won its victories it will then meet its
problem, and find that it can be solved in only
one way. It will verify once more that word of
TertuUian : " Wherever the soul comes to itself,
as out of a surfeit, or a sleep, or a sickness, and attains
something of its natural soundness, it speaks of God."
The question remains, Have we to-day, visible to
us, an equivalent for all the losses which religion,
which Christianity, in the movements we have
sketched, appears to have sustained ? One might
first ask, " Do we need equivalents ? Are not many
of the things we call losses really gains ? " Have
we lost anything worth keeping ? We do not beheve
it. In the physical world no atom of matter or force
is ever destroyed, and that obtains, be sure, in
deeper things. All of spiritual power that has ever
been in the world is here now. No true prayer ever
uttered, no noble deed, no sacrifice, no beautiful life,
no soul's aspiration, no effort of love, no gain of
purity, but is, in its essence, everlasting, ever-
35
The Life of the Soul
working. All these beautiful inner things are now
in our world, surrounding us, working upon us,
moving forces of the universal redemption.
And, finally, we have Christ, His life and teaching,
to which both the Church and the world will have to
come back. We remember here Lessing's word :
" Christianity has been tried for eighteen centuries,
while the religion of Christ has yet to be tried."
All our apparent losses will be more than made up
if they bring us back to Him. Consider His teaching
and life ; the things He cared for ; and contrast them
with the fussy worries of the after theology ! He
shows no concern about the age of the world, or the
age of man ; He does not trouble about astronomy
or geology, as in any way affecting the spiritual
Hfe. The creeds are full of difficulties which are not
His difficulties. The difference between His teaching
and that both of Rome and of the Socialists is that
whereas they materialise the spiritual, He spirit-
uahsed the material. His teaching is full of the
material, but always to show its spiritual meaning
and purpose. His business is the secret of the true
life — about setting man's soul right with itself and
with its Origin ; to base life upon the only true
foundations, upon holiness, truth, and love. And
when all the systems, theological, scientific.
Socialistic, have run their course and had their day,
it is to that point, and nowhere else, the weary spirits
of men will come, to find their rest.
36
IV
OF SEEKING AND FINDING
A WATCHER of the skies, looking down upon our
movements on this earth, might describe us as a
world of seekers. And he would not be far out.
Every living thing is engaged on a perpetual search.
The flowers, the trees seek for air and light. The
animals, small and great, are on an incessant quest
for food. And ourselves : every sense, every faculty
in us, is busy on this one thing. Our eye waits for
vision, our ear for sounds, our appetite for its
satisfaction. Every emotion is a search. Revenge
is on the trail for its victim ; curiosity hunts for
news ; science hunts for facts ; love is eager for
answering love. And if our watcher carried his
observations still further, and investigated our
findings, he would see that his first description
still answered. For our finds end always in a further
search. They are never ends but beginnings. They
serve only to feed our insatiable appetite for seeking.
The whole business is a deep one ; deeper than any
of us know. Indeed, we might be designated as
blind seekers, for we are mainly after what we cannot
see. Neither in our seeking nor our finding do we
ever fully comprehend what we are after. The one
thing we know here is that all the waters of these
varied fountains never quench our thirst. We are
as eager at the end as at the beginning. Let every
37
The Life of the Soul
visible tangible object of desire be attained ; it
is only to start us on a vaster longing. The infinity
of man is found in the infinitude of his desire.
There have been grim philosophers who have
fastened on this feature of life as the proof of its
futility, as the ground of pessimism. Schopenhauer
makes it one of his leading arguments. Our desires,
our seekings, he says, torture us, by their restless
activity ; their satisfaction is only a satiety, and so
the circle of misery is complete. We deny both the
statement and the inference. Let anyone examine
his own experience. Have we found the search a
painful thing ? Has the student found it so in his
quest for knowledge ; or the lover as he waits and
works for the answering love ? The gold seeker
as he prospects, as he toils with pick and shovel,
is a merry fellow. He enjoys the quest though the
find may be long deferred. The pleasure of the
chase is more in the chase than the fox brush at the
end. And the seeking by no means ends in the find-
ing. It has results, values of its own which are to
be reckoned in, of which we shall have more to say
later. The philosophy of seeking and finding, if we
only carry it deep enough, will come out not as a
pessimistic but as a very optimistic philosophy.
Let us look first into this question of seeking.
On a long sea voyage one gets sometimes a sinister
experience which may serve as illustration for what
we have here to say. Looking out from the stern
of the ship one sees sometimes the flash of a solitary
fin, that lifts itself for a moment above the waves
and then disappears. It is a shark that is following
us. Does it get the scent of our flesh there ? Has
it intuition of any sick person aboard whose body
38
of Seeking and Finding
may by and by be dropped into the deep ? It is
hopeful, perhaps, that you may drop over ! Suppos-
ing you did, it would probably find you. But what
would it find? The answer is hardly flattering
to our self-esteem. You may be a person of ability,
of wealth, of political or social ambitions, of high
spiritual aspiration. Would it find any of that ?
It would find simply an edible, a gorge of flesh,
which is what it is after. Yet all these other things,
or some of them, are in you, are you. But it finds
what it seeks, the lowest of you, and that because
it has no power of seeking anything else. If instead
of this hungry monster a friend had found you, how
different his finding ! He would have met and
rejoiced in your intelligence, your affection, your
soul. To find the best things, we need, it is evident,
a power of seeking. It is the developing of this
power, the lifting it to its highest terms, that
makes all the difference to life. In the things around
us, the humblest-seeming, all manner of treasures are
locked up. We may imagine we have found them,
are possessed of them, and we have found no more
of them than the shark who makes a meal of us.
It is when we consider this side of the matter that
many things which are otherwise dark become clearer
to us. Take, for instance, man's quest of truth,
above all of religious truth. Why is it, we ask, that
more has not been revealed, that the oracle re-
mains so dumb, that questions of such importance
are left in such a haze of doubt ? Age after age
the cry has gone up for light, for the clear heavenly
utterance that would dispel for ever our dubieties.
And there is neither light nor voice. We progress
into deeper uncertainties. What our fathers held
39
The Life of the Soul
to be the surest evidence, the indubitable note from
above, reveals to the critical investigation of our
time its lamentable lack of proof. Our only certainty
is that things are uncertain. Renan said, and we
believe it, that religion would survive all its illusions.
But meantime the discovery of our illusions is a most
depressing business. Why is it that things are so ;
that the Bible is so different from what the fathers
took it to be ; that Church dogma is so easily, so
fatally assailed ? Are we shut up here to a pessi-
mistic conclusion ; to a belief in the divine in-
difference ; that the human quest and aspiration are
all a futility ! Our pessimism here arises from our
habit of looking at the matter from the wrong end.
We fail to see that the spiritual education of the race
has been so far an education mainly of its faculty
of search. To disclose all would be to stop the
development of the soul. What it needs above all
else is the cult of its seeking power. In its earlier
stage, and even in its present stage, it has no more
faculty of finding than has the shark in pursuit of
its prey. Man hankers after the lower things, even
the lower religious things, and the " no " with which
his research is so persistently met is the process by
which he is being trained to understand his universe,
by which his search power is being raised to the degree
in which the highest in the universe may unfold its
secret. While we are in the shark stage we seek as
the shark does, and for the shark objects. We shall
reach the revelation when we are equal to it.
The world is slowly beginning to understand
the cosmic way of dealing with us. Science here has
proved itself a better learner than theology. In the
early ages theology posed as the recipient of all sorts
40
of Seeking and Finding
•of truths let down from heaven. It was sure of its
fact ; sure, before it had troubled to examine it —
to find whether it was fact. The advent of genuine
science was the advent of a new method. And the
irony of the thing here is that while ecclesiasticism
was declaring itself to be the one revealer of the divine
way, it was left for science to show that its way was
heaven's way, while the theologic way was of the
earth, earthy. It was science that grasped the
cosmic idea ; the idea that the celestial reticence
was to teach man the true seeking ; to educate his
eye, his ear, his thought. It was science which found
that in proportion as this culture went on, in
that proportion the world secrets opened, the
universe became intelligible. To-day, happily,
theology is now itself on the road which science
opened, and is trying to discover truth in the only
way it can be discovered ; not by the noisy shoutings
of Church councils, not by the so-called infallible
dicta of popes, but by patient, humble research.
When w^e are once on this, the right road of
seeking, it is wonderful how things open to us. To
him that hath is given ; to him that hath the trained
faculty, the opened eye. We speak often of accidental
discoveries, of how men searching for one thing find
another. Madame Curie was not looking for radium
when she found it. The scientist who found bromine
was experimenting with sea water, expecting by
passing chlorine gas through it he would get iodine.
What he got was not iodme but bromine. Marconi
discovered wireless telegraphy in a similar haphazard
way. Would Newton have found out gravitation
had the apple not fallen from the tree ? But there
are really no accidents here. Millions of apples
41
The Life of the Soul
had fallen from trees the ages through, and nobody
thought of gravitation. It took a Newton to make
that use of the apple. And all these other seemingly
accidental discoveries ; what is the real story of
them ? It is in every instance that of trained minds
concentrated on groups of facts, facts which, as one
after another they leaped into view, flashed back
their secret to the insight which beheld them. Call
them accidents if you will, but they are accidents
which never happen to bungling seekers.
The history of illusion — and what a history that
is — is the story of bad seeking. Erasmus tells a
funny story of a group of people in England who were
watching a sunset. Suddenly a wag amongst them
exclaimed : " Do you see that great dragon there,
with fiery tail and flaming eyes ? " People strained
their eyes. ** I see it," said one ; " and I," said
another, not to be outdone. Soon the report of the
awful portent was spread over the country, causing
widest consternation. It is so easy for people to see
what they want to see. That is the origin of innu-
merable miracle stories. Before a saint can be
introduced to the Roman Calendar, a certain quan-
tity of miracles have to be credited to him. And
they are readily forthcoming. The wonder stories
of Francis of Assisi, as recorded by Bonaventura,
are astonishing enough. We are very sure they would
not have happened, or been recorded, had he lived
in our time. Our world is saturated with the super-
natural, but it is of a different sort from that recorded
by monkish chroniclers.
Thus far, we have been speaking, and perhaps
at too great length, of seeking on its purely intellec-
tual side. But there is another seeking, another
42
of Seeking and Finding
training of research, of even deeper importance than
that of the reason. A man's spiritual education may
be spoken of as a training in the proper estimation of
values. We all begin with the shark. Like him we
seek for something to eat. And we go on from that.
As life progresses all the senses offers their values.
And there are multitudes who seek and find little
value in anything else. A Roman epicure com-
mitted suicide because his sensual excesses had
reduced his fortune to eighty thousand pounds.
He found life no longer worth living with so small
a provision for his appetites. But where the soul is
awake, where it has opened itself to the divine invita-
tions that reach it, new standards of value arise.
It finds new objects of search. It finds a new value
in the world around it. As the real contents of a
man are not discernible by a shark, so the real
qualities of things are infinitely beyond the unseeing
eye. The enlightened mind is filled with reverence,
with wondering awe, in presence of the humblest
objects around it. Matter, in the view of modern
science, is becoming an intensely spiritual thing.
Behind the stone, the flower — within them we may
say — are wonders beyond words.
Research here is a growing aid to faith. Suppos-
ing that inquiry had shown the universe as inferior
to what the early ignorance had conceived of it !
But, on the contrary, it shows it as ever more wonder-
ful, fuller of grandeur, mind, and power. And if
this be so on the material side, can we suppose that
research into the moral, the spiritual, will have any
different result ? Faith and knowledge go here
hand in hand. The revelation is always of something
greater than we knew before. If there is infinite
43
The Life of the Soul
power, can we doubt that the spiritual correlatives
of power, that love, that holiness, are less than
infinite ? The soul as it grows, becomes ever more
sure of this, engages with an ever increasing ardour
in the search for the highest good. It seeks it,
and finds it, in God ; it seeks and finds it m man.
It seeks it in all life's experiences, the darkest not
excepted. Behind pain and loss and grief it is sure
of a good concealed. Christ's Calvary proved that,
and man's Calvary holds always a like treasure.
Finally it unites itself, in indissoluble bonds, with
the ultimate Good, and says with a Kempis : " I
would rather be poor for Thy sake than rich without
Thee. I choose rather to be a pilgrim with Thee
on the earth than without Thee to possess heaven.
For where Thou art there is heaven ; but where
Thou art not is death and hell." Here, now, and in
all worlds, is the true seeking and the true findmg.
44
V
THE LIVING PAST
RiTSCHL, the German theologian, who has enriched
religious thought in so many directions, had a curious
animus against metaphysics. They had done so
much, he said, to misrepresent and to disparage
Christianity. Undoubtedly he had good grounds
for that opinion. There have been bad metaphysics
and especially bad Christian metaphysics. But to
condemn metaphysics as a whole is like condemning
the action of the heart. They are in us, and we
cannot get on without them. We all of us carry
a metaphysician inside us — of varying qualities.
To the extent in which we are thinkers, we find our-
selves facing questions which lie behind the visible ;
we want to know the meaning of life, the meaning of
ourselves ; we want, if w^e can, to get into contact
with the ultimate realities. One of these final ques-
tions is as to the idea of time, and of our relation
to it. Bergson has of late been shaking up all our
notions on that subject ; has been exposing the
incurably bad habits which philosophy for ages
has been cultivating in its discussion of the theme.
We do not propose here to deal with the special
points which he raises, but rather to deal with the
illusion which we have all been cherishing — that of
the dead-and-goneness of the past. We speak and
think continually of the past as something finished ;
45
The Life of the Soul
of the present as the only alive. There is a sense,
of course, in which that is true. There is all the
difference between yesterday and to-day. But it
is only a very partial truth. If the past is dead, it
is, like all other kinds of death, by no means an
extinction. If the past dies, it dies to rise again,
in another form, but a form which is mighty and
vital. We propose here to see in various directions
how this truth is brought home to us.
We have spoken of the present. We say often it
is the one thing we possess. But has it occurred to
us that we should know no present apart from the
past ; that the present contains the past as an
essential part of it ? At this moment we are feeling
things ; seeing things. But we should at this
moment never see or feel anything were it not for the
moments before. A perception which was alive only
in this moment would be no perception. The tree
we see would be no tree were it not that previous
perceptions had given us the idea of a tree. Every-
thing we look at is to us what it is through the
memory we retain of previous seeings with which
this moment's view is connected. The actual
moment would be for us the barest edge of sensation
were it not for all the past moments which our
consciousness brings into it. This, which is true of
seeing, is not less true of all other operations of the
senses. Take that, for instance, of hearing. What
are you doing when you enjoy your Mozart or
Beethoven ? If you had only what you call the
living present, you would get none of their music.
The sound you hear conveys nothing apart from the
sound you have just heard. It is the passage from
that which has been to that which is, the movement,
46
The Living Past
that is, of the music from one phrase to another —
one heard, the other remembered — that gives the
growing harmony all its meaning. It is so on every
side of consciousness. Your joy in meeting your
friend would be no joy if the present meeting were
all. It is the memory of all your past meetings, of
what your consciousness treasures of all your past
intercourse, that gives the significance to this actual
now.
Take another line. You have your body to-day.
When you got up, you washed it and clothed it and
fed it. Here it is, in actual possession ; your eyes,
your ears, your limbs, your entire personality, as you
find it in this year and day of grace. It is an affair
of the present, yet all your past is living in it ; the
past, not only of your actual life since birth, but of
all the ages and aeons since things began. If in all
these measureless spaces behind ; if in all the epochs
of animal and vegetable life, in all the geologic ages,
back to the nebula of the star that started us, one
atom of the material in us had acted differently
from how it did act ; if one cell of the countless
billions of cells and their ancestors that have worked
in us had shown some variation from its ordered
course, you would not have been what you are at this
moment. And this which is true of your physical
formation is not less true of your character, your soul.
Your way of looking at things, of deciding upon
things ; your temperament and disposition ; the
words and deeds that make you esteemed or other-
wise ; what is all this ? We speak of it as partly
inherited, and that is another push of the past inside
you. But when, in addition, we speak of your own
free will ; of your free action as a moral agent, we
47
The Life of the Soul
are still in the same region. It is in the sum of your
past decisions and actions ; in the deeds that have
led to habits, that we seek your present character.
Here again your past has made your present. You
are what you have done.
We think of the past as alive in memory. But
what we actually recollect is only the smallest part
of what is stored there. There are underground
reservoirs, which preserve our story, and where no
detail is lost. What comes to view in recollection
is only a stream from those vast storehouses. There
are moments — they say they come to people in
drowning — when things for years forgotten come
back in minutest detail. There are, in fact, memories
all over us. Think of our automatic actions. We
walk without thinking about it. But there was a
time when walking was a conscious effort ; when
every step needed the full concentration of our
mind and will. What is the meaning of the change ?
It means that the memory has got from our minds
into our limbs. The muscles, the nerves now
recollect for us, and do the walking without troubling
our brains. We walk automatically to-day because
our past initial efforts are living in us now.
The past is a reservoir of incalculable forces.
We have no instruments for measuring its power.
You can make approximate estimates in material
things. Geologists can measure our coal beds and
reckon up their probable output and duration.
Astronomers can offer guesses as to the total energy
of the sun. But who shall figure out for us the
energy of a great action ? The battle of Waterloo
is still acting on all the European destinies. France,
Germany, England, Russia, are all in their present
48
The Living Past
position and policy, feeling its impact. The Ameri-
can War of Independence is vital at this moment
in every American institution, in every phase of
its life, in the soul of every citizen. Said Carlyle to
Emerson as they looked at a church spire, " Christ
died on the Cross, and His death built that church."
If you could estimate in foot-tons the energy which
has gone to the rearing of all the Christian structures
from the first Good Friday till now, you would have
an idea of the merely physical forces that have
streamed out from that death. And what measure
would this be of the moral and spiritual forces which,
streaming from that centre, have wrought in all the
succeeding centuries, and are working here to-day ?
You may imagine the physical forces as diminish-
ing in their operation, in the ratio of their distance.
But the moral energy, as this supreme example
testifies, knows no such law. The power of the Cross
is greater to-day, more widely diffused, than in all
the ages since it was first upreared.
The past, then, is not only something behind us.
It is here within us, moulding our present. It might
seem from this — and it is a view that has often
been taken — that the past is for us a kind of fate ;
that it is our master, exercising a tyranny over us,
involving us in an unescapable web of necessity.
That is one of the mistakes we make when thinking
of the past as dead. But it is not dead ; it is alive,
and because alive it is full of mobility. It changes as
we change. It becomes plastic in our hands. How
mutable it is becomes evident, for one thing, by the
widely different shapes into which historians mould
it. Compare, for instance, the view of the English
Revolution and of Cromwell taken by Clarendon
49
The Life of the Soul
and that of Carlyle in his " Cromwell's Letters and
Speeches." Yet they are reviewing the same period
and the same facts.
But a more decisive evidence of this, and one
that gets closer home to ourselves, is that which
comes from the past in its relation to our personal
life. It changes here, we say, as we change. As
illustrations take two outstanding careers, those
of St. Paul and Luther. The apostle had an
education in rigid Pharisaism ; Luther one in ascetic
Catholicism. These facts of their lives lay behind
them — done, experienced, once for all, you may say,
and not to be reversed. Of themselves these two
pasts would have worked on, in the one case to a
more fanatical Judaism, in the other to more
and more of Romish servitude. They worked that
way to a certain point. But in both personalities,
at the given point, a mighty change was wrought in
the soul. These men had their vision, their new
revelation. And immediately with that inner
change the past had changed. It assumed an
entirely fresh aspect ; from it emerged new motives,
new forces. Instead of a push in the road they had
been travelling, it thrust them in a quite other
direction. Every feature of the past became a reason
for opposition, instead of for quiescence, a reason for
hating where they had loved, for loving where they had
hated. " All things have become new," and the old
has at every point helped in the transformation.
The truth which stands out so vividly in these
great careers is one that is common to us all. It is
the essential truth of religion as an operative power ;
the truth of sin, of repentance, of conversion. The
past of the evil-doer is, in a sense, an irrevocable
50
The Living Past
past. His misdeeds may escape the justice of man ;
they will never escape the justice of things. " Deeds
are what they are, and their consequences will be
what they will be." In a crime the man wronged
comes off always better than the man w^ho wrongs.
We may indeed pity the criminal, for he is at war
with the nature of things. To persist in wrong is
to plunge downwards, a movement where all the
past is a dead weight, which aids at every instant
that netherward progress. But here, too, as the
religious life is perpetually showing us, the miracle
may come in — the miracle of an inner personal
change, with the past as a chief assistant. A light
from above strikes in, a spiritual power, which turns
the past from being a chain that drags down into a
goad which urges. The horror of remorse is the past
in a new aspect. There is in that past as clear a con-
version as in the soul of the repentant man himself.
Its face is changed, its very heart is changed. It is
now all an urgency, a quickening, a power unto
salvation. The demon that dragged down has
becomxc an angel that beckons and that aids.
The view which we have here taken, and which,
we venture to think, has shown itself to be well
founded, gives us an outlook in various directions.
It has shown us that the present is full of the past,
is helpless, powerless without it. But it shows us
also that the past looks also to the present as an
indispensable ally — calls upon it, in fact, incessantly
to do its share in the evolution of life. The past
is never content with itself ; it demands always the
something more. It is here that a mere conserva-
tism, content with a repetition of bygone things,
shows itself so hopelessly wrong. It is contrary to
51
The Life of the Soul
the whole scheme and movement of life. For it is
only when the past is creating a new present that it
fulfils itself. Nowhere is this more clearly visible
than in the history of rehgion ; in its intellectual
history, and in its spiritual history. The former
offers us the deposit of old beliefs, as given in creeds
and dogmatic systems. That they are futile as
preservers intact of those old beliefs, futile however
zealously people subscribe or recite them, is shown
by the fact that modern men never take them in the
sense in which they were written. They read into
them other meanings — meanings dictated by the
larger life that has since flowed in.
On the spiritual side of religion the truth is still
more manifest. To keep here to the old, and the old
only, is always a failure. Rehgion in each succeeding
generation, to make an impression, must contribute
its quota of new. The old is there to help it produce
that. To reproduce instead only itself would be to
contradict the law of life. Take, as a modern
instance, the story of Methodism. Wesley's success
lay in that, while full of the old, he superadded the
new. To a lifeless orthodoxy, sunk in the apathy of
its own forms, he brought the elan of a fresh spirit,
a spirit that broke through convention, that defied
the censures of the current respectability, that ran
its hot metal into the channels that best suited it.
Modern Methodism has reached a standstill because
it has forgotten the lesson of its founder, forgotten
in the very effort to follow him. It has kept on re-
producing the past, forgetting that the past is there
always to create something beyond itself. It keeps its
old forms, whereas its leader's method was to break
forms when better ones were to be had. It aims at
52
The Living Past
the decorum, at the convention which he despised.
When it regains his initiative, his daring— when, Hke
him, it takes de I'audace, de Vaudacc et toujours de
I'audace for its motto, it will reproduce his victories.
We have throughout spoken here of the past as
exhibiting an endless changefulness, an " eternal
flux," as Heraclitus puts it. There is one aspect of
it, however, where this law does not hold. We
refer to the qualities of things. We see here a gleam
as of eternity showing through. It is so in material
objects. Through all the ages water goes on acting
in the same way ; wood continues to burn, granite
to exhibit its stubborn hardness. We come to trust
these qualities as faithful servants that never deceive
us. And the same is true of actions. A deed of
kindness, of unselfish sacrifice in the fifth century
creates in us the same moral emotion as a similar one
in the twentieth. The good is eternal. And as the
ages progress, it is more and more evidently coming to
its own. The evil by its nature is self-destructive. By
its nature it means a loss of vitality, a failure to hold
with life's upward movement. Its end seems to lie
in a dislocation of itself, a return to the primal stuff
out of which a fresh and better start will be made.
The past, as we have viewed it, shows us one of
those invisibles out of which our life is made. We
are through and through creatures of the invisible,
which forms us, rules us, daily recreates us. We speak
of it as dead, yet we see it to be alive. There is,
indeed, no death. What we call by that name is
another form of that endless activity in which our
being is immersed — an activity which will take care
that no element of us, whether body, soul, or spirit,
shall ever be destroyed.
53
VI
OF DEAD PERFECTIONS
Our readers, many of them at least, are doubtless
familiar with De Quincey's delightful essay on the
stage-coach, where he describes that British institu-
tion at the height of its glory. It is the time of
the Peninsular War, when news of Wellington's
victories over Napoleon's marshals kept the nation
in a state of delirious enthusiasm. De Quincey
pictures a ride from London to the North on a coach
which bears with it the tidings of Talavera. The
coach, ablaze with colours and decorations, with
driver and guard in full uniform as bearers of his
Majesty's mail, as it tears along the perfect roads,
its superb team of bloods doing their twelve miles
an hour, its passengers hurraying, its horn splitting
the air with its joyous blast, is to all and sundry, peer
and peasant alike, the one centre of interest. It
carries the news which makes the heart of England
throb ; it is the bond which unites city and country,
the teeming metropolis and the remotest hamlet of
the border. It is an institution of which the country
is proud ; and it is something to be proud of. A long
evolution had developed it, had developed the horse
flesh in front of it, the coachman who handled the
perfect team, the roads along which they thundered,
the system of relays, the country inns, where man
and beast found rest and refreshment.
54
of Dead Perfections
In De Quincey's vivid page we have the descrip-
tion of a perfection, but of a perfection which is dead.
Here is a glory that has vanished. What our fathers
regarded as the high-water mark of locomotion repre-
sents to us almost the nearest approach to standing
still. Imagine our news going at twelve miles an
hour ! In half an hour a modern event has been
flashed over the globe. Now we fly along our iron
roads, and we are beginning to fly through the air.
All this is a parable. For what has happened to
the old coaching system is happening everywhere,
in regions very far removed from coach driving.
We are here, indeed, in the track of what seems a
universal law, one whose operation we do well to
study. We see systems, forms, methods and ideals
of living evolving up to their acme, reaching their
highest stage, and then, when at the height of their
power and dominance, meeting their fate and passing
away. Their fate ; what is it ? To meet that most
formidable adversary of the good — something better.
It is not evil that kills the good ; it is the more good,
the better, the best. Is it not wonderful, all this,
full of strange significance — to see myriads of our
fellows, generation after generation, working within
a given system of things, regarding it as the final
ultimate system, regarding its perfection as the only
possible one ; and then to see, arising out of the
immeasurable unknown, a new something, inchoate,
formless at first, but acquiring swiftly its own
cohesion, symmetry and method ; which by and by
invades, occupies, and finally expels from its ancient
territory that old system which thought itself
eternal ?
And note always that those dead things are so
55
The Life of the Soul
perfect of their kind. The old stage-coach in which
De Quincey rode, with all that belonged to it, was,
in its way, hardly surpassable. And so many other
unsurpassable things have gone. There are extinct
civilisations with arts whose secret we have lost.
We read of a certain early Etruscan brooch repre-
senting three bees poised on a flower which could not
be successfully copied by the foremost artists in Paris,
in spite of repeated attempts. The Egyptians had
a manufacture of colours which remain as brilliant
as ever after four thousand years. Our aniline d3^es
would in that period have disappeared absolutely.
Our winnings under the new system are always at
the cost of something lost. The modern American
has improved his continent out of all recognition
as compared with what it was under the regime
of the Indian tribes. Yet where would the New
Yorker of to-day be by the side of a red man in
tracking his way through a primeval forest, in telling
the time by the sun, in tireless physical movement,
in the endurance of hunger and thirst ?
In its invasion of an old system the new usually
displays itself as all that is clumsy, awkward and
repellent ; and for the reason that the old is perfect
of its kind, while the new is a tyro, a beginner. Your
champion walker as he stiides along is the picture of
grace, ease and power. Behold him as he takes his
first lesson in riding, and you will have the reverse
of that. And yet this lesson is a step forward.
Contrast the wild beauty of the untamed wilder-
ness with the first encroachment of civilisation in
a frontier holding ; the majesty of the primitive
forests, of the limitless prairie, of the mountain
range, with the sheer ugliness of those burnt stumps,
56
of Dead Perfections
of the squalid hut, of the ragged patch of veget-
ables ! Yet this also is a step upward. Along our
every foot of advance we are treading on something
beautiful that our progress kills. On our way to
manhood we lose our childhood. Mothers lose their
babes as much by their living as by their dying. The
little socks, the toys, the photograph of that lovely
four-year-old recall often to a tear-stained face the
remembrance of a childish perfection, with which
the lusty youth or man of affairs now bearing the
name can hardly be identified. The child has died
into the man.
A great deal of the world's pessimism arises
from the fact that men refuse to accept the lesson of
this ; arises from their always clinging to the
decaying old as though there were nothing better
or as good to follow ; from the belief that the
perfection in which they have grown up is the only
perfection ; that its destruction is " the end of all
things." There have been men, both of the ancient
and modern world, who have placed the value of
living in the period of youth and early manhood, in
the age of animal strength and passion. That,
to them, is the perfect life ; and there is nothing to
follow that is worth having. Says Anacreon, the
poet of sensual loves, " When once the appointed
time of youth is past it is better to die than to live."
Mimnermus, called the eighth sage of Greece, in like
manner put everything on youth and pleasure, and
demanded as the extreme limit to die at sixty. And
this note, so astonishing to some of us, has been
re-echoed with painfullest iteration by the moderns.
Benjamin Constant writes in his Journal Intime,
" When the age of passion is over, what else can one
57
The Life of the Soul
desire except to escape from life with the least
possible pain ? " The elder Mill has an almost
exactly similar sentiment. Chateaubriand spent a
day of profound sadness. Asked the reason, he
exclaimed " I am forty." Horace Walpole, when
fifty, writing to Mme. du Deffand said : " Ah, my
friend, after twenty-five what is the rest worth ? "
Are youth and pleasure, then, the only perfections
of life ? Contrast with these melancholy dirges
the manly words of Lucilius, who, writing of his later
years, says : " My soul is full of vigour and rejoices
in having no longer much to do with the body. It
leaps with joy, and holds with me all sorts of discourse
on old age ; it says that it is its flower." The
Roman satirist, born before the dawn of Christianity,
strikes here the essentially true note. He finds
the merely passional vigour, so far from being the
human ultimate, to be an inferior and passing form
of our being ; an introduction to life rather than
life itself.
One might stay to elaborate that side of the theme,
but there is another, and even deeper aspect of it,
which calls for our attention. The problem of moral
evil in our world, so long accepted by theology
as a settled question, has been re-opened in startling
fashion by later researches. Against the doctrine
of man as a fallen being is now arrayed the doctrine
of man as a being who has risen. Science asks us
to think of man as originally a part of the animal
kingdom. He descends from a race for whom the
idea of sin did not exist. He was a perfect animal,
just as a tiger is a perfect animal. A tiger is not
troubled with theology. It is the perfection of
strength, suppleness, animal grace, and of ferocity.
58
of Dead Perfections
It is the ne plus ultra of a certain order of being.
And its perfectness in that kind is not interfered with
by any intruding thoughts from another sphere.
If it has any sense of sin it does not show it. It
slays its victim and drinks its blood with an enjoy-
ment undiminished by any tenet of total depravity
or of eternal punishment. How did man, beginning
on a similar plane, come by his present inward
condition ? How did he come by his conscience,
by his sense of guilt ? Taking into our view all the
facts, so far as they are known to us, the movement
seems to have followed with perfect accuracy the law
we have traced elsewhere, the law of dead perfections.
It is the old story of the champion walker learning
to ride ; of the breaking in upon nature's wild beauty
by the intrusion of civilisation. Man is not to be
the perfect animal merely ; he is to be something
more, to learn a quite new set of lessons, and to fall
into terrible confusions, into bewildering awkward-
ness and ugliness in doing so. He is the village
artist who, because he has talent in him, is sent to
study the classical masters, and there learns with
shame and confusion of face, how his own faculty
stands in presence of these great ones. His sense of
sin is part of his move upward ; it is the result of the
dawning upon him of a higher ideal. John Bunyan,
when plagued with this consciousness, wished he
had been a dog. In his agony what a comfort to
him would have been the thought that his spiritual
turmoil showed how much more he was than a dog ;
how his sin-sense was a saving sense, a sign of his
progress, of his rise in the scale of being ?
Let it here be noted that science in thus profoundly
modifying our doctrine of the Fall, in no wise takes
59
The Life of the Soul
it away ; in no degree diminishes its force. The
" exceeding sinfulness of sin " remains what it was.
But it gives us a new aspect of it, an aspect of hope
in place of despair. Sin remains no longer an
anomaly in the universe, a defeating of the divine
purpose. In the vast scheme of life this phase of it
has all been accounted for, and its limitations set.
It is at most the failure, the blundering of the pupil
in the first stages of a new discipline ; his ugly hut,
his first miserable crop in that new territory of being
which, in all its vastness of resources, is destined
to become his own.
This doctrine of sin, as the early, inevitable stage
of man's progress to a new perfection, has been
attacked on two sides. The old school theologian,
who ignores science ; who, in his devotion to the
Church dogma, is blind and deaf to all that has been
learned in these later years ; who, in the terms of
that dogma, regards mankind in the main as a hope-
lessly doomed race, under the wrath and con-
demnation of God — will, of course, have nothing to
say to it. It is almost amusing to turn from him
to another opponent who, from a quite different
quarter, assails it with an equal strength of language.
Nietzsche, whose philosophy has had so singular
an influence on modern Continental thinking, has
no terms strong enough to indicate his detestation
of that inward movement which has produced the
modern soul. He calls it the " internalisation "
of man, a movement in which what he regards as
the primitive healthy animal instincts, instead of
being, as at first, allowed their full action outwards,
were turned in upon himself ; a movement by which
he became a self-torturer, by which he produced in
60
of Dead Perfections
himself that, to him, baneful phenomenon, " a bad
conscience." He speaks of it as " this secret self-
violation, this artist cruelty, this form of burning
into oneself a will, a criticism, an opposition, a con-
tempt, a ' No,' this dismal work of a voluntarily
divided soul which because it delights to make suffer
makes itself * suffer.' " And his counsel is that we
should reverse the action of evil conscience, and
bring under its ban " all unnatural bents, all
aspirations for another life, all that is hostile to
the senses to the instincts, to nature, to animality ;
in a word, all the old ideals which are, each
and every one, hostile to life and slandering the
world."
We may set this teaching against that of the old
dogma, to answer each other. They are equally
contrary to facts as they are, as we know them to
be. The Nietzsche doctrine is practically an advice
to Bunyan to go back to his doghood ; to the earlier
settlers to leave nature to her wildness. It is to
admit that the whole course of things in human
development is a mistake and that our business is
to reverse it. We are not prepared to admit, on even
Nietzsche's word, that the universe is a mistake, its
way of ordering things a blunder, which this philo-
sopher should have been called in to correct. And
we could not reverse it if we would. Nature never
sounds a retreat. Her word is " forward." There
is nothing that has come to man in his long history
but is there of purpose, part of a plan for his inner
advancement. His old animal perfection was broken
in upon, broken up, to prepare for a new higher
one, to the making of which all his ideals, all his
struggles, all his failings, even are contributories. We
6i
The Life of the Soul
pin our faith to the world's order, even though a
German philosopher may impugn it.
But here we must stay our hand, and at a point
where the theme becomes boundlessly suggestive.
The prospects it opens are almost terrifying in their
vastness. Our present systems, our present ideals,
are they, too, on their way to the same limbo of
dead perfections ? Certainly we see on them all the
touch of change. Who is to be the coming saint ?
Is he to be in the likeness of the past ; the pale
ascetic, nourished in the mediaeval creed, fleeing this
world as evil, despising his humanness as though it
were opposed to divineness, scorning the present
and exalting the future — as though this piece of
eternity were less valuable than any other piece of
eternity — is he to be this kind of man ? That ideal
is passing ; a new one is already taking its place ;
a new human perfection in which holiness is con-
strued as wholeness, which accepts the world as
good, and this moment as good, and labours to make
the best of both ; which takes the whole man into
consideration — his body for strength and beauty,
his mind for widest knowledge, his soul for noblest
emotions. That is a sample of what is coming in
man's most intimate life. And there are other
imminent breakings up of which here we cannot
speak. Are we afraid of these changes ? We
need not be. For in the history of all that has as
yet taken place we see one law at work. The broken
perfection is not lost in being broken. As it dies it
yields its essence, carrying its life into another and
higher form. No good thing is lost. The good in
your system, rehgious or other, will not be lost what-
ever may happen to its form. And the good
62
of Dead Perfections
treasured in your soul will not be lost either. For
ourselves and our systems are linked to a Purpose,
a Love that does not change, to a Perfection which
never dies.
Our little systems have their day ;
They have their day and cease to be ;
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.
63
VII
OUR PERSONAL FORTUNES
" RoMANXE," says Lafcadio Hearn, " is not in
novels, but in lives." And certainly there is in every
individual of us, the meanest and commonest, more
wonderful " copy " than any journalist or novelist
has yet put into print. We have great literatures,
great in character painting, but no literature has yet
explained a man, or any considerable part of him.
Rousseau says of his " Confessions," that " the book
is a piece of comparison for the study of the human
heart, and that it is the only one that exists." It is
certainly exceedingly frank and exceedingly nauseous.
But Rousseau took a vast deal more explaining than
his book offers us. Augustine, Bunyan, Amiel,
Vauven argues, have written copiously about them-
selves, but how far do their writings discover you and
me ? Nowadays people appear less interested than
formerly in introspection. They seem to have taken
the advice of Chamfort : " Let us do more and think
less, and Hve without the study of living ; et ne pas
se regarder vivre." The old-fashioned diaries have
gone out of fashion. They seem reserved for Divorce
Court cases. Too often our self-revealers reveal
simply their egotism, their desire to draw attention to
themselves. HazKtt, scoffing at this self-advertise-
ment, prefers the man who " sees enough in the
universe to interest him without putting himself
64
Our Personal Fortunes
forward to try what he can do to fix the eyes of the
universe upon him." Carlyle will have nothing to
do with religious self-dissection — when it is done in
public. Froude's " Nemesis of Faith " drew from
him this savage rejoinder : " What is the use of a
wretched mortal's vomiting up all his interior crudi-
ties, distractions, and agonising spiritual belly-aches
into the view of the public, and howling, tragically.
' See ! ' Let him, in the Devil's name, pass them by
the downward, or other method, and say nothing
whatever."
It is, indeed, always a perilous business, and
generally a bad one, to talk much about ourselves.
But that need not hinder us, in a private and modest
way, from feeling all the wonder of our lives, from —
shall we say ? — enjoying the romance of our personal
fortunes. It ought not to make us conceited ; quite
the reverse. Our story, in one view — a view which
we need to keep constantly before us — is the most
insignificant of recitals. In this sense, we, all of us,
the greatest of us, count for so very little. Kings
even are small fry. There have been so many of
them. Who of us at the moment could give the names
of the French kings of the fourteenth century ? What
great persons they were while they were there !
What a fuss over their baptism, their marriage, their
coronation, their wars, their doings in general !
And now nobody, except youths cramming for an
examination, remembers their names ! Could you
mention any of the Under Secretaries of State in
England half a century ago ? What gods they were
in their households and social circle when they were
appointed ! What is our present Prime Minister's
reputation among the millions of China ? The vast
65
The Life of the Soul
proportion of the existing human race has never
heard of him. And, if so, what of the rest of us ?
Our little popularisings cover so small an area, and
are soon forgotten. And most of us have no
popularity at all. We are a speck in the immensity,
one briefest gleam in the immeasurable eternities.
Omar Khayyam puts our existence as
One moment in annihilation's waste,
One moment of the well of life to taste.
And that may pass as describing our external
position, our standing in the visible world.
So much of our insignificance. But now what of
our significance ? It is here the romance, the marvel,
comes in. You are here, and it took all the past
eternity, all the forces of the universe, to produce you.
If in all the past aeons of primitive evolution, all the
geologic ages, all the first beginnings of life, all the
countless generations of animals, all the countless
generations of men ; if in all this movement one
link had been missing, one action of the universe had
failed in its stroke, you had not been here ! You
belong to the whole, are an integral part of the whole.
The whole had not been the whole without you.
You are constantly, in a hundred mysterious ways,
passing into and reconstructing the whole. What
travellers we are, in a way that perhaps has not
occurred to many of us ! Without leaving your
home you are continually journeying. Your breath
leaves your lungs, and forms by-and-by part of the
atmosphere that is working upon Mont Blanc, or
Everest. Your material form, as it daily disintegrates,
enters into the life of mountains, of rivers, of rolling
seas. While you are here you are everywhere.
66
Our Personal Fortunes
This sense of belonging to the whole is one of the
deepest things in our personal fortunes. For it is
true of our soul as well as of our body. Have you
never felt, in looking from the top of a mountain
over a vast prospect, a yearning to fly from peak to
peak, to possess, to enter into the deepest reality and
essence of all you see ? For you feel you have here
only the shell of things ; the core of it all is beneath
and beyond you. And that instinct, which is of the
very essence of your nature, be sure means something.
It is the sense of your soul's relation to the soul of
things. It shows that the world belongs to us, the
soul of it as well as the body, in a possession more
real than we as yet know, but are yet to know.
There is another strange thing belonging to our
personal fortunes. It is the fact that they are ours
alone. We are full to-day of the idea of Socialism,
of a complete and relentless sharing of things. Every-
thing is to be divided up to everybody. Some
enthusiasts talk of common homes and com.mon
tables. We have a vision of some black and greasy
brother proposing to share our bed. Nature rather
laughs at these ideas. Supposing all this programme
were carried out, she would yet interpose her im-
passable barriers. The outsider may squeeze us as
close as he likes ; he will never get into our interior
being. We may have the widest circle of acquain-
tances, and life-relationships that are very dear and
go very deep. But in our essential self we remain
always alone. A score of friends may sympathise in
your pain, but no one of them can feel it. The sensa-
tions which result from your varied experiences are
for your special address, and are never delivered by
mistake to your neighbour. Our companions share
67
The Life of the Soul
our joys and our sorrows in a way ; but they are
never to them what they are to ourselves. We are born
alone and we die alone. We are the great solitaries of the
universe. The greater the crowd around us the keener
is the sense of our aloneness. Does not this suggest
that nature's way with us here is to compel us upon
a spiritual relation ; that she has insulated our interior
being so carefully in order that the current may flow
without interruption between our soul and that Over
Soul who is the spring of our energy, the Other of an
eternal fellowship ?
The newspapers, in publishing accounts of wills,
often speak of " the personalty," which is given in
pounds sterling. We know, of course, the legal
meaning of the term, as thus used. But it is a curious
use of the word, characteristic of the age we are
living in. A man's personality in the true sense is
the person he is, the point he has reached in spiritual
growth. And his personal fortunes will always be
in exact proportion to that growth. For it is
according to it that he will assign his own values to
things, put his estimate on everything that happens
to him. If he has reached no further than the
point of merely wanting everything his own way, he
will, whatever his material wealth, be continually
disappointed. His will be the cry, probably without
the humour of it :
Oh, darn the things that go and be,
Without consulting you and me.
But what an inner fortune he will be possessed of,
if he has reached the point where he can say with old
Epictetus, that God-possessed soul : " Do not look
for things to happen as you wish ; on the contrary,
68
Our Personal Fortunes
wish for things to happen as they do. By this means
shall your life achieve prosperity ! " With your
soul in this temper, what does it matter whether you
live in a palace or a cottage ? What matter it that
your hands do this or that, scrubbing or polishing,
if your mind is free, if your heart is harmonious with
all that is ? *' This is a fine occupation for a count,"
said Duke Geoffrey of Lorraine to his brother
Frederick, whom he found washing dishes in a monas-
tery. " You are right, Duke," was the reply, " I
ought to think myself honoured by the humblest
service to the Master."
In our mammonised age the word fortune has
become almost synonymous with a cash balance.
When a man has ** made his fortune " it means that
he has accumulated so much in pounds sterling,
in securities, or other property. We have, we
suppose, the vocabulary we deserve. But in this
universal cash business there is a point worth noting,
which suggests applications. In all great business
concerns, in banking, in limited liability companies,
there is, in their stock-taking and balance-sheets,
always an amount placed to reserve. The reserve
fund, continually accumulating, represents the
soHdity of the concern ; it is the insurance against
emergencies, against sudden drains. In our personal
fortunes, reckoned in the wider sense we are con-
sidering, there will also be an ever-accumulating
reserve fund. The soul meets its outside affairs
ever more easily because of this growing inner
strength. It is a fund, for one thing, of knowledge.
We discover the secrets of trouble, and the discovery
disarms many of our fears. We find, for instance,
that the strokes we have most dreaded do not fall.
69
The Life of the Soul
Those that do come are exactly what we did not look
for. " I have had a great deal of trouble in my life,"
a dying man once said to his children, " and most of
it never happened." Those of us who have lived
long enough have proved the truth of the saying.
We have learned also how generous life is in its
apportionment of trouble. The crisis, the misadven-
ture, the catastrophe, has been bad enough while it
lasted. But have we forgotten the joy of relief
when it was over ? The peril, the mauvais quart
d'henre we encountered years ago ; how we have
told it over and over again to overselves and to our
friends, and have so prodigiously enjoyed the telling !
The remembrance that we are out of the bad affair
that threatened to cloud our career has been since a
life-long possession.
And the soul's reserve fund, lying there at the
centre of us, a fund of faith, of innermost spiritual
good, renders us more and more immune to the
outside assault. We are wronged or insulted by
another ? We feel, with Bernard, that none can
really injure us except ourselves. The wrong falls
back on the wronger ; it is so much more his affair
than ours. Have you not found, in the midst of
outwardly uncomfortable circumstances, often to
your glad surprise, an inner elation of spirit, which
makes you say, with Marie Bashkirtseff, " My body
weeps and sighs, but my soul inwardly rejoices " ?
One thinks here of John Woolman, that beautiful
Quaker soul, who, on a mission to the Indians, alone
in the forest at night, with rain falling heavily, with
no fire, sat at the trunk of a tree, and occupied
himself with *' a sweet meditation on the love of
God."
70
Our Personal Fortunes
We are here in this world to learn its lesson, to do
our bit of work in it, to contribute our quota to the
life of the whole. We shall not have learned its
lesson or have done our work properly unless we have
found out how to lose ourselves joyously in that
universal life ; lose ourselves in its highest ideals,
in its final ends. One of the worst chapters in human
history is that which records how men, in the world,
in the Church, have allowed their petty ambitions,
the quest of their personal fortunes, to betray the
interests of truth, of liberty, of the world's good.
Let us care supremely for the great things, the
greatest things, and God will take care of us.
71
VIII
THE PRESSURE OF LIFE
As we walk through the fields in the springtime
we are conscious of many things ; most of them
joyful things. The blue of the sky, flecked with
hght, passing clouds, the bright sunshine, the new
vernal breath, the sense that the grim forces of
winter, his cold and darkness and death, are rolHng
away defeated — all this forms an intoxicating
consciousness. But behind the scene there is
another thing, perhaps the most potent of all. It
is the sense of an immense pressure, that is every-
where being exerted. Within the trees, within the
flowers, within the dull earth itself, we see an im-
prisoned force that is bursting to express itself.
It is the pressure of an unseen hfe, hfe that labours
to put itself into form, to show its infinite potencies.
It is behind the whole vegetable world, hfting, push-
ing, expanding, with a milhon-ton energy. It is in
the sap that runs in the trees, and bursts there into
leaf and flower ; in the hedgerows where by and by
will " break the white foam of the spring " : in the
growing corn shoots ; in the heart of man, which it
fills with a tumult of hopes and desires.
In that sphere of things the pressure is a wholly
joyous one. We say : " If this is life, then life must
be a good thing ; its reawakening is the coming of
beauty, of gladness, of all that is good." To say that
72
The Pressure of Life
nature once more lives is to say that nature enjoys,
and calls us to enjoy. Has it ever occurred to us to
ask whether the pressure that exhibits itself so
blithely in the springtime is, in its essence, the same
thing as that other pressure which we feel to-day in
our social state, in our civilisation, in the soul of
every man and woman of us ? It has certainly in
that sphere a different way of showing itself.
Human life, especially in its modern phase, is every
hour and day under a tremendous driving power.
One would have thought that the advent of
machinery, the pressing of the nature-forces into the
service of man, would have lessened the strenuous-
ness of life. Instead it has increased it. We are in a
day when a single machine will do the work of fifty
men. And yet the man behind the machine is more
anxious than ever ; the lines are cut deeper on his
features. " Merrie England," to come to our own
country, is not nearly as " merrie " as in Chaucer's
day. We lack entirely the careless gladness of the
" Canterbury Tales." Our riches have increased
enormously, but our peasants, our artisans, are
poorer than they were then. And they feel their
poverty more. Their sense of it is heightened
immeasurably by the wealth that flaunts itself before
them. The man behind the loom, in the coal mine,
on the engine footplate, broods and broods as he
works. The pressure upon him expresses itself just
now in hostile labour combinations, in strikes, in
revolutionary movements.
But his efforts here do not seem to lighten his
burden. In some ways they add to it. His strike
is a sword without a handle. As he grasps it, its
sharpness cuts first and deepest into his ow^n flesh.
The Life of the Soul
The capitalist is hit by it in a way, but he will not eat
one meal the less ; and his household fire will not
burn the less brightly. The striker has hardly
scratched the skin of his adversary, but his weapon
has drawn the red blood of himself, his wife and
his children. His successes, whatever they are, are
won against tremendous odds, and with heaviest
sacrifices.
But the workman — is he the only one on whom
life presses heavily to-day ? He thinks so, but there
he is wrong, prodigiously wrong. We have had
acquaintance with men who in their career have
known all there is to know of artisan life and of
capitalist life, who have risen from the handling of
tools to the handling of great riches. One occurs
vividly to our mind at this time who, in a frank
talk, told how he enjoyed the savour of existence far
more as a young carpenter than in any after-period
of an exceptionally prosperous career. His later
wealth had added immensely to the pressure of
life. The development of interests had multiplied
the burdens. The modern capitalist carries a world
on his shoulders. He cannot eat more or sleep
more than of old ; probably less ; he can rush
about in trains or in his motor, but what sort of
a mind does he carry in his journeys ? All his
enterprises, all his investments, are so many points
of attack. A revolution in China, unrest in Mexico,
a threatened bankruptcy in Japan, are to him not
merely political news. They are his affairs, they
touch his stake in the world.
And, as a human being, the more highly developed
he is the more do the common fates, in which he
shares, press upon him. If he is possessed of keen
74
The Pressure of Life
sensibilities, the more impossible he finds it to be
happy while others are unhappy. His own pros-
perity gives him additional pangs in view of the vast
adversities around him. In the recent coal strike
how many of us were unable to eat our dinner or
to enjoy our fire with the thought upon us of fireless
homes, of children going without bread ! And our
capitalist, as, with the rest of us, he progresses from
youth to old age, finds each stage to bring its own
especial pressure, and the later ones grow in their
heaviness. In the earlier days the force behind is
all in the direction of growth, of action, of full
expression of oneself. In the later it is more and
more the pressure of the void, of an appalling
emptiness. The hard-pressed toiler looks with
envy at the unoccupied classes, at the " idle rich,"
as possessing a freedom denied to himself. Here,
he thinks, amongst these privileged, is a perpetual
holiday for body and mind. It is the greatest of
delusions. It is precisely to the unoccupied that
Hfe's pressure assumes its most imperious and
menacing forms. That void of vivid interests is,
to our strangely compacted soul, the heaviest of all
burdens. It is then that the most insistent questions
force themselves. It is in such times we ask :
" What is the meaning of life ? What are we getting
out of it ? To what end am I sleeping and waking,
thinking, hoping, fearing ? "
Your man of leisure is the least furnished, the least
protected, against the strokes of human fate.
Advancing age is the time of bereavements, when the
loved things, the loved persons, pass away. The
vacancy hurls itself upon us as an overwhelming, an
intolerable force. The house with its furniture,
The Life of the Soul
every brick in it, every feature of it, has been associ-
ated for us with a loved form that was the Hfe of it
all. The loved one goes, and these outward things
seem all to have died with it. They, too, are dead
now, and look at us as corpses of their former
selves. The place which was once a home has become
a tomb. And all the riches of the world are pov/er-
less to touch one pang of the deadly grief, to ease one
pain of the broken heart. Plainly there is no
escape for us, whatever our station in life, no escape
for the king on his throne or the beggar on the way-
side, from the insistent, often maddening, pressure
of life.
It is time now to ask. What is the meaning of this
pressure ? Is it some evil fate that is upon us ?
Are we pursued here by a Nemesis whose business it is
to wreak punishment upon us ? Or can we see in
all this another and a better purpose ? May we
not come back there to the scene we sketched at the
beginning, to the panorama of springtime, and ask
whether on this question there may not be here some
suggestions for us ? Is there, we may well inquire,
any radical difference between nature's process in the
outside world and her process in man himself ? Is
the pressure which, in the one case, is so evidently
beneficent, maleficent in the other ? Who can
believe it ? There are in nature's world abundant
oppositions, apparent contradictions. But they are
apparent rather than real. Beneath them all, if we
look deep enough, we see her underlying unities.
And in the conditions we are studying here we find
no exception to that law. Her pressure on the soul
is the same, in method and end, as her pressure on the
tree. Her purpose is to get out of the soul, as out of
76
The Pressure of Life
the tree, all there is in it. We are not to be content
with what we are ; to rest there ; because we are not
to remain where or what we are. We are creatures
in the making, and nature's driving process is a
making, are-making process. When she fills us, and
more when she empties us, it is to the one end. We
do not understand her process because we do not
understand her end. The one working faith for us is
that the end is there, and that it is something greater
than we know.
Man is forced along his pathway. His great
things are produced in spite of himself. It is when
men and nations are pressed " beyond measure, so
that they despair even of life," that they make
history. It was in the Indian Mutiny that ordinary
Englishmen, the men and their captains, showed
themselves heroes and demi-gods. It was in the
eighteenth century, when Britain's fortunes were
at the lowest ebb, when her glory seemed fatally
dimmed, when the world seemed passing her by,
that under Pitt she awoke and rallied ; conquered
India, conquered Canada, penetrated South Africa,
founded a world-wide Colonial Empire. It was under
Elizabeth, when her poor five million inhabitants
were menanced with infinite perils, when her very
existence, conspired against by the Catholic Powers,
was at stake, that she stretched herself to her full
height, that her sailors smote Spain, wrested from
her the dominion of the seas, while her poets burst into
music that still fills the world. It was when Judaism
lay expiring, as it seemed, under the heel of Rome,
that it produced Jesus, and gave the world a new,
immortal religion. And the rule with nations is the
rule with ourselves. Whoever has done anything
n
The Life of the Soul
has done it, not by himself, but by the force behind.
" The man who goes furthest," said Cromwell, who
spoke from experience, " is the man who does not
know where he is going." The one thing he knows
is that he is being pushed along, and by a power
outside himself.
Upon every mother's son of us ; upon the worker
and the idler ; upon the rich and the poor ; upon the
good and the bad, life presses with its urgent, insistent
force. That pressure is felt in our fullest, completest
movements ; is felt even more formidably in our
vacant hours. Some of these pressures, be it here
said, are of human contrivance, needless, harsh,
unjust, and will have to be removed. But we shall
never remove life's pressure ; and the supreme
fact about it, which we need above all else to carry in
our mind, is that it is a good and not an evil thing.
It is the Spring in us, the power of our growth, the sign
of our greater destiny. We are burden-carriers, as
ships are ; and to be heavily freighted is always better
than to go in ballast. The weight of our load is the
assurance of our value.
78
IX
OF SPECIAL PROVIDENCE
" Unless the hairs of your head are all numbered
there is no God." The words are George Macdonald's,
and they put the challenge of faith in its clearest and
boldest form. We all want to believe that our hairs
are numbered ; that we are the objects of a special
loving care. We feel with Michelet : " Let the
sentiment of the loving Cause disappear, and it is
over with me. If I have no longer the happiness of
feeling this world to be loved, of feeling myself to be
loved, I can no longer live. Hide me in the tomb."
But the wish, we are told, is not evidence. Is not
the evidence rather the other way ? Our age has
become penetrated with a sense of the utter indiffer-
ence of nature to our personal fortunes.
The heavens above make no disclosure ;
The earth keeps up its terrible composure.
It is said the earthquake at Lisbon made multi-
tudes of people atheists. Do we wonder ? The
world order is no respecter of persons. In a ship-
wreck the sea will drown the saint as composedly
as the escaped murderer. We rebel against a system
of things which has permitted ages of slavery, of
brutal penal laws ; which allows a civilisation
where, at our own doors, people are herded in
homes of one room, where children die for want
of food, where men kill themselves because life is
79
The Life of the Soul
too much for them. Why, it is asked, if God is omni-
potent and loving, do men and women drag them-
selves about in weakness and disease, when He could
so easily have made them strong and healthy ? Could
not the power which made the everlasting mountains,
which gave the sea its resistless might, have put
some of this wasted energy into our suffering frames ?
That would have made all the difference ! The
present writer's correspondence is full of this question-
ing. It takes sometimes curious forms. Says one
inquirer : " If I am robbed of money, you may say
perhaps that the loss is meant for my moral discipline.
But where does God's will come in on the side of the
robber ? Is he carrying out God's will ? Again,
when a child is born as the result of a man's and
woman's sin, is the child's soul, brought this way
into existence, an affair of God's will ? Or is it a
soul without God ? " Truly, if faith is to exist at
all, it will be as a hardy plant. It has to weather
some rude shocks, some baffling queries.
And yet it does exist. That is the first thing to
be said. It exists and has existed in all ages of the
world. Lactantius, the early Christian apologist,
was not far out in his bold statement that belief in
Providence was the common property of all religions,
and was firmly established before all revelation.
And the significance of this fact is not diminished
by the circumstance that the reasons for this faith
were often so grotesque and, to our mind, so ludicrous.
An instinct may not the less be a true instinct for the
false accounts of it given by its possessors. A man
may walk long before he can find a proper statement
of the physiology of movement.
In Christendom for long ages the idea of a special
80
of Special Providence
Providence was sustained by accounts of miraculous
occurrences. The sign of God's care over human
lives was in His surpassing or contradicting the
known laws of nature. The fifty odd volumes of the
Bollandist collection of the " Acta Sanctorum " are
stuffed with wonders of this sort. As we read them
we are tempted to exclaim, with Meredith, in his
" Shaving of Shagpat " : —
Oh, world diseased ! Oh, race empirical,
Where fools are the fathers of every miracle !
The world's majestic order was not good enough for
these enthusiasts. To demonstrate God's power in
life they must make Him a law breaker. Not less
singular is the way in which, in Church annals, a
special Providence is seen in the triumph of one's
own party or faction. The sudden death of Arius
on his triumphal entry into Constantinople is held
by Catholic writers, Newman included, as a divine
intervention in the cause of orthodoxy. When
Louis XIV. signed the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, by which he expelled the most stable and
truly religious element of his subjects, we have his
minister, Michel le Tellier, exclaiming : " My God,
I thank Thee that mine eyes have seen the salvation
of Thy people ! " A successful battle, no matter
in what infamous cause it has been won, has invari-
ably been followed by ecclesiastical Te Deums. The
faith in Providence as a sort of special relief agent,
to be called on at all hours of day and night, was
perhaps never more naively expressed than in the
story of an old negro, who, during an earthquake at
Charleston, prayed as follows : " Good Lord, come
and help us ; oh, come now. And come Yo'self,
Lord ; 'taint no time for boys ! " Our suppliant
8i
The Life of the Soul
believed in help at first hand. He had a healthy
distrust of intermediaries.
Views of this kind still hold their ground over a
very wide area, but to most intelligent people they
are no longer satisfactory ones. If there were
nothing else we should be left without a doctrine of
Providence. We have not mentioned the theory of
pluralism, so ingeniously developed by the late
Professor James ; nor that of dualism — of an Ormuzd
and Ahriman, two opposing powers or personalities,
of good and evil, that under these and other names,
both in Christendom and outside it, have been used
to explain the seeming confusion of things in our
world. Certainly there is no a priori reason against
the idea of a clash of wills as possible behind the
scenes. Enmities and malignities are a too familiar
phenomenon amongst ourselves. They are a part
of the spiritual world, as that world exists in the
community of human souls ; and who shall say why
they may not exist in a spiritual world beyond, and
yet in touch with our own ? The weirdest theory
we have met with as explanation of the supposed
cosmic disorder is that of the Piedmontese pessimist
whom Benjamin Constant encountered, who held
that the world was made by a God, but a God who had
died ! His intentions were excellent, but He passed
before His work was finished, and so left everything
as confused as we see it ! A cheerful view, truly,
and which may be said to have the merit of originality
but which does not otherwise appeal to us.
It is time, however, we faced the problem for
ourselves. In doing so let us come back to our first
proposition. The faith in a special Providence exists,
it exists in spite of calamities, of nature's indifference
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of Special Providence
and apparent cruelty, in spite of all adverse theories.
Why, we ask, does it exist ? It is there, we answer,
and will always be there, because it dwells in a region
beyond and above Nature. The spirit of man has
its own realm. When it turns in upon itself ; when
it seeks its centre ; when it speaks to its kin ; it
knows instinctively that the highest in itself has a
source ; that the goodness within it derives from a
higher Goodness ; that its imperfect love represents
a perfect love to which it is united. And this spiritual
assurance is not displaced by any outward happen-
ing. Rather it feeds upon such happenings. Is it
not worth considering that faith in special Providence
instead of being killed by calamity, has actually been
built on calamity ? It is when the external presses
at its hardest that the soul gets its clearest and
intensest self-consciousness ; it is then it retreats
to its citadel. As to nature's indifference, her
cruelty, was she ever more indifferent, more cruel
than when the Man of Nazareth hung upon the Cross ?
The old Gnostics maintained that Jesus did not suffer,
it was only an appearance. We know better. Not
an ounce of Nature's penalty was remitted, not a
jot or tittle broken of her inevitable law. The slow
torture of the agonised body, its weight hung upon
the cruel nails, was felt to the full. And yet it was
there, in the career that ended so, that the mightiest
faith the world has known, the faith in God as the
Father of Eternal Love, was born. And ever since
the times of suffering have been the times of faith.
Scotland to-day is an orthodox country. Its com-
fortable burghers have a very respectable sense of
religion. But will anyone say that its religious faith
is comparable in its intensity with that of the men of
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the Moss-hags, who sheltered their starved and storm-
beaten bodies in dens and caves from the fury of the
oppressor ?
When you talk of the relentless laws of Nature,
you must talk also of the spirit of man, in its relation
to them. An earthquake, you say, shows the in-
difference of the world-order to our personal fortunes.
The present writer had a letter from an English settler
in South America, whose house had been thrown
down and his prospects ruined by an earthquake.
He and his family had spent the night on which
he wrote unprotected on the hillside. And he wrote
to say that never in his life had he experienced such
a sense of the presence of God, and of confidence in
Him, as in those dread hours. At such times men
have dealings not only with nature's laws, but with
something beyond them. In our pessimistic specula-
tions our mistake is in constantly looking to the
outside and neglecting the inside. It is the men
who have fronted privation and danger and death,
who have least to say about Nature's cruelty. They
have not found her cruel. Dr. Taylor, the Marian
martyr, when he was told he had reached the place
where he must suffer, said : " Thank God I am even
at home." He did not think of death at the stake as
a mere cruelty. It is not the desperate situations
that promote pessimism. That is the result rather of
luxury and overfeeding. When Whymper, the great
climber, was tumbling down a precipice of the
Matterhorn, expecting every moment to be his last,
he describes his sensations. He felt no pain, and no
disquietude ; he had rather a sort of amused curiosity
as to which bump would finish his business ! And
many a climber in similar situations — we can count
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of Special Providence
ourselves in the number — can testify to the same
feeling.
The faith in a special Providence which is possible
to our time, and to all times, is then a faith which
resides in the spiritual realm, which springs out of
our spiritual instincts and affinities ; which works
in a sphere that transcends Nature, which accepts
her laws, even in their hardest expressions, as minis-
tering to its development. We say this in face of all
the objections. Let us come to them — to the things
we said at the beginning. Why, with a good and
omnipotent God, is not our world more perfect ;
why weakness and disease, when with such powers
abroad in the universe there might have been strength
and health ? Why has a state of society been
permitted in which the rich rob the poor ; in which
the hardest work is done for the worst pittance ; in
which we have homes of one room ? That is to say,
supposing God had done everything for us 1 Would
that have been a better condition than the one in
which we find ourselves ; one in which we are
invited to find out things, and to do things for
ourselves ? A paradise with nothing to do might be
a paradise for somebody else to admire ; it would be
no place for a working soul to find itself in. We are
reminded here of the saying of Geothe : '' It would
have been for Him (God) a poor occupation to compose
this heavy world out of simple elements, and to keep
it rolling in the sunbeams from year to year, if He
had not the plan of founding a nursery for a world
of spirits upon this material basis."
The whole scheme, indeed, so far as it opens to us,
is one whose primal object — for which all else is
risked and even sacrificed — is a scheme for the
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development of human spirits, and that by leaving
for man to do all that he can do. He is not to be
coddled— to be furnished with crutches when he can
use his own muscles and limbs. The school-boy who
finds a companion to do all his sums for him may
regard his helper as a special providence. But he
is not a good providence. Why should man be cured
by miracle of his diseases ? Let him learn to cure
himself. That will give him not only health, but the
laws of health— so much larger a possession. His
difficulties, his miseries— what are they but a
perpetual challenge to try again ? People are
plagued here by droughts, there by deluges. They
pray for better weather, and get no answer to their
prayers. But is there no answer ? Is not heaven's
silence here a quiet challenge to man to undertake
his weather ? We are beginning to conquer the air
by flying in it. But is there not another, a larger
conquest, yet to be attempted ? Are we not in sight
of a time when man, helpless hitherto under his
storms and heats, shall turn the energies of his
intellect to these seeming intractable elements and
subdue them to his sway ? However that may be,
this, at any rate, becomes increasingly clear to us—
that every human weakness, every social disorganis-
ation, every hindrance to our perfecting, lies there
before us : not as evidence of heaven's indifference,
but as heaven's challenge to our own effort. We are
to work out our own salvation, the only salvation
that can be of any value to us.
It is on this line of things that we find the answer
to questions such as those in the correspondence we
mentioned in the beginning. Where is the special
Providence, the will of God, in the action of the
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of Special Providence
robber who despoils us, in the bringing into the world
of an illegitimate child as the result of lust ? That
is no new question. We may equally think, " Where
was the will of God in the Sanhedrin that condemned
Jesus, or the soldiers who buffeted and crucified
Him ? " And it is answered in the same way. Be
sure there was a will — the will that put a soul of good
into things evil ; the will that left man free do to his
worst as well as his best ; to find himself by pursuing
wrong roads to the very end, and discovering what
was to be met with there. The human freedom, with
all the risk of using it wrongly, is better than no
freedom. The soul can grow under no other condi-
tions. Man must put out to sea, even with the
chance of wreckage, for he will never become a sailor
by remaining in port. And our faith goes so far as
to believe that in this human voyage even his wreckage
will not ruin him. For man's worst has its limitations,
and contains in itself some subtle seed of recovery.
As that excellent Christian Father, Methodius, has
it, " For I say that man was made, not for destruc-
tion, but for better things." The scheme we are
under is a moral one ; a scheme under which the
thief will pay for his thievery, and the lustful man for
his lawlessness of passion. But it is one also which
recognises in the criminal more than his criminality.
If he is under a law which exacts its penalty, he is
under a grace which is higher than law, which uses
law as the instrument of its purpose of blessing.
Yes, the hairs of our head are all numbered.
Whenever we pray we affirm that. And we can
match this affirmation, in our being's highest act,
against all the materialisms and all the devil's
advocacies, from whatever quarter they come. For
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The Life of the Soul
the soul here is sure of itself. It moves here in a
sphere the world cannot enter, still less conquer.
Quis separahit ? In face of life's sternest tragedies,
of its utmost extremities, it joins in the Apostle's
triumphant hymn of faith, knowing with him that
neither life nor death, things present nor things to
come, can shut it off from the Infinite Love.
^S
X
PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION
Psychology, in some respects at least, may be
described as almost a new science. It has framed
for itself a vocabulary which was unknown to the
ancients. Telepathy, mediumship, the subliminal
consciousness, the double or multiple personality,
the trance phenomena, are terms and phrases which
we have had to invent in order to set forth facts and
conclusions which are the harvest of modern investi-
gation. The word psychology is, of course, an
old one. It means, literally, " the doctrine of the
soul " ; and there have been doctrines of the soul
since man found he had a soul. If anyone wants to
know what the earlier theorists have done in this
direction, let him read Augustine's " De Anima,"
where he will find an amazing collection of the views
of the early world. Aristotle and Plato, the Christian
fathers, the Middle Age schoolmen, the mystics, the
latter philosophies, orthodox and unorthodox, with
an infinite variety of interpretation, have had this
as their common theme. And no man can be called
an authority on this subject who has not, with his
other qualifications, a fairly comprehensive know-
ledge of that vast literature. Yet we repeat, the
science, in some of its aspects, is to-day a new one.
The phenomena of the mind are being studied with
new instruments, and under new canons of research.
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The Life of the Soul
The psychological schools of Nancy and of Paris ;
the experiments of Charcot and Maxwell ; the
investigations of Myers, of Lodge, and of William
James — to mention a few of the myriad workers in
this field — workers who have put the human con-
sciousness under a microscope, who have followed
its normal and its abnormal manifestations with the
trained eye of the scientist, have given to our know-
ledge a fresh start which promises immense results.
The influence which these later researches is
likely to have upon religion is already being shown
in more than one direction. It has produced new
arguments for personal survival of death. " When
I can see without eyes, and hear without ears, and
understand without a brain," says Diderot in a famous
passage, *' I shall be more disposed than I now am
to believe in my existence after my eyes and ears
and brain have been destroyed by death." His
belief would have been somewhat disturbed by the
experiments of his fellow-countryman, Charcot, who
has exhibited persons, under trance conditions, as
actually performing these impossibles ; reading
print applied to their knee, or the sole of their foot ;
or in telepathy beholding scenes and events far
beyond the reach of bodily vision. Arid apart from
such experiments Diderot might well have asked
himself whether the marks of a higher intelligence
everywhere manifest in the universe depended on
the action of some colossal brain like our own,
ensconced at the centre of things ! We have only
to state the proposition to feel its absurdity. But
this verdict carries with it the farther one, that spirit,
consciousness, intelligence, in their highest degree,
are independent of brain, of this or that material
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Psychology and Religion
combination ; not the slaves, but the masters of them,
using them for this or that form of manifestation,
according to their height of being. In another
direction we have the evidence which Lodge, Myers,
and others have offered the world as to supposed
communications from deceased persons, affirming
their continued conscious existence. That evidence
is still sub judice, and upon it we express here no
further opinion than this — that evidence which has
proved convincing to minds of the finest scientific
quality and training is bound to have its weight in
the decision of the highest of all problems. In this
category of the contributions of the new psychology
to religion we cannot omit to mention the ingenious
argument which Dr. Sanday has developed from
the phenomena of the subliminal mind as anewfactor
in the doctrine of the Person of Christ. That it is,
to our thinking, not a convincing argument, does
not detract from its value as suggestion ; as opening
up the vast possibilities of modern research in the
recasting of current theology.
While paying this debt of recognition to the new
facts and theories, it is not, however, with these
that we propose here chiefly to concern ourselves.
We come back again to that original definition of
psychology, as " the doctrine of the soul." The
soul in its natural, normal action ; as it has been
known to act and feel ever since we have had any
record of it ; let us, from our modern point of view,
and in the midst of our present-day controversies,
come back upon that for its verdict. ReHgion is
supposed to be an affair of the soul. Has the soul
itself any clear affirmation about it ? We would say
here with Tertullian : " I address thee, soul,
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The Life of the Soul
simple and rude, uncultured and untaught, such as
they have thee who have thee only ; that very
thing pure and entire, of the road, of the street, of
the workshop. I want thy experience. I demand of
thee the things thou hast brought with thee into man,
which thou knowest either from thyself, or from thy
author, whoever he may be." Let us inquire
whether in its primitive emotions, in its instinctive
attitude to the universe, in its response to events, in
its qualities and capacities, it has any solid testimony
to offer ; and, if so, to what sort of reality it points.
Has it ever occurred to us to analyse the im-
pressions which the universe makes upon us ? Have
we inquired as to why it is that, in contemplation of
its scenes, and of the events that occur in it, such and
such feelings arise in our minds ? Why is it that as
we gaze upon the sea, on the great mountains, on the
blue heavens, on the peering stars, there comes upon
us the sense of the awful, the sublime ; that there
arises the instinct of adoration ? Why, when we look
on a flower in the hedgerow, or in our garden, do we
speak of them as beautiful ; how is it they create in
us the idea of a perfect beauty, beyond even that
which their own outlines suggest ? How is it that
events as they occur produce in us the idea of a cause,
and lead us to the belief that all things have a cause ?
Why is it that actions in our neighbours and in our-
selves affect us so strangely by their moral quality ;
why do we describe them as low, base, mean ; or as
noble, pure or holy ? Is there a reason in themselves
for all this ? We can conceive of beings on whom
they would have no such effects. We have near
neighbours in the animal world who are not at all
responsive in this way. There are cattle grazing in
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Psychology and Religion
the Alpine pastures to whom Mont Blanc suggests
nothing in particular. Your dog may sniff the rose,
but has he a theory of the beautiful ? There seems
only one way of accounting for these effects in us,
and that is by referring them to the constitution
of the soul itself. We feel like this because we are
made like this.
Take the effect of music upon us. When you
listen to Bach's Passion music, or to Handel's Largo,
or to some simple hymn of your childhood, what is
your theory of the impression they produce ? You
can go into the science of the thing. There is a back-
ground here of figures, of mathematics. There are
estimates of the number of atmospheric vibrations
belonging to each note in the scale and of the
combination of these numbers in harmony, in counter-
point. There are questions of the vibratory quality
of different instruments, of their timbre. There are
further questions of the structure of the ear, of the
tympanum, the auditory nerve. But all this has
brought you no nearer. All this fails utterly to
explain why this strain stirs to martial ardour, why
that drowns you in sadness, why another lifts you
to the heights of religious rapture. Are you not
pointed here to an inner spiritual structure, answering
to some unseen reality without, to a soul of music
in the universe ; to a spiritual Reality which holds
all you feel and to which your feeling is the echo,
the response ?
It is the same with events. Search all the histories,
all the literatures. The accounts of the world's
happenings there, in different ages and countries, are
marvellously diverse. Lafcadio Hearn says the
Oriental thinks naturally to the left when we think
The Life of the Soul
to the right. *' The more you cultivate him the
more strongly will he think in the opposite direction
to you." But there is one thing in which East and
West, North and South agree, and that is in giving
a religious aspect to events. They agree with Thales
in principle, if not in expression, when he says,
*' All things are full of Gods." And the notable
point here is that the more tragic the event, the
more sinister the external aspect of things, the
more intense has been the activity of the religious
consciousness. Who, antecedently, would have
imagined that a common execution, a crucifixion,
could have become the central fact of a world-
rehgion ? How explain it except on the admission
that it fitted in with the make of the human soul ?
Is not that suggestion in " Wilhelm Meister " true
to the fact of things, where we read of a broken
crucifix ? "I cannot help recognising in this crucifix
the fortunes of the Christian religion, which, often
enough dismembered and scattered abroad, will
ever in the end gather itself together at the foot of
the Cross."
The soul's response to the universe, to its character
and its events, may be described as an echo. Now,
an echo follows certain laws. There are surfaces
which produce no perceptible echo. Where one is
heard at all it will be in accord first with the char-
acter and volume of the sound which strikes upon
the resounding surface, and, second, with the quality
and conformation of that surface. Had human
nature, which is the surface here in question, been
other than it is, the outside world, in its impact upon
it, would have produced a correspondingly different
effect. The actual soul's echo, as we know it, is the
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Psychology and Religion
testimony to its essential structure. Upon this
quivering compound of thought and feeUng the
cosmos has, through the ages, struck its varying
note ; struck its note of joy and sorrow, of triumph
and defeat ; its gentler touch of love, friendship,
peace, happiness ; its harsher strokes of pain and
hardship, decay and death. What has been the
response ? The wonderful thing here, as we have
said, is the soul's reply to the world's hardness ;
that, instead of a result of pessimism and revolt,
there has been in all races and times a response,
more or less articulate, of faith, trust, resignation,
prayer, the full play of the religious consciousness.
Take the most staggering of all facts, that of death.
To the eye it is the end of all things. A corpse
seems the mockery of human aspiration. What is
the use of noble purpose, of high striving if this
is the outcome ; this decaying body, without sense
or sight, or thought, or feeling, fit only to be buried
out of sight ? Yet before this seeming final humiHa-
tion the soul refuses to be dismayed. Instead it has
constructed its reHgion out of it. Even where it
has placed the lowest estimate on the future its
note has been of lofty courage. " Death," said a
a great Stoic moralist, " is the only evil that can
never touch us. When we are, death is not. When
death comes we are not." Cicero finds in death
nothing to fear, everything to hope. " Death," says
he, ** is an event either utterly to be disregarded if
it extinguish the soul's existence, or much to be
wished if it convey her to some region where she
shall continue to exist for ever. One of these
two consequences must necessarily follow the dis-
union of soul and body. . . What then have I
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The Life of the Soul
to fear if, after death, I shall either not be miserable
or shall certainly be happy ? " In the oldest known
civilisations of the world, in Babylon and Egypt,
we find the mind of man full of a future life, of which
the present is the preparation and the portal. Christ-
ianity in its still more confident affirmation is intro-
ducing here no foreign element. It is resting on
the inner structure of the soul ; putting into articu-
late language the echo of man's nature, to the nature
of things in which it stands.
We say, then, that the testimony of the soul is
a religious testimony ; that its response to the
universe, as we find it in the sense of awe, of adora-
tion, before nature's sublimity ; in the emotions
called up by great music ; in its feeling for beauty,
in its attitude before events, is a response which
substantiates the broad truths which we speak of
as religious. There arises here immediately the
question as to the kind of religion to which it testifies.
That is an interminable subject on which we cannot
now attempt to enter. But there is one feature
of it on which a word may be said. Whatever form
religion may take the foundation of it, where it is
sincere, is faith. And what is faith ? We have had
so many definitions of it ; so many authoritative
declarations concerning it, that one might well regard
it as a res judicata, an affair about which there is no
further question. As a matter of fact, our time is
pressingly in need of its own affirmation. Is faith
a yielding to authority ? Is it the acceptance of
a scheme of belief offered us by past ages ? Are we
to believe something because somebody, a pope or
a council, or a doctrinal article, declares we shall be
damned if we do not ? It is here that psychology
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Psychology and Religion
comes in to the help of religion. It is here that the
soul pronounces its own verdict, a verdict proceed-
ing from its own nature. Listen, as against all
external pretensions, however august, to the voice of
your own soul, and it will give you an answer. It
will tell you that there is no faith, in any genuine
sense of the term, which does not arise from its own
free and unfettered action. There may be yielding ;
there may be submission ; there may be a sort of
acceptance. But let these terms stand for what they
are worth. They are worth something here in our
world ; their exact value is doubtless fully appraised
in another world. But be sure of this : they are not
faith. That word only belongs to an action of the
soul, where, in the consciousness of its own freedom,
it makes a truth, a fact, aye, a person, its own by the
deliberate acceptance of mind and heart. Luther,
in his great reforming years, saw this clearly. Later
he went back somewhat from it, and after years have
seen a long succession of dismal departures. But
consider this great word of his : " Therefore it is
vain and impossible to compel by force this belief
or that belief. Force does not do it. It is a free
work in faith to which no one can be forced."
True religion, then, must rest on a true psychology.
Deeper than all churches, all priests, all Bibles, even,
is the spiritual nature of man. A faith which accords
with that nature, which is its direct and genuine
utterance, can never die out. It is the voice of the
soul, and will last as long as the soul endures.
97
XI
IS CHRISTIANITY PASSING ?
We find growing numbers of people lo-day asking
this question ; putting it to themselves if not to
others. A Roman Catholic lady in a letter to us
says, " Christianity is passing. Our own leaders
realise this, and I have often heard good Catholics
say that Christians may yet find themselves in the
position they were in in the third century, a sort of
moral oasis in the desert of the new Paganism."
Leading Catholics, we may note, have been saying
this for some time past. As far back as 1870 we have
Cardinal Guibert writing of France : " We Christians
form a society, a people apart, which, no longer
being in community of ideas with the immense society
which surrounds us, is becoming disintegrated, and
is, in fact, in full process of dissolution." ^ At a
later date, in 1902, M. Bourrier, the ex-Dominican,
in the Chretien Francais, described two Paris
gatherings on a very wet Sunday. One, in a
Protestant Church, where an excellent discourse
was delivered by the pastor, was very thinly attended.
The other was at the Trocadero,which, despite the very
heavy ram, was crammed with five thousand people,
while the crowd outside was enormous. It was to
celebrate the fete of " Reason." The speakers
proclaimed themselves as Atheists ; spoke of " the
dead God on whom the priests live ; " " but saluted
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Is Christianity Passing ?
morality, moral force, justice, the social order," etc.
Bourrier thinks, however, that, despite their phrases,
they were really remaking religion.
With Catholic Christianity in this position in
France, how is Continental Protestantism faring ?
It is an insignificant minority in France, though
exercising an influence far beyond its numerical
proportions. In Holland, Professor Gunning, of
the University of Ley den, says, " The masses in
Holland are alienated from the Church." And
what of Germany, Luther's land ? Some years ago
the late Dr. Stocker, the eloquent court chaplain
at Berlin, gave this testimony : " German Protes-
tantism is sick, sick unto death. In the North and
North-east the Friends of Christianity are among the
aristocracy and among the peasants ; while in the
middle classes, the educated, industrial, commercial
people are, with few exceptions, opposed to the
Church. The working men of the towns, belonging,
as they often do, to the Social Democratic party,
are necessarily hostile." Another clerical witness,
Pastor Eric Forster, says : " In Mecklenburg,
Pomerania, and the Mark of Brandenburg, that is,
the most purely Protestant part of Germany, the
Church is dead." These were testimonies of some
ten years back, and there is no sign that the drift of
things, so far as concerns organised Protestantism,
has been altered or converted. The prominent
working-class leaders, the Bebels, the Bernsteins,
are, like their predecessors, Marx and Lassalle,
bitterly hostile to Christianity, and they carry their
followers with them. Inside the Church the state
of affairs may be indicated from the fact that at the
Universities the Divinity classes, which used to be
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The Life of the Soul
crowded, now show bare boards, and that there is
almost a famine of candidates for the Protestant
pulpit.
England and America, the great Protestant centres,
show a different spectacle from this, but even here
we see the organised Church in an increasingly
difficult position, everywhere the struggling against
odds. As to America, Dr. Gladden recently
declared that Congregationalism was a Church of
the employers rather than of the employed. New
York on Sunday presents the aspects of a pagan
city, and the same is even more true of Chicago and
San Francisco. And our own London ! Anyone
who watches in church hours its mighty stream of
life moving hither, thither, by road and rail, by
motor and tram or on foot, to the links, to the tennis
court, to the open, to the sea, or indoors to the
cinematograph show — any whither but to the church
door — has evidence enough of what is going on.
The congregation is more and more that of the
parents — less and less that of their children. If
the movement of the last twenty years goes on for
another twenty years — and it promises to go on wdth
an increasing velocity — what shall we have in London
and in England ? Plainly, in England and the
world, we are up against a big question for our
existing Christianity.
For our existing Christianity, we say. For that
is where the whole question lies ; that is where we
may most easily mistake the signs of the times.
It may easily be that our present Christianity is
passing. That is very different from saying that
Christianity itself is passing, or is likely to pass.
Let us here consider one or two plain facts. The
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Is Christianity Passing ?
first is that the " existing Christianity " always has
been passing. As an historical development that
has ever been its fate, and this because of laws that
are not passing, but are permanent. So far its
history has been that of nothing else but deaths and
rebirths. What was the first Christianity ? It was
that of Galilee and Judaea, when Jesus was present
with His disciples. It was, in a way, the highest,
the most vivid, actual, veridical Christianity the
world has seen, or will see ; the Christianity of the
Master's personal presence, of His smile. His inspiring
word ; the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount,
warm from His lips ; of the parables, of the healings, of
of the wondering awe, of the rapture in simple hearts
as they looked upon a life, a personality such as men
had never seen before. That Christianity died upon
the Cross. It was a chapter closed and finished.
This Jesus was never more seen on the earth. The
resurrection faith, in all the forms it took, and
testified of, presents us always with another, a
spiritual person, filling the hearts of believers wdth
indescribable enthusiasm, creating a Church,
revolutionising a world, but never again the weary
pilgrim that men had seen by the lake, the inspired
discourser at the supper table, the martyr at
Golgotha.
Here, then, was one dead Christianity, extinct for
evermore. And that has been followed by so many
others ! That of the apostolic age, when men
received their Gospel by word of mouth, took it from
men who had seen the Lord ; the age without a New
Testament, when a living inspiration broke from
apostolic lips ; when the substance of our Gospels
passed in fluid form, as a memory, a tradition from
lOI
The Life of the Soul
lip to lip ; that also in a generation or so died, never
to be revived. It requires a patient study of the
period, and of what followed it, to realise the enor-
mous transformation which took place between that
second Christianity and the later which succeeded it ;
that later in which the pastor became a priest, in
which the supper was turned into a magical mystery ;
in which for the Sermon on the Mount and the
apostolic counsels men were offered the web of
metaphysics called the creeds as the objects of
Christian behefs. Remember that for long centuries
afterwards the extraordinary amalgam called
Catholicism, amalgam of popes, councils, eccle-
siastical hierarchies, metaphysical creeds, with the
Bible as background, a Bible hidden from the laity ;
that this was practically all the Christianity extant
in the world. At the Reformation that Christianity
died for all the succeeding Protestant peoples. The
Reformers and their children, through all these after
generations, had done with masses, transubstan-
tiation, Church infallibilities, priestly absolution,
monks and monkeries ; lived on another Christianity,
a Christianity of open Bibles, of simple worship,
of a growing freedom of private judgment. One
might prolong the story to our own day. Where
now is the Christianity of the Commonwealth men,
of the Covenanters, of the early Quakers, even of the
first Methodists ? You may look for it all over the
globe and find it nowhere.
Surely this is significant, if only we will look into
it properly ? Lying here behind us, clear in plainest
view, is a history of extinct Christianities ; dead,
and in their old form never to live again. In our
perturbation at what seems passing to-day, is it not
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Is Christianity Passing ?
a little astonishing that we take so coolly what has
happened in the past ? As if what is happening
now were unheard of and absolutely without pre-
cedent, whereas it is full of precedent ; simply a
further illustration of what has been happening all
the time, and by the very law of things is bound to
happen.
It is time we inquired what this law of things is.
Historical Christianity, in the vast transformations
which we see it to have undergone, has been under
conformity, and will be, so far as seems, to the end,
to the changeless law of change. In the material
world we see ever the same force, but ever in trans-
ition ; one in itself, but Protean in its forms ;
appearing now as motion, now as heat, now as
chemical energy, now as electricity ; never at rest,
eternally at its permutations and transformations.
And this which is true of the inorganic, dead world,
as we call it, is even more visibly true of the organic,
of the world alive. No moment here of permanence,
all a rush of life and death. Stay the death of par-
ticles in your body, their decay and removal, and you
stop your own life. Death, everywhere, is the renewer,
the supporter of life. The child dies in becoming a
youth, the youth in becoming a man. Panta rei,
" Everything in flux," said old Heraclitus ; modern
evolution is but the echo of that ancient word.
Christianity is cast into the cosmic system ;
appears as a part of it, and must therefore of
necessity be subject to its laws. Never has it been a
static but always a dynamic. Even its seeming most
stationary elements obey those laws. You speak of
its Scriptures, of its doctrines, as there in perma-
nence. No. As a factor in human life they change
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The Life of the Soul
with every human being they touch. There are as
many Christianities as there are Christians. Are the
Scriptures the same to the child who spells his way
through them as to your professor of Biblical
criticism ? You may call your Book the same.
It is never the same to the souls that read it, and they
are here the matter in question. To grumble at
this is to grumble at the law of this universe and at
the God who made it.
Evidently, to get a true outlook upon our
Christianity we have to understand somewhat better
than we have done the ways of the universe in which
it has appeared. And its way is the same for the
visible and the invisible. The law in the visible
world is the law in the spiritual realm. Mr. Moody
once, in discussing revivals, dropped a pregnant
remark. Said he, " God never repeats Himself."
It is true, and covers the entire field. Human souls,
like human bodies, live under a ceaseless evolution.
They would die if they refused to obey it. We live
under a world-policeman whose word is ** move on."
We are under a perpetual compulsion to take the next
step. Every fresh discovery in science, in history,
in our knowledge of earth and of man is a reiteration
of the call, a fresh pressure from behind. And
beneath all this, beneath our brains and our think-
ing, is the vast rush of the life-stream itself, carrying
us, as with the sweep of a planet, carrying us forwards,
onwards, towards bournes we do not see.
Christianity is afloat on that tide. It is a part of
the movement, and is being carried along with it.
But let us here reassure ourselves. We have to
look here at something that is bigger even than his-
torical Christianity. We have to look at the Power
104
Is Christianity Passing ?
and Purpose that are behind it. For as the scien-
tist finds in the cosmos a changeless power and law,
working through incessant change, so in the inner,
spiritual cosmos we find ourselves up against that
same changeless law and power. And they work
always in one way, and towards one end, upward,
upward. And the power is an exhaustless power.
Do we think the Providence which produced Jesus
and the Church exhausted itself in that effort ; that
the spiritual movement then introduced is, from
lack of further energies, doomed to futility ? Force
in the spiritual realm is as eternal as force in the
material. It can never exhaust itself. Origen, the
subtlest brain as w^ell as the holiest soul among the
Greek Fathers, has here a daring utterance.
Recognising Christianity as part of a Divine,
spiritual movement, he regards it as preparation for
something even higher than itself. He speaks of it
as the feature of an eternal Gospel, a stage of it
destined in its turn to be outgrown.
Well, the Christianity of his time has been super-
seded and outgrown ! We could not come back to it
if we tried. And we may be equally certain that a
thousand years hence the Christianity of our time
will have been outgrown, and our successors will be
no more able to come back to us than we could go
back to him.
But let us get back now to our present and our
immediate future. What is the bearing of all this
upon our existing church conditions ? Is the
decay in church attendance, then, and similar
symptoms, evidence of a decay of Christianity ?
We might here ask another question. Is there
evidence anywhere that the Founder of Christianity
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The Life of the Soul
placed the decay or growth of Christianity in a census
of church attendance ? This question, we are con-
vinced, is one not so much of religion as of a new social
and economic condition ; it is a question of our
having now eighty per cent, of our population crowded
into stuffy cities, mewed up in stifling homes, and
workshops, and factories. The modern Sunday is
the rush of human lungs to the open air ; of hungry
eyes to a sight of green fields, of cramped muscles
to a place to stretch them in. Added to that is the
fact that literature has so largely taken the place of
the sermon ; is often so much better a sermon,
and listened to under such easier conditions.
The Gospel inside the Church is suffering grievously
from stuffiness ; the Gospel outside the Church,
in a freer air, is everywhere winning new triumphs.
One might say that the Christianity of to-day, as
compared with that of yesterday, exhibits the change
from a liquid to a gas ; has broken out from a fixed
to an elastic form ; has become less and less an
institution, and more and more an atmosphere.
The Sermon on the Mount never had a more atten-
tive hearing. The substitution of Christ's spiritual
for the Devil's animal never had a more promising
future.
The prospects of the Church for the time now
before us will depend on the way in which it adapts
itself to the new conditions. The people are all for
the open, in mind and body, and the Church must
also come into the open. It has upon it an enormous
charge. It is the depository and the nucleus of all
that is most precious to human life. The world
cannot get on without its force and its message. We
have spoken of Germany and France as turning
1 06
Is Christianity Passing
?
away from its ministrations. But in both countries
how the movement of their highest thought is steadily
back to a spiritual interpretation of life ; how
Eucken in one and Bergson in the other are attacking
materialism, and what a response is being given to
their call for deeper, higher things ! No, we are not
discouraged. History and the laws of the universe
forbid that. They show us a death that is ever
followed by a resurrection. The Galilee Christ-
ianity in a way is dead ; the Apostolic Christianity
in a way is dead. And so is the mediaeval. But we
see how this death was a prelude to a vaster life.
The law still holds. What of death there is in our
present Christianity is only the preparation for
greater things to come. The law of the spirit of
life in Jesus Christ has in store its noblest triumphs
over the law of sin and death.
107
XII
RELIGION AND FEELING
The relation of feeling to religion is fundamental.
It goes to the root of the matter. There is no
aspect of the spiritual life which it does not affect.
The differences of view on this point have led to
profound distinctions in Churches and in theologies.
The supreme importance of the matter has in these
later days dawned upon three orders of thinkers —
the scientists, the philosophers and the theologians.
To all three of them, and to the first two especially,
religion has gained a new interest and a new stand-
point. They are studying the subject not so much
as a revelation from heaven, as for a revelation of
the structure and qualities of the human soul. They
begin, not with affirmations about the Divinity, but
with the study of man. They read the lives of the
saints, to discover if they can what basis of reality
lies behind their recorded experiences ; what truth
of life their visions, their emotions, their volitions
actually stand for. Hence we have such books as
Hoffding's " Philosophy of Religion," Pacheu's
" Psychologic des Mystiques," and James's " Varieties
of Religious Experience." Writers of this order,
while differing widely in their starting points and
in their conclusions, have this in common, that
they treat their subject as an affair of sheer scientific
analysis. They apply to it their microscope,
io8
Religion and Feeling
their scalpel, as to any other natural object. It is
something remarkable for them to investigate ;
to wring out of it, if possible, its secret. The simple
Christian believer, falling into such company, will
often be startled, and sometimes shocked by what
he hears from them. Yet they are well worth
listening to, for their side of the matter is a real one,
if only part of the whole.
Amongst theologians it was Schleiermacher who
opened to the modern world the significance of feeling
in its relation to religion. There has hardly been,
before or since, a man better qualified for the task.
For he spoke not simply as the man who saw, but
as the man who, from the depths of his soul, had
felt. The child of deeply pious parents, his
exquisitely pure and tender nature — truly one may
say anima naturaliter Christiana — open in its aspira-
tions to every breath of heaven, his early training
amongst the Moravian community introduced him
to every phase of emotional religion as it flourished
in that fervid community. At Herrnhut a strict
evangelical doctrine was fused into an ecstatic devo-
tion, in which for a time his soul was steeped. Later
came the reaction, when the claims of an intellect
of extraordinary force and range asserted them-
selves, and forced him out of the pietistic Eden into
the desert of doubt and almost despair. But the
desert time, as with all true souls, proved an entirely
fruitful one. In the end we see the intellect, having
carried its researches into every region of know-
ledge, coming back to faith. It finds itself in a new
and beautiful accord with that earlier feeling,
observes it from a new and higher standpoint, sees
all its deepest implications, as an integral and
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The Life of the Soul
unspeakably precious part in any complete
philosophy of life. The fruit of those meditations
appeared in the famous Reden, or Discourses on
Religion, which came to the sceptical Germany of
his day almost as a revelation. Here was a fore-
most intellect startling his countrymen with the
affirmation that their denials were a mere narrow-
ness ; telling them to look deeper into their own
souls ; telling them that religion in its essence was
no mere theologic formula, no mere doctrine of the
schools, but an ultimate element in their own
structure, a portion of their essential being, without
which it was impossible to understand either them-
selves or their universe.
Schleiermacher, of course, had his limitations,
which we can see to-day. His view that the religious
feeling was primarily a sense of dependence does not
satisfy us. It contains so much more than that.
One remembers Hegel's criticism : " It makes the
dog a more pious animal than his master." And
it is to us an extraordinary limitation of view which
made it possible for him to address himself simply
to the cultured classes, under the idea that the labour-
ing multitude were, by their slavery to mechanical
tasks, incapable of the deeper religious feeling.
Could he not have remembered that in the first age
Christianity gained its most enthusiastic recruits from
that very class ? He wrote in Germany. Had he
been in England at the time he would have found
that Methodism, where the religious feeling exhibited
itself in its intensest forms, was a movement, at its
beginning, almost entirely confined to that class.
But leaving Schleiermacher, let us try here a little
thinking of our own. Feeling comes before thought,
no
Religion and Feeling
is the foundation of thought. It is the first reaction
of the soul in its contact with the external. It is
the soul's reply to the touch of the universe. We
should never know ourselves apart from that contact.
The outer world, with its events, its pressure upon
us, is the organist who plays on our instrument.
Those successive touches call out our every note.
We should never know the notes were there apart
from that handling. Our joy, our sorrow, our
admiration, our disgust, our fear, our hope are at
the beginning mute possibilities, with no facility of
realising themselves apart from the outside call.
And when, in response to that call, they do speak,
their voice is final. There is no appeal against their
verdict. No argument, no pleading can persuade
us that the pain we feel is not pain, that our joy is
anything else than joy. Civilisation is crammed
with falsities, but there is no falsity in our feeling.
And so we have to go to it for the final truths.
This feature in feeling — its absolute truth-telling
— shows clearest in our bodily sensations. But it is
not less veridical in our higher part. Our moral
nature, by an imperious necessity, loves what is
lovable, hates what is hateful. And here it is that
we have our final test of a true and false religion.
What the heart rejects is a final rejection. Our finest
instincts are a court of appeal more decisive than
the subtlest logic of the schools. " We needs must
love the highest when we see it." Yes, and we needs
must spurn the lowest when we see it. As that
instinct becomes cultivated, and learns to trust itself,
it will prove the death-blow to all faiths that fall
below its standard. It is the growth of the human
heart that is making impossible all the old theologic
III
The Life of the Soul
cruelties. The God within us is good, and will
accordingly recognise no God without that is not
good. So, too, our science, our philosophy, all rest
ultimately upon feeling. Why this incessant search
for the true ; why these enormous pains to sift it
from the false ; why trouble as to whether the sun
goes round the earth or the earth round the sun ?
Does the knowledge of it make one penny of difference
to you ? And yet we pursue, and shall pursue, this
incessant quest, and there is absolutely no reason for
it but a primal feeling of the soul ; the instinct
which tells it that truth is lovable and at all costs
to be followed. Without that feeling there had been
no science.
It was upon feeling, and not upon dogma, that
Christianity was founded. Newman, in his
" Apologia," tells us : " From the age of fifteen
dogma has been the fundamental principle of my
religion. I know no other religion. Religion as a
mere sentiment is to me a dream and a mockery."
As we read this we wonder what his religion would
have been if he had lived before the age of dogma ?
We know what his dogma was ; that of the Councils
of the fourth and fifth centuries, enlarged after-
wards by the decisions of Trent. But there was
some genuine religion before those dates. The
religion of Jesus Himself was assuredly not that of
dogma ; not of these dogmas. You search the
Galilee teaching in vain for much of what you find
there. The religion of Jesus, in Himself, and as
communicated to others, was a life, a personality, a
Divine communion, a Divine power. It was a love,
a trust, a fellowship, a suffering, all lived and acted,
all felt in the soul, beyond anything, deeper than
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Religion and Feeling
anything that could be put into words. It was that
life, that devotion, that sacrifice, flowing in spiritual
power upon men's souls, that converted them, that
made them Christians. The spiritual condition in
Jesus produced a new spiritual condition in His
disciples. Here may we say with Hermann in his
" Christian's Communion with God " : " We are
Christians because in the human Jesus we have met
with a fact whose content is incomparably richer
than that of any feelings which arise within ourselves,
a fact, moreover, which makes us so certain of God,
that our conviction of being in communion with Him
can justify itself at the bar of reason and of
conscience."
But while contending for the supremacy of feel-
ing, as the ultimate, final quality of our souls, let
us be clear about one thing. Feeling never exists,
never acts, alone. It is full of thought, of reason.
In its simplest, primitive states it contains a deeper
reason than our conscious one ; the Reason that
formed us, that is continuously at work upon us.
And so feeling contains, as it were, our own logic in
solution. Our logic forms itself out of that, and later
assumes its definite shapes. And reason and feeling
working in this way, each into the other, by and by
unite in a definite conception of their relative place.
From this co-operation, the primitive feeling becomes
ever purer, higher in its content and action. So it
is that in the end the better our thought the surer
our feeling.
It is when we understand the laws of feeling that
we can see how to use it, and how not to misuse it.
We see, for instance, the truth of Professor James's
statement, in his " Varieties of Religious Experience,"
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The Life of the Soul
that " spiritual excitement takes pathological —
i.e., diseased — forms whenever other interests are
too few and the intellect too narrow." You have
illustrations of that in the wild religious ecstasies of
the Montanists in the second century, and those
of some of the German sects in Luther's time.
" Other interests were too few and the intellect
too narrow." We see also in religion that feeling is
not to be cultivated in us as though it were an end
in itself. It is in us as a driving power ; fuel to a
machine that is meant to do work. We have to
beware of too much expression of religious feeling.
That is a most true and deeply significant word of
Carlyle : " It is a sad but sure truth that every time
you speak of a fine purpose, especially if with
eloquence and to the admiration of bystanders, there
is less chance of your ever making a fact of it in your
poor life." So fatally easy is it to let our fine feeling
evaporate in words, instead of silently turning its
energy to the doing of deeds.
And finally it is an outrage upon our religious
feeling — our dearest gift from God — to force it by
artificial and exaggerated stimulation. There is no
side of us, and this least of all, that can with impunity
be forced to a feverish and abnormal activity.
Nature's reply is invariably that of reaction.
It is here, especially with weaker and unbalanced
natures, as when you set fire to combustible materials.
Some revivals we have seen in our day have illus-
trated that law. They have raged over districts like
a forest fire, producing for a time a splendid illu-
mination, but leaving behind them a wilderness of
blackened stumps. The religious indifference that
has followed means simply that the peoples thus
114
Religion and Feeling
dealt with have had their capacity for emotion
burned up, and have to wait till a further supply has
accumulated. If our religious teachers desire really
to bring about the reign of God in this world, they
must do it by themselves obeying the laws of God.
And those laws are writ deep in the fundamental
structure of the soul.
"5
XIII
OF HAVING AND GETTING
That saying of Jesus, *' To him that hath shall
be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken
even that which he hath," seems at first sight one
of the most cynical of utterances. It fits in so
exactly with the way of the world. The people who
have, the heati possidentes, as Bismarck once described
them ; the holders of fat purses, born with a silver
spoon in their mouths, to them all seems given.
Society fawns upon them. They get its compli-
ments, its titles, its obsequious service. That they
have is the reason for their always getting more.
" Money makes money," The position of these
" haves " enables them, moreover, to prey upon the
"have nots." A threatened coal strike enables the
capitalists to raise the price of coal, a price which
the almost destitute have to pay. The humble
toilers, at the bottom of the scale, look up from their
misery to watch the idle rich, who "toil not, neither
spin, ' ' with nothing to do but to receive their revenues
and to spend them on their follies. They look up,
to curse a world where such things are.
Was Jesus, in His utterance, condoning this state
of things, describing it as life's inevitable law ? It
was hardly like Him to do that. Hardly like Him
who suggested to the rich young man to " sell all
that he had, and give to the poor." There is, by the
ii6
of Having and Getting
way, in the " Gospel to the Egyptians," an enlarged
account of this interview which we might well accept
as authentic. In this narrative we read : " The
Lord said to him. How canst thou say I have ful-
filled the law, ' Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself,' and behold many of thy brethren, sons of
Abraham, are clothed in foul garments, and perish
of hunger, and thy house is full of many good things,
and nothing cometh out of it to them ? " Were He
to appear in our midst to-day there is little doubt,
in the matter of " have " v. " have not," which side He
would be on. But here is the curious thing. It is
He, the carpenter's son, who had not where to lay
His head, who makes this startling declaration
about " him that hath." Plainly there is a meaning
here which is not the cynical one, which points in
quite another direction.
It is not this or that transitory condition of society,
but what lies behind, at the basis of life, that is here
in question. Standing there we find in these New
Testament words a group of truths that are vital and
fundamental, and which furnish a platform from
which the outlook is vast and inspiring. We have
here neither Socialism nor anti-Socialism, but a
doctrine of man ; a doctrine which, amidst all
possible changes, continues always the same. It
contemplates man as the possessor of something,
and because a possessor therefore a receiver. It
offers a law about the conditions of possessing, and
also of receiving. It supposes that all of us —
the meanest and poorest of us — have something to
begin with, and that everything depends on what
we do with that something. Its dealing is not with
man as a mere social or economic factor, but with
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The Life of the Soul
man as a moral being ; with man as possessing
intellect, conscience, and will ; in fine, with man as
a soul. And that not as a complete soul, but rather
a soul in the making. We come into the world with
the beginnings of it all ; germs of it, with a vast
possibility of development. That is what we have ;
and the way we deal with this " have " determines
all we shall get. It is precisely as we work upon
this innermost " have " of ours, as we train it,
ascertain the eternal laws of it, and render to them
our entire obedience, that it becomes available for
receiving. If we use this innermost treasure rightly it
will return upon us with ever-accumulating interest ;
if we use it wrongly the capital itself will be taken
away.
The applications of this law are endless, but let
us, as a concrete example, begin with the class with
which we started, and where the statement seemed
to have so cynical an application : the class of the
world's possessors. A man is born into this class ;
with all the comforts, all the luxuries, ready to his
hand. Inside him, looking out over these things, is
his faculty of reception, of enjoyment. It is for the
moment the fullest equipped, biggest part of him.
That, because he and his ancestors were animals,
before they were men. But behind this animalism
lie the things which make him a man — his conscience,
his sense of duty, his spiritual faculty. Supposing
now our man, leaving this inner area of him, his true
manhood, all neglected and undeveloped, lets loose
on the things around him his animal receptiveness ;
fills himself with all of world, flesh and devil his
money can buy, what will follow ? The working,
the terrible inevitable working, of the New Testament
ii8
of Having and Getting
law. This man, with all his " have," will become a
" have not." He has lived for enjoyment, and his
enjoyment will be taken from him. His pleasures
will cease to please. " It all becomes very dis-
gusting in the long run," was the naive confession
of a professed libertine to the present writer. His
money can buy everything except the one thing he
wants — enjoyment. The honest labourer, on fifteen
shillings a week, enjoying his sleep at nights, eating
his bread and bacon with appetite in the open air,
is a prince compared with this man who has run
through all the gamut of animal sensation, to find
himself at thirty bankrupt of life.
There is no " hath " worth having that is not
worked for, and the work must always be an inward
work. Our primary gifts are nothing until they are
cultivated ; until we have put heart and soul into
their development. And precisely as we work at
them, obey the laws of them, do these gifts extend
their faculty of reception. Life here, if we give
it a chance, is extraordinarily generous. We learn
to read, and all literature is open to us. We culti-
vate music, and the world of sound becomes a new
heaven to the spirit. Whatever you learn becomes
a life-long possession. The seeds you sow in the mind
never cease from yielding their harvests. And the
higher you go in this cultivation the more subtle,
the more profoundly satisf3dng are the values that
flow in. The more, in our self discipline, we rise
above the world, the more surely, the more richly
it belongs to us. For then behind its material we
find always the spiritual ; simple things become
avenues to ineffable joys. John Wesley, a slight,
slim figure weighing a surprisingly small number of
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The Life of the Soul
pounds avoirdupois on the scale, cultivates his faith,
his love to God and man, and offers them to his
fellows. To-day some thirty millions of Methodists
offer him their homage, and that represents but a
small part of his influence in the world. To minds
so cultivated who possess a " have " of this sort, the
very trials, suffering, hardships which are the stock-
in-trade of pessimism, become means of inner re-
freshment. A writer of the second generation of
the Pilgrim Fathers complains that in the new,
more comfortable circumstances, the spiritual joys
of the people had become much less than " in the
time of wants." The well-to-do Wesleyans of to-day
sing sometimes in their well-furnished churches that
wonderful hymn —
Who suffer with our Master here
Shall soon before His face appear,
And by His side sit down.
But do they get from it any of that spiritual rapture
with which their fathers sang it ; the men of the first
generation, who for their faith were stoned, dragged
through horse-ponds, exposed to every insult by
raging mobs ? These were truly of the heati possi-
dentes, who ** having nothing possessed all things."
But these considerations, important as they are,
are mere fringes of the main topic. " To him that
hath shall be given " rightly studied forms the finest
and most final of challenges as to the position and
destiny of man. Its argument is that because man
has what he has he may expect an infinity of things
that are to come to him. One might say this of his
inheritance in this world. He is undoubtedly to be
the conqueror, the possessor of it in a way hardly
dreamed of as yet. He has, so far, barely scratched
120
of Having and Getting
its surface. The hidden depths of power and possi-
bility remain yet to be revealed. But that is only
a small part of the matter. It is when we come
from the visible world to Man himself, to what he is
in essential being, that the theme opens to its true
dimensions. We have lived through the epoch of
the human dethronement. Fifty years ago science
professed to have rediscovered man, to have put him
in his place. Biology had traced his animal descent,
his affinity with the anthropoid apes. Other investi-
gations had told with seemingly shattering effect
upon the freedom of his will. He was, as much as
all other living beings, a part of nature, a creation of
matter and force. His feelings were nerve reactions,
the result of outside stimuli. The brain secreted
thought as the liver secreted bile. He was simply
a mechanism, a creature of heredity and environment.
In the dry light of these discoveries the old philo-
sophies, the old idealisms, the old religion, the old
God, all have vanished. As a French writer puts it,
the '* hypothese Dieu s'elimine."
That was the new faith of fifty years ago. We
are now far enough from it to wonder how so amazing
a position could ever for a moment gain possession
of intelligent minds. We are now recovering our-
selves, and asking questions of science. We are
asking how a universe non-intelligent at the beginning
could produce intelligence. We know the carpenter
can make the table, but the table make the
carpenter ? As Professor Janet puts it : " Every-
thing leads to the belief that if nature began by chaos,
it would never have come out of it." The materialist
has to ask himself how it comes about that the very
thought which makes him a materialist should be in
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The Life of the Soul
itself so essentially unmaterial ? Did it belong to
matter ; why has it none of the characteristics of
matter ; why should a great thought not fill a com-
mensurate space ; why should a weighty idea not
be weighed in ounces or pounds avoirdupois ? If
anyone wants the present attitude of science and
philosophy on these questions let him read Bergson's
'* Time and Free Will," and Eucken on " Life's Basis
and Life's Ideal," where the one, by purely scientific
arguments and demonstrations, shatters the mid-
Victorian necessitarianism, and the other, by a pro-
cedure different but not less cogent, exhibits
humanity as beginning in Nature but essentially
beyond and above it.
Again, we are asking, and with full reason, not
simply how things have happened, but why ? We
are looking not simply to beginnings but ends. Put
man's beginnings at the bottom ; derive him from the
dust. Put the primitive soul at the lowest ; say of
it, if you will :
Body and spirit are two, God only knows which is which,
The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk
in a ditch.
But the question is. How is it that from humblest
origins it has developed along the line we see it on ;
developed obedience, the sense of duty, the force
of love ; developed ideals, developed religion ;
developed the sense and feeling of a spiritual world,
the belief in an unseen Holy to which it passionately
cleaves ? All these are facts of life, as much as is
the grey matter of the brain, and with a deeper
question in them than any grey matter can offer.
The spirit of man is full of aihrmations about itself,
which find their answer not in matter but in life.
122
of Having and Getting
It is here, in his position as a spiritual being in a
spiritual universe, that man stands before us as the
great possessor. And here it is we find the tre-
mendous meaning of the word, " To him that hath
shall be given." For his possession here means
nothing at all if it does not mean the preparation for,
and the invitation to a reception. It is because the
soul, by the irresistible working of its own nature,
creates great hopes, that we have the surest argument
for their fulfilment. As Fouillee puts it : *' The ideal
is but the deepest sense and anticipation of the future
reality." Is not Lodge within the realm of fact when
he argues : " Our highest thoughts are likely to be
nearest to reality. They must be stages in the direc-
tion of truth, else they would not have come to us,
and been recognised as the highest " ? We may
trust here to Nature's economy. She does not waste
her material. She has not furnished the ox in the
field, the fish in the sea, with expectations that
go beyond their limits. Are we to think that she has
lavished on man the boundless wealth of expectation,
of spiritual aspiration, for no purpose at all ?
Can a finite thing created in the bounds of time and space ;
Can it live and grow and love Thee, catch the glory of Thy
face ;
Fade and die, be gone for ever ; know no being, have no place ?
** To him that hath." We have now one-half of our
being ; the half of faith, of growing fitness, of
infinite desire. And yonder, whence our spirit came,
waits the other half which shall complete us.
12$
XIV
THE DEEPENING OF LIFE
In speaking of the deepening of life we are, of
course, using the words in an accommodated sense.
We cannot make life deeper than it is. It was
here before us, deep, deep as eternity. Our own
consciousness has beneath it an abyss of being
beyond all our thought. Towards the ultimate
reality our eye strains itself in vain. We get
shadows of it ; hints, suggestions enough to fire
the imagination, to stir the noblest hopes. But we
walk by faith, not by sight. The higher our in-
telligence the more baffling the mystery. Says
Eckhart, that grand old mystic, *' Many people hope
to see God as one sees an ox." A naive expectation
that, which we have ceased to share. And of life,
not in its ultimate sources, but as showing in our-
selves, we know so little. We are kept going by a
machinery which works independently of our will.
We know only the surface of ourselves. Science,
in this subject, uses a different language from that
of thirty years ago. " Life," says Sir Oliver Lodge,
*' appears to me something whose full significance
lies in another scheme of things, but which touches
and interacts with this material universe in a certain
way, building its particles into notable configurations
for a time — without confounding any physical laws
— and then evaporating whence it came." Says
124
The Deepening of Life
Flammarion, " The sub-conscious nature does not
seem to depend upon the organism. It is probably
anterior to it, and will survive it." In our own
consciousness, and in utterances such as these, we
obtain glimpses of the depth of life, as it is in itself.
Our concern, however, is not with this aspect of
the question. We propose to deal here not with life
itself as the ultimate mystery, but with our own
attitude towards it. Life is deep enough, but are
we deep, or in the way of becoming so ? Are we
digging down or only skimming the surface ? Are
we extracting and storing any inner deposits, or
allowing the fleeting years to leave no trace ? It is
a question both of the individual and of the national
life. We see here enormous differences between
one man and another, between one race and one
age and another. Our own age seems in these
matters to be at the crossways. It is not sure what
we are here for, or what we should strive after. It
interprets in such opposite ways the meaning of the
world, of the cosmic discipline under which we find
ourselves. Is our existence, in Voltaire's words,
'* line mauvaise plaisanterie," or has it a serious
meaning ? Are we extracting from it amusement,
or chagrin, or something else ? Have we acquired
a definite attitude towards our environment, a recog-
nised way of dealing with circumstance, so that
events beat upon us as the stream upon the mill
wheel, turning machinery and grinding corn ; or
as the wave that beats upon the rock — its one effect
corrosion and destruction ? What is nature's own
view here ? Has she, in the long history that is
behind, disclosed any spiritual purpose towards us ?
Is her process an idle clash of forces, indifferent as
125
The Life of the Soul
to ends ; or can we discern in her operations a
recognisable scheme for the soul ? Is man here
to pass a few years in a stupid acquiescence, in a
careless indifference, in a bestial revel, in a passionate
and despairing antagonism ; or is he here as a pilgrim
of eternity, the seeker of an end that is central, an
adventurer of the infinite, a tracker of ultimate
Reality, who, searching ever further, sinking ever
deeper, shall at last find himself in God ? These
are the problems which our age confronts, and
which men and nations, in their separate ways, are
trying to settle for themselves.
Certainly nature, the constitution of things, in
some plainly visible directions, works towards the
deepening of life. We are harnessed to civilisation,
and civilisation, amongst other things, means work.
We are born into a system which demands of us an
ordered energy, an energy which tells not only on
the thing we are doing, but at every stroke backward
upon our character. An onlooker observing us
from some other sphere would say that at least we
seem tolerably busy. There never was a busier
age. The world shakes with the thunder of our
machinery ; it is hot with the fever of our activities.
The pace grows quicker every year. It seems as
if in the immediate future idleness will become a
criminal offence. And we have something to show
for our work. We are cutting and carving our
world as though it were wax in our hands. We are
making it work as it never did before. Every quality
of its elements, every ounce of its energy, is being
called into play. And all this reacts upon character,
making us swift, eager, quick-witted, versatile,
ingenious.
126
The Deepening of Life
But civilisation is discovering that work — at
least, this kind of work — with all its advantages,
has some woeful limitations. Our machinery has
a way of making men into machines. Our routine
deepens men the wrong way : deepens them, presses
them, into ugly ruts of mechanical habit, where they
neither see nor feel aught beyond their immediate
task. Worse than that, when at the goal of his
exertions, in the full tide of his most successful
activities, there creeps over man the sickening
doubt as to the good of it all ; as to whether the
game, however well played, is worth the candle.
When he has reached the height of his ambition, will
he find there aught but a barren vacancy, his height
a point where the winds beat more furiously than
below ? It was such a feeling that came with over-
powering force upon the mind of John Stuart Mill
when, as he records, in 1826, he asked himself the
question : " Suppose that all your objects in life
were realised, that all the changes in institutions
and opinions which you are looking forward to could
be completely effected at this very instant, would
that be a great joy and happiness to you ? And an
irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered
' No.' " He speaks of the melancholy which there-
upon immediately fell upon him, and which for a
long period afterward pressed him down. One
wonders here that it did not occur to so acute a
mind that in most activities the joy is in the striving
rather than in the result ; in the chase more than in
the fox-brush at the end. And there were deeper
considerations which Mill, noble character that he
was, seems both then and afterwards so strangely
to have missed.
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The Life of the Soul
Plainly these activities of the external life, however
fast and furious, however magnificent their apparent
result, do not satisfy the human problem, do not
fill the human soul. And this seems to carry with
it the conclusion that they were not meant to satisfy.
And it is precisely here that the cosmic order appears
once more to show its hand. It hints at depths of
life to which our surface labours do not reach ; at
objects of our being that are beyond their sphere.
We pause in our rush to ask, " Where, after all,
is the Reality which is our true possession ? " Then
we are reminded of another push which nature
gives us in that direction ; that of what w^e call evil,
sorrow, suffering. Sorrow is one of the universals.
Joy is a perhaps ; suffering is a certainty. The
world's evil has been the cornerstone of scepticism,
the rock on which atheism builds its church. To
us all it is the everlasting perplexity. " Si Deus,
unde malum? Si non Deus, unde honum ? " ("If
there is a God, whence came evil ? If there is
no God, whence came good ? ") So men weary
themselves with this question. Michelet said the
French were the only people who knew how to suffer
gaily. Yet nowhere has the pain of things produced
a deeper pessimism. " On entre, on crie ; c'est
la vie ; On crie, on sort ; c'est la mori." One could
hardly find in literature a terser, darker summation
of life. But is there no solution that is not confused,
or contradictory, or despairing ? The suffering,
the weariness, the decay, the oncoming death, which
beat through all our successes ; find their way behind
all our outside achievements, have they no meaning
but a cynical one ? Are we not rather pushed to
the conclusion that their purpose lies in the deepening
128
The Deepening of Life
of life; Nature's further thrust at us to push us
back from the surface things ; to compel us upon
some centre within ?
This is to say — we have been long coming to it —
that Nature has a religious meaning. But let us be
sure what we mean by religion. The Churches
are all around us, offering us their special brands,
their final solutions. But as we study them we are
confronted with that modern attitude which sees
in this direction often more difficulties than helps
to faith. Some of them offer us a revelation compact,
precise and ready-made, an answer let down from
heaven to all our questions. In their authoritative
documents we have angels talking, verbal messages
transmitted, voices from the clouds. One might
suppose that in earlier times earth and the celestial
spheres were in as direct communication as London
and New York. To the modern mind, all this, we
say, is a difficulty rather than a help to faith. For
our age finds the heavens singularly reticent. If
there is any religion for us to-day, it does not come
that way. The most tremendous fact for us now is
the silence of the spiritual world. Our religious
speech is human speech ; and we know no other.
All that comes to us from past or present in this
sphere is the echo of man's aspiration, of man's guess.
But is this fact the destroyer, or even the embarrass-
ment, of faith ? We are beginning now to learn
better. We know that if the cosmic order is silent
on this question, it is not inactive. Its answer is
not in talk, but in deed. Its very silence is a pressure,
meant for the deepening of life. We are thrust in
upon ourselves, that from the depths there we may
get the response we seek. The " voice from the
129
9
The Life of the Soul
excellent glory " of which men of old speak, was the
voice from the centre of the soul. And its message
is authentic.
Where humanity develops a crying want it
is on the road towards the supply. And the
surest proof to-day of religion is the fact that
man cannot get on, individually or nationally,
without it. An evidence of this is given in the
present condition of France. One of the most
arresting books of our time is the work by M.
Fouillee, one of her ablest thinkers, on " La France,
au Point de vue Moral." In some respects it is an
appalling picture. Criminality has trebled there
in extent during the last fifty years, and the worst
feature of it is the condition of the youthful popu-
lation. The youthful criminality more than doubles
that of the adults. In tracing the causes of it M.
Fouillee speaks of the breaking up of the home-life ;
the influx of the country to the town ; the unfettered
licence of the pornographic press ; and, gravest of
all, a system of national education which cultivates
the brain, while paying Httle or no attention to the
soul. He is no clericalist, far from it ; he is a philo-
sopher, pure and simple. But the statistics and
his knowledge of human nature show him clearly
enough that a nation cannot live without a high
morality, and that no strong morality can exist
without the spiritual sanction. It is in Brittany,
where a naive faith exists, that the criminal statistics
are the lowest, where the virile virtues are highest.
As a cultivated scientist, Fouillee has the keenest
sense of the mental impossibilities of that faith.
But he sees that it contains a genuine religion ; and
it is a pure, genuine religion that can alone save
130
The Deepening of Life
France. Art, science, industry, commerce, literature,
have their great place in the national life. But of
themselves they are not deep enough. The ultimate
requisite is something that can cleanse and vivify
the soul.
France, for the deepening of its life, needs a deeper
religion than it has got. And that is the need of us
all. That religion is here waiting for us. " The
word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart."
The great spiritual teachers have known this. They
found religion in the religions. Their instinct led
them through all the outside trappings to the centre.
Montesquieu was not thinking of the ceremonial or
dogmatic crust of Christianity when he thus described
its essence : " A religion which envelopes all the
passions ; which is not more jealous of actions than
of desires and thoughts ; which holds us not by
chains but by innumerable threads ; which leaves
behind it human justice, and begins another justice/'
Gerard Groote, of the fourteenth century, living in
the heart of Catholicism, nurtured in its traditions,
as he spoke to the multitudes who hung, entranced,
for hours at a time on his lips, had little or nothing to
say on creeds and ceremonies. What were his
themes ? The love of God, the Divine search, the
great salvation, the possibility of life with God. And
it is here that Jesus meets us, the deepest of all. His
disciples embellished His story with signs and
wonders, the things He cared about least of all.
" Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe."
We do not need them to-day any more than did He,
for He is Himself the sign. One could wish all our
people could learn some foreign language in order to
read the Gospel teaching as a new kind of message.
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The Life of the Soul
In our mother tongue it flows over us too easily in
the well-worn channels. We need to come to it on
a fresh road, so as to linger over every word. For
those words open depths indeed. Here is a life
which reaches down beyond us, down to the centre.
** Evidences of Christianity " ? Here are the
evidences. As we study that teaching, that life,
that death, and the Power and Spirit that followed
the death, we are looking not only into the depths
of ourselves, but to a depth beyond ourselves, down
to the Divine hiddenness whence springs the
utmost life. This is the deeper Christianity ; to
survive all changes of form, all advances of thought,
the fulness that can fill our emptiness, that can
deepen our life down to life's foundations, that for
life and death can give us victory.
133
XV
THE HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS
On the theme of man's spiritual relations the
twentieth century seems to have broken new ground.
We find ourselves at a new starting-point, both in
philosophy and theology ; at the opening in both of
a fresh route, which may carry us we at present
scarcely know whither, except that it will land us in
great changes in both spheres. Speaking generally,
the old systems, especially the theologic systems,
began from above and worked downwards. They
began with an absolute, with abstract ideas — with
eternity, infinity, with omnipresence and omni-
science and omnipotence — and sought to reconcile the
actuality, as we encounter it, with these conceptions.
To-day in our endeavour to solve the riddle of
existence, we are beginning from the other end.
We begin with what is here, in us and outside us ;
with the concrete fact as it thrusts itself upon us,
and from this try to work our way upwards. The
tendency in itself is not entirely new. It has been at
w^ork for a good while, and in the most diverse minds.
It broke out in the eighteenth century, in a crude
and destructive form. Diderot's atheism, so-called,
was simply an effort to get rid of the intellect-
ual contradictions involved in the then prevalent
conceptions of the Absolute. Says he : " The
incompatibility of physical and moral evil with the
133
The Life of the Soul
nature of the Eternal Being evolves itself into this
dilemma : it is either impotence or bad will ;
impotence if He wanted to hinder evil and could
not ; bad will if He could have hindered and did not
will it. It is this that has led people to imagine
the fault of the first father of us all, original sin,
future rewards and punishments, the Incarnation,
immortality, the two principles of the Manichaeans,
Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Persians, the empire
of light and darkness, and other absurdities that have
found credit among the different nations of the
world."
To call these things absurdities is, of course, very
French and very eighteenth century. It is that
destructive business which is so easy — as easy as
breaking windows. And yet Diderot touches here
the weak part of philosophic and theologic abso-
lutism. He voices the very difficulty which to Mill
was so confounding ; that terrible " either-or "
of the world's evil. " Either God is not wholly
omnipotent or He is not wholly good." The difficulty
is the oldest in the world ; but the special note of
to-day is, as we have already observed, that on this
and all the allied questions we are starting from
a new standpoint. We begin at the bottom instead
of at the top. We are trying to frame our question
as to what is above by first finding out, as far as we
can, what is beneath. Before we pronounce on the
infinite we are studying our own doorstep and what
is immediately around it. We recognise that in this
life we shall never get a complete or satisfying view,
for a view from beneath upward is as one-sided as a
view from above downward. But we have attained
the grace of recognising that it is better, and more
134
The Higher Consciousness
modest for us, instead of dogmatising about an
upper view, without ever having been there, to get
a clear notion of the landscape about us, where we
really are.
Our age, examining its questions from this humbler
standpoint, is concentrating its attention on the
problem of consciousness. That, of course, is the
key to everything else. We can only know our world
in proportion as we know ourselves. We are to-day
beyond Kant in some things, but we can never forget
our obHgations to the man who showed us, as it had
never been shown before, how largely the world
outside is, in its appeal to us, manufactured by the
action of our own mind. But to-day we are upon
some new questions here. On the subject of con-
sciousness, what it is, and what its implications are,
philosophy and theology are shifting their ground.
In the latter half of the last century the battle was
between the materialists and the ideahsts. Then the
biologists and physiologists, approaching the problem
from the outside, made our inner life an affair of the
blind cosmic forces, and landed them^selves in a
materialistic determinism. They were answered,
and with good effect, by idealists such as Lotze,
Martineau, and Green, who, with a truer instinct,
insisted on beginning from the inside ; from what we
knew best, namely, ourselves ; and who showed
that the very ideas of force and of causality on which
their opponents, the naturists, relied, originated in
ourselves, and were transferred by us to the world
outside ; and who argued further — carrying here the
war into the enemy's country — that if mind, energy,
allied with free will, were the ultimate facts of
existence, as given in consciousness, it was to these,
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The Life of the Soul
and not to blind matter, that we must look as our
guides for interpreting the outside universe.
In that earlier contest we may say the battle has
already been won. Bergson has given the coup de
grace to materialism in his exhaustive analysis of the
brain and its relation to thought. It is only after
a close study of that analysis that we can appreciate
the jest with which he sums it up: *' That there is,"
says he, in " Matter and Memory," " a close connec-
tion between a state of consciousness and the brain
we do not dispute. But there is also a close connection
between a coat and the nail on which it hangs . . .
Shall we say then that the shape of the nail gives
us the shape of the coat, or in any way corresponds
to it ? " The jest would be almost an impertinence
if it stood by itself. After studying his researches
into the functions of the brain and the functions of
mind, the sarcasm is seen to more than justify
itself.
But the contest has now been pushed a step
further ; on to fresh ground, a ground which opens
an immense new outlook for theology. The scientific
world is preparing to admit consciousness as, though
alHed with, yet distinct from, mechanism. But
the study of it, in all its forms, has opened up some
questions which go deeper than the old con-
troversies. We are asking, Where does consciousness
begin ; how far does it go ; and what do its mani-
festations show us as to its ultimate source and
end ? The first question is, as now studied, giving
us some surprising results, which offer their own
hints as to those other problems. Consciousness
begins lower down apparently than we had previously
thought. We remember here Haeckel's conjecture
136
The Higher Consciousness
that feeling, of a sort, begins with the atom— with
the sense there of attraction and repulsion. It
may be so ; it may be that the earth on which we
tread, the soHd, immovable mountains, know more
than we think. Is the vegetable world a thought-
world ? Maeterlinck's investigations, in his " In-
telligence of Flowers," offer here some extraordinary
suggestions. Says he : " Some flowers, like the
lucerne, have invented the Archimedian screw. . .
But these ingenious screws are failures ; they could
only act for a certain height ; they are too low
to come into action. They are an illustration of
Nature's mistakes." On the other hand, he ob-
serves : " When shall we succeed in building a
parachute or a flying machine as rigid, as subtle, and
as safe as that of the dandehon ? " Of vegetable
contrivance in general he says : " The different
developments of flowers, for impregnation, etc.,
follow exactly the line of inventions and improve-
ments amongst us. A clumsy contrivance is
succeeded by a simpler one. ... It would
really seem as though ideas came to flowers in the
same way as to us. The flowers grope in the same
darkness, encounter the same obstacles, the same
ill will in some unknown. They would appear to
possess our patience, our perseverance, our self-
love ; the same varied and diversified intelligence,
almost the same hopes and the same ideals. They
struggle, like ourselves, against a great indifferent
force that ends by assisting them."
As we ascend the scale, as we enter the animal
world, we see yet closer affinities with our own
consciousness. The soul of a beetle is as immaterial
as the soul of a man. Ants are enormously clever
137
The Life of the Soul
people. Lubbock has shown us how they contrive ;
how in presence of unexpected obstacles they put
their heads together and overcome them by their
native w^it. A dog has a wide range, not only of
intellect, but of morality. It is capable of dis-
interested love, of jealousy, of hope, of fear, of
remorse. In man himself we have a consciousness
at the highest range known to our actual experience.
We have not only sensations but ideas ; not only
percepts but concepts ; not only the concrete but
the abstract ; the sense not only of time but
eternity ; not simply of the immediate but of infinity.
We have not only the pressure of sensation, but
the idea of causality, the relation of effects to causes ;
the powder of after-looking and fore-looking, which
traces back from present appearances to their
origins and onward to their results ; above all, we
have that dominating moral sense which gives to
things their inner values, and which proclaims
the universe w^orthless unless it have a moral end.
And it is out of this consciousness, as we see it at
work in the low-er spheres, and as we find it in our-
selves, that we have to fram.e our idea of that higher
consciousness which man everywhere has looked
to as the framer and guide of our world. Here it is
that the battle of our day is being joined. It is
admitted practically everywhere that there is such
a higher consciousness. The higher, we feel, did not
begin with the lower ; thought could not have
originated in no-thought. The stream does not
rise above its source. Unintelligent matter could
not of itself become intelligent. But where and what
is the intelhgence that started thought— thought
as we find it in the vegetable, if you allow it there ;
138
The Higher Consciousness
in the animal, and in ourselves ? Is it in the direct
action upon us of the omnipotent, omnipresent,
omniscient deity which the earlier thinking has offered
us ? We come here upon that terrible " either-or "
which Diderot and Mill have elaborated for us. We
come upon those limitations which Maeterlinck finds
in the flowers ; upon an intelligence which thinks
as we do, and makes mistakes as we do. We come
upon the whole question of the world's evils, disasters,
catastrophes ; upon human sin and misery ; upon
the cruelty and indifference of Nature, as seen in a
San Francisco earthquake, in the fiery blast from Mont
Pele6 which destroyed St. Pierre, upon that crash
on the ice of the Titanic which plunged two continents
into mourning. What, it is asked, is your higher
consciousness doing in all this ? Is it an omni-
potent all-loving consciousness ? Why, then, this
history of defeat, this catalogue of woe ?
These questions have been pressing upon modern
thought with a new intensity, and they have pro-
duced some remarkable answers. The late Professor
James, of America, has given his, in his doctrine of
Pluralism ; and Bergson, so far as his constructive
thought has gone, suggests a creative evolution
which as yet is hardly fully conscious of itself. It
would seem as though the modern mind, in its quest
for a solution of the enigma, were tending backwards
to that Gnosticism of the second century which split
the controlling intelligence into a hierarchy of sub-
ordinate powers, whose lower ranks only were
entrusted with immediate contact with man and
his destiny — as though here our apparently
newest thought were once more turning out be to of
very ancient date, refurbished for the occasion.
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The Life of the Soul
What now have we, as Christians, to say to these
new developments ? We cannot ignore them ; they
have bitten too deeply into the world's best minds
for that. And there is no reason why we should.
Indeed, it will not surprise us if the evolution of
ideas on this subject leads to a reaffirmation and
a further extension of the central Christian doctrine.
It seems as though science and philosophy, working
from their own standpoints, are about to meet on
the New Testament doctrine of a Divine incarnation,
a doctrine of it with a wider reach. That doctrine,
in Christian theology, has hitherto been restricted to
the Person of Christ as a historical figure. What
we may now contemplate is the carrying of this
doctrine into the whole scheme of creation and of
providence. The New Testament speaks of God
as, in Christ, " emptying Himself, taking on Him the
form of a servant." It teaches a limitation of the
Divine, that it may draw near to, and ally itself with
humanity. But the considerations we have been
enumerating raise the question whether such a self-
emptying, such a limitation, have not been carried
farther ; whether creation itself, the bringing into
the existence of beings like ourselves, dowered with
intelhgence and free will, is not itself a Hmitation ;
whether the Infinite One, in fathering such a world,
and in guiding it, is not Himself under a Kenosis ;
whether we have not here, in nature and history,
to do immediately with a self-limited power and
knowledge ; a power and knowledge that work as we
do by experiment and effort ; by partial successes,
by mistakes and failures even ; working against an
outer indifference and even opposition, on the way
to a final and victorious good ? May it not be that
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The Higher Consciousness
there was no other way than this— of humiliation
and self-abnegation — of bringing such as we are to the
best that is possible for us ; that only in His union
with us in failure and disaster lay the road to the
perfectibility of our spirits, to our final bliss in oneness
with Himself ? May it not be that here, by this way
of science and philosophy, we are coming to a greater
doctrine of the Cross, as borne by our God from the
beginning of His relations with us ; the doctrine of
" the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world " ;
that we have here the key to the mystery of the ages,
the mystery of pain and sin, and mistake and death ;
have it in the doctrine of One who has stooped from
His height to share our imperfection, to travel with
us till the end is reached and the Hmitation is over,
till the Kingdom is finally delivered up to the Father,
and God is All in All ?
141
XVI
OF NEW INTERESTS
What is it that makes life a success or a failure ?
Does the matter lie in our riches or poverty ; in the
position we achieve or fail to achieve in society ; in
our health or ill-health ; in the ease or the difficulty
of our career ? All these considerations have their
weight — a different weight with different people.
There is another test, surer and deeper, but one
often so strangely overlooked. Has life been
interesting ? For that is a success in itself. But out
of this arises immediately the question, What is it
to be interested ? We cannot stay to elaborate
that theme. For working purposes it may suffice
to say that an interest is an outward something
which congenially appeals to and unites with our
inwardness ; which helpfully stirs the soul, and draws
it out of itself. We were not made to dwell alone.
Left to ourselves, we are a vacuity, a nothing. The
life process, over all its range, is a perpetual wedlock,
a marrying of the inner to some outer — of the eye
with light, of the lungs with air, of the ear with sound,
of the mind with its affinities. A carding machine,
set to work without the wool it is made to tear, will
rack itself to pieces. We are like that. We must
have our wool to work upon. But there is a little
difference between our machine and that of the
factory. That works upon some one special material.
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of New Interests
Ours has for its material all life, all time, all events,
all the universe.
Nothing is more wonderful than this capacity of
ours for interest ; and the provision which Nature
has made for its exercise. The child begins with the
marvel of itself, and of its senses. In those first
months it is, in its own way, occupied with the vastest
problems ; solving as it can the mysteries of time, of
space, of motion ; of the relation of its tiny being
with the strange world it has come into. Later, it
is full of its toys, its games. Every year brings its
new interest. As the powers develop the field opens
for their exercise. There are constant surprises.
Think of what it means to learn to read ? The age
of passion opens, a realm of the vastest promises.
What immense new interests open with love, with
marriage, and parenthood ! Yes, but after !
" After thirty, life is all plain prose," remarked some-
one once in our hearing. That depends. It is here
the battle comes. For now the question will be
decided whether life is to be a dull affair or one which
grows in zest with every passing day ; and the ques-
tion will be decided by ourselves. It will be decided
by the way we handle things and look at things.
If we are to find a constant interest in life it will
have to be on Nature's terms. She is the most royal
of givers, but always on conditions. She will not
throw her pearls before swine. "Do ut des,'' "I
give that you may give," is her motto. And our gift
must come early in the transaction. Her condition
here is indeed itself one of her best gifts, without
which all the others would be useless. Her object is
not to smother a passive nature with bounties that
would be a mere burden, but to offer in proportion
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as we are prepared to receive — and to use. And
so to win an interest in things we must work at
them. Here is all literature ; but you must first
learn to read. Here is the heaven of music ; but you
enter by the strait gate of notes and finger exercises.
The rule is everywhere, and absolute. In propor-
tion to our doggedness in learning do all the old things
of the world become new. A child is interested in
worms. It is a genuine interest, and will afford
it a certain pleasure. But probably the pleasure
will not increase ; rather the other way. Most of us,
for the rest of our life, see no beauty in worms. A
Darwin comes along and studies these creatures.
While society is rushing from theatre to ball-room
in the feverish endeavour to keep interested, this
man studies his worms. Finally, he writes a book
on them, " The Formation of Vegetable Mould by
Worms," and we find what fascinations are hid in
these humble crawlers for a mind that is open to
their teaching.
It is when we have learned to learn that our
world becomes so interesting. Jeremy Bentham was
writing Latin at the age of five, and was already known
as " the philosopher." From then to eighty-five,
when he died, he never ceased his ardour in the
pursuit of truth. Says Mill of him : " He never
knew prosperity nor adversity, passion nor satiety.
He never had even the experience which sickness
gives ; he lived from childhood to the age of eighty-
five in boyish health. He knew no dejection, no
weariness of heart. He never felt life as a sore and
weary burden. He was a boy to the last."
Bentham missed some of the great things, but he
knew at least this supreme secret — to work and
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of New Interests
to learn from Nature's " open sesame," with which
we open door after door into ever-widening fields of
life. Take, too, this sketch of Nasmyth, inventor of the
steam hammer, which we get in that charming
biography, " Memorials of Susanna and Catherine
Winkworth " ; " He told us a great deal about his
early life ; his living for two years on five shillings
a week for food, five more for lodging and dress ;
how, when his wages were raised to fifteen shillings
a week, began the ' butter ' period, ' and I laid by
my first capital besides.' Then he told us about the
difficulties of his new monster gun, and his new plans
about it. Then he got off on his great moon studies ;
and he described great geologic eras in the earth's
history in quaint, vivid language, more like Mr.
Kingsley's than anyone else I know." Here is a
man beginning at the very bottom — a capital
place to begin at — beginning with the struggle for
bread, a struggle in itself so mightily interesting, as
most of us know. So far from being beaten by it,
he becomes a capitalist on fifteen shillings a week ;
going on in his learning and his thinking till moons
and geologic eras become part of his life. We are
not all Nasmyths, but his method is open to us all.
Following it we may not perhaps reach his height,
but there will not be a dull spot in the road.
There is no way to lasting interests apart from
work. We all travel nowadays more or less. The
world is a world on wheels. But masses of travellers
get the minimum of pleasure out of the maximum of
expense. We met a man who was unspeakably
bored by the Alps. At the foot of Mont Blanc he
sighed for the pleasures of the town. Contrast this
attitude with that of a Ruskin, the prepared and
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The Life of the Soul
disciplined soul, to whom every fold and undulation
of the mountain masses told the story of their forma-
tion and purpose ; who saw the science and the
artistry of every cloud that floated above ; to whom
every leaf on the tree beside him whispered its secret
and laid bare its beauty ; and whose infinite know-
ledge of detail served only to deepen the sacred joy
with which the grandeur of the whole affected him. In
these scenes we carry away in proportion to what we
bring. Once sailing in the ^gean, we lay in view of
Salamis and " the mountains that look on Marathon."
As we mused over the mighty story the scene recalled,
we were accosted by one of the crew, who expressed
his wonder at the fuss travellers made over these
places, which seemed to him " nothing in particular."
Our world is to so many people " nothing in parti-
cular." It is because they themselves are nothing in
particular. And they might be something if they
tried.
When we have worked with Nature ; when we
have responded to her appeal ; when we have
cultivated all round the faculty with which she has
endowed us of being interested, it is astonishing how
free, how elastic, how wholesome, becomes our
attitude to life. Its heaviest blows become to us a
change of interest. Robert Bruce, the hunted
fugitive, watching in his cave a spider at her work,
was probably as happily occupied as when he was
conquering at Bannockburn. The disaster that
breaks in on our enervating comforts and sets us
adrift on the world is often the one thing needed to
wake up our dormant energies and to discover to
us our true selves. We read of the Jerusalem
Christians that the persecution which broke out about
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of New Interests
Stephen sent them everywhere preaching the Word.
We may be sure that afterwards they would not have
missed that experience. As missionaries they found
life on so much larger, so much more interesting a
scale than as mere hearers and talkers at home. The
Pilgrim Fathers lost England to find and found
America. Herein is the beneficence of Nature, that
in whatsoever new situation she plants us, she pro-
vides there for us our store of new interests. The
incessant circulation of human fortunes, from down
to up, from up to down, from ease to danger, from
health to illness ; what is it but her effort to keep us
awake ; to fill us with new treasures of thought and
feeling ! There is a saying in the North, dealing with
the fluctuations of wealth, " that from shirt sleeves
to shirt sleeves is an afiair of three generations."
We may take it as a world arrangement to secure us
from that monotony of conditions which destroys
initiative and emasculates a people. Sir Thomas
More, in his " Utopia," has an arrangement by which
at regular intervals the townspeople and the country
people change places. In our wilder speculations
we have wondered sometimes what would happen if
something of that sort took place between our East
and our West-end ; if at regular intervals Belgravia
migrated to Whitechapel, and Whitechapel to
Belgravia ! One end of the experiment would be
more hazardous than the other. We doubt whether
the East would prosper morally in the West. But
Park-lane would learn some admirable lessons from
the migration, and gain some interests entirely
worth possessing.
And this leads us to what must ever be one of the
chief human interests — our interest in people. Our
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The Life of the Soul
attitude there will exercise all our morality and all
our religion. There is a cult of new interests here
which is entirely detestable, that of the pushers, who,
as they rise in the world, forget their old friends,
knowing henceforth only the people of the circle they
have reached. " If you want to climb, cling to the
skirts of those above you, and take no notice of those
beneath," was the advice given to an aspirant of our
acquaintance. There are few who would utter such
a cynicism, but there are many w^ho act upon it.
Others are interested in both high and low^ with the
view of profiting by both of them. We think here of
Goethe's description of Christianity as the religion of
" the third reverence," the reverence for the poor and
lowly ; the religion of Him whose interest in the
multitude lay not in what He could get out of them,
but in what He could impart to them. Diderot was
not a Christian, but we love that description which
Morley gives of him as a friend. " Diderot was
content to take friendship as the right, the duty,
or the privilege of rendering services without thought
of requiring them, or gratitude for them, back in
return. No man that ever lived showed more sterling
interest in furthering the affairs of others around
him. He seemed to admit every claim on his time,
his purse, or his talents." There showed the Christian
heart, the essentially Christian temper. That temper,
as it possesses us, turns instinctively our friendship
into a helpfulness. Our reservoir will become foul
and stagnant if its waters are held in. It is kept
pure by its constant outflow. We anticipate a time
when every family of means will, as an affair of its
health and salvation, link itself on to some poorer
home, or circle of homes, sharing their burdens,
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of New Interests
pouring into them some of its own warmth and cheer.
Yet our friendships need not be confined to the poor
and the lowly. There is one direction in which,
without self-seeking, we may follow the cult of the
highest. It is in those ideal friendships, in that
fellowship of kindred souls, with which the great
literatures furnish us. As we read the biographies
of noble souls we are widening our circle of loved ones.
Across continents, it may be across ages, our hearts
go out to these other hearts. When we reach the
page which records their death we mourn, as at a
grave. We say to ourselves, " This cannot be a
farewell. These lives which have passed hence are
there to make heaven richer for us. We will tread
the path they trod, to join them by and by."
The great interests, if we faithfully pursue them,
become ever new. Take that of faith, of the religious
life. As, after a fairly long career, we look back upon
its history in ourselves, we are astonished at its
developments, its transformations. Throughout it
has been the one inspiring principle, our highest,
deepest, best. The one, the same, we say, yet never
the same. How naive at the beginning ! Some of
us began in the narrowest school, and we believed all
that was taught there. Religion was something
that reached the world in the New Testament time ;
was then lost for a millennium and a half, till it was
rediscovered by Luther. It was encrusted with
creeds and doctrines of that Reformation time,
which we regarded as inspired. Then the intellect
awoke ; awoke to history, to science, to literature,
to philosophy, to criticism. There was a time when
everything seemed to go ; when we wandered in
the wilderness, in a solitary way, and found no city
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The Life of the Soul
to dwell in. We found later, that in all this we were
under guidance ; that the new knowledge which had
poured in was not for the destruction, but the de-
liverance, the enrichment of faith. By its means
faith had acquired a thousand new interests ;
interests in antiquity, in outside peoples, in all the
facts of the universe ; it had ceased to be a narrow-
ness which shut us off from the world and our fellows,
and had become a sense, a throb of the universal
life, a harmony of the soul with all that God had
made. Religion from the beginning has been full
of surprises, and its greatest are to come.
To conclude and to sum up. The secret of making
life successful is to make it interesting. Nature here
does her part, but she cannot work without our
co-operation. You will never keep up life's interests
by a mere receiving ; there must be steady doing.
The surface sources are soon exhausted. That
exhaustion is Nature's invitation to dig deeper.
There you will find an exhaustless supply. Are you
bored with the newspapers, with the gossip you hear,
with the round of pleasures that have ceased to
please ? Why not put your spade into some new
ground ? Why not, to name one thing, learn Greek,
and read the New Testament in the language in
which it was written ? Half an hour a day will give
you the language, and with it a joy for ever.
Are you retiring from business ? The step
will be disastrous unless you exchange the vivid
interests you are there leaving for others which
are deeper and wider. Each age, each condition, as
we reach it, calls for the cultivation of its definite
interests. Old age demands here its special effort.
You must learn the business of being old. Well
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of New Interests
learned, it will yield richest fruits. It will replace
every loss from the earlier time by some new gain
of the spirit. Thus prepared, we shall find, when
death comes, that it brings its own surpassing
interest. An interest of hope and solemn expecta-
tion as of a traveller, who, passing through the
glooms of a shadowed way, sees openings beyond
into a sunnier, a vaster realm.
151
XVII
OF JUDGMENT
We begin this chapter with a question from an
Australian correspondent : " I wish, with several
others, that you would give us your views of ' The
Judgment Day.' Is it a day of the far-off future,
or are we now being judged ? " The theme here
suggested is, indeed, worth all our study, and the
more so as there seems upon it so singular a confusion
of ideas. Before we can talk of the Judgment Day,
we need first of all to understand what we mean
by judgment. What does the word itself carry ?
As used in our English language it stands for ideas
which seem the most remote from each other. We
speak of judging a horse, or a prize bullock. We say
of a man that he is of " sound judgment." We speak
of literary, aesthetic, historical judgments. There
are the judgments of our criminal courts. And the
same voice which, in the New Testament, depicts for
us, the " Judgment Day," gives us the injunction,
" Judge not." Can we, in this seemingly disjointed
collection of meanings, discover any common prin-
ciple ; anything which unites them, as expressing
one and the same thing ?
We have got here, we say, an apparent mixture
of meanings. In one use our word stands for just a
criticism. Our English "critic" and "criticism," it
is worth noting, come from the very Greek word which,
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of Judgment
in the New Testament, carries such awful significances.
The same word is used for passing an opinion, and
for pronouncing a sentence, and decreeing a penalty.
That seems a strange thing. Is the law of language
in binding together these apparently distinct and
separate ideas guilty of an irrelevancy, of a confusion
of terms ? No ; there is no mistake. When we look
deeper into the matter, we shall perceive that lan-
guage here has conformed, in the strictest way, to
the law of life. All these meanings hang together.
In studying them, we find, put into the clearest light,
what judgment is, and what punishment is, and how
the one is related to the other. And so, finally, we
may get some kind of answer to our correspondent's
question, as to whether " the Day of Judgment is
in the far-off future, or whether we are now being
judged."
What, then, to begin with, is judgment ? In its
simplest form it is a process which is perpetually
going on within ourselves. It is a product of percep-
tion and of memory ; of seeing and recollecting.
When I say, "This is a horse," a double process has
gone on within me. First my senses have conveyed
to me the impression of a given form. I call that
form a horse because my memory serves up to me the
recollection of other forms, previously seen, to which,
from their similarity in shape, movement and char-
acter, we have given this common name. And in the
expert judge of a horse, the same double process has
been carried on, with more exactness. His perception
of the animal, of its various features, is at once
associated with memories within him, in which these
features are recognised as " points," as belonging
to a certain order of merit. His judgment is good in
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The Life of the Soul
proportion to his quickness of perception, and the
wide store of memories to which he can refer, and so
compare what he sees in this horse with what he
knows of horse-character in general. And the same
is true, whether the object of judgment is a horse or
a picture, or a statue, or a poem. Always the process
is an affair of seeing and remembering, of the proper
use of these two faculties. When we come to judg-
ments of opinion, and still more, of character, the
same thing happens— with a difference. Here, too,
what is seen or heard is referred immediately to our
store of memories. To pronounce on a statement
that is offered us, we summon immediately all we
recollect in reference to it, put it side by side with the
newcomer, and see how it compares. So an act, a
moral deed, is placed against what hes in us of
teaching, of ideal, and is pronounced on accordingly.
The difference here between our moral judgments
and those of the expert and the artist lies in the fact
that the will, almost dormant in the latter, comes
in the former into far more decisive action.
Here, then, we have judgment in its simplest,
in its original form ; as an act of the mind, proceeding
according to the laws of the mind. We have now
to ask how it comes to connect itself with those other
interpretations, with judgment considered as catas-
trophe, as punishment ? We have here to pursue the
original idea of it one step farther. In that first act
of the mind we have performed what is called a
classification. We have referred our quadruped to
the class of horses ; we say that block of stone
belongs to the class of granite. That is to say, this
quadruped has the qualities which are common to
horses ; this stone the quahties common to granite.
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of Judgment
And they will act, be, and endure according to the
qualities of their class. The horse, we know, will
breathe, and eat, and sleep and move, and in the end
die, in the way of horses. The granite will be of a
weight, of a colour, of an endurance according to the
way of granite. All the things that happen to them
will be according to their qualities, will be the natural,
inevitable result of those qualities. And so, when in
one of our law courts a jury declares a man to be a
murderer, it, too, has performed a classification.
It has not made the man a murderer ; it has simply
declared, if the verdict be a true one, what is the
already existing fact. He is that, and it says so.
The judge's procedure is yet another classification.
His sentence means simply that this man, being a
murderer, is in the class that, according to the
existing law, is open to certain results. The judge
does not make the law. He states its operation on
the class in which this man has placed himself. A
horse, by being a horse, is exposed to all that
commonly happens to horses. A convicted murderer
is, in like manner, exposed to what happens to con-
victed murderers.
Now we begin to see what judgment is and how it
is related to punishment. But we have at this point
to note a difference between what happens in criminal
courts and what happens outside. In our courts,
in human society, our penal judgments are not
invariable. They have not an immediate, an
inevitable relation to the facts. They are often
capricious. In minor cases a judge has a large
discretion in the sentences he pronounces. And the
human codes differ widely in different nations ; in
different phases of civilisation. We condemn as
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The Life of the Soul
barbarous the English criminal law as it existed in the
time of the Georges, a law which sent young girls to
the gallows for petty thefts. Outside all is different.
There w^e find a judgment, yes, a criminal court,
where there is no caprice, no uncertainty. Here
sentence is strictly according to the fact ; is indeed
bound up in the fact, and proceeds from it. The
law here is that certain causes will produce certain
results. And there is no appeal against it. If you
put your hand in the fire it will burn you. If you
drop from a precipice gravitation will execute its
sentence on you at the bottom.
And this law, so manifest in these more brutal
instances, works higher up with an equal certainty.
Its classifications proceed with an unerring accuracy.
They are fully visible in the moral sphere, for all who
will look for them. If a man by his acts places
himself in the class of rogue, of charlatan, of lecher,
the cosmic law will proceed with him accordingly.
There are all manner of dodgeries possible in this
region of things ; in which clever fellows may seem
to hoodwink the universe ; but the universe, in the
end, is always too much for them. " God does not
pay at the end of every week, but in the end He pays,"
said Anne of Austria to Richeheu, and it was a true
saying. The universe has such a disdainful con-
tempt for rogues. It allows them their pitiful
satisfactions ; gives them the run of their swine-
trough, but as long as they continue in their rogue-
hood, sternly closes against them all its higher
possibilities. By no clever trickery can profligacy,
can low livmg, come into the possession of the
beatitudes. Carlyle, in his " Life of Frederick,"
speaking of his early vices, has a prophetic note on
156
of Judgment
this theme. " To burn away in mad waste the divine
aromas and plainly celestial elements from our
existence ... to make the soul itself hard,
impious, barren ! Surely a day is coming when it
will be known again what virtue is in purity and
continence of life ; how divine is the blush of young
human cheeks ; how high, beneficent, sternly
inexorable if forgotten, is the duty laid, not on women
only, but on every creature, in regard to these par-
ticulars ? Well, if such a day never come again,
I perceive much else will never come. Magnanimity
and depth of insight will never come ; heroic purity
of heart and of eye ; noble, pious valour, how can
they ever come ? The scandalous bronze-lacker age,
of hungry animalisms, spiritual impotences, and
mendacities, will have to run its course, till the Pit
swallow it."
The ancients knew of this cosmic judgment ; knew
it in its grandeur, in its presence at the heart of things.
Plato in the " Gorgias " insists that the wrong-doer
is far more miserable than the sufferer of the wrong ;
is worse off without punishment than with it.
The evil deed carries its retribution written in its
own essence and quality. When the Hebrew
prophets spoke of " days of judgment," coming upon
men and upon nations, they followed the strict fact
of things. The da}^ of calamity in its swift sudden-
ness is no arbitrary interference. Nature knows
those days, in the physical and in the moral world.
But there is no caprice about them. They are the
outworking of causation's rigidest law. The rush of
the avalanche is no single event. With things as
they are it could not help being what it is. If we
could see the causes at work we should be able to
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The Life of the Soul
predict what was coming. The judgments on nations,
on institutions, are always of this order. They proceed,
mark you, never from the outside but always from
the inside ; out of the heart of the facts themselves.
Of such days there have been, in the world's later
history, not wanting instances. The Reformation
was surely such a judgment, a judgment on the
existing Romanism ; a judgment, a bringing to light,
and to a focus of result, of things as they were ; on
the one side the spiritual decay, the moral putrescence
at the Vatican; where, as Villari says, "it seemed as
though the papacy desired to extirpate all religious
feeling from the mind of man, and to overthrow for
ever every basis of morality " ; on the other side the
uprising in honest minds of a clear consciousness of
this state of things and of revolt against it. Of that
event may we not say here with Carlyle, to quote
again that prophet of ours : " The most untheological
of men may still assert the thing (the Reformation)
and take it with more of awe than they are wont,
as a correct reading of the will of the Eternal in
respect of such matters . . . Protestant or not
Protestant ? The question meant everywhere :
Is there anything of nobleness in you, O Nation, or
is there nothing ? Are there in this nation enough
of heroic men to venture forward, and to battle for
God's truth against the Devil's falsehood, at the
peril of life and more ? . . . Austria, Spain,
Italy, France, Poland— the offer of the Reforma-
tion, was made everywhere ; and it is curious to see
what has become of the nations that would not hear
it." He sketches their after-history, as vividest
illustration of what did follow upon their refusal.
The French Revolution was another of these
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of Judgment
" days of judgment." Again it is no outside inter-
ference ; it is from within, the direct, inevitable
outcome of things as they were, of deeds and of men
as they were. Clear-minded observers saw what was
coming, what must come. Arthur Young, traveUing
through France on the eve of the catastrophe, says :
*' What have kings and ministers and parHaments and
states to answer for ; seeing milHons of hands that
would be industrious idle and starving through the
execrable maxims of despotism, or the equally
detestable prejudices of a feudal nobility ! " The
judgment, so terrific as it is when it comes, is yet so
entirely natural. There are no miracles here ; no
flaming sky appearances. That is not the way of
things in this universe. And yet be sure this is
heaven's doing not the less. It is heaven's proclam-
ation of how things work. " You kings and nobles
and priests have been of this character and have
acted in this way. Well, this is the outcome of such
deeds and such characters ! "
Jesus was a proclaimer of judgment, of His judg-
ment. In His recorded statements concerning it He
is speaking, as was His wont, in parables. The scenic
accompaniments of thrones, and clouds, and angels,
and assembled multitudes, are pictures drawn in the
manner of His time. But the essence of the thing is
here as we find it everywhere. The judgment, as
depicted m the Gospels, is a classification. It is a
statement of what people are ; of what they have
made themselves. " You have been so and so,
you have done so and so. That defines what you are ;
and just as the horse, by being a horse, has the place
and treatment assigned to horses, so you will get your
place and treatment according to — what you are."
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The Life of the Soul
That is the essence of it. The universe has no other
way of dealing with man or thing than that of putting
them into the place to which they belong. That is
the inexorable law of all things in the heavens above
and on the earth beneath. This judgment is a
present one and a future one. *' Now is the judgment
of this world," says Christ in one place. Elsewhere
He puts the judgment in the future. Both state-
ments represent the truth of things. We are now
being judged ; for we are now in the place to which
our deeds and character have brought us. And the
law of " now " is the law of " then." For the future
also is a future of judgment.
Observe here that the judgment, as pictured in
the Gospels, is a judgment of works. It is according
to what you have been and done. There is no men-
tion in it of grace. Is not that a singular thing,
worth noting ? For the New Testament proclaims,
above all things, a Gospel of Grace ; a Gospel of
Redemption, of salvation to the chief of sinners.
How, then, are we to interpret this anomaly ? There
is only one way. The seeming contradiction is there
to drive us to the great, illuminating fact that the
law under which the universe works is in itself a
law of grace ; that its meaning, its end, is grace and
redemption. The punishment is, as Plato in his
" Gorgias " insists, there as curative. The " un-
quenchable fire " is to burn up the chaff. It is the fire
of God's holy love, which burns to utter purification.
For God is Love, and in hell or heaven can act only
as love, and in the methods of love.
Meantime, the injunction for us, from the same
authority, is " Judge not." And that because we
are not competent to the business. Is not this
1 60
of Judgment
injunction a gospel in itself ? What else can it mean
but that the ultimate pronouncement on our neigh-
bour will be so much wiser, so much tenderer, so much
closer to the fact, than any summation of ours ?
" If we knew all we should forgive all," said Mme.
de Stael. And there is only One who knows all !
Concerning our too easy gossip on our neighbour,
may we not take that word of Zeno ? " Nature
gave us one tongue but two ears, that we may hear
just twice as much as we speak." And that word
also of St. Bernard on fasting : " Let your ear fast
from rumours, praise, slander, gossip, controversy ;
and your tongue fast from detraction, murmuring,
fault-finding." God's judgment is a judgment of
Love. Let ours ever fashion itself on that high
model.
i6i
11
XVIII
OF LIFE VALUES
What we mean by life values is something
different from what we mean by the value of life,
though the two are intimately connected. That the
latter is a supreme interest was demonstrated, as
perhaps never before, by the world-shaking tragedy
of the Titanic. Had that miracle of science and of
luxury gone to the bottom by itself there would
have been a sufficiently formidable outcry — chiefly
on the Stock Exchange and at Lloyds. But it was
not the loss of money, not the finish at a stroke
of the great ship, that tore the heart of humanity.
It was the thought of those fourteen hundred odd
souls that perished with her. And it is noteworthy
here, noteworthy as an answer to the notion that
our age is given up exclusively to the worship of
mammon, that in the estimate of loss the emphasis,
in the general consciousness, was put, not on the
size of the fortunes of the dead, but on the size of
their souls. The world's pity and admiration went
out to the heroic captain, who died at his post ;
to the crew and passengers, who in the prospect
of awful death exhibited the noblest qualities of
their race. To lose such men, ah ! what a loss !
And yet it was not even these whose death gave
us our deepest sense of impoverishment. That came
as we thought of the most richly dowered nature
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Of Life Values
of all who disappeared into those icy depths. It
was the loss of a plain man, without title, without
fortune — who in estimating the value of William
Stead thought of his fortune ? — it was the loss of this
man that hit us most keenly ; and why ? Because
not only those of us who knew him intimately, but
because all the world recognised in him a man
possessed of the supreme human qualities, the world's
best mental and moral force. No. Man when, in
moments like these, driven back to his inmost self,
recognises, beyond all money values, the value of
the best kind of life.
But this leads us to what we want here specially
to deal with. Life is the supreme value ; but what
gives it its value ? Ritschl enormously enriched
and extended religious thinking by his discussion
of what he called value-judgments. And since
his time the subject of values has become a first-
class theme both of philosophy and theology. We
have come to see how the problem of life, its religious
dogmas, its social, economical, ethical systems, are
all fundamentally affected by this question of value.
We ask what is the true idea of value ? how has it
arisen in man and society ; whether there is such a
thing as a proper scale of values ; and what help
this value-consciousness in man affords us in our
judgment of God, the world and the future ?
As we look into the matter we find that all our
values are related to feeling. Things are valuable
to us in proportion to the kind and intensity of
feeling they excite. In earlier discussions of this
subject — notably in Bentham — the feelings referred
to were of one order, those of pleasure. We can only
keep to that if we extend the idea of pleasure far
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The Life of the Soul
beyond that of mere animal sensation ; extend it
to include cesthetic, moral and spiritual pleasure, the
pleasure not only of the body, but of the inmost
soul ; the pleasure which the martyr feels in the
flames, where the pain of the tortured body is over-
borne by that deeper rapture which the spirit feels
in the accomplishment of its duty, in its union with
the highest. And here arises a scale of values, of
higher and lower ones. For every feeling has its own
value. The sense of hunger gives its value to food ;
animal passions make for the time being their grati-
fication the chief value ; the desire of power gives
its price to the means of securing it ; the thirst for
revenge in the hour of its dominance will make all
else subordinate to the wreaking of it. With the
moral development of man we see a higher scale
of values emerging ; and nothing gives us better
evidence of the divine education of our race than to
trace the sure movement here of the human conscious-
ness. We see coming up in man the feeling for
beauty, the sense of altruism, of the regard for others ;
the sense of justice, of righteousness, the sense of a
possible inner perfection, and the desire for it ; and
the culmination of all this in the soul's deepest in-
stinct, which leads it to the perception of an All
Perfect, in whom beauty and holiness are finally
expressed, and the yearning for a union with that
All Perfect as the spirit's highest good.
The significant fact here is that all the great
philosophies, and all the great religions, if we
examine their inner contents, reveal the same move-
ment, the same ascending appreciation of values.
You come from the values of sensation to the values
of the spirit. Take the idea of beauty. Men first
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Of Life Values
grew to it in the study of outward nature. They
saw it in the splendours of sea and sky, of green
fields, of towering mountains, of the human form.
In this last expression it was mingled with baser
elements, with lust and passion. And nowhere was
this aesthetic sense more often or more deeply com-
mingled with animal instincts than among the
Greeks. But amongst them note the ascent. Plato,
in the " Symposium," shows how, in the prophetic
souls that are the trainers of their fellows, the
aesthetic sense moves from the lowest things to the
highest. " And the true order of going or being led
to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth
as steps along which to mount upwards for the sake
of that other beauty ; going from one to two, and
from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair
practices, and from fair practices to fair ideas, until
from fair ideas he arrives at the idea of absolute
beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty
is." In the " Laches " he has the same thought
as to the beauty of sound and music. Speaking of
a man whose words and actions agree, he says :
" And such a one I deem to be the true musician,
attuned to a fairer harmony than that of the lyre,
or any pleasant instrument of music." Beyond the
concourse of sweet sounds he discerns a deeper
harmony, of which the former is but the image, the
sublimer music of the finely attempered soul.
This rise in the scale of values is nowhere more
vividly represented, and carries nowhere a deeper
significance, than in the development of religions.
In the early cults we find the religious values were
almost entirely physical. The gods were appealed
to as sunshine givers, as rainmakers, as gods of the
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The Life of the Soul
harvest, of the battlefield, of the sexual relations,
of birth and generation. Polytheism divided the
ruling powers into separate personalities having
charge over these various departments. The gods
were worshipped as helpers of the passions, as the
means of satisfying the appetites. That was all that
man was then equal to in his religious aspiration.
Then came that mighty change, born first in the
prophet souls, when religion reached the idea of the
moral and spiritual as man's highest good ; when
deity was realised as personified Holiness ; when
bodily sensation and worldly good were felt to be
inferior values as compared with justice and
righteousness and love. No history gives us the in-
timate record of that change, but no greater thing
has happened since man began upon this earth.
We have, we say, no detailed record of the origin
of these value-judgments. But concerning them our
own experience, and the experience of the race, show
us two things. A large part of our sense of value,
and of the ascending scale of it, is hereditary. We
are born into the acquired consciousness of the
society to which we belong. We take in our mental
atmosphere and grow by it, as we take in the air we
breathe. We grow up as civilised beings, and become
civilised instead of savage, as part of our natural
inheritance. But is that all ? If it were, society
would never advance beyond where it is. But
society is not static, it is dynamic. Its story is
that not of a quiescence, but of an incessant move-
ment, and of a movement upwards. And the
ultimate factor of that movement is not society, but
the individual. The world goes forward because
there comes into elect souls of these communities
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of Life Values
a new light from within, a light which reveals the
defects of the state in which they find themselves,
its deviations from the perfect way, and under the
pressure of which they become reformers, religious
founders, it may be martyrs. What in them finds
expression in the highest degree, is more or less in
us all. It is an essential condition of our growth
that we should come to individual decisions on the
moral problems of our time : that we should take our
stand against society itself where we find its habits
and customs inferior to the light within us, a hin-
drance to our own and our neighbour's spiritual life.
We have in this way not only to help conserve the
inherited moral values, but to create new ones, to
help the universal soul in its struggle for complete-
ness.
In this discussion of life values we come now to a
question of capital importance — that of their dura-
tion, the relation of them, we may say, to time and
to eternity. How time comes in here is illustrated
in a very material fashion by the methods of our
insurance societies, which, as we know, have an
interest of their own in life values. Their whole
business is concentrated on the time factor. Their
rates of insurance are according to the probable
duration of your life. Duration, indeed, is every-
thing in our estimate of values. We have never, in
our time, had a more tragic illustration of that than
in those last hours of the Titanic. There were men .
on board reputed to be worth millions ; worth
millions, and they had a calculable number of minutes
to live ! What were the millions worth to them then ?
Possessions, it is clear, of any sort, are nothing to
us apart from some assurance of their permanence.
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The Life of the Soul
And it is precisely because this is so that man, come
into his consciousness as a moral and spiritual being,
has found the necessity of the doctrine of immor-
tality as a preserver of his highest values. The
argument for a life beyond the grave is, in our day,
being pushed along various lines. Men bring evidence
for it from psychology, from telepathy, from appari-
tions, from the seances of spiritualists. We may
take that evidence for what it is worth. The real
argument lies elsewhere. All religion, it has been
said, is an effort to preserve the continuity of the
higher values, and there is truth in the saying. That
the best in us, that which gives all the dignity to life,
should perish utterly in death, while the mere shell
and body of us should go on existing eternally in one
form or other, is not only incredible to the reason —
it is a reduction of the value of these best things to
a vanishing point, which is not less incredible.
And this brings us to another of the relations of
time to value. We live from moment to moment.
This actual moment where we now are is, in a way,
all that we possess. The past has gone and cannot be
recalled. The future is not here, and so far as we are
concerned, may never be here. Out of that fact
arise two totally opposite ideals of life. The sen-
sualist says to himself, " I have this moment ; I am
not sure of any other. I will take my pleasure in
it at all costs and whatever happens. The present
is all I know ; why should I allow a shadowy future
to rob me of my immediate gratification ? " At the
opposite end of the scale we find a man confronted
by a great, a tragic decision. He, too, has his one
moment — the moment in which he must decide
whether he will sacrifice his life or his honour ;
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Of Life Values
whether he shall put all he has been taught
and felt of loyalty, of duty, into that one moment,
or accept instead a long continuity of moments
at the price of those fealties ? That was the
moment which confronted the martyrs of the
Titanic — the men who put the women and chil-
dren on board the boats and themselves remained
behind to die. It might be argued that their lives,
many of them at least, were worth more than those
of the people they saved. What they felt was,
though perhaps it never came to clear thought in
their minds — but what they felt was that the values
in them of honour, of chivalry, of readiness for sacri-
fice, were better worth possessing, though death was
the price of them, than the continuance of an earthly
life from which those values had been deleted. Here,
indeed, was the translation into poor humans of this
despised twentieth century, of the truth that blazed
once for all from the Cross of Calvary ; that love's
sacrifice, that love's loyalty to the highest, is the
heart of all being, the deep mystery of God. And
do we think that such a moment can be the last in
the career of those who know it ; that there is nought
but nothingness beyond it ? No. The life-value
of that death-moment is a value that will never die.
This belief in the continuity, the deathlessness
of the higher values, is, we say, the meaning and the
root of all religion. What has come into us here
from the spiritual heights beyond us partakes of
their immortality. If a further argument for that
were needed, it lies here — that the faith in this, and
the love and enthusiasm begotten of it, are the great
factors in promoting and furthering life, while the
opposite — the spirit of negation and of no faith — is
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The Life of the Soul
a factor of decline and decay. Goethe, that pro-
found student of life, has put this in his own con-
vincing way : " The most profound, or rather the
unique theme of the history of the world, to which
all others are subordinate, is the conflict of belief and
unbelief. The epochs where faith prevails, under
whatever form, are the marked epochs of human
history, full of memories which make the heart beat,
full of substantial gains for all future times. On the
other hand, the epochs of unbelief, no matter what
their form, even when they bring for a moment a
semblance of glory and success, vanish in the end
into insignificance.'' It is the same world-compassing
observation which makes him put into the mouth of
Mephistopheles this summing up of his destructive
character : " I am he who denies." The value of
life lies in the spiritual values which religion has
brought into it. They are invisible values, and
because invisible they are safe from all that the
visible can do against them.
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XIX
CO-OPERATION
We think of co-operation to-day mainly as a phase
of industry. We have in mind those Rochdale
artisans who, in the middle of last century, struck on
the idea of a combination among themselves, a union
of their own class for manufacture and distribution—
an idea which has since covered the land with pros-
perous societies and flourishing enterprises. But
this trade co-operation is only the particular applica-
tion of a principle that goes vastly deeper. It is,
indeed, the central idea of all life, of the world order.
We are only beginning to see the range of it ; the
implications that underhe it ; the suggestions it
offers on ultimate problems ; the part it has to play
in the social organisation of the future. For this
principle is rooted in the nature of things ; appears,
indeed, to be the explanation of that nature.
Followed far enough, it seems to give us our final
insight into God and man ; into good and evil ;
into authority and freedom ; into the ultimate bases
of society. Let us try and follow it in some of these
directions.
Co-operation has for its first condition the idea of
separateness, of distinction. Its start is in individu-
ality, which it demands shall be clear and complete.
It asks that each contributing element shall have,
within its own limits, a certain sovereignty of being,
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The Life of the Soul
not to be intruded on or coerced by anything outside.
You see this, to take a famihar illustration, in musical
harmony. Your orchestra does not reach its per-
fection unless each separate contributor is master
in his own line ; unless each note has its own
independent value. The blending is a blending of
full and unrestricted powers. And what obtains in
music obtains everywhere. The quality of a ship's
construction lies first in the quality of each of its
materials. It is not enough that its parts fit accur-
ately into each other ; that its lines and proportions
are in accord with the architect's plans. Beyond
that, it means that every steel plate, every bolt,
every mast and spar shall, in itself, reach its highest
level of quality ; that each contributor to the whole
shall be best in itself. And you can get no true
combination in the social, the political, the religious
— in any order, in fact, where the same idea does not
hold. It is only when we have fully grasped this,
with all it implies, that we are able to discover how
distant we are from finality in these combinations ;
the blunders we have been making in these various
departments of life. It is only then that we can start
to put away the old, wrong methods, and commence
on the better, the true ones.
To begin here at the very beginning, we have to
make up our minds that the unity of the universe
is not, and never has been, a unity of sameness, but
one of a pre-existing separateness. There has never
been a one by itself. We cannot conceive, even, of the
the divine nature in that way. The trinitarian has
here logic in his contention. Allow the Ultimate
Being to be conscious, and you have immediately a
multiple. This because there can never be a subject
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Co-operation
without an object, a thinker without a thought, a
feeling without something that is felt ; affection,
or any moral emotion, without some other on whom
they can be exercised. Our own life, too, is an
inherent, an ultimate multiplicity. We consist of
two things, of matter and mind, and no analysis
will ever reduce the essential difference between
them. Tyndall, in his famous Belfast address,
startled the British Association and the orthodox
British public by his declaration as to the poten-
tialities of matter. But it was Tyndall who had to
confess that " the passage from the physics of the
brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness
is inconceivable as the result of mechanics " ; and
that " the problem of the connection of body and soul
is as insoluble in its modern form as it was in the
pre-scientific ages." We know to-day how the
brilliant researches of Bergson have confirmed that
verdict ; how the study of the structure and functions
of the brain, while showing it to be the most mar-
vellous of machines, proves that it is only a machine ;
and how the limitations of its relation to conscious-
ness show, also, that we who use it are not machines.
The same mental and final doubleness of things is
similarly revealed in the connection between
matter and life. The two work in a different way, by
different laws, and towards a different end. The
universe, regarded simply from the side of matter
and force, is like a clock that is running down.
We see in it a dissipation of energy which, if it con-
tinued, would bring everything to a standstill. But
side by side with this realm of inert matter, which
we cannot conceive of as ever adding to its own
quantity, we see another realm which is under no
^7Z
The Life of the Soul
such limitation. Life, thought, is ever adding to
itself ; makes new creations out of a seeming
nothing. While matter runs down, vitality mounts
up ; adds to its accumulations. In these efforts it
uses matter, but its very essence and its everyday
working show its nature and destiny to lie elsewhere.
We have then a separation, a doubleness, a
multiplicity of things and forces going back to the
roots of creation. That is what, in all schemes of
life, we have to reckon with. The world system is
one of distinct entities, independent in themselves,
but made to fit into each other, and by their union
making a higher completeness. It is wonderful to
note how this system works in man himself, in his
own interior economy. His morality, what we call
his virtue, comes from the interplay of two things
in him ; his appetites and his conscience. He finds
in himself, as part of his internal fitting, certain
impulses, passions, which urge to action, to expres-
sion. He is not responsible for their presence in
him. He finds them there, ready made, as much a
part of his nature as his limbs or his eyes. Ignorant
people, whose ignorance has often been assisted by
a crude theology, have been in the habit of regarding
these passions as a sort of original sin, the sign of
depravity, the *' lostness " of human nature. As a
matter of fact, they are the groundwork of all man's
morality, of all his virtue. Milton saw this. As
he finely put it : " Why did He (God) create passions
within us, pleasures round about us, but that these,
rightly tempered, might be the very ingredients of
virtue ? " Without great passions, says Vauven-
argues, there had been no great heroes. But the
passions left to themselves would leave man less than
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Co-operation
man. It is here we come, in the human interior,
upon our principle of doubleness. For, lodged in the
same frame, there lies that other element, the
element that the Greeks called suneidesis, or
conscience, the element of moral judgment, founded
in a moral law, the law which says, " thou shalt '*
and " thou shalt not " ; a law which carries in itself
its own rewards, its own punishments. From the
interplay of these two factors comes morality, comes
the formation of character. There would be no
chastity apart from a possible unchastity ; no
generosity, no self-abnegation, apart from a possible
selfishness. What we call evil is the background on
which we paint our goodness. And, still further,
there would have been no true morality unless, in
the mutual action of these components, there were
perfect freedom of choice. If all were predetermined
man would have been a machine. His moral value
depends absolutely on his moral freedom.
This interior co-operation, we can see, will reach
its perfection in proportion as the two components,
the passions, the natural impulses on the one hand,
and the moral judgment on the other, reach res-
pectively their full powers, and act on each other in
the true way. We get here the guiding principle of
that larger co-operation where man acts on his fellow-
man, in the sphere both of his mental and his material
interests. You will have there no proper co-operation
apart from the perfecting of the separate factors,
the separate workers, and their interplay on each
other in an ordered freedom. See first how this
affects the internal interests, the affairs of our mind
and soul. Here man has for ages been the victim
of an old, bad system which has ignored all the
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The Life of the Soul
principles we have been explaining. The system has
been that of concentrating knowledge, and the
power which knowledge brings, in the hands of a
few, and of using that knowledge to exploit the
ignorance of the many. The Church has sought to
make the authority of a class, of a priesthood,
supreme over the mind and the heart of the people.
It has imposed upon the laity creeds and dogmas
declared to be final, on the acceptance of which
depended their eternal salvation. A timid, un-
questioning acquiescence, a state, in short, of moral
cowardice, was thus made the foundation of character,
reducing mankind to a small class of dictators and a
huge horde of slaves. On this system Kant has a
pungent comment. He says : " Those who get
up and say ' Whosoever does not believe all that we
tell you will be eternally damned ' ought surely to
have faith enough to add, * but if it is not true we
ourselves will agree to be eternally damned.' This
might convince them that they are after all not
so firmly convinced of dogmas that they want to
force upon others." All this is the reverse of the true
co-operation of mind upon mind. The religion of the
future will be a religion which holds as its first
principle the freedom of every man to test to the
utmost the truth or falsehood of all that is taught
him. For just as an engineer is not made by a
book of mechanics, or by saying " yes " to all its
propositions, but by his own comprehension and
mental assent to its proofs, so is a man made religious
only to the extent to which his own mind and soul
in the exercise of their fullest freedom have yielded
assent to the truth offered him.
And what is true of man's spiritual is true also of
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Co-operation
his material interests. The Nietzschean idea of
human society is for the strong man to rule, very
much as an engine-driver rules his engine. We want
no spontaneity in the engine. If that piece of
machinery were suddenly to become possessed of a
will of its own, all sorts of awkward complications
would ensue. The engine-idea can only be worked
through the absolute acquiescence of the engine, the
certainty that it will act in a particular way ; will
carry out, not any idea of its own, but the will of the
man behind it. The theory is that as it would be a
disaster for our machinery to develop ideas of its
own, so it is a disaster to permit the masses to do
any thinking for themselves. They will be better off,
and society will be better off, if the control is left to
the superior minds, who can do the best kind of
thinking. Let the rulers rule and the people obey.
The argument is plausible, and is probably con-
vincing to Tsardom and autocracy in general. Its
flaw is that it neglects the first elements of the
problem. The awkward fact here is that the material
to be handled is not what the argument demands.
For better or worse man is not a machine. While the
engine is simpl}^ a means to an end, man is an end in
himself. He possesses the mind and will which
are absent in our engine. And just as our engine is
useful because we use it with a full knowledge of its
qualities, so man can only be useful when we use him
with a full knowledge of his qualities. More than
that ; as the perfection of the engine lies in the fact
of all its elements being of themselves the best
obtainable, so the social machine will only do its best
work when all the elements of it are of the finest
quality. The true social co-operation will be reached
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The Life of the Soul
only when every member brings to it of his best, a
best which can only be reached under conditions of a
disciplined freedom. Disciplined, we say, for when the
individual man reaches his best he will understand the
value of obedience as much as the value of freedom.
Not dominance and autocracy, whether of the
capitalist over labour, or of priesthood and dogmas
over the soul, but a free co-operation of minds after
truth, of hearts and hands in industry ; this is the
goal towards which society is now moving. We are
a long way from it yet. We are at present only
tuning our instruments. We have no conception of
the music that, with a proper conducting, we can
make out of each other. Consider, to take one
instance only, our existing domestic condition.
Our great cities are a waste wilderness of unordered
lives. The London suburbs contain endless miles of
homes, all shut off and isolated from each other.
Our clerk or warehouseman goes off in the morning
to his work in the City, leaving his wife to wrestle
with the day ; to wrestle with its solitude, with its
monotony, with its round of exhausting toil, with
the nerve-racking care of children. Her neighbours
are as unknown to her as if they dwelt in Africa.
The home is self-inclusive ; all its cooking, its
heating, its lighting, its service, a separate, unaided
affair. The utter wastefulness of that solitary fire,
of that solitary cooking apparatus, is the smallest
part of the waste ; the real extravagance is in the
expenditure of nerve force, the expenditure of
cheerfulness, of the body's ease, of the mind's
equilibrium, of the force of soul and spirit which all
this entails. When is our middle class going to
invent the corporate home ; the home which shall
178
Co-operation
secure privacy and at the same time society;
which, with a common kitchen-range, with a
common heating and lighting apparatus, with
a common service, shall cut down expenditures
to a minimum, while raising the quality of the daily
menu and the ease of the domestic life to a maxi-
mum ? Where is the middle class creche, to which
the children can be sent, and be made happy,
relieving the overtaxed mother of the heaviest of
her strain ? Modern society has all sorts of com-
binations ; combinations of political parties for the
mutual ousting of each other ; combinations of
capitalists, combinations of labour. When shall
we turn our organising faculties to combinations for
the prevention of this miserable domestic waste of
nerve and strength and temper ; for the promotion
of social easement and happiness ?
" We have touched here only the fringe of our sub-
ject, but enough has been said at least to show its
dimensions, Co-operation is the key to all things
in heaven and upon earth. We see it at work alike
in the divine and in the human ; in the framing of
the universe ; in the making of the separate soul ;
in the framework of industry ; in the organising of
the social and domestic life. And everywhere its
principle is the same — that of the perfecting of the
separate parts, and in their true relation to each
other. For that perfecting and that true relation the
watchword is always an ordered freedom. When
we have reached that stage, the stage where each
individual part of the organism is at its best, and each
is in its true place, then shall we have a state in
which the apostolic word shall receive its deepest
fulfilment, that " all things work together for good."
179
XX
FROM BELOW UP
In discussing the human problem it is helpful
to note how all our experiences work into and help
each other. We find light on the most abstruse
questions by bringing them back to their primitive
starting-points. We are all to-day intent on social
progress, on improvement, on getting on, and getting
up. The gospel we are after is a gospel of climbing.
Well, take climbing, the actual thing, and note w^hat
it shows us. The heart of the Alpinist, be he merest
amateur or President of the Alpine Club, beats faster
as he thinks of it. You start from the bottom,
generally in the dark, with a sense of prodigious
things to be done, dared, and endured on the way
up. One hates the excursionist railways that vul-
garise those sacred heights yonder ; that make
things easy, and, by doing so, ruin all the genuine
sensations. You tramp, perhaps, some miles of
valley road, the guide's lantern swinging in front,
then strike off for the upward movement. Your
company tramps along, through a pine forest,
maybe ; on through miles of uninteresting, barren
approach, till at length you are upon slippery
rock or gleaming ice. Here the tug begins ; the call
on your nerve, your training, your endurance. You
are now in the upper world, the wonder world, where
everything is different from the scene below. You
i8o
From Below Up
get by and by the spectacle which no human being
should miss, were it seen once only in a life-time.
In the eastern blackness a faint flush appears. Then,
in succession, flung on the infinite canvas from the
brush of the unseen artist, a dream of all magic
colours, making the heavens, making the peaks, a
transformation scene of unimaginable glory. You
look round and on the rock above you strikes a level
ray of purest gold. The sun has risen ; the heights
salute you with the miracle of a new day. Later you
reach your summit and stand to record your sensa-
tions. They are an amalgam difficult to analyse,
but they are one of an extraordinary richness. There
is the sense of immeasurable prospect, of aloofness
from all common and petty things ; the breathing
of a diviner air. But a part of it which you would
on no account have missed is the feeling of the toil
of the ascent, of its sudden, unlooked-for hazards, of
the calls it has made on all your manhood ; and,
not least, of the intense comradeship it has en-
gendered ; of the worth to you of your comrades, of
your guides ; a worth having no relation to wealth
or position, but solely to their strength, their courage,
their qualities of limb and head and heart. To have
got there without effort, to have reached the peak
by machinery ! Certainly you have reached there,
and have seen things. But the climber knows that
the climb is the thing. It has given him a taste,
a flavour of life which no machinery can furnish.
We have here an elementary life experience ; one
of sheer, immediate fact and feeling, which offers us
lessons for regions a long way removed from the
Alps. Society itself, as we see it to-day, may be
described as an Alpine country. It is a region of
i8i
The Life of the Soul
heights and depths, and where all of us are occupied
in the business of climbing — or of watching other
people climb. Some of us are up ; a great many of
us are down. Of the former there are people who
start at the top, who seem, in a way, fixed there.
But the vast majority are on the lower levels ; and
numbers of them appear, in their turn, to be fixed in
that position. They turn their eyes, aflame with
envy and desire, to those shining heights above and
curse the destiny which keeps them in the plain.
But throughout the whole of the thickly-peopled
territory there is an incessant movement. All have
the instinct of change, the desire to get away from
the point where they are to something which seems
better. Those who are lower down want to get
higher up ; those who are on the supposed heights
are, in another way, equally discontented. They also
want something better. The primal instinct here is
undoubtedly a right one, but there are the gravest
of doubts as to the modes of following it. It is good
to be climbers ; but we have first to make sure that
we are after the right peak ! The question here is
one that involves the whole organisation of society ;
is one as to whether, in order that we may each for
ourselves reach the real fulness of life, we shall not
have radically to change the entire system under
which our present positions are assigned.
If the object of life is to obtain completeness of
being ; to enrich it with the fullest experiences, to
become as powerful, as mutually serviceable, as
inwardly blessed, as the conditions which Nature
offers us make possible, then it is certain that our
present social laws and conventions are, to this end,
a hindrance rather than a help. No one of our
182
From Below Up
classes, as at present organised, is getting the best out
of life. Consider first the condition of what are
called our " upper ten " ; the people born to titles, to
riches, to great inheritances which they have had no
share in wdnning. The first thing that strikes us
here is that these people are under a great human
deprivation. They are at the top without climbing ;
of that tourist class, we may say, who are brought
to their summit by machinery. They are there, but
they have missed the joy of movement, all the fun,
the discipline, the daring, the output of nerve and
muscle that the real climb brings. Fancy starting
on a peak where, if your legs are to swing at all,
they must carry you downwards ! To begin at the
top, indeed, inverts the whole process of natural
movement ; of the body's movement, and of the
mind's. And so we find the average mental condition
of the so-called upper classes an unwholesome one.
The morality of it is topsy-turvy, one may say ridicu-
lous. The values are upside down. Here are people
who do nothing, looking down on the people who do
things ; those who have contributed nothing to
society, who do not earn their own bread, regarding
the contributors, the toilers, as inferior, to whom it is
a condescension to speak. It is not all of this class
who act thus ; there are noble souls of them who act
and think in quite another way. And the offenders
themselves are not individually to be too greatly
blamed. Their attitude is not one of malice prepense.
It is the habit bred of a false position ; it is a part
of the moral deprivation to which their condition has
doomed them.
These people, contrary to the general idea, are
really amongst the unprivileged. They have not had
183
The Life of the Soul
their chance : neither their chance of usefulness,
nor their chance of enjoyment. The newspapers
tell us of some young heir acceding to a fortune of
;f 100, 000 a year. Imagine the position ! He has
nothing to work for ; for the highest pecuniary
rewards of work are there for him already. The
roads of art, of science, of learning, of industry lie
open ; all roads full of interest, of opportunities for
developing a man's powers. Will he follow any of
these ? Why should he ? How entirely unnecessary,
how far beneath him ! Instead there open to him the
pleasures which money buys ; pleasures of the palate,
of the wine cup, of the gaming-table, of all the vices
in their most luxurious and enticing forms. Our
youth, unless he is of more than common stuff, will
follow the line of least resistance ; will " sow his wild
oats " ; will run through his years of dissipation,
to find himself, before life is well begun, if not
bankrupt in fortune, assuredly beggared of the
finer enthusiasms ; a world-worn cynic, for whom
the ordinary pleasures have lost their flavour, to
whom existence is at best, as Voltaire put it, " line
mauvaise plaisanterie." It is really a pitiable
spectacle. Our young fellow has not had his
chance. Our social order, or rather disorder, has
made it next to impossible for him to taste life's
real worth, its true success.
One might put the matter into terms of arithmetic.
Let us take £ioo,ooQ, and calculate the amount of
enjoyment to be got out of it. Let us suppose
three men who in the course of their career have had
that amount in possession. One begins with it ;
begins thus, as we say, at the top. And he begins
by spending, without earning ; by spending lavishly
184
From Below Up
beyond his income. The process continues, and he
becomes more and more impoverished, until at the
end he finds it all gone, and his days close in poverty
and want. Our second man begins also with that
sum in possession. He is more careful than the first,
and keeps within his income, so that, at the end,
the sum remains undiminished. The third — and
we have known such — begins with nothing ; nothing
but his character, his industry, his ability. Exer-
cising these he works on from point to point, first
with small successes, and then larger ones, increasing
year by year the sphere of his gains, of his interests,
and dies finally in possession of the sum we have
named. It is, for all of them, the same figure, but can
you calculate the difference in life's experiences,
in solid enjoyment, in the evolution of values that it
stands for in the three careers ? The first story ;
how utterly miserable ! It begins with luxuries
which become necessaries ; they lose their power of
producing pleasure, but their absence causes acute
pain. The man's progress is downward from the
light into ever-deepening gloom. The second has
a better time ; but how far from the best ! He has
tramped a level, beaten road, but has known none of
the joy of cHmbing. It is the third man to whom the
life more abundant has been given. For to him has
been vouchsafed, not only the summit, but the climb.
The lowly beginning in the dark was, of all his fortune,
the best fortune. It made every fresh step something
better than before. It secured that all which came
after should have its own special relish. Each day's
meal of life found him with unimpaired appetite, and
his zest remains fresh to the end.
Our illustration may seem a shockingly material-
185
The Life of the Soul
istic one. " As if money, the getting or spending
of it, were the one thing in life ! " Assuredly that
is not what we mean, or what we think. But ours
is a materialistic age ; one in which, for the best of us,
money counts for a good deal. We use the illus-
tration, not by any means as covering the question
of true living, but simply to show, in a way which
everybody understands and which none can gainsay,
how the present order of society, on the very money
basis on which it is founded, cheats its supposedly
most favoured sons of the best part of life's
inheritance.
If this is the way in which our present system
affects the " favoured classes," the people who are
up, what, we next ask, is its effect upon those who
are down ? We have said that the supreme defect
of our existing social state, as it relates to the upper
stratum, is that it shuts them off from life's best
chance, that of climbing. But that is also exactly
what it does for that vast majority of the race, the
people below. Our condition is static where it
ought to be dynamic. Its watchword is rigidity,
whereas the very life of life consists in movement.
To begin at the bottom is ideal, provided only that
you do not stay there. The mischief is that our
" bottomers " for the most part do stay there, and
with no prospect of rising. They are kept there by
a thousand things ; by their own weakness and
insufficiency, by the lack of good guides, by con-
ventional restrictions, by the dead weight pressure
of the classes above. This state of affairs is, we see,
breeding down below a huge and dangerous discontent.
It is a condition which cannot continue. The
question is whether the change that is coming is to
i86
From Below Up
be one of volcanic upheaval, or such a reconstruction
as shall restore to both classes their chance ; a
chance such as will on both sides set the cramped,
inactive limbs once more in motion ; as shall enable
both upper and lower to taste life's full experience, its
full expansion ; as shall make the valley and the
height accessible to all.
The choice is now being offered us, and we can take
which we prefer. The position to-day in England
is not altogether unlike that of France under the
old regime. We have a similar gulf between the
upper and lower, and a similar condition of feeling
between them. The old French noblesse, who
looked de haul en has upon the " canaille " beneath,
who extorted to the utmost ounce their privileges,
who flaunted their splendours over against the
misery of the country peasant, the squalor of the
Quartier St. Antoine ; have they not their parallel
in our " idle rich " who exhibit their sybarite
luxury, their pampered ostentation, in full view of
the labourer who toils and starves on his pound a
week ? We know what the end was of the French
situation; how the sneer of the noble was met by the
a has les aristocrats of the populace ; how in a flash
the social values changed places, making " nobility"
execrate and infamous, and labour and poverty the
only passport to safety ; how, in fine, the storm
broke which swept away the whole upper world in
a whirlwind of ruin. We say the English tempera-
ment, the English religiousness is against all that.
Let us not be too sure. Human nature is a queer
thing. There are explosive gases in it which, heated
to a certain point, burst into flame, and make havoc
of temperaments, havoc of everything that is within
187
The Life ot the Soul
reach. And that heating process is going on among
us just now at a rate which is getting beyond our
registering apparatus.
It is time we considered that other method ; the
method of a sane reconstruction, of a return to the
primitive, the eternal conditions of human well-
being. We cannot here discuss details ; they will
arrange themselves as the development goes on. But
the radical principle of it all is that every one of us,
every individual unit of the social system, should
begin at the true place of beginning, at the bottom ;
— at the bottom, with every opportunity of moving
up. A new idea must pervade society, the idea that
every soul of us, in whatever position we are born,
should begin life with labour, with discipline, with
the bearing of burdens, with the enduring of hard-
ness. Our educational methods, our industrial
systems, our society ideals, must be reconstructed
in a way that shall secure to the rich man's son all the
lessons that labour, yes, the roughest, hardest labour,
can teach him, that shall make him one with his
fellow in the comradeship of industry, that shall
save him from the dreariness, the withering blight
of an aimless existence ; and that shall open to the
poor man a sure road to those heights which hitherto
have been shut from him, the heights of refinement,
of responsibility, of the noblest satisfactions.
A reconstruction of this sort will involve a radical
change, both for rich and poor, in the idea of what is
" up " and what is " down." Where all are workers
there will be no longer any sti.^ma upon labour.
The stigma will be upon idleness. The social code
will be here like that which Ignatius Loyola imposed
upon his followers, where the same man was expected
i88
From Below Up
to be equally ready to teach mathematics at the
university, or, if need were, to clean shoes in the
kitchen. To be " up " will no longer be to occupy a
position for pampering diseased appetites, for in-
dulging the childish vanity of display. It will be
to have reached the point in which the soul, master
of itself and of its world, reaches the inmost meaning
of life, and tastes the unfailing joys of purity, of
knowledge, and of power.
From below up. That is the only enduring social
method, because it has been through all ages the
divine method. God's rule and education of this
world is on that line of things. His creation of it
and His redemption of it have been by a kenosis, an
emptying of Himself. We think of Him as the
transcendent who has become immanent ; whose life
has entered into the lowliest forms, and through them
has wrought Himself into ever fuller expression ;
who has become one with life in all its striving, in all
its defeats, with all its slow movement to victory.
And the method of His creation is the method of His
redemption. Here too He comes, not with pomp
of ro37alty, but in the form of a servant made in the
likeness of men, in the likeness of humble, labouring
men. Science and the New Testament speak here
the one language. Together they form the one and
onlv basis of the true social life.
189
XXI
LIFE'S MUSIC
Man will never become a materialist so long as his
harp and his viol are left to him. He can never deny
his relation to a spiritual world while so ethereal a
thing as music is here to keep him company. Music
is so plainly of two worlds, a mediator between them.
It touches matter ; it touches spirit, and each
vibrates to the contact. Note the two things and
their relation here. On the one side you have the
collection of sounds, the product of vibrations in the
air ; sounds, with their marvellous harmonic relations,
their connection with number, with mathematics,
with the qualities of metals and strings ; all this for
the material side. But there is the other ; that of
the soul's response. How has this come about ?
How is it that you have this common language,
appealing at once to the universal heart ; that leaps
across all the tongues, all the dialects with which the
human family has confused itself, and tells its
own story to every listening soul ? Why is it that
these vibrations, movements of the impalpable air,
breaking on the tympanum, on a nerve, stir in us all
that is exalted, mystical, religious ? Religious we
say ; for all religion is in music. It had been as well,
perhaps, for the faith of the world, if it had never
been spoken, but only sung. All that is highest and
deepest in religion ; all that it strives to express ;
190
Life's Music
its vision, its aspiration, its sense of the utterly
beautiful, of the utterly holy, comes to us along this
road as on no other. Here we have no arguments
against, no answering scepticism ; we hear, we
believe, we adore. We talk to-day of ministering
angels as though that were some legend of old. In
music we have an angel, not shaped for us in bodily
form, but something beyond ourselves, that waits
on our spirit, that whispers our relationship to a
harmony that is behind and beyond all ages and all
worlds.
One of the thousand marvels of music is in its union
with other things ; with things that, at first sight,
seem so dis-similar. It is, we say, on its physical
side, a vibration. We are told that the number of
vibrations of the string which gives out, on a piano,
the sound of middle C is 270 per second. The
number of vibrations of the middle or F line of the
light scale is reckoned in uncountable billions.
But the wonder here is not in these numbers, but —
have you thought of it ? — that one movement of our
ether envelope should give us what we call sight, and
another this absolutely different sensation we call
sound. Two worlds, utterly remote from each other,
shut up in the same atom, opening themselves on
two nerves of our brain ! But sound, shut off in
this way from sight, has deep alliances with it, as
with all other things. Particles of matter, under
the influence of rhythmical sounds, will arrange them-
selves in symmetrical forms. Here under our eyes
is reproduced the truth of the ancient fable, of
creation coming as a form of harmony ; of the spheres
in their everlasting dance, moving to an inner world
music. One thinks here of the theory which Fechner
191
The Life of the Soul
develops with such subtlety and depth of observation ;
of our earth as having a conscious soul, and the
rushing streams, the booming tides, the songs of
birds, the crash of thunderstorms, as the music to
which it listens.
Assuredly it is by a true instinct that we carry the
idea of harmony beyond that of the concourse of sweet
sounds. We know a music that the ear does not
catch. The deepest, divinest element in it is some-
thing outside the range of notes and scales. These
are only one form of a deeper principle. For life
has its harmonies, also its dissonances which no
instrument can express for us. Yet the principles
of the one are essentially the principles of the other.
They are mystically alhed. Your Broadwood
stands there in your drawing-room, with its row of
eighty-five black and white keys. It is your sound
factory — which you may handle in such different
ways ! A child, a savage, shall dump their hands
on it, producing wild, inharmonious crashes. Your
learner may wring from it his indifferent performance.
Now let your true interpreter come, your Chopin,
your Rubinstein. They are the same notes, with
no change in their nature, no augmentation of their
inherent power, and yet how changed is your piano !
It is now as if all the heavens were singing to you.
Transfer all this to that larger keyboard ; that on
which we are all playing, the keyboard of life.
Here again it is an affair of the instrument, and of the
kind of player. For the world we are in to-day, wdth
all the facts of it ; the facts of our birth and station ;
of our sex ; of our strength or weakness ; of our
possessions or lack of them ; the whole range, in short,
of our circumstances — what is tliis but our larger
192
Life's Music
Broadwood, on which we are bidden to make such
music as we can ? " Ah ! " you say, " what a
different instrument, what a different business !
It is no Broadwood this, not nearly so easy to play.
In that you have some assurance of what the keys
and strings will do ; they are there to make music,
and their effects are calculable. But this vastness
which surrounds me ; this cruel world set up against
my solitary self, so much of it unknown, so much
seemingly hostile ; is there any comparison between
my task and that of your skilled artist, who knows
exactly the response each key will make to his
touch ? "
A just contention, but one which, rightly viewed,
should surely stimulate rather than depress us. That
we are set down before an instrument of this sort ;
not a keyboard of limited notes and powers, but an
organ whose dimensions, whose capacities are those
of life itself, of the whole universe, and bid to play
on that ; have we not here the highest compliment
that ever has been or can be paid to us ? For the
trust here reposed in us is not simply that of playing
our organ. It is that first of attuning it, of getting
it into order, in a way even of constructing it. What
are offered us are rather the materials than the
perfected instrument. We are first to shape them,
to draw out their harmonic possibilities, to bring them
to their point of expression. That has been the task
of our race as a whole rather than of the individual.
The business of the ages has been to find out one after
another the qualities of its organ ; and with every
discovery life has become for us all a richer music.
But there remains for each one the individual task.
We, separately, are at the keyboard, and the question
193
13
The Life of the Soul
is, What kind of music are we making ? Shall we
quarrel with our organ ; dash our hands on its keys
with a gesture of despair, calling it badly constructed,
badly arranged ? Shall w^e reproduce all the old
tricks of the earlier scholars ; tricks of idleness, of
fiat disobedience, of defiance of the rules ? There are
a hundred ways of being bad musicians. There is
only one way of being a good one. Ah ! Why not
catch the spirit of the great task ! Why not see
that here, for us, once in the great eternities, has come
our chance, to sit before this sublimest of all instru-
ments, that we may extract from it our separate note,
a note counted worthy to mingle with, to enrich, the
chorus of immortal life !
In this connection let us think of another key-
board, more restricted, more definitely before us,
but where the handling will make all the difference
for ourselves and others. Our home life, where our
closest relations lie, where life runs at its deepest
and fullest, is the arena where are tried the greatest
issues of our success or failure. And people fail so
often here because they miss the fact that their part
in the home circle is above all that of the musician.
Wife, husband, brother, son ; they are here before
us in many capacities. What we need always^ to
remember is that they are, first and last, musical
instruments, and that our business with them is to
extract their true music by a proper handling of the
keys. All the jangles, all the bitternesses that ruin
so many homes and spoil so many souls, are, if we
would only see it, the result of bad playing on the
part of somebody. There are temperaments more
difficult than others ; but is there one we ever
encountered that does not contain notes that, rightly
194
Life's Music
touched, respond always and sound true always ?
Your disagreement yesterday, have you analysed it ?
Did it not come from a disregard on your part of all
you know of the instrument you were dealing with ?
Was not your word or action a mere crash on the keys,
without any attempt to find the right combination ?
The real music lessons for our household life are not
five-finger exercises, daily piano-strummings. They
are the practice of a nobler art on a nobler instrument.
They are the study of the harmonic possibilities of
each nature there in contact with us, and the training
of our mind and of our touch to draw them to their
fullest expression. And the harmonic result here, if
we are ambitious in this business, will be not simply
the production of the simpler airs of domestic peace
and agreement, delectable as these are. Can we not
also search for and train the loftier notes that there are
in each soul ; set them quivering in response to the
best in our own ; and thus make out of the home inter-
course, a symphony of the loftiest music of the soul?
The principles which hold in the family life are good
also for the wuder combinations of modern society.
Here is a vaster instrument than that of the home.
It is an affair of a great multitude of performers, of
very varying degrees of proficiency, and, alas ! at
present with a clash of disagreeing conductors. We
are full to-day of the social unrest. Capital and
labour are arrayed in two armies of apparently
opposing interests. Their present condition is one
where open war in the way of strikes and lock-outs
alternates with periods of preparation for war. Each
camp has its war chest, its staff of leaders, its arsenals,
its weapons of offence and defence. When active
hostilities are suspended we are aw^are of plottings, of
The Life of the Soul
arrangements going on beneath the surface, for a
more desperate campaign in the future. And yet
every sane mind knows that this is all wrong.
Society was made not for discord but for harmony.
The present position is an ignorance — one might say
a wilful ignorance — of what we may call life's
orchestral principle. Your concert cannot be a
concert so long as you have two rival conductors.
There will be no music here so long as you have two
inimical interests waving separate batons. We shall
get our concert, noble and refreshing for both per-
formers and audience, when those interests are fused
into one, when the instruments speak under a single
direction. The way to that fusion is clear before
us. Robert Owen pointed it out a hundred years
ago. Said a Leeds mill-owner to him once : " If
my people avoided waste I could save £4,000 a year."
Owen replied : " Give them £2,000 of that, and you
will do it ; and you will be £2,000 a year richer."
That is the whole secret. Give the workers a share
in the profits of their industry, and the two armies are
one ; the clash of rival conductors is over, and the
real concert begins. The music here is not simply
that of the tinkling of coin, an excellent music in its
way, especially where it is heard in aforetime empty
pockets. It is a music also of a new joy in work,
of a new interest which makes each hour spent in the
mill, each stroke of the tool, full of a happier con-
sciousness ; music of a heart-warming union between
the capitalist, the brain worker in his office, and the
hand worker at the loom, co-operators now for one
end, for their common good. How long will capital
and labour be in learning this lesson ? Is it not time
the nation, by some collective act, hastened the
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Life's Music
business^ We have had enough of our jarring
discords/ We have been, so far, playing monkey
tricks with our organ. It is time we began to strike
out the noble music that is in it.
The principle which is good for the home and good
for the nation ; which, in fact, is the only one for
them, is good also for the world, the only one for it.
The " Concert of Europe," the " Federation of
Mankind," are at present only words. That they
have got into words, have come so far as articu-
late expression, is, indeed, something, presage of
what is coming. But we need to hasten the pro-
cess. We are still under the shadow of possible
wars. History so far has been a series of huge
discords ; and that phase has not yet ended. Con-
sider what a battle is. The opposing armies are
in themselves a beautiful harmony. The men
march together in a rhythmic movement. Their
manoeuvres are part of a great theme. From the
commander-in-chief to the drummer-boy they form
part of a vital organism, each portion of which
occupies its appointed position, contributes its share
to the majesty of the whole. But all these glittering
evolutions, this ordered sweep of flowing squadrons,
carried on to martial strains that stir the heart,
are for what ? The two forces meet, and
there is an end of harmony, the negation and
destruction of it. What follows is chaos let
loose. Hours of hideous uproar, a welter of
blood, in which bodies, torn by shot and shell, are
broken from the human image into hideous, ghastly
shapes of ruin ; in which minds loose their sanity,
turned into hells of raging passion. In the end come
victory and defeat — victory, which has turned one
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The Life of the Soul
side into an army of demons, maddened with the
blood lust ; defeat, which in the other has broken
all its beauty of array, destroyed its discipline,
turned its serried battalions into a mob of fleeing,
cursing, despairing men. Surely in this twentieth
century we can do something better with human
souls and bodies than that ? Something better
with human courage, with the human faculty of
organising, of ordered movement ? If these two
armies had been working together, instead of against
each other ; had been using all these qualities of
hardy strength, of trained intelligence against the
foes of both, against the ills that encompass life,
that were a saner sort of battle 1 In the fight against
want, against disease, against ignorance, the fight
to enlarge the human boundary, to widen its horizon,
to lift its status, there is no breach of harmony.
Every stroke is a musical one ; the union of effort
is the noblest of orchestrations.
Let us end with the root principle of all. The
soul's music derives from a divine musician. It
finds its true note only in a conscious union of itself
with that Other. Beginning there it realises a grow-
ing harmony within and without ; within, in the
concord of its own powers ; without, in a happy
fellowship with its fellows, with all things that live
and move. To know it is to possess the secret of
which Keble sings :
There are in this loud stunning tide
Of human care and crime.
With whom the melodies abide
Of th' everlasting chime ;
Who carry music in their heart
Through dusky lane and wrangling mart,
Plying their daily task with busier feet
Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat.
198
XXII
AMALGAMS IN RELIGION
Our starting point shall be a letter from an
American correspondent who has spent over twenty
years in Japan. It concerns a suggestion by the
Minister there for Home Affairs, of a union in their
country of the accepted religions, Buddhism and
Shintoism, with Christianity as a combined national
faith. The proposition has since been withdrawn,
but the terms of the document are sufficiently in-
teresting. It advises the old religions to " occident-
alise themselves " ; while as to Christianity, it should
" discard the policy of confining itself to a certain
sphere, as if it were a sort of colony in a foreign
country, and aim at greater success by adapting
itself to our national constitution, and being careful
to harmonise itself with the popular sentiments and
customs."
The manifesto, even in its cancelled condition, is
suggestive of much. Before dealing with it, we may
add a little from our correspondent's letter. He
says : " Things have come to such a pass in Japan
that the authorities are now turning to any religion
that will help them out. They tried to .make a
religion out of that old worship of ancestors in general,
and the Emperor in particular ; but the youth of
the land found in this neither restraint nor inspiration ;
while Socialists and even Anarchists came to question
the source of authority. Again they tried to revive
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The Life of the Soul
the old ceremonies at the thousands of village shrines,
but the city folk were unaffected thereby." And
now we see the authorities turning to Christianity
duly modified and reconciled with the land's imme-
morial customs, as a means of arrestmg the nation's
swift moral decline.
It is a spectacle of the profoundest interest. In all
external and material things Japan has shown a
unique power of assimilation. With an incredible
quickness it has absorbed our science and our arts.
It has armed itself with the latest European weapons,
and has shown how to use them. Its cotton looms
are competing with our own. It builds warships
whose armaments are of the latest type, and handles
them with consummate skill. It has shown itself
a foremost fighting power, and is rapidly becoming
a foremost manufacturing one. But, as its Govern-
ment is now finding out, a nation cannot live by
material things, however astonishing its progress
in them. The conspicuous and terrifying feature of
Japanese life to-day is its growing moral corruption.
The old faiths, on which the spiritual side of the
nation has been nourished, have lost their authority,
and there is at present nothing to take their place.
The younger generation has become frankly and
aggressively materialistic. Its students read Herbert
Spencer and Nietzsche. The decay of faith has re-
sulted in an orgy of vice and sensuahsm. Material
interests are pursued with a ruthless disregard of
humanity. In the factories and workshops child
labour is carried on with a cruelty beyond that of
the worst days before our Factory Acts. Japan, in
view of its rulers and its best thinkers, is hurrying
towards an abyss from which nothing can save it,
200
Amalgams in Religion
except a revival of true religion, a revival of the
sense of spiritual values.
What has Christianity to say to all this ? It is
invited to come in and bear a hand — under
conditions ? Can it comply with these conditions ?
Can it compromise to any extent with the old faiths,
with the old customs ? Well, it has shown in its
long history a most extraordinary power of
assimilation. Newman, in a passage of his " Essay
on Development," speaking of the early Catholicism
in its contact with the heathen world, says :
** Temples, incense, lamps, and candles, votive
offerings, holy water, asylums, holy days and
seasons, processions, blessings on the fields, vest-
ments, tonsure, the ring in marriage, turning to
the East, images and the Kyrie eleison, are all of
Pagan origin, and sanctified by their adoption into
the Church." Pope Gregory the Great, in his letter
to the English missionaries, gives the rationale of the
process. ** Let them," he says, " hang garlands round
their temples, turned into churches, and let them
celebrate such festivals with modest repasts. Instead
of immolating animals to demons, let them kill such
animals and eat them. . . so that, by allowing
them such material pleasures, they may the more
easily be brought to share in spiritual joys. For it
is impossible to expect savage minds to give up all
their customs at once." It is not difficult to guess
what Gregory would do in Japan, were he there to see.
Christianity, indeed, has been the greatest of
absorbents. It has received hardly less lavishly
than it has given. Some of its most sacred
ceremonies are importations. When in the second
century, in Justin Martyr and in Irenaeus, we read
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The Life of the Soul
of the sacrament as a partaking of bread and
wine which are transformed in the receiver into a
divine life for the soul, a veritable " seed of im-
mortality " ; and when we inquire where these ideas
came from, we are irresistibly reminded of those
Eleusinian mysteries which had entered so pro-
foundly into the mind of the ancient world ;
mysteries in which baptism and the partaking of
consecrated bread and wine were celebrated as a
form of union with God. We go farther back than
this. The doctrine of the Logos which forms that
magnificent prologue to the Fourth Gospel, is
essentially a Greek doctrine. Philo Judaeus, the
Hellenised Jew who made it the basis of his teaching,
had borrowed it from Greece. Was it not old Hera-
clitus who said : '' Although the Logos is common to
all, the majority of men live as though they had an
understanding of their own " ? His doctrine is that
the true man is enlightened not of himself, but by the
Logos, the manifested Reason, the inner light of the
soul. The borrowings indeed were in all directions.
Says Professor Barker in his *' Political Thought of
Plato and Aristotle " : " The Church Fathers
borrowed the political theory of the Stoics — its con-
ception of a universal communion, a natural law, and
the equality of all men before that law."
The amalgam which the Japanese Minister pro-
poses for Japan has, we see, to a quite marvellous
extent, already been accomplished in Christianity.
The Church is already a union of apparent opposites.
It has in its history illustrated the old Stoic adage :
Omnia tendimt ad unum. It has absorbed the
most seemingly incongruous elements. We have
noticed some of these, but not nearly all. What
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Amalgams in Religion
intrinsic relation is there between Christianity and
architecture, or music or painting, or the sciences ?
Yet, when with Ruskin in our hand we go into
St. Mark's at Venice, or when we listen to Handel's
Messiah, or stand before Van Eyck's " Adoration
of the Lamb," or Da Vinci's "Last Supper," we see
that the building, the music, the pictures, are just
full of Christianity. It is like the poker in the fire.
The poker has entered into the fire, and the fire
into the poker. The sciences have arisen outside of
Christianity, have often been in bitterest opposition
to it. But as surely as it has been with the arts,
so will it be with the sciences. Their rapprochement
is already a fact ; their fusion is only a question of
time. Science has changed, is changing the existing
Christianity ; Christianity is changing the existing
science. The two will blend ultimately in an
amalgam which will give the world all the inspira-
tions of faith, and all the certainty which comes from
loyalty to fact. And Japan, the foremost nation of
the East, will assuredly contribute to that result.
Lafcadio Hearn, who spent so much of his life in that
country, has a discouraging utterance here. Says
he : " As the Oriental thinks naturally to the left
when we think to the right, the more you cultivate
him the more strongly will he think in the opposite
direction to you." We doubt it ; at the utmost the
saying is only very partially true. Japan, for in-
stance, has not in many most important matters
been thinking in the opposite direction from us.
She has not thought so in all the material sciences.
There, what has been true to us has been true to it.
It thinks in the same way about mathematics and
shipbuilding and manufacture. The foundations
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The Life of the Soul
of its logic are the foundations of our logic. And its
sense of the ultimate moral values is the same, what-
ever variation there may be in its applications. It
believes passionately in our science ; will it not
come also to believe in our religion ? That the East
does not think always in the contrary direction
to the West is proved surely by the fact that the
West has accepted a faith which came from the
East. But the Christianity which is to win in Japan
will have to be, through and through, a scientific
Christianity. Japan will reject a great deal of our
old theologies. It has none of the prejudices which
have fostered and protected them in our own minds.
Here the East which has accepted the science of the
West, will react upon our own faith in insisting
upon a scientific basis for all it is going to believe.
Singular interchange ! The East, which gave us our
religion, will, in accepting, be one of the most effective
instruments in its reformation, its purification.
So much for Japan, and for the East. But our
theme has some home and some interior applications
on which, in closing, a word has to be said.
Christendom is at present split up into scores of
separate organisations, some at smaller, some at
vastly greater distances apart. But there are
amalgams coming here. The Stoic law, " All things
tend to unity," is, in these regions, very visibly at
work. The Protestant bodies are all busy with
schemes of coalescence. They are already one at
heart. And in the heart of Catholicism a movement
has arisen which portends prodigious results. The
new Catholicism, of which the late Father Tyrrell
in England, Loisy in France, Murri in Italy, are repre-
sentatives, is for the present under the cloud of
204
Amalgams in Religion
Rome's authority and repressive measures. But
it cannot be put down. Time and all the forces of
the human mind are on its side. And this movement,
which stands for the rights of science, of the human
reason, is an alliance with Protestantism in all the
deepest things for which it stands ; for the rights of
research, for the acceptance of critical findings, for
the freedom of heart and mind. Here Goethe shows
himself the prophet. Says he : " The better we
Protestants advance in our noble development, so
much the more rapidly will the Catholics follow us.
As soon as they feel themselves caught up by the
ever-spreading enlightenment of time, they must go
on, do what they will, till at last the point is reached
where all is but one."
Religion is finally, in its essence, the greatest of
of all amalgams, the amalgam of the soul with God.
Christian theology has for centuries occupied itself
with the nature of Christ. At Nicaea and Ephesus
and Chalcedon it formulated doctrinal definitions
with the object of declaring His essential oneness
with the Father. He was *' homoousios," of like
nature with the Father. We may accept the defini-
tion. But can we not go further ? Does Christ
leave us when He becomes divine ? Or is He not the
proof that because He is divine we are also ? Was
Plotinus wrong when he applies this very term
" homoousios " as a designation of the human soul ;
declares that it, too, is " of like nature with God " ?
Christ were not the perfection of humanity, at once
its archetype and its finest result, were He not human.
In His highest glory, as in His deepest humiliation.
He is ours. On Calvary's cross and at Heaven's
gate He is complete in us as we are complete in Him.
205
XXIII
THE CULT OF IDLENESS
There has been a good deal said in praise of
idleness. Says Walter Savage Landor : " I like
idle people ; they are not rapacious. It is from
rapacity most evils originate." The world is full of
people who appear to sympathise with this view ;
who, at least, have earned its encomium. A famous
traveller quoted by Montesquieu, being asked to
give his impressions, said that what most struck him
was the extent to which the different races of man-
kind were given to laziness. There seem so many of
the opinion of the Indian chief that walking was
better than running, standing still better than
walking, and that lying down was best of all. For
the real flavour of idleness you have to go south.
We in the cold and humid north have to work to
keep warm. It is in the Islands of the Caribbean,
or by the coral strands of the Pacific, that you get
the cult in its perfection. There, in that glorious
sunlight, work seems a kind of profanation, an
intrusion on Nature's order. Why should your
native work ? A loin-cloth clothes him, the sun
warms him, the cocoa-nut, the banana, and myriad
luscious fruits which grow of themselves, are there
for his sustenance. Let a man stretch himself under
his palm, take into himself the air, the light, the
beauty, and be satisfied with the sense of existence.
ao6
The Cult of Idleness
If all the world were like that the probabilities are
that in all the ages there would have been the very
minimum of work done. Man would have existed
as part of this luxurious nature, and there would have
been no record of his doings.
Things have not been ordered that way. The man
of the northern regions, pursued and pressed by his
winters, has inaugurated and practised a gospel of
work, with momentous results to himself and his
planet. His work has created astonishing changes
in the earth, but most of all in himself. He has grown
so that the easy-going southern native finds himself
his inferior, is dominated by his strenuous energy.
The northerner has created an ethic of activity,
which places idleness as a fault, almost as a crime.
Yet is there not something to be said for it, for
occasionally, at least, doing nothing ? In our
feverish activity we are apt to forget that so much of
it has been of a sort that had better have been left
undone. Are there not, for instance, tongues that
are too industrious ? What a measureless amount
of mischief had been saved ; what domestic and
public peace had been secured, if these lingual
muscles, in families and in nations, had been resting
instead of moving ? To-day, at this height of civilisa-
tion, there are numbers of our institutions, of our
organisations, about which our devoutest wish is
that they could remain idle for evermore. If
our policemen, our armies, our navies, our magis-
trates and judges, our prison warders, our asylum
staffs, could all be put on the idle list ; if things
were so that their services, their activities were no
longer required ; if not one of them, so far as their
professional functions were concerned, could find
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The Life of the Soul
anything to do ; would not that be one of the most
blessed of consummations ? If some of the world's
most strenuous workers — generals, admirals, states-
men, orators — instead of doing or saying what they
did, had simply not said or done them, what
slaughters, what barbaric strokes of policy, what
hideous catastrophes had been prevented ! At
least half the world's energies have been misdirected,
have worked for human misery instead of for its
happiness. If Timour and Genghis Khan, and
Napoleon and Metternich — to name a few energisers
out of scores — had been idle where they were active,
would not mankind have been the gainer ?
And even the best kind of workers, those whose
efforts are not destructive or merely preventive,
but directly ameliorative, do not their careers offer
an argument for a wise idleness ? So much of their
work had been better undone. It has been the tragedy
of the creative minds, the poets, the artists, the
reformers, that they have so often worked for the
mere sake of working, when their energy was without
inspiration, and so by a soulless industry have
marred their fame. Goethe was sensible of this.
" Productive work," said he, " is not an affair of
much production, but of that which lasts. My
advice is to force nothing, and rather to trifle and
sleep away all unproductive days and hours than
rather on such days to compose something which
will afterwards give no one pleasure." Wordsworth
lived to old age, but the poetry by which he lives
was an affair of some ten years. He went on com-
posing, but what he wrote after, with one or two
exceptions, is a mere accumulation, to be dug through
to reach the treasure. Luther's real accomplishment
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The Cult of Idleness
which produced the Reformation was practically
finished in 1523 — his theses at Wittenberg, his
appearance before the Emperor at Worms, his Bible
translation, his great writings, *' To the Christian
Nobility of the German Nation," *' The Babylonish
Captivity of the Church," " The Instruction for
Children," and " Concerning the Bonds of Obedience
to Temporal Emperors." There were some seven
years of that earth-shaking activity. He lived long
years after, but his labours after were retrograde
rather than progressive. That after-industry made
no addition to his glory, was rather a blot upon it.
There are times for the best of us when Nature
calls on us to do nothing, rather than do something.
Then she appears to us as the praiser of idleness.
When we yield to her call she offers us delicious
rewards. It is the busy man who really tastes the
joys of idleness. To be so utterly fatigued that you
have not a thought or a stroke left in you ; and then
to lie down and do nothing ; to just rest, with your
head on some sunlit strand, or among the heather ;
and let nature come in and caress you ; employ upon
you her gracious healing forces. Does life offer
anything better ? Lecky in his " Map of Life "
tells of an epitaph he came upon in a German
churchyard. " I will arise, O Christ, when Thou
callest me, but, oh ! let me rest awhile, for I am very
weary ! " How many of us can sympathise with
that ! To just rest ! There are souls so battered
with the storms of life, so crushed under its burden,
that heaven pictures itself as — to begin with, at any
rate — a millennium of motionless peace.
What a much more comfortable and withal profit-
able life should we have if it were eased of some
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The Life of the Soul
of its misdirected activities ! Weary editors, sitting
at their desks, toil through reams of communications
from people anxious to get into print, but who lack
every literary qualification. They are so industrious.
Ah, if only they would let that branch of industry
alone ! What a relief to that prisoner of the desk
if they would only eat, or sleep, or play golf, or do
anything but write ! There are boarding-school
misses who hammer at pianos for hours each day,
who will never do anything with this industry but
rack the ears and nerves of martyred listeners.
There are people whose one industry is in the way of
formal religious exercises ; nuns in convents, monks
who break their poor rest to drone through their
midnight offices. In a side chapel of St. Peter's at
Rome, we listened once to some score of able-bodied
men who were chanting the psalms. As the dreary
recital went on we found ourselves wondering that
men with bones and muscles, with brains of a sort,
should employ these good materials in so strange a
fashion. They were supposed to be addressing the
celestial powers. What a business for Heaven, had
it nothing better to do than to listen, through all the
days and all the years, to these endless repetitions !
To suppose it does listen is hardly a compliment to
the heavenly intelligence.
So far this might seem to be an essay in praise of
idleness, but that is not at all our intention. There
have been in our history, as we have hinted, an
immense number of things done that had been better
undone, where sheer idleness had been preferable.
But that is no recommendation to do nothing. After
all, ours is a working universe, and one that has no
mercy on the shirkers. We have suggested that the
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The Cult of Idleness
heavenly powers do not always listen to mechanical
religious repetitions. But that does not imply an
idleness up yonder. The powers there are occupied
with real activities ! And such activities ! To
produce a single colour on the chromatic scale
requires countless millions of ether vibrations.
The very atoms, which we had thought of as centres
of immobility, are now discovered to be centres of
force, each a sort of interior solar system, with
electrons revolving round them at inconceivable
velocities. When we in our weariness lie down and
rest. Nature is not resting. She is at work on every
part of us, building up tissue, reinvigorating exhausted
brain cells, carrying on over every part of our system
her mysterious therapeuty. When one part of us
is utterly idle, it is that some other part may get its
chance of operation. When the brain worker falls
back exhausted, unable to add a stroke to his work,
his subconscious part is often at its fullest energy.
Our upper thought is dead, or asleep ; but our under
thought, our sub-conscious self, is so fully alive.
By and by its activities will appear in the emergence
of the best thoughts we ever had.
The universe we are in is an example of industry,
which we shall all of us disregard at our peril. But
it is plain we shall have to revise our notions both
of industry and idleness. There have been, and are,
abundance of mischievous industries. We shall
have to abolish these ; but that does not mean a lapse
into laziness of those concerned in them. They will
have to turn to work that counts. What is happen-
ing to-day is that we are getting new values for work.
Of old, men energised with their muscles. They
handled the spade, the axe, the loom. A great mass
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The Life of the Soul
of this labour has been dispossessed, dispossessed by
thought. Arkwright invents his loom and the old
hand-worker drops out. Spade husbandry is suc-
ceeded by the steam plough ; the flail disappears
before the threshing machine. Here are industries
despoiled of all their virtue, for there is no virtue in
machinery. One man's bit of thinking throws all
those muscles idle. The brain worker rules the
world ; it is his virtue that counts. Has it occurred
to us what sort of a world we shall get when all the
old hand toilers are set at leisure to labour with their
minds instead of their muscles ? That means the
earth's thought-power increased a millionfold. One
of its first exercises will be to re-organise work, to
stop the useless, the mischievous activity, and to set it
upon the things worth doing.
It will destroy stupid work and insist on good
work. Man will toil as the heavenly powers toil,
with a fine wisdom in harmony with all that is.
Everyone will have leisure, but a leisure that he will
turn to profit. Bellamy, in his " Looking Backward,"
described the social condition of the nineteenth
century as that of a prodigious coach to which the
masses were harnessed, and who dragged it toilsomely
along a very hilly and sandy road. The passengers
seated on the top would call down encouragingly to
the toilers at the rope ; but they always expected to be
drawn and not to pull. It was a fairly true picture
of what undoubtedly will have to cease. For one
thing, the coach is rapidly ceasing to be drawn by
human muscles. We are instead harnessing to it the
nature forces. Men will think instead of pulling.
With thought behind it, the coach will go of itself.
In future, where men's hands are still employed,
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The Cult of Idleness
they will work in unison with high thoughts, in
exalted labour ; of the arts which develop beauty,
of the sciences which control force.
And behind all other activities the soul will work ;
will work outwards and inwards and upwards, until
every labour is saturated with love and with purity ;
work into brotherhoods, into holy fellowships ;
work upwards till it reaches beyond the clouds, and
sees God in His heaven.
213
XXIV
THE LACK OF GREATNESS
" A PEOPLE is the roundabout way by which
Nature arrives at six or seven great men." The
saying is Nietzsche's, one entirely characteristic of
his cynical philosophy. It is at once more respect-
able and more true to life if we turn it round and say,
" Nature's six or seven great men are her way of
arriving at a people." Without, however, discussing
that question, the point before us is whether at the
present time we have the great ones, or are in any fair
way of producing them ? In raising it we have no
wish to play the easy and well-used role of the
laudator temporis acti. The old stagers are so apt to
think there is nothing good in their own day. There
is an interesting book, published some forty years ago
by M. Rigault, of the French Academy, in which he
gives a history of the eternal battle between the
ancients and the moderns. He describes there how,
generation after generation, in his own country and
elsewhere, writers have contended now for this, now
for that side of the subject ; one school ascribing all
the wisdom, all the greatness, to the men of the past,
the other finding all the glory of life in the present
and the coming days. This, at the beginning, has to
be conceded, that we are not good judges of our own
time. We are too near to get the proper perspective.
When we remember — to go no farther back — the
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The Lack of Greatness
sneers with which a Wordsworth, a Keats, a Tennyson
were greeted by their contemporaries, and which
followed them for so considerable a part of their
career, we may well be cautious how we appraise
the men of the present hour.
In talking, too, of a people, of a time, we have, in
appreciating their greatness, or the lack of it, to con-
sider, not simply the outstanding names, but the
general level of character and performance. If the
choice is between a high average of ability and
well-doing, without special prominence, and a state
of things where the splendour of a few names is
accentuated by the mental and moral poverty of
their contemporaries, we should not hesitate in our
choice. In such a case we should sympathise with
the daring line of our poet : —
Make no more giants, God,
But elevate the race at once !
Carlyle had his eye on that aspect of greatness
when, in " Past and Present," speaking of England,
he says : " The English are a dumb people. They
can do great acts but not describe them. Nature
alone knows thee, acknowledges the bulk and
strength of thee : thy epic, unsung in words, is
written in huge characters, on the face of this planet
— sea moles, cotton trades, railways, fleets and cities,
Indian Empires, Americas, New Hollands, legible
throughout the solar system ! " In this aspect of it
there is greatness enough in Britain yet. She has
writ herself larger on the globe than in Carlyle's
time. She is the Rome of the modern world, carrying
her roads, her laws, her administration, her commerce,
her mighty engineerings, to earth's farthest bounds.
And she is humanising her peoples. To produce a
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material and moral progress amongst the masses,
to infect them with noble ideas, is an infinitely better
thing than to concentrate all this in a few elite, whose
illumination and happiness throw only into stronger
relief the abject misery of the multitudes around
them. And it is this which the future historian will
have to say of the England of our time.
Yet with all this granted, it remains that we need
the great, the outstanding men, and fare badly
without them. And this because your great man
doubles the value of all the others he is in contact
with. He sets the pace ; he opens the way. Breath-
ing his atmosphere, men draw into themselves, in-
sensibly, something of the secret of his life, the vast
vitality of his soul. It was said the presence of
Napoleon on the battlefield was worth an army corps.
Under his eyes each soldier was double himself. In
religion it is the same. One Wesley is worth a dozen
Conferences. When men of this calibre are absent
from the field, instead of the clarion voice of the
leader we have the confused hubbub of the crowd.
The Church gathers itself together in synods and
assemblies ; issues reports as to the decay of its
numbers ; has interminable discussions on the state
of affairs ; draws up new constitutions ; consumes
the hours of the day and the night, consumes
endless reams of good paper, in haranguings, in
proclamations, in protocols, in warnings and appeals.
And the world goes on its old indifferent way. Let
the genuine man appear, the prophet of the time,
and there is an end of this. He is his own protocol,
his own method. He is the conference ; he is
the battle. The legions range themselves behind
him, knowing that there, at the front, is the secret
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The Lack of Greatness
of victory. It is no synod, or assembly, or written
constitution, or carefully elaborated new scheme
that produces your Luther. To get him is your
Church problem. Is it not time, amid our weary
lucubrations, that we turned our attention in that
direction ; to the problem of how our Luther is
to be procured ?
There is no doubt as to the present lack of men
of the highest type. The dearth is evident over the
whole world. Our best men are successful rather
than great. Germany is making money, but where
are its Goethe, its Schiller, its Kant, its Beethoven ?
Italy has freed herself and is spinning and weaving
and speculating. But where shall we look for a new
Dante, a new Raphael, or Angelo, or Da Vinci ;
where for a Savonarola ? France is without a
name to put beside its Pascal, its Racine, its Fenelon,
its Voltaire ; even its Chateaubriand or its Victor
Hugo. Our colonies are prosperous ; but when will
Canada or Australia produce their Shakespeare,
produce a man to stand with the Elizabethan giants ?
At present, so far from giving the world its leaders
in the great things — in science, literature, or religion
— the colonies are having to import their professors
and their preachers — the rank and file of the mind
and of the soul. And England herself, who exports
so freely of her rank and file, has she any leaders to
export, or any for her home consumption ? Are
any in sight of whom Matthew Arnold sings : —
The one or two immortal lights
Rise slowly up into the sky,
To shine there everlastingly ?
We fill more pages of print to-day than in any epoch
of our history. But whether any line of it will
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confer immortality on our epoch is a question we do
not like to ask ourselves. Our supreme poet, our
supreme artist, our genius of religion, are yet to seek.
The question recurs, then, and with the more in-
sistence ; how, amid all our producings, are we to
get this product ? It is the one indispensable thing ;
the thing we cannot do without, and of which, at
present, we have no supply. Is there no way of
getting it ? Have we to trust here to chance, or to
some deep law of nature, whose mystery is beyond
our fathoming ? Certainly the mystery is deep,
beyond any plumb-line that has yet been let down.
We are unable to say how the great births have come
about. We cannot account for Shakespeare by any
study of his ancestry. And the great men, when
they do come, do not propagate their greatness.
Their children too often are the opposites of
themselves. Marcus Aurelius is the father of a
Commodus ; the noble Germanicus begets the mad
fool Caligula ; Cromwell is followed by a Richard
Cromwell ; the philanthropist Howard has a son who
shames him by his drunkenness and libertinage.
And the greatness of nations follows a curve too large
for our comprehension. Greece, in the time of
Pericles, produced a harvest of abil ty, of genius, in
proportion to its population, which the world has not
seen equalled. It sank, and from then till now has
given us nothing of the first class. For thirty years
of the Renaissance Italy shone w^th a galaxy of
names which illuminated the world. It has done
nothing comparable since. And in England we have
never produced, in any given period since, a half-
dozen we could match with a half-dozen to be picked
from " the spacious days of great Elizabeth." It
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The Lack of Greatness
would seem as though the human race, in its history,
follows a law similar to that seen in the world's geo-
graphy ; where the land, spread for vast spaces over
level plains, at given intervals rises to great peaks
and mountain chains ; to descend again, by foot-
hills and lesser eminences, to farther reaches of
inconspicuous lowland.
Truly the law of great births, of eugenics — to use
the modern phrase — is an obscure one. Neverthe-
less, we are not without indications as to its general
trend. Nature, if she withholds her demonstrations,
at least gives us hints. She tells us, for one thing,
that we shall never get great men unless we take up
the making of manhood as our chief and overmaster-
ing consideration. Our manufactures are worse than
nothing unless this manufacture is properly con-
sidered. Thucydides, in his account of Attica, says
that while other Grecian States were noted for
their production of corn, wine and oil, Attica was
celebrated for its produce of men. Rem acu.
His needle there touches the spot. And to make men
we must begin with making their bodies. The first
condition of success, says Herbert Spencer, is to be
a good animal. And the makers here are hard
work, wholesome food, and fresh air. When shall
we learn that we cannot build a first-class race out of
the noisome, thrice-breathed air of crowded homes,
of unwholesome cities ? We have now three parts of
our population in those conditions, and we might
as well have put them into a mortuary chamber.
*' The fresh air of the open country,'* says Goethe,
** is the proper place to which we belong ; it is as if
the breath of God were there wafted immediately to
men, and a divine power exerted its influence.*'
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England won its place in the world ; reared the
conquerors at Agincourt, Quebec, and Plassy, its
Shakespeares, Miltons, Cromwells, its Puritans, when
the country was a country population, bred in the
open. It has discovered no substitute for that
regime. Its present attempt to dispense with it will
prove the most disastrous of experiments.
Greatness has had for its other conditions sim-
plicity, hardship, the contact with difficulties,
dangers, and sufferings. " Know ye not," says
Nietzsche, " that the discipline of suffering alone,
suffering . . . has carried men to great heights ? "
However that may be as an ultimate proposition,
we know at least that so far the prophets and leaders
of the race have been trained in that school. " Made
perfect through suffering " is the New Testament
description of the training of Jesus. That He was
born into the working class, in the home of a
carpenter ; that He lived in the open, fared hard,
had no banking account, had the poor and outcast
for companions, and died a death of cruel pain, is
surely one of the biggest things in His Gospel.
Beyond all the theologies that rest on His name,
stand out these facts as of prime significance for us —
significant as the data of the great life. And they fit
in with all the rest that we know as to the cult of
greatness. Buddha was born into the princely
state. To win his greatness he renounced all that ;
entered on the path of privation and of beggardom.
So was it with Confucius, with Bernard, with St.
Francis, with Loyola. Study any great life that has
ever been lived, not in the religious line only, but
on every field of affairs, and you will find that it is
in difficulties, in struggles, in the fronting of perils
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The Lack of Greatness
and ghastly possibilities, that the great spirits have
been formed. We are now all for wealth and ease.
Jewry, which gave us our religion, has for these last
eighteen centuries been a race of money makers.
Result that, if we may except Spinoza, it has pro-
duced no prophet since St. Paul. In our rush for
epicureanism and eudaemonism, have we ever
speculated as to what heights we shall reach along
that line ? The sort of country through which these
paths lead is illustrated by a recent controversy in
which a writer in a well-known review advocated the
revision of our ethical code in the direction of allowing
our women the same sexual licence as " fashionable
society " permits to men. Our latest definition of
freedom is a freedom for our womanhood to become
impure ! We are certainly getting on.
To make and to keep a race great, with a chance
of evolving supermen at its top, we require, we say,
if past experience is any guide, conditions for health
and bodily vigour, and the contact with labour,
hardship and difficulty. But there is more than
that. There must be the permeation of the people
with ennobling ideas. As necessary as a pure air
is to the body is a bracing atmosphere for the
mnd. There must be a diffused sense of and feeling
for greatness. It is on this the soul of a people must
be nourished — on great examples and on great ideas.
And this cult of greatness, if it is to come to anything,
must not be confused with a mere cleverness. You
may have an infinity of talent and a nation of rogues.
Talent at its best is a thin affair. Your Pica de
Mirandola shall, at the age of twenty, speak twenty-
two languages. He may, and be after all the man
we find in ** Hudibras " :
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The Life of the Soul
He that is but able to express
No sense at all in several languages,
Will pass for learneder than he that's kno-wm
To speak the strongest reason in his own.
Erasmus was a cleverer and more learned man than
Luther. But weigh the two in the scale of depth and
performance, and where is your Erasmus ? Great-
ness is never a surface affair. It is lodged in the
hidden depths of character.
And thus it is that, to help a people upward, you
must use the forces that reach those depths. And
the one and only force that is adequate here is that
of vital religion. Hausrath is hardly regarded as an
orthodox critic, yet note this observation of his :
" Religious life is one of the most powerful motives
in healthy nations, but its significance is still more
strongly felt through the void left in the life of a
people by its decay/* And on the positive side let
us add this testimony of another impartial historian.
Says Justin McCarthy in his " History of the Four
Georges," of Wesley and Whitefield, "The man must
have no religious feeling of any kind who does not
recognise the unspeakable value of the great reforms
which they introduced. . . They pierced through
the dull, vulgar, contaminated hideousness of low
and vicious life, and sent streaming in upon it the
light of a higher world and a brighter law."
The Scottish people has, for some generations now,
enjoyed a singular mental and moral pre-eminence.
As has been truly said, no people since the golden age
of Greece has reached a higher level, or produced,
in proportion to its numbers, such a number of out-
standing men. Is there any doubt as to the causes
of this ? Other nations may well take note. At
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The Lack of Greatness
the time of the Reformation, nigh four centuries ago,
Knox and his coadjutors laid for their country the
foundations of a real religion and a real education.
The Bible, that book, above all others, of deep souls
and deep things, became the common property of
the people. And with the Bible came the common
school and the common university. While England
at the same momentous hour of choice harked back
to semi-feudalism, setting up a ceremonial religion,
and closing its seats of learning to all but a privileged
class and a privileged sect, Scotland, child of a happier
destiny, opened to its entire people, its humblest as
well as its highest, the foundations of knowledge,
and the fountains of spiritual power. No world
history has ever shown more strikingly the play of
cause and effect in the evolution of a people.
We are not then, on this supreme matter, entirely
in the dark. The whole question is whether we are
prepared to follow the light so far as it opens to us.
People talk of decay of nations, of the decay of
Churches, as though there were a kind of fate in it.
Let us not believe it. Life is only a downgrade affair
when we disobey the laws of it. Get on the track of
those laws and every step is upward. And we are
beginning to learn these things. We are at the first
dawn of a new science of life. As that progresses and
its fruits appear, man will reach levels of character
and of achievement for which the past, great as it has
been, will show as only the first laborious steps of
preparation. Is not this what the Master meant in
His saying : " I will show you greater things than
these " ?
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XXV
CONCERNING BIG THINGS
" I PLAY with life ; it is the only thing it is good
for," said Voltaire, who was rather fond of expressing
himself that way. " II faisait le tout en hadinant."
" He treated everything as a jest," says one of his
contemporaries. He speaks elsewhere of the world
as a joke, and a rather poor one. That has been a
French way of looking at things ever since Rabelais,
with his fire enorme, made fun of Church and State,
of theology, and philosophy, of heaven and hell.
We are not to take this jibe at seriousness too
seriously. Both Rabelais and Voltaire did some very
big things and some very serious things. Jowett, of
Balhol, said of the latter " that he did more good than
all the Church Fathers put together "—a somewhat
startling judgment for an Oxford don, worth recalling
even if we do not endorse it. But this way of treating
life as a small affair, an affair of trifles which do not
much matter, was a fashion of the time, an English
fashion as weU as a French one. You get that view
in the letters of Lady Mary Montagu and in those of
Horace Walpole. Benjamin Constant finds the
chief blessing of life to be that of amusing oneself.
William Law lashes the prevailing temper in his
sketch of " Flavia." " If she lives thirty years in
this way, she will have spent fifteen in bed, and four-
teen in eating, drinking, dressing, visiting, reading
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Concerning Big Things
plays and romances, and going to the theatre." In
our own time we have an enormous number of people
to whom the criticism would strictly apply. Life,
in this expression of it, is a very small affair indeed.
Sophie Charlotte, Queen of Prussia, grandmother
of Frederick the Great, was once discoursed to by
Leibnitz on " the infinitely little." " Mon Dieu,"
said she afterwards, " as if I did not know enough of
that ! " The life of courts produced enough of
this element. And the life of courts, and of circles
outside courts, goes on producing it with unabated
zest to-day.
Far be it from us to wage war upon life's smaller,
its trivial aspects. The "infinitely little" is
certainly there, and has its claim upon us. And the
comic aspect of things has also its appeal to all
healthy minds. Our laugh, be sure, is heaven-born,
comes of one of our finest human faculties. Man
would not be man without it. Often it is our best
interpretation. But our joke may be carried too far.
It is so when it is made the sole interpreter. We shall
miss life's meanings if we let it end here. Against
this study of littleness, for which we have such ample
opportunities, let us put the study of greatness.
That, and not the infinitely little, is what we are
here for. Nature loves her jest, but on the whole
she is tremendously in earnest. We are here for big
things, for grandeurs and sublimities, and the meanest
and obscurest of us will fatally miss his way unless
he makes that the bottom fact in his consciousness.
A bold proposition, perhaps, but let us see how it
works out.
To begin with, we are in a big universe, and we
are the only creatures on this planet who are aware
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The Life of the Soul
of the fact. Our myriad fellow-creatures dwell in
a small world. They never stop outside the finite.
The ant knows its ant-hill and little more. The ox
grazing in the field has a field for its world. The
eagle surveys a vast prospect, but compare it with the
human prospect ! Man is a small creature. His
skull is a few inches across. But the things that are
locked up there ! His vision traverses millions of
miles of space, and where his eye fails his thought
begins. There are no walls to his thought. He
stands up consciously as part of an infinity of
extension, an eternity of duration. He is infinite
and eternal, because these two things, infinity and
eternity, are in his apprehension, are the basis of his
mental structure. There could be no infinite around
him unless there were an infinite within him. For
all creatures are the size of the world they live in.
The stars could convey no message to us were it not
that our nature is starry, on the scale celestial.
Consider, too, the career on which we are launched.
We are thrust upon great adventures. We have each
one of us, every day of our lives, to encounter the
unknown. What a discipline is this silence of
nature. Our fathers found much of the greatness of
life to lie in the revelations that have been made.
We are disposed rather to put it in the little that is
revealed. So much is left to ourselves, to our
courage, to our trust. We are perpetually taking
leaps in the dark. The maiden in her twenties
receives her offer of marriage, to which she must give
her " yes" or " no." Her life hinges on that answer,
but there is no word given as to what it will mean to
her of happiness or sorrow. She must will herself
away in the dark. Consider our capacity of suffering.
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Concerning Big Things
Every nerve in us carries a possibility of agony ;
all our affections, our mind's ambitions, our heart's
desires, can be made the instruments of pain. And
we are in a world which tests them to the uttermost.
We are ever near neighbours to catastrophe, and the
point is that we are aware of it. The lower animals
suffer pain, but they have no foresight of it. Whereas
we know the sort of world we are in ; we know the
deadly blows it can aim at us. And at the end we
shall all face the tremendous adventure of death ;
all of us take the leap into that greatest unknown.
What does all this mean ? Many things, doubt-
less ; many things beyond our present compre-
hension. But one of them surely is this : that
life, for us, is meant to be something beyond the
dimensions of a jest. We are something bigger
than our biggest laugh. We have been put up
against big things, a sign that the Framer of us
accounts us big. We do not set pigmies to fight
giants. Things are matched according to their
capacities. That we are set in such an arena ;
ushered into the presence of infinities and eternities ;
counted equal to such endurances, such vast adven-
tures, is not this the sign of what is thought of us by
the Ruling Power ? Our doubts, our fears, the
fateful decisions thrust upon us ; life's appalling
possibilities, its immense despairs ; these are no
schemes for ants and moles. The scheme supposes
our greatness. It is a plan for heroes ; for the
making of them, at least, if they are not that already.
The scheme were ridiculous if it meant anything less
than this. Its size, its character fit in, not with the
infinitely little, but with the infinitely great.
We are called upon, we say, for big things. That
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The Life of the Soul
is Nature's invitation to us, her clear revelation con-
cerning us, the first article of her rehgion. She puts
no bounds to our possibilities. The stuff in you, she
says, is the essence of all that was, and is, and is to
be. She is ambitious for us, as a mother who dis-
cerns in her children divine capabilities. And man
has given what is, on the whole, a wonderful
response to her call. Tiny creature that he is, he
has mastered his planet and changed it out of all
recognition. He has yoked his brain to the elemental
forces and made them the servants of his will. His
are the strength of the winds and the waves. He has
struck the secret of the hidden powers, and is on the
way to the innermost of all. He can construct things
a thousand times his own size, a thousand times his
own strength. As a maker, a builder, an inventor,
there is no end to his creations. If he w^ere made
for that only ; if that of itself were greatness, we
could pronounce him an unqualified success. But it
is just here that our doubt comes in. For this work,
after all, is not himself. A spider is just the same
a spider, with all its ugliness, though it live in a
palace ; and a man may stand mid the largest
creations and be himself as a spider in the palace,
entirely unbeautiful.
Modern society is as yet quite at sea as to what
constitutes greatness. It has forgotten some
excellent lessons on this subject, and has put no
better knowledge in their place. Its present verdict
is for enormous outside possessions. It is not the
man but the load he carries on his back that is the
big thing. And the load is not ornamental. An
American society novel pictures a dinner party of
millionaires. The hostess stands on a ten thousand
228
Concerning Big Things
dollar rug, looks round on her hundred thousand
dollar drawing-room, which is part of a two million
dollar mansion. At dinner one of the guests addresses
his neighbour in a fifty million dollar voice, and is
answered in the deprecatingly humble merely ten
million dollar tone. It is not wit, or wisdom, or inner
nobleness, but simply money that talks. Is this the
ne plus ultra of humanity ? The old pagan world
could teach us better. To its thinkers, greatness
was an affair of the man, not of his possessions.
They visualised their own soul, and thought of man
as great or not great according to its size and quality.
" Give me," says Plato in the Phaedrus, " beauty in
the inward soul, and may the outward and inw^ard
man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be
wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as
none but the temperate man may bear and carry."
And this inner beauty was to be attained by contact
with the sublimities of the inner, spiritual world.
How does our shoddy millionaire look in contact with
this idea of the " Phaedo " ? " But when, returning
unto herself, the soul reflects, she then passes into the
other world, the abode of purity and eternity, and
immortality and unchangeableness, which are her
kindred, and with whom she ever lives, when she is
by herself and is not let or hindered. And this state
of the soul is called wisdom."
Does Park-lane or Fifth Avenue, we wonder, ever
read Longinus ? In his treatise on *' The Sublime,"
there are some things which might be profitably
studied there. To our modern money-maker he has
some quite surprising things to say. He is colour-
blind to the virtues of doUardom. Sublimity, he
avers, is " the note which rings from a great mind " ;
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The Life of the Soul
not, you perceive, the gold ring at all. He goes on,
" If one were to look upon life all round, and see how
in all things the extraordinary, the great, the
beautiful stand supreme, he will at once know for
what ends we have been born." But he comes still
closer : " I try to reckon it up, but I cannot discover
how it is possible that we, who so greatly honour
boundless wealth, who, to speak more truly, make it
a god, can fail to receive into our souls the kindred
evils which enter with it . . . When all no
longer look up, nor oftentime take any account of
good reputation, little by little the ruin of their
whole life is affected ; all greatness of soul dwindles
and withers, and ceases to be emulated, while men
admire their own mortal parts and neglect to improve
the immortal. A judge bribed for his verdict could
never be a free and sound judge. . . . Even
so where bribes rule our whole lives, where we pur-
chase with our soul gain from wherever it comes, do
we really expect amid this ruin and undoing of our
life that anyone can be a free and uncorrupted
judge of the great things, of the things that reach to
eternity ? "
We call these men pagans and ourselves Christians.
They were better Christians than we are. And we
have to come back to their teaching. They saw
clearly what we, with our bemuddled vision, are
failing to see, that greatness is an affair, not of the
things outside us, but of the things inside us. They
heard, what we are becoming deaf to, the call of the
invisible. They felt in them the presence of the
spiritual world. They saw into the human problem,
that it lay in the type of manhood we produce ; that
greatness finds itself not in the size of our buildings
230
Concerning Big Things
or of our bank balances, but in the size of the soul ;
in the quality and furniture of it ; in the possession
there of strong convictions, of high thinking, of noble
feeling.
We seem engaged to-day upon the business of
belittlement. We enlarge everything but ourselves.
We build leviathans and skyscrapers, and dwarf our
own nature. We cover the sky with a roof of drab
materialism. We deny our connection with the
infinite and the heavenly. We assail the convictions
for which of old men died. Where is the temper
which enables a man to say, as that old Covenanter,
David Cargill, said when executed for his faith at
Edinburgh : " The Lord knows I go up this ladder
with less fear, confusion, or perturbation of mind,
than ever I entered a pulpit to preach " ? " We
have not enough faith to-day," said Renan, " to
produce a heretic." We are belittling marriage and
proposing instead a chance sexual connection ; we
belittle chastity as an old convention which inter-
feres with passional enjoyment ; we deny to love its
loftiest meaning and phrase it in terms of animalism.
We are living beneath the great literatures. They
were never cheaper and never less read. Instead of
feeding on the great souls, the age draws its inspir-
ation from the sporting papers, and from novels
whose interest lies in their uncleanness. We can do
wonders with steam, with electricity, with aeroplanes,
and are in a chaos as to what we should do with
ourselves. We have no clear ideas as to how we
should be born, how educated, how fitted for the
business of living. We are in a war of classes as to
the distribution of property, a war in which hatred,
revenge, and the compulsion of physical force are to
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The Life of the Soul
be called in aid. As if this were the road to human
well-being ; as if there could be any solution of that
problem apart from an inner solution ; as if there
w^ere any road to human happiness away from the
road of the soul's discipline, purification and enlarge-
ment ! It is a wonderful thing, we say, to travel
at sixty miles an hour. Yes, but if you are a fool
or a rogue when you get into the train and are a fool
or a rogue when you get out of it ! Magnificent,
to flash news from New York to London in thirty
seconds. But if the news is only of divorce, or
swindling, or political corruption, have we gained
much ?
The big things are all in the soul, and proceed
from the soul. The outside property depends first
and last on the inside property. There will be no
right production of goods and no right sharing of
them until there has been a right production and
a right distribution in human souls, of conscience,
veracity, purity and love — a production and dis-
tribution there of religion, in the high, eternal sense
of it. Make us all millionaires to-morrow, and the
great things of life would remain just what they were
and where they were — would remain in our relation
to this universe and to the Ruler of it ; in being and
doing, and suffering ; in the doing of our daily work ;
in our right relation to our fellow ; in sympathy, and
service, and sacrifice ; in the development of our
powers ; in the lifting of them to ever higher levels ;
in meeting the mystery of life ; in facing death and
what is after death. Amid all our material advance-
ments shall we ever get beyond this, which Socrates,
in the " Georgias," says to Callicles ? "I consider
how I shall present my soul, whole and undefiled,
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Concerning Big Things
before the judge in that day. Renouncing the
honours at which the world aims, I desire only to
know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and
when the time comes to die. And to the utmost of
my power I exhort all other men to do the same."
The big things are things which are open to us all.
In offering them to us Nature scorns our petty dis-
tinctions of rank and station, even our distinctions
of gift and faculty. In reading these lines you have
perhaps railed at the world, at the writer, and at
yourself. " Big things ! What big things have
fallen to my lot ? Everything around me is petty
and circumscribed. Feeble in body, feeble in mind,
one of the unendowed, at the hindmost of the rank
and file ! " Do not rail, my brother ; do not despise
yourself. You are in a big world and with a big
destiny. Your very weakness, your limitation, are
your big things. They are there for you to act nobly
in them, to fight the good fight with them. Do you
not see here the trust that is reposed in you ? You
have so much greater a fight than that of the other
man who is so much easier placed. In this hardest
post you have the chance of the greater triumph.
Throughout the fight the Watchman has his eye
upon you. In that inner struggle you are waging,
there is more glory to be won — in due time to be
manifested — than in all the blood-stained battlefields
of militant conquerors.
233
XXVI
THE DEEPER REASON
Coleridge, in his " Aids to Reflection/' drawing
largely upon Kant and his other German masters,
makes much of the difference between reason and
understanding. By understanding he means the
faculty which deals with the data furnished by the
senses ; by reason the faculty of reflection, of pure
thought, which, governed by its own laws, pronounces
the ultimate verdicts. The one we share with other
animals, though in a higher degree ; the other is on
this earth, the prerogative of man alone. The
Coleridge argument was received with enthusiasm
by the orthodoxy of the day, which used it in ways
he himself hardly approved. It was so comfortable
when science urged facts disagreeable to dogmatic
assumptions, to escape by appeal to another court.
" Your facts are perhaps rather confounding to the
understanding, but then, you see, we have a judge of
appeal who quashes your verdict ! " The Coleridge
plea of reason versus understanding has, we say, been
much misused — worked in ways the modern mind
cannot endorse. It cannot accept the ideal of a dual
control, still less of a contradictory control. The mind
moves altogether. It is essentially a harmony and
not a discord.
But the Coleridge idea, whatever obscurities there
may be in his own statement of it, and whatever
234
The Deeper Reason
mishandlings it has suffered at the hands of his
followers, has been a fruitful one. He put the thought
of his day on a track which has brought us to a higher
point and a firmer ground than his own. We have
no faculties in opposition to each other, or that
really contradict each other's verdicts. But the
understanding, the calculating, scientific faculty as
we now call it — the faculty which deals with matter
and force, which is the instrument of our scientific
research, is to-day discovering its own limits, and
that by the exercise of its own powers. And it
is recognising the fact that side by side with it are
contents of the soul, which, in their hints and
predictions, are more to be trusted than itself.
Science, as the exponent of the outside material
world, is drawing its own boundary lines, beyond
which its instruments are not competent in the
search for reality. Bergson, our latest and finest
exponent of the new philosophy, in his ** Matter
and Memory," and his " Time and Free Will,"
has magnificently demonstrated, and that by the
very methods of science, the futility of the attempt
to explain the mind by arguments derived from
matter. The materialistic Monism is as dead as
Queen Anne.
The human problem, the problem of the relation of
man to life and the universe, as he shows, can never
be solved by the data with which science alone can
deal. There is in us a deeper reason, which, while
not contradicting our owm logic, goes far beyond it.
There are in us other elements which contain this
deeper reason without expressing it, and which have
always to be taken into account. These other con-
tents of our nature — instincts, feelings, sympathies,
235
The Life of the Soul
aspirations — we are now beginning to perceive, have
in them a subtler logic than our expressed logic ;
have a further reach, a deeper implication than our
formulae, and are on the whole more trustworthy
than they. " Zwei Seelen wohnen ach ! in meiner
Brust." Pasteur, so rigid a scientist, has expressed
this on his own behalf : " There are," says he, " two
men in each one of us : the scientist, he who starts
with a clear field and desires to rise to the knowledge
of nature through observation, experiment, and
reasoning ; and the man of sentiment, the man of
belief, the man who mourns his dead children, and
who cannot, alas ! prove that he will see them again,
but believes that he will, and lives in that hope."
It is precisely here, in the instinct of belief, in the
instinct of hope, that we find at work our surest
reason. The soul's promises here, greater than the
visible reality, are reality in the making. We are at
present only at the beginning of our creation, and
our instincts are the clearest signs of the course that
fuller creation is to take.
We are full, we say, of a reason that is deeper than
our logic, deeper even than our consciousness. See
that child in its cradle. It knows absolutely nothing
of how it came to be, of what it is going to be. It is,
we say, absolutely dependent upon its parents' love
and care. But how much do its parents know ?
How much can they do ? They are more or less
expert at child-rearing, and will do their best. But do
they know anything of the process by which the air
the child breathes, the food it takes, are converted into
vital force ? Do they know how its billions of cells
keep themselves alive and perform their functions ;
how the heart keeps beating and the lungs respiring ;
236
The Deeper Reason
how the several parts of its multiform organism work
harmoniously into each other, and together keep it
growing and developing day by day ? But if the
child and its parents are ignorant here, who is it that
knows ? Is there not here, plain before your eyes, at
work a deeper reason ? Can you, as you watch that
child in its cradle, help bowing before a Power, so
tender, so loving, that with a more than mortal
wisdom is nursing it into life ?
Go further. When you watch a tool, a machine,
what are you lookmg at ? A piece of cold steel, a
collection of rods and frames. Is that all ? The
tool, the machine, are full of thought — not their
own thought, but another's. The man who conceived
that machine is, in a way, living in it. His ingenuity,
his purpose, his hope, are all there, and will be as long
as it lasts. Without that thought it would not be
what it is. You may call it, if you Hke, objectified
thought. And when you look at a stone, at a tree,
or away from them to the whole panorama of the
heavens and the earth, what is it you see ? That,
too, is objectified thought. For the stone, the tree,
the Universe are all under law— law under which they
all fit into each and each into all ; under which they
all work with a purpose, part of which we can see, and
part of which is hidden from us. But what are laws,
relations, purposes, but thought ? Where does that
come from ; whose thought is it ? Diderot argued
that as the brain is the organ of thought, when our
brain ceased our thought would cease. Was there
ever a funnier argument ? If the brain alone causes
thought, the thought in the universe must come
from some gigantic brain hid somewhere in the depths
of space. One wonders what its size must be, and
-37
The Life of the Soul
how this brain got itself constructed apart from a
thought to construct it ?
With such evidence before us of that deeper reason
which, invisible but ever present, works incessantly
within us and around us, we may proceed to make
some suggestions concerning it which seem to be
fairly well founded. For instance, if the child, as
we have seen, is maintained in life and growth by a
knowledge and a care which are certainly not its
own, may we not assume that its after career is under
the same guidance ? The grown man is, in a way,
put in possession of himself. He is left to do all that
he can do. The unseen Power is full of economies.
It will not waste its strength where it is not wanted.
But over the vastest area of his life the man is help-
less. He cannot keep his own heart beating. He
knows nothing of what is going to happen. Ask him
to say what he will be or do ten years hence, and he
has no answer. Has the Power that keeps his heart
beating no function in his life beyond this ? If the
hairs of his head are all numbered — and if they were
not, how could they grow and keep alive ? — if these
are all numbered, are not also his footsteps through
life, his mistakes, his follies, his sorrows ? Are not
these all numbered and guided — and that towards
ends which this deeper reason knows and has pro-
vided for ? The Providence of the child is the
Providence of the man — a Providence of love that will
not let him go.
And if this be so of the man, assuredly it must
be also of the race. We are so engrossed with our
human activities, and so satisfied with them, that
we constantly fail to see that they are the outworking
of a reason deeper than our own, and for ends beyond
238
The Deeper Reason
our own. Take as example the developments of
religion, in the past, and now in our own day. At
home we have our Christianity divided into sharply
contrasted sects, each proclaiming its own faith and
organisation as the true one. The founders of them,
and their followers, acted with all sincerity. They
believed in a heavenly commission to proclaim their
doctrine, to establish their religious order. And we
may say that they were right here as far as men can
be right. When men honestly look for heaven's
guidance they get it. But do we suppose they knew
all they were doing ; that their purpose was the final
purpose ? We are already beginning to see what
they did not see. Our Episcopals, our Independents,
our Presbyterians, our Methodists, dreamed of the
victory of their order over all other orders, as the
estabhshment of the one true Christianity. We now
suspect that verdict ; suspect that a deeper reason
lay in this work than its fosterers imagined. In
denominationalism, as it has worked hitherto, we
see Nature working as she does in other biological
fields, seeking after new human types, and that by
segregation and separate development. And this
with the further end of crossmg these types, and by
an after inter-conimunion producing a blend of all,
richer incomparably by the fusion of their individual
qualities.
We see this deeper reason at work in those very
mistakes of faith which have often so puzzled us.
Nothmg is more certain than that the Early Church,
in its belief in an immediate Second Advent, was
under a delusion. But have we asked why ? Has it
occurred to us that in the economy of things, delusions
are a necessary part of the human development ?
239
The Life of the Soul
They are often a husk which protects the fruit. They
are at the same time a source of the energy needed to
carry a movement forward. The deeper reason — •
ever, as we have said, economic in its use of every
scrap of force — uses illusions for the immediate end
it designs, and then casts them aside. And as with
the past, so with the future. We stand aghast often
at the course things are taking, so contrary often to
our sense of what should be. The deeper reason,
depend upon it, is not aghast. Its great movement
goes on ; a movement in which our very fears and
consternations will play their appointed part.
That deeper reason is so infinite in its reach that
we may well build infinite hopes upon it. Our fears
come from our limitations. Can we believe that the
countless millions of human beings who have lived on
this earth all survive ? And if they do, will it be pos-
sible for us, amid such an inconceivable multitude, to
find again those we love ? A staggering thought,
doubtless; but then everything is staggering in this
universe. It is a universe of inconceivables that have
actually come to pass. To find ourselves actually
existing in such a world as this — is not that a thousand
times more antecedently improbable than that,
actually being here, we may find ourselves again in
another state ? The most inconceivable is the present
actual. It is science to-day that overwhelms our
reason. Take one simple statement. In the space
of a second, red light, of which the vibrations are the
least frequent, accomplishes four hundred billions of
successive vibrations. Supposing you counted this
succession of vibrations, and did each in the five-
hundredth part of a second, it would take you twenty-
five thousand years to go through the operation.
240
The Deeper Reason
And yet this is what happens in the momentary
flash of a red Hght ! That is how this universe is
kept going. Everything in it is beyond us ; its
movement, its energy, its wisdom, are beyond us.
With what it has done for us, shall we put any limits
to what it can do ?
These, we think, are fair assumptions from what
we know of the actual work of the deeper reason.
What it has already done is, we think, a ground for
the assertion we made at the beginning — that the
true organ and expression in us of that reason lies
not so much in our present knowledge or our formu-
lated experience, as in our hopes, our spiritual
instincts, our ideals, our aspirations. They are the
promises of what is to be. We are to live on our
hopes rather than on our fears. The very fact that
hope is a life-making factor ; that its immediate
effect upon us is an effect for health of body and
mind ; a help to the blood's circulation and to the
mind's best activity ; this, in itself, should assure
us that its indications are the true ones ; that in
following them we are on the track to which the
deeper reason points.
Grow old along with me !
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made ;
Our times are in His hand
Who saith, " A whole I planned,
Youth knows but half ; trust God ; see all,
Nor be afraid."
241
16
XXVII
RELIGION AS INWARDNESS
Many of us have read that remarkable little work,
" The Great Illusion," a work with which Mr.
Norman Angell a while ago succeeded so effectually
in startling the political world. He showed there how
the things which, in the present situation, so im-
pressed the senses — the bloated empires, the huge
armaments, the idea of conquest as a means of
enrichment — all rested upon a misconception. The
real forces that were making the world, that were the
factors of progress and well-being, both for nations
and individuals, lay elsewhere. To multitudes it
came with the force of a new and quite revolutionary
idea. Indeed, it has been scoffed at as chimerical.
But nobody has disproved it, nor brought any solid
arguments against it.
But that is not the only optical illusion under which
society to-day is suffering. There is another, if
possible, more widespread and more obstinately
cherished. It is one concerning religion — its real
place in the world, its strength and weakness, its
coming fortunes. Here, too, we are conquered by
the senses ; we are slaves to the eye. When we
think of religion we turn instinctively to the visible
signs of it ; to cathedrals, churches, meeting-houses ;
to creeds and institutions ; to rites and ceremonies ;
to the statistics of worship and church attendance.
242
Religion as Inwardness
How many buildings have been erected during the
year ; are they full or empty ; what sums have been
raised ; what are the figures of membership ?
According to the fluctuations in these items we
pronounce upon the rising or falling fortunes of
religion in our midst.
All these things, of course, have their place in the
scheme of religion, and are every way worthy of
consideration. The mistake is to put on them the
wrong emphasis, and to draw from them the wrong
inferences. For no one of them is religion ; no, nor
all of them put together. You might destroy every
cathedral and every church ; every creed and every
ceremony, and you would scarcely have touched
religion. Indeed, if there were a touch at all it would
be one of revival rather than of repression. For
all these things, buildings, creeds, ceremonies, are
like the reefs flung up by the coral insects, dead
efforts of a past life ; not the life itself. For religion
is living spirit and not dead matter ; and you cannot
make one stand for the other.
** The church attendances," you say, " are, at
any rate, an affair of living persons." True, but the
rule holds even here. Does anybody nowadays read
Law's " Serious Call " ? It was the book which
first awakened John Wesley ; one of the devoutest
books ever written, and by one of the devoutest
Christian souls. Yet at the very beginning we find
this : " It is very observable that there is not one
command in all the Gospel for public worship ; and
perhaps it is a duty that is least insisted upon in
Scripture of any other. The frequent attendance at
it is never so much as mentioned in all the New
Testament. Whereas that religion or devotion
243
The Life of the Soul
which is to govern the ordinary actions of our life is
to be found in almost every verse of Scripture. Our
blessed Saviour and His Apostles are wholly taken
up in doctrines that relate to common life."
Religion, in fact, is, from beginning to end, an in-
wardness. It is an affair of the condition of our
spirits. Its progress or decay lies in the question
whether we are going forwards or backwards in our
mental, moral and spiritual temper ; whether or
not we are adding there new graces, new powers,
new beatitudes of thought and feeling. And this is
true of nations and races as well as of individuals.
When we want to ascertain the growth or decay of
religion in the world we must turn at once from the
external to the internal ; we must find out whether
the inner temper of the people is moving upwards or
downwards.
When we have got this fairly into our minds ;
when we have got rid of our religious optical illusion,
and have learned to interpret spiritual matters, not
materially, but spiritually, we shall find ourselves
in a new way of thinking about many things. For
one, we shall measure people's religion, not by the
creeds they subscribe, nor the forms they celebrate,
but by what they are getting out of them. A man
may belong to the communion you regard as
entirely orthodox, may carry out all its ecclesiastical
prescriptions, and so far as inwardness is concerned,
have no religion in him at all. All his inwardness
may be a heathen inwardness, one belonging to the
lowest spiritual type. Another man whose com-
munion is one against which you have been fighting
all your life, is full interiorly of those very things
which Jesus spoke of as religion. Beneath his
244
Religion as Inwardness
heresies we find a love, a tenderness, a sympathy,
whose accent we know at once. This is the language
of the Kingdom. This is the sign manual of Christ.
Here is the true orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of the
heart ; the orthodoxy not of the letter but of the
spirit. Bishop Creighton was expressing this when
he spoke of his sense of union with many men at a far
remove from his own Church dogmas, a union far
closer than with multitudes of those who, in his own
words, ** symbolise with me."
This kinship of the inner life, of the Gospel beati-
tudes, carries us indeed far afield. In the earliest
know^n literature of Egypt there is extant the religious
confession of a lady who, those far millenniums back,
expresses her love for her God, a love which impelled
her to succour and help the needy and to do all the
good she could. What mattered that she called her
God by another name than ours I Our soul leaps
to that kindred spirit as one truly of the household
of faith ; of the faith that worketh by love. When
we read of that rigid Catholic, King Louis IX. of
France, that he was accustomed on every Wednes-
day and Friday to fill his rooms with poor people, to
whom he ministered with his own hands ; when we
read of him in his great crusade saying to the
Saracens : " Say on my part to the king your master
that I desire so greatly the salvation of his soul that
I would stop in the prisons of the Saracens all my
life, and never again see the sunlight, if your king
and his people would become Christians in reality;"
as we read does not our soul bend instinctively
before the majesty of such a love ? Where are our
credal differences in the light of an inwardness of
this kind ? The day is dawning upon us when this
245
The Life of the Soul
new perception of spiritual values will become the
only one ; when we shall cease our emphasis upon
doctrinal confessions, and ask, as our religious test,
not what creed a man signs, but how much love he
has, what amount of patience, of sympathy, of
willingness to suffer and to serve ?
And w^e shall more and more apply this test in
judging of the condition and prospects of religion in
the world. How, in this respect, does the matter
stand to-day ? Is religion gaining or losing ? Well,
it has unquestionably lost some things. It has lost
the fiery zeal which tortured and burnt men for a
divergence of opinion. The Covenanters had a
magnificent inwardness of sorts ; an inwardness
of faith, of courage, of unworldliness, of endurance to
the death, which makes us ashamed. But the
narrowness, the fierceness of it ! May we not be
thankful that our spirit is purged of the temper which
permitted Richard Cameron, preaching on the last
Sunday before his death, to break out in this fashion :
" He was assured that day the Lord would lift up
a standard against antichrist that would go to the
gates of Rome and burn it with fire ; and that ' Blood '
should be their sign and * No Quarter ' their word ;
and he earnestly wished it might first begin in
Scotland ! " The quality of our religion, as an
inwardness, is full enough of imperfections. But
it has developed at least to the point of making
such an utterance impossible, and indeed shocking,
to the men of every confession to-day.
It may be asked, indeed, whether what religion,
as a spirit and temper, has lost in intensity it has not
gained in inclusiveness. The idea of it and the
feeling of it contain so much more than they did.
246
Religion as Inwardness
We see it as no longer a British, or a European, or a
Protestant, or a Christendom affair, but as a human
affair, in which we are sharers with the race. Con-
trast it with the early Puritan outlook and you see
how much vaster it has become ; how incomparably
richer in its reach, its interests, even its problems.
We can feel the beat of the common human heart
across oceans and continents. The human
consciousness is drawing together, in preparation for
a common move upward. Think of the changed
attitude towards other races in so brief a time in
world history as that between us and De Quincey !
He writes thus of China : " I am terrified by the
modes of life, by the manners, and by the barrier of
utter abhorrence placed between us, by feelings
deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with
lunatics or wild animals." One may safely say that
the gulf between our feeling to-day and that here
expressed is far greater than the gulf between our-
selves and the Chinese. And to have gained this new
brotherhood, is not that a prime feature in religion ?
The truth about the present situation seems to be
that the breaking down of much that entered into the
religious life of the past is part of a movement
towards a new synthesis which will make religion a
vaster, more cosmopolitan, more comprehensive,
and more richly furnished system than the world
has ever known before.
Let us now, on this theme, get to some more
personal considerations. If religion is intrinsically
an inward thing, what of our own inwardness ?
What is our personal progress in love, in patience, in
thankfulness, in hope, in the instinct of service ?
The judgment on you and me is not in our attitude
247
The Life of the Soul
towards the Athanasian Creed or the Thirty-nine
Articles, but in our attitude towards our brother.
When we have convinced ourselves of the futility of
most of our outside theological controversies, we
shall begin to consider this other matter, viz., the
vast possibilities of inwardness, and the deplorable
lack of our education there. There is no one of our
inner tempers and dispositions but is in a state of
comparative barbarism. What is the condition of
our patience ? We are surrounded by people of
manifold infirmities and defects. What a field is
there, opened for us by the Master, for a quiet, loving
endurance ! You can be the saviour of their inward-
ness by this development of your own. To know
how to be silent ; how, when the w^ord comes, to let
it be charged with sweetness, with sunshine ; here,
more than in any public eloquence, or hymn-singing,
or theological fervours, is the field for our religion.
If it is not good enough for victory there, it is not good
for much anywhere.
What is the condition of our cheerfulness ; of our
daily joyous gratitude ? Are we living at the top
of our circumstances or at the bottom ? How are
you fitting your mental state to your bodily state ?
You are now more or less crippled by infirmities ;
you can only walk one mile now where before you
could walk twenty. Are you in a perpetual grumble
about that lost twenty, or do you daily thank God
that you can still walk one ? Have you not learnt
yet that to be content with what you have, in God's
present will towards you ; that to rejoice in His will,
as containing all that is good, is a far better thing,
a greater achievement, than all your athletic powers
of former days ? How are you progressing in the
248
Religion as Inwardness
science of hope ? Have you gained the assurance
that good is not only better than evil, but stronger ;
and that, spite of all present appearances, the best
is going to conquer ? And does this hope cause you
always to stand for the best ; for truth and love at
any cost, though their present way be through a
Calvary ?
We have for years been occupied with the question
of religious education, and prodigious have been our
quarrels about it. It is time we began our own
religious education. When we take it up in earnest
we shall discover that it means one thing ; that
religion itself means one thing — the systematic,
thorough, and complete education of the soul.
249
XXVIII
THE UNORGANISED FORCES
There is a sense m which this title may be regarded
as a misnomer. If we went deep enough we should
find there were no unorganised forces. This is not
a fortuitous universe. Everything that works in
the world of matter and the world of mind has its
place in the scheme of things ; has its own apparatus,
its own fitness for doing w^hat it does. But the
term will serve as well as another for describing the
conditions in which we find ourselves. We are
surrounded by great organisations, well established,
some of them ver}^ old, the laws and customs of
them clearly defined, their several parts fitted into
each other, and all serving a common end. In this
country w^e have the State, the Church, the Army,
the Navy, an educational system, a commercial
system. They are the things that first strike the eye.
They seem to cover and control the national life.
These institutions are largely conservative. They
represent the status quo. Their primary instinct is
their own self-preservation. Their leaders and
rulers, whose own position depends so much on their
stability, are naturally inclined to look askance on
any intruding and subversive element.
But over against these institutions ; over against,
we say, but rather beneath and above them, we find
a region of forces, invisible, formless, without status,
250
The Unorganised Forces
without exchequer, with no Hnked battaHons, or
complicated machinery; a region that is, neverthe-
less, perpetually menacing the ease and immobility
of the established order. It is these invisibles that
both the present and the future have most to reckon
with. They act like the thrust of vegetation that
will uplift the heaviest flagstones ; like the ceaseless
weather attritions of the high Alps that are turning
the Matterhorn into a ruin, that prove stronger than
the everlasting hills. The unorganised forces, in
their operation on society, have to be looked for in
the deeps of the human spirit. Says Eucken :
** Great things take place within us." Great things
trul}^ the greatest of all. For it is what takes place
here that controls all that takes place outside. It is
the unformed that masters all the formed, and in
the end takes its place. The movement that is felt
beneath the oldest foundations, and makes the highest
pinnacles tremble, is the movement of the unseen life.
But we have not reached the bottom even yet. For
man, as he is, even at his profoundest, is not the
originator of that movement. It is only because he
is in contact with a deeper reality than himself, in
contact with a universal and eternal Spirit, that
he finds himself urged ever onward, ever upward.
It is by virtue of this contact we find that law of
things so finely described by Coleridge in his " Aids
to Reflection " : " All things strive to ascend, and
ascend in their striving ; all lower natures find their
highest good in semblances of that which is higher and
better." It is thus that the seeming weak things of
this world are for ever confounding the mighty.
It will be interesting to note, in some different
directions, the way in which the unorganised forces
251
The Life of the Soul
break in upon and utterly change the existing order.
China, as an estabhshed state and constitution, has
been a going concern for some thousands of years.
It had a change of dynasty some few centuries ago,
but its ruHng system, with an emperor worshipped
ahnost as a god, with its rehgion, its educational
system, its mandarins, its social customs, has been
there for ages. Within the lifetime of many of us
it stood there, the image of immobility, impregnable
apparently to all assault, without or within. Then
something happened within certain spirits. Blown
across by winds from the West, there settled in these
minds germs of unrest, of inquiry. Within them a
thought arose, the thought that there were better
things to be had. In search of them, of new
knowledge, of new light, some of these thinkers
wandered East and West ; wandered to Germany,
to England, to America, to Japan. They were an
unorganised force ; their motor was just a thought.
To-day, as the result of that thought, we see this
age-long system uprooted, China's wall — not the
stone one, but that far stronger of prejudice, of caste,
of obstinate pride — thrown down ; and four hundred
millions of people, hitherto shut off from the world,
joining themselves, heart and hand, to the onward
march of progress. On one side all the established
and embattled institutions ; on the other a thought ;
and the thought conquers.
The victory of the unorganised is not alwaj^s so
striking as this ; indeed, is very rarely so. It wins
ordinarily without letting people know that it has
won ; without letting them know, indeed, that there
has been a fight at all. Bishop Creighton, out of his
historical studies, came upon a truth which few have
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The Unorganised Forces
recognised : " We sometimes speak," he says, " as
though nothing ever happens save what is formally
discussed and voted upon. The most important
things are those which are unperceived and unrecog-
nised till they have been accomplished." The
moment we look round we see how accurate that
statement is. Who can account for a given change
in public opinion ? Who can, for instance, put his
hand upon the birth moment, or discover the exact
workings of the power that brought about the
existing social conscience ? Yet that new, unseen
thing in the world has changed our operations in a
dozen directions. The old institutions are there,
but they work in a different way, and to different
ends. It has revolutionised our penal code ; made
the former wholesale hangings of boys and girls for
trifling offences impossible. It has, in fact, altered
our whole attitude towards crime. In the old days
men committed their offence and got hanged, and
there was an end. To-day society arraigns itself
with the prisoner in the dock. It asks why he got
there ; what neglects of its own, what lack of its
fences and safeguards, permitted his fall. Its whole
aim has changed from punishment to prevention.
It seeks no longer to wreak itself on men's badness ;
it would rather cherish and help their goodness.
The organisation is still there ; the penal code, the
judge, the gaol. But the whole thing is changed ;
and the change has been wrought by a breath from
the unknown.
This new moral consciousness has not only altered
our penal code. It has altered the whole range of
our religious thinking. The religious organisation is
still there ; in outward appearance very much as it
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The Life of the Soul
was. In England we have the Establishment, and
the Nonconformist bodies. Their forms of worship,
their written creeds, their ecclesiastical orders are
practically those of centuries ago. But they have all
to reckon with this new consciousness, this something
that has arisen, none can tell how or when. It has
sucked from the creeds all their ancient venom. If
man has found this better way of treating sin and
defect, the inference is that the old way was not
God's way ; for God's way is not worse than man's,
but better. The moral insight which has led man
to see that to meet crime and wrongdoing by mere
penalty is not only a brutality but a blunder, is an
insight which goes beyond ; which sees itself as
arising, not out of the human will, but out of the
Divine will ; that it is itself the work of God, and
therefore a further revelation of His character and
purpose towards man ; of His own way of dealing
with sinful souls. If man is treating penal acts by
reformatories and methods of reclamation, we may
be sure that God is not behind His creature. The
moral code is not provisional. It is as universal as
gravitation. The rise of the moral consciousness has
taught us with a new emphasis that God is love,
everywhere and always ; in the hells as in the heavens ;
that wherever souls are He is there, the force of
redemption and heahng.
The rise of this consciousness has in the meantime
given a new edge to religion, to faith. No better
illustration can be offered of it than the Conference
on Foreign Missions held some time ago in Edinburgh.
In the old times the urgency of the plea for missions
lay in the cry that the unevangelised heathen were
every minute of the day dropping into endless torment.
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The Unorganised Forces
That note was entirely absent from the Conference.
Yet never in the history of missions was their cause
advocated with more ardency or with surer feehng
of their coming world-conquest. The Conference
was strictly orthodox ; represented the essential
orthodoxy of the Churches. Yet that new thought,
an unorganised force, issuing from the deeps of the
unseen, had changed the whole missionary aspect
and appeal.
The Bible is at once the history and the vindicator
of the unorganised forces. Its story, rightly read, is
that of the ceaseless expansion of the human spirit ;
of its incessant struggle against and victory over all
that opposed its onward march. The old prophets
stood single-handed, revolutionaries against a cast-
iron system. Against priests, against kings, against
ages of custom and routine they had only their
spoken word. The priests, the routine, have gone,
but their word remains. Micah, watching the
slaughtering of lambs and of he-goats ; watching
the extortions of the hierarchy, waxing fat on the
popular superstitions, burst into the magnificent cry :
" What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly,
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? "
Thousands of years after, Huxley, the nineteenth
century scientist, at issue with all the orthodoxy of
his day, finds in the old Hebrew's words his own
resting-place, his own confession of faith. Centuries
after Micah Jesus stands in a similar environment,
only a worse, a more desperate one. The organised
forces are mightier than ever, and more merciless.
Palestine is under the shadow of invincible Rome.
The national life is crushed under her weight. Within,
the spiritual power is in the hands of the priests ;
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The Life of the Soul
of time-serving Sadducees in league with the State,
of fanatical Pharisees who make religion a round of
ceremonies, a tissue of minute observances. Against
it all He stands, the lonely One. He has one thing
to offer, Himself — His teaching, His life, His death.
And that unorganised force conquers ; conquers
Pharisee and Sadducee, and imperial Rome itself ;
conquers, and is conquering to-day. Since that
greatest epoch of all history the organised forces have
arisen again, risen many of them out of His very
name, and have done their best to crush Him. They
will pass or change, but He will endure, man's
immortal hope, the key of his problem, his divinest
symbol.
We come back at the end to where we began. The
unorganised forces are the conquering ones. The
visible is everywhere under the power of the
invisible. What is to be is greater than all that is.
The cracking and tumbling of our present institutions
are no sign of decay, of rum ; their instability means
simply the underground working of something
better that is coming. And again have we here to
confess our title as something of a misnomer. These
underground forces are unorganised simply to our
eye. They look so in comparison with the established,
visible order. There is an organisation behind them,
which we do not see. Huxley, to mention him once
more, watching under a microscope the evolution
of a salamander's egg, as he noted the stages of the
movement, the swift partitions, the rise and placing
of the organs, the whole unerring process, was stricken
with awe and wonder. It was, he said, as if he could
see the unseen artist at work, knowing his plan,
sure of his effect. Be sure there was an Artist there.
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The Unorganised Forces
The organisation coming into view had a higher one
behind it, the organisation of Wisdom and Love. If
you sprinkle a handful of soft iron filings on a sheet
of paper, and pass underneath a powerful bar-magnet,
the filings will arrange themselves into graceful and
symmetrical curves. When the magnet is removed,
all fall back into chaos. Our world — its chaos of
matter and force — has had passed under it something
greater than a bar-magnet ; a Power that is intelli-
gent, that is holy. That the world does not fall into
chaos ; that it advances instead into ever higher
forms of purpose and beauty, is because that Power
never ceases its operation. Blessed are they who
rejoice in the movement and in the Power behind it.
Says Plotinus : " The doctrine serves to point the
way, and guide the traveller ; the vision, however,
is for him who will see it."
257
17
XXIX
THE PRICE OF FEAR
We pay, one way or another, for most of our
emotions, but it may be safely said there is no one of
them so ruinously expensive, and in so many direc-
tions, as that of fear. The world is having just now
a vivid illustration of the fact in the present relations
of Germany and England. The two countries are
engaged in building against each other enormous
fleets and armaments at a cost of scores of milHons —
millions wrung from their toiling masses ; millions
which, applied to the well-being of their populations,
would make both nations an earthly paradise. And
why ? Because the two peoples fear each other.
A large portion of the Press on both sides is occupied
daily with the business of spreading this fear, of
raising it to the point of mania. And the irony of
it all is that each knows the other's fear is a groundless
one. The German, we are told, of late months has
hardly been able to sleep in his bed from expectation
of an English invasion, or, at least, of the sudden
destruction of his fleet. We who are in England
could tell him there is no more hkehhood of our
invading Germany than of our invading Mars. The
German, on his side, knows that the idea of invading
England is equally absurd. The facts here are
certain, but neither can persuade the other that they
are facts. The nations are, for the time, possessed
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The Price of Fear
not by reason, but by fear. And these millions,
thrown away year by year, are the price of it.
Another generation, looking back on this state of
things, will regard us with contemptuous pity.
But it is not by any means only in international
relations that we see the enormous expensiveness of
fear. It is the cause every day of accidents, failures,
deaths. It is a paralyser. It seizes on men's nerves,
muscles, brains, and puts them all out of gear. A
nervous person crossing a street and met by a sudden
swirl of vehicles will in nine cases out of ten do the
wrong thing. His fear rushes him on the danger he
seeks to avoid. A man will walk on the pavement,
where a slip would be of no consequence, without any
tendency to slip. Put him on a rock ledge of the same
or greater breadth, but with a chasm of a thousand
feet beneath him, and, unless he is trained, he will be
in imminent danger of falling. Fear gets hold of his
muscles and disorders their action. Crossing a ledge
in the Alps once, of no danger to a climber, our guide
told us that a few days before, in charge of a tourist,
he had to carry the man on his back. He was helpless
with terror. There are people who rob themselves of
their daily happiness because they are afraid of what
is going to happen. They may be in an Eden of
worldly circumstance, but fear has built for them a
dungeon in the midst of it, from which they cannot
escape. Fear has been the evil genius of govern-
ments, of societies, of religions. The despotisms
that have crushed the peoples, that have filled
prisons with noble captives, that have burnt martyrs
at the stake, have been built on fear. It has been
the deadly foe of freedom. Men must not inquire,
must not search for truth, because — something bad
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The Life of the Soul
might happen. The peoples must have no Hberty,
because liberty was dangerous. That great word
of Gladstone, " Trust the people," was, even to the
day it was uttered, an incredible doctrine to the mass
of rulers.
It is time, surely — the world has grown old
enough — to diagnose this most potent of the
emotions, to ascertain its nature, its laws, its uses,
and to put it in its proper place. We have paid
dearly for it ; it is time we knew something about
it. There are different kinds of fear, and we must
not forget there is a good fear as well as a bad one.
Side by side with the fear that comes of ignorance,
of want of training, of cowardice, there is the fear
that comes of knowledge, the fear that goes with the
highest courage. A parent will often fear where his
child does not. There are things the child would
touch, but must not ; would swallow, but are put
out of his reach. The Alpine guide who treads
easily along the edge of the precipice will stop where
the tourist would go on. He sees what the inex-
perienced man does not see. He will even stop your
talk, for the state of the snow is such that a sound
may bring the avalanche. Binnen, Tyndall's guide
for years, one of the best and bravest of men, on his
last expedition, heard a crack in the snow above.
" Wir sind alle vcrloren " — " We are all lost," he
exclaimed. Most of them were, himself included.
Wholesome fear is the fear that comes from
knowledge. It arises from a correct estimate of the
nature and qualities of things, both in the physical
and the moral world, and warns us off from actions
that are contrary to their laws. There is no bravery
in breaking the laws of the universe. Bravery lies
260
The Price of Fear
in knowing them and obeying them. No guide
will jump down a precipice. He will not insult
gravitation that way. He knows what gravitation
would think of it. But he will walk fearlessly along
the edge of it because he can trust his eye and his
nerve. And when a patriot in his country's cause —
a Winkelried rushing on the opposing spears — throws
away his hfe, he does it in a trust born of inner
knowledge, a trust that his country will gain by his
sacrifice, and that in the other world to which he gives
himself it will be well with him. And the martyrs
of progress, the men who in the interests of some
truth they have seen or discovered defy Church and
State, are equally sure of their fact. The universe
is on their side — will take care of their personality
and will vindicate their memory.
The greatest fear that has been in the world is the
fear inspired by religion, and especially in its views of
death and of a future state. There have been the
two kinds of it, the good and the bad. Death is
indeed a formidable presentation to the human mind,
and that whether we have faith or no faith. Rid
the thought of it of every element of superstition,
and yet upon the strongest minds it casts its shadow.
The absence of a belief offers its own terrors. Huxley,
in a letter to Morley, expresses his horror of annihila-
tion ; his horror at the thought that in 1900 he might
know no more than in 1800. He would rather, he
said, be sent to the Inferno than cease to exist — pro-
vided he were accommodated in the upper circles
where the temperature and the society were tolerable !
Science was rather a failure here. Goethe, in his
later years, had reached something more consoling.
Said he to Eckermann : "At the age of seventy-five
261
The Life of the Soul
we must, of course, think sometimes of death. But
this thought gives me the least uneasiness, for I am
fully convinced that our spirit is a being of a nature
quite indestructible, and that it actually continues
from eternity to eternity."
The shadow cast by death, however, has been in
innumerable cases the result not so much of a scanty
belief as of a bad belief. Religion, as manipulated
by ecclesiasticism and priestcraft, has been guilty
here of some monstrous perversions, of some most
impudent pretensions. The Church's exploitation
of human fear, in the interests of its own authority,
and of its pecuniary profit, has been one of the
worst chapters of the world's history. There is
nothing meaner to-day on this earth than Rome's
doctrine of purgatory and the use she makes of it.
The uninstructed masses are told that their departed
dear ones are undergoing all kinds of tortures in that
most uncomfortable place, from which, by cash
down paid to the priests, they can be more or less
relieved. Mr. Michael McCarthy, in his " Priests
and People in Ireland," gives some interesting par-
ticulars as to the way in which the system is worked
upon the Irish peasantry.
But the real wrong to religion, as well as the worst
insult to the human intelligence, is that offered by
the doctrine which has held sway in Christendom for
so many centuries — that sinful man, after death, is
met by an angry God, and is dealt with thereafter,
not by love, but by an eternal vengeance, expressing
itself in endless torment. As if God's nature could
change because a man dies ! One might as well say
that a mother who meets her child's fractiousness
with constant patience and love so long as it is awake,
262
The Price of Fear
should change to a relentless fury the moment it
falls asleep. One would have thought that the
very face of death, as we look upon it, has been enough
to dispel such ideas. Have you not noticed the
beauty of a dead face ? How the commonest, the
ruggedest features in that hour smooth themselves,
how the wrinkles of care vanish, how there steals upon
it a calm as sweet as that of a sleeping child ? And
what is that but nature's seal of benison — her dumb
assurance that the departed soul is in good hands ?
Can we not trust God on the other side as well as on
this ? Poor Heine, who had made a strange enough
thing of life, murmured as his last words, " Dieu
me pardonnera ; c'est son metier," and he had
grounds for his faith. If God is love. He is love every-
where ; in all the hells as in all the heavens. He
cannot deny Himself.
Yet there is a true fear of death, one that may well
be described as a godly fear. It is that which
proceeds, not from ignorance, not from priestly
assertions, but from knowledge ; from the facts of
the universe as they offer themselves to us. It comes
from our recognising that the laws of the universe
in which we live, its physical and its spiritual laws, are
constant. And one of these laws is that evil doing
is followed by consequences, by pain and suffering.
The soul cannot break these laws without penalties.
We know that by our experience here. And if the
physical system which obtains on this earth is the
system which operates in Arcturus and Sirius, in all
worlds, can we suppose it is otherwise with the
spiritual system ? If sin carries penalties before
death, it will carry them after death. The ancients
were well assured of this. Says Plato in the
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The Life of the Soul
" Republic " of the transgressor : " When he finds
that the sum of his transgressions is great, he will
many a time like a child start up in his sleep for fear,
and be filled with great forebodings." And Ovid,
that careless singer of love and wine, has in the
" Fasti " a passage of a different tenor :
Ah, nimium faciles qui tristia crimina caedis
Flumina toUi posse putetis aqua.
" Too easy are you in your view that flowing waters can carry
away the sad crimes of blood ! "
We may well fear, and with fear avoid, those future
penalties ; the moral disorganisation, which sin
brings, with pain and suffering in its train.
Yet what is the prospect here ? Is it that which
Jonathan Edwards pictures of " sinners in the hands
of an angry God " ; or that of the mediaeval theology
which taught that the saints in heaven would delight
in watching the endless sufferings of the damned ?
Such a doctrine, horrible in itself, is contrary to all
the universe has taught us. What is physical pain ?
It is never a vengeance, but always a warning signal,
nature's exclamation over a wrong state of things ;
her call for help. And she brings her own help ;
begins always her remedial process. And moral
pain — the sense of guilt, the anguish of remorse —
is the precise analogue in the spiritual world of physical
pain. Here, too, is no vengeance, but the cry of
warning, the appeal for change, for help. And pain
and suffering, as we know them, are not destroyers,
but healers. They are part of that process of
evolution whose work is not downwards, but upwards,
not towards ruin, but towards development. Can
we think that this process will be reversed in any
264
The Price of Fear
future world ; that the upward striving of creation
will be turned into one of senseless harrying and
destroying ? We think too well of God to hold any
such creed. We say rather with old Dr. Donne :
" Blessed be God that He is God, only and divinely
like Himself." To know Him is to reach that
perfect love that casteth out tear. Let us keep the
fear that preserves us from rash trifling with the
eternal laws ; which keeps us in line with God's
purpose, instead of against it. But let us cast out
the fear that paralyses ; that puts us under the heel
of priests and dogmatists ; that clouds human life
with needless terrors. Let us instead have the
courage that believes in God, for all worlds, and for
all eternities.
265
XXX
OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE
A MAN is only half himself until he has found
his brother man. Eve, according to tradition,
shortened man's residence in Paradise. But the
garden would have been no Paradise without her.
Our soul comes to its life by virtue of the brother
souls that surround it. It is to them we owe our
language, our writing, our music, our work, our play,
our peace, our war, our differences, our unities.
Alone we should cease to be human. We should
know nothing of the world ; nothing even of our-
selves. Nature made us social. She has an odd
way of putting us into positions without telling us
beforehand anything about them. Without inform-
ing us as to the duties and responsibilities of the
social life she began by placing us in a family. One
of the first things we learn is to talk, and to listen to
talk. And we have been talking and listening, on
and off, ever since. Think of the number of speeches
we have made, of the words that have rolled off our
tongues since then ! A queer retrospect, when we
come to think of it, with so much in it that is hardly
golden. The world is carried on under a babel of
utterance. Had we a universal telephone, we could
hear it all — on the boulevards of Paris, in the cafes
of Vienna, on the Exchange of London, in the
bazaars of Constantinople ; — the talk in drawing-
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of Social Intercourse
rooms, in the streets, in the palaces of kings, in one-
roomed homes — the harvest of one hour would be a
literature, a unique human chronicle. There it is,
such as it is, going on at this moment. There it is,
forming characters, shaping destinies, making happi-
ness and misery, the most tremendous thing in life,
and yet the thing of which, in any deep sense, we
take the least account. As we dressed ourselves this
morning, did any of us think seriously as to the style
and shape our day's conversation was to take, from
what sources it was to be drawn, in what spirit it was
to be carried on ?
We are speaking here of our extempore utterance —
the largest part of utterance. The diplomatist who
is about to meet a foreign ambassador, the orator
who has to address to-night a crowded audience,
will doubtless go carefully over what he has to say.
But most of our speech is not oratory, nor high
politics. It is ourselves in undress, the word of the
moment. Yet it is precisely here, in what we say,
and hear said in ordinary intercourse, in the ceaseless
giving and receiving of the mind's small change,
we have the formative influences that make or mar us.
Compared with this, as an influence on character,
the great, carefully considered deliverances are as the
effect of the occasional thunderstorms to the ceaseless
work upon us of the ordinary atmosphere. What a
man says to his wife or his child at the dinner table
reveals him more surely than his finest eloquence
from pulpit or rostrum.
It reveals, because it shows us at unawares ; shows,
not what we wish to be, not what we want the world
to think of us, but what at the moment we are.
Not that the revelation will necessarily be a dis-
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The Life of the Soul
creditable one. If it discloses sometimes our worst,
it often shows our best. Grant and Lee were both
great men, and had done great things. But nothing
to us is more interesting or delightful than the story
of their meeting at the Appomattox Courthouse.
For years they had been deadly foes. They had
commanded opposing armies, which had inflicted
enormous slaughter on each other. Their meeting
now was at the crisis of their lives. Yet at sight
of each other what happened ? A beautiful and
entirely human thing. To each of them rushed
memories of earlier days, when they were together
as comrades at West Point and in Mexico. Their
talk ran on to old times, till at last Lee had to call
Grant's attention to the object of their gathering,
which was to surrender his beaten army to him, the
conqueror ! Their actual contact revealed what
years of bloody warring could not wash out — that
they were friends who esteemed each other. It is
precisely this actual contact, this beating of heart
close to heart, that destroys enmity. It was the for-
tune of the present writer to form one of a quartette
who spent many days together in Norway. The
other members were an Anglican canon, a Roman
Catholic priest, and a Unitarian layman. We
formed the happiest society, in which we discovered
to our continual wonderment what a vast area of
common ground our souls occupied. " If we go on
like this,'' it was remarked, " what is to become of
all our political, our theological, and our ecclesiastical
animosities ? " What, indeed ! The secret of the
coming world unity will lie in getting men together
and in letting them talk at large.
Our main thought here is of the ethic of inter-
268
of Social Intercourse
course, but we must not forget that there is, or rather
has been, an art of it. Conversation, in our day,
seems to have ceased to be a fine art. Perhaps we
talk less because we do more. It was said of Moltke
that he was silent in seven languages. Wellington
was no talker. When called in as one of the chief
advisers of the young Queen, he found himself at a
loss. He complained to a friend, *' I have no small
talk, and Peel has no manners ! " But the world
has had its great talkers. If only we could recover
some of it, what a literature we should have !
Socrates said his best things in dialogue ; the
'' Symposium " of Plato gives us a hint of what
those Greeks could do. The Gospels give us frag-
ments of the talks of Jesus. If only we could get a
full report ! And if there had been a Boswell at table
when Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, and the
other great spirits of the time met at the '* Mermaid,"
we should have had something as good as their
comedies and tragedies. As a sheer art, conversation
reached its highest level, in modern times, at least,
in the period just before the French Revolution. In
the salons of Mme. du Deffand and Mile, de Les-
pinasse the French wit and brilliance flashed as never
before or since. We are told of Diderot's conversa-
tion that it showed a verve, a wealth of ideas, a
rushing, cumulative force that even his writings
do not reveal. And across the Rhine, at Sans Souci,
where D'Holbach, Voltaire, Algarotti, and the great
Frederick kept the ball rolling, a listener tells us that
if the talk could have been put into a book it would
have equalled the finest literature. It was said of
Mme. de Stael that, while not physically attractive,
she could subdue any man if she talked to him for
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The Life of the Soul
a quarter of an hour. How thankful we are that
Johnson had his Boswell, and Goethe his Eckermann.
What multitudes have delighted in the outflow of
those rich minds over the dinner-table who are
ignorant of " Rasselas/' and who know nothing of
the great German's " Theory of Colours ! "
Some of the greatest passages in history were talk,
or what arose out of it. We may well believe that
some of the divinest things in the Fourth Gospel
were spoken over the supper table in the upper
chamber at Jerusalem. That must have been a
memorable meal at Thermopylae when Leonidas said
to his friends, " Let us go to breakfast as we shall sup
in Hades." What a talk, too, was that at the last
banquet of the Girondists in the prison of the Abbaye,
with the guillotine waiting for them on the morrow,
when the noble Vergniaud thrilled his companions
with a discourse on the immortality of the soiJ I
One would have liked to hear what Milton said to
Galileo when he visited him in Italy. " There it
was that I found and visited Galileo, grown old, a
prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy
otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican
licensers thought."
Religion, which begins first in the thought and
feeling of some heaven-inspired soul, has found in
every age its most effectual form of propagation in
free, unfettered talk. Christianity was spread in
this way before anything was written. We get a
vivid idea of what went on in that passage of Irenaeus
on Polycarp : " I can tell also the very place where
the blessed Polycarp was accustomed to sit and
discourse . . . and his conversations with the
people, and his familiar intercourse with John,
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of Social Intercourse
as he was accustomed to tell, as also his familiarity
with those that had seen the Lord/' One of the, to
us, most refreshing things in Early Church history is
the description given by Gregory Thaumaturgus of
the spiritual fellowship enjoyed in the circle which
had gathered round the beloved Origen. He found,
he says, in these fellow-students " the true kinsmen
of his soul." The day on which he met Origen was
to him " the first day to me, the most precious of
all days, since then for the first time the true sun
began to rise upon me. For he [Origen] was possessed
of a certain sweet grace and persuasiveness, along
with a strange power of constraint." He speaks of
their communty as " that sacred fatherland where
the sacred laws are declared. . . . and where by
day and night we are still occupied with what the
soul has seen and handled, and where the inspiration
of divine things prevails over all continually."
Here was talk, the free outflow of a great soul,
which fashioned men into saints and heroes. The
Puritans were not afraid of religious conversation.
Calamy said of Baxter that " he talked about another
world like one that had been there, and was come as
a sort of express from thence to make a report con-
cerning it." We remember that a similar remark
is made by Erasmus concerning Sir Thomas More.
It was in the free intercourse of the Common Room
at Lincoln College that Methodism was started.
And later, in the Oriel Common Room, Newman's
movement began. It is here, in this frank encounter
of man with man, more than in set speech, that your
spiritual genius shows himself. Of one of Wesley's
intensest prophets of the second generation, William
Bramwell, we read how he held whatever company
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The Life of the Soul
he entered enthralled by the highest themes of inward
religion. He would suffer nothing else. If another
topic was introduced he would say, " Now we are
wandering from the point," and lead them back to
the one subject. What an armchair companion for
the smoking room of a modern West-end club !
In the early days of the Plymouth Brethren there
was an Exeter dentist of whom it was said that
" he had the habit of dropping sentences which
changed people's lives ! " These men were of the
temper of that William Allen, the Quaker, who with
another " Friend " journeyed to St. Petersburg to
interview Tsar Alexander on religious subjects ;
actually gained admission to the autocrat, conversed
with him on spiritual things, and left him profoundly
impressed.
We do not get much of that type of conversation
now. It is as if the things discussed no longer
existed. And yet they do exist, and they are worth
talking about. On the whole, one must admit that
while the world has progressed in many ways, it
shows little improvement in the matter of social
intercourse. In some aspects of it it has gone back-
ward. Where now do we get talk like that of
Johnson or Goethe, or that of the French salon in
the ante-Revolution days ? How much of our
fellowship is, so far as any intellectual or spiritual
product is concerned, a sheer waste of time — that
most precious of our possessons ! How often it is
a mere gabble, and a venomous gabble at that !
One can understand the action of the Society lady
who remained always to the end of a function,
because, as she said, she was sure she would be torn
to pieces if she left anybody behind ! Have we
272
of Social Intercourse
improved on the social condition described by
Pascal ? " If people knew exactly what was said
about them there would not be four friends in the
world " ! Locker-Lampson, in one of his nonsense-
verses, has hit off with sufficient accuracy the modern
scheme of society :
They eat and drink, and scheme and plot,
And go to church on Sunday,
And many are afraid of God,
And more of Mrs. Grundy.
Fairly accurate, we say, with the reservation that
now they do not " go to church on Sunday." No
wonder that the best minds keep more and more
away from this chatter-world. They can employ
themselves so much better. One feels with Seneca :
" Never do I return home in the same moral condition
as when I went out." And with Nietzsche :
" Among many people I live like the many and do
not think like myself. It always seems to me that
they wish to banish me from myself and rob me of
my soul."
The remedy for all this is hardly to banish our-
selves from society ; is it not rather to lay in some
stock of principles for our conduct in it ? And one
of these is an edict of banishment against scandal
so far as our personal talk is concerned. And that
will not be a negative principle. It is easy to see
why people fall so readih^ into backbiting. It is
because they have nothing else to say. It is on the
same principle that bargees fill their sentences
with lurid expletives. The habit is not really a
vicious one. It is a consequence of their lack
of adjectives. They have not the resources of
Dean Swift, who confounded a cursing Irish iishwife
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The Life of the Soul
by calling her an isosceles triangle and other epithets
culled from Euclid. Scandal is simply the conversa-
tional resource of empty minds— and the remedy is
to fill our minds with other themes and interests.
And here it should be our business not simply to carry
our best into the common exchange, but to help
others to bring out their best. The wise conver-
sationaHst will have in his mind a signal-box
apparatus, full of levers for keeping trains on their
proper lines. Such an art is perhaps more needed
in the domestic circle than in the discursive talk of
the salon. How many a quarrel-spoiled home would
regain its peace if one of its members kept an eye on
the signal-box ! It takes two to make a quarrel.
If a given line will lead to a collision, why not turn
the points ? It is easy enough. The quick, im-
petuous natures, whose explosion point is so soon
reached, have nearly always a fund of generosity in
them. Touch that, and their weapon falls. In our
intimate fellowships, to be put in charge of a difficult
nature, to help it by our patience and love to a truer
command of itself, to a readier access to its own best,
—is not this the most sacred of trusts— the one
where we may win the noblest, most godhke of
victories ?
The world's true social intercourse is yet to seek.
It is an affair of so many more things than speech.
To reach it we shall need a new social system ; a
system in which every man will realise his relation
to his fellow, and find his joy in contributing to that
fellow's welfare. That means a vast breaking down
of barriers, a vast opening up of new sympathies.
Our present condition is one of irreligious barbarism.
If Christ came again among us, do we think He would
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of Social Intercourse
travel in a first-class carriage, or in the saloon of the
Mauretania ? You would find him in the third-
class, and in the steerage of the liner. He would go
there to seek the true humanness of humanity.
If He came to London, think you He would be
satisfied with a West-end where souls are crushed out
by enormous luxuries, and an East-end where in
numberless homes people eat and drink, sleep, get
ill and die in one room ? While these things exist
let us not call ourselves Christian, or even civilised.
Plainly we are only at the beginning of our task as
human beings. We shall never be right with God,
or with His universe, till we have set about in earnest
to be right with our neighbour.
275
XXXI
ON DOING THINGS
We are all doing things ; but have we ever tried,
with any thoroughness, to penetrate into the mean-
ing of our doing ? ** In the beginning was the Word ;
in the beginning was the Thought ; in the beginning
was the Deed," says Goethe, leaving us to ponder
the riddle of that threefold alternative. Doubtless
these all lay in the beginning ; were concerned in
it. How they were related in that primal start
we may perhaps never know. It is the cosmic secret,
and we shall not here concern ourselves with it.
What we want is to trace, as far as we can, the sig-
nificance of that third beginner ; the meaning to us
of doing, of action. Questions arise, vastly impor-
tant questions, as to what it counts for in the philo-
sophy of life, in the framing of character, in the
creation of belief, in the whole business of morality
and religion. We are getting some new light on these
subjects. We have hitherto been so busy that we
have hardly had time to think about our busyness.
But we are thinking about it now, and in a way
which is likely to produce some considerable changes,
both of theory and practice, in the questions we have
mentioned.
Says Fichte, in the " Bestimmung des Menschen,"
or " Vocation of Man," that noble product of one
of the noblest minds : '* Not merely to know, but
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On Doing Things
according to thy knowledge to do, is thy vocation ;
not for idle contemplation of thyself ; not for nursing
devout sensations ; no, for action art thou here ;
thine action, and thine action alone, determines thy
worth.'* That is a saying which is easily assailable.
Might we not say, in the Latin phrase, operari sequitur
esse : '' doing follows being, is according to being."
Should we not, therefore, seek for quality of being
before we talk of doing ? To which the answer is,
that it is only by doing that we get to being ; only in
action do we reach our true selves. That, to begin
with, is evidently the way in which eternal being has
sought to realise itself. We could imagine the
Divine thought as resting in an eternal contempla-
tion of itself. Or we can imagine it as pondering
eternally over the choice between all the possible
modes of action. We can imagine it even as so
conscious of the perils of action as to determine not
to act. That has not been its way. We find our-
selves in a universe where the decisions have been
taken, where the greatest things have been done.
Philosophers have amused themselves by imagin-
ing systems which would have been so vast an im-
provement on the one that exists. But doubtless
all the possible ones had been considered before
the advent of our philosophers. The fact, the won-
derful fact, is that, out of them all, one has been
chosen ; this one in which we are. The adverse
possibilities were all dared, and the thing started
on these lines. The great Beginner sets the example
to all other beginners by doing something ; by
daring something ; by doing and daring this ! May
we not say that it was only by doing and daring that
He could realise Himself ?
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The Life of the Soul
It is an aside from the argument we want here
to pursue, but may we not pause a moment to
contemplate the scale on which this doing has
been accomplished ? We are full to-day of our
machineries, our manufactures, our inventions, our
discoveries. But what is all this activity of ours
compared with that other activity we come into, an
activity which has been going on with clockwork
regularity through countless millions of years ? We
build ships that rush the seas at thirty knots an
hour. What of this world-ship we are all sailing in,
that ploughs with unerring movement the depths
of space, whose endless cycle gives us our seasons,
and measures for us the years of our life ? Talk of
speed ; talk of horse-power ! Add together the
forces of all our enginery, and compared with this
enginery, they are as the flick of a finger ; they do
not affect its movement by a hairsbreadth. What
a noise we make with our fevered industries ! The
planet which carries them all moves without a sound.
Man's forces are noisy because they are so puny.
The world movement, which contains them as a
grain of sound on its surface, knows the secret of
perfect silence. And yet this stupendous planetary
machine, so immeasurably old, so enduringly young,
so stupendous in its silent power, is but a speck in
a solar system which is itself but a speck in the
infinite universe of worlds. The doing here has been
on a royal scale.
But let us get closer home. Our main concern
here is with ourselves, and we want now to show
how it is by action, and action alone, that we can get
our proper bearings in life ; that thus only can we
reach truth and goodness. We say truth for one
278
On Doing Things
thing ; for it is only by doing that we can touch
truth. Were we to content ourselves with thinking,
with mere speculation, we should find ourselves
speedily in a universal scepticism. How, for in-
stance, do we know there is an outside world ? When
you say you see things, or hear things, or touch
them, is not all that you have here a certain modi-
fication of your own consciousness ? What relation
have these sensations of sight, sound, touch, to the
things in themselves ? And what reality is there in
your own consciousness? May it not be a mere
dream ? How can you be sure that it contains in
itself the fact of things ? Does not your intellect
play all manner of tricks with you ? Did not Zeno,
in an argument to which none of his contemporaries
could find an answer, prove the impossibility of
motion ?
And, in the same way in which, by mere think-
ing, you can reduce the outer world into a mere
affair of your own sensations, you can destroy the
fabric of all morality. Has not everything been
determined beforehand ? Is not your nature, with
all its desires and impulses, an affair of pre-existing
conditions ; of your physical and moral ancestry,
of the play upon you of outside forces beyond your
control ? Are not all these forces, those around you,
and those behind of the past, part of a system of
iron causation, in which every link is bound to all
other links, all of which in their place and quality
have been determined by an invincible necessity ?
Why, then, talk of being good or bad ? Are not you
a part of nature which, indifferently, makes here a
toad and there a lion, and by the same law makes
here a great man and there an ignoble one ? If there
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The Life of the Soul
is any blame here must we not put it on nature and
not on ourselves ?
What is the deliverance from all this tangle ? It
is always and everywhere by action that we free
ourselves. It was by walking about that Zeno's
contemporaries made sure that his argument, that
the hare and tortoise argument, had a fallacy in it
somewhere. Bergson, better than any later thinker,
has supplied the intellectual refutation, but it was
action, first and all along, that has made men
believe inmotion. We find our outside world in the
same way ; by acting, always acting as if it were
there, and were what it professes to be ; and by
finding our action always justified by results. And
in the moral sphere it is the same. We act here as
though we were morally free agents, able to choose
between good and evil, and we find that the moral
system responds to our action. It justifies our faith.
The moral struggle assures us that we are not
machines, but free agents, creating our character
by a moral volition. By doing, we reach the con-
viction of a world above nature, a world of the inner
life, whose laws are other than those of force and
necessity ; above them, using them for its higher
ends. In our contact with the visible world, as in
our contact with the invisible, we live by faith. For
action is simply faith in operation. It were im-
possible except for a belief in the truth of things ;
and it is rewarded by the response which all things,
visible and invisible, make to it. "So lange man
strebt, glauht man ; und so lange man glaubt, streht
man.'* " So long as we strive we believe, and so long
as we believe we strive." It is, in fact, in doing
things that we create ourselves. Action is the
280
On Doing Things
proof, the declaration of our freedom. By it we
bring into being something that was never in the
world before — our character, our personality. And
when, in the exercise of our free volition, in obedience
to the inner call of the spirit, we go on choosing the
good, we find in the act itself the assurance of a foot-
hold in a higher realm, a possession there, from which
no reasoning can shake us, for it is rooted in the
deeps of consciousness. We know ourselves as of a
kingdom of the Unseen, whose laws are above those
of matter, and whose possessions are secure from all
material assault.
Doing things is the ground plan of evolution, and
it is also the ground plan of all sane religion. The
saying of Coleridge, " All things strive to ascend,
and ascend by their striving," contains the whole
scheme of creation so far as we can see it. In every
living thing, in vegetable, in animal, in man himself,
there is a principle of movement, an instinct after
the more, an instinct which is the pledge of eternal
progress. And here note that as in the lower
creation, so pre-eminently in man, the movement
comes, not from outside, but ever from within.
In neglecting, or evading that fact, we find some of
the most fatal mistakes in morality and religion.
There is here all the difference in the world between
doing a thing yourself and having something done
for you by someone else. There is no greater im-
morality in the world than a doctrine which tells
a man his whole salvation is secured by just believing
in the work, the sacrifice of another. That is a
theological salvation from a theological condemna-
tion, a salvation of theory rather than of fact.
The sacrifice of Christ, the salvation wrought by
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The Life of the Soul
Him, was a doing, which ever invites our doing.
Salvation ! From what, pray ? From God's wrath?
But it was not God's wrath but His love that sent
Christ into the world. Jesus said to the adulterous
woman, " Hath no man condemned thee ? Neither
do I condemn thee. Go and sin no more." Is not
that the Divine attitude ? Where is the wrath there ?
He has nothing to say to this woman's past, bad
though it were, except to be done with it, and to begin
again. Your salvation is truly of God ; but of Him
through yourself ; from your lower self into a higher
one. And this ever by your own act ; by the act of
faith which appropriates God's grace ; by the free
acceptance of His holy will ; by the energy of
obedience to His inward call. " This do and thou
shalt live " is religion's first and final word.
It is with these principles to guide us that we are
beginning at last to discern between the true and
false methods of education. We are spending
millions annually, and uncountable hours of educa-
tional time, in filling our children's brains with things
that have no relation to their actual life. This is
true both of our public and our common schools.
Sydney Smith said that he supposed he had made ten
thousand Latin verses as a scholar, and had never
put his hand to one since. And how much of the
mental drill of the people's school is of the same
category ? Our very amusements to-day consist
more in watching other people, professional people,
do things, instead of doing them ourselves. Real
education consists in training people to action, to
the action which will make them experts in their
own life-struggle ; it is to bring them into actual
contact with reality, and show them how to deal
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On Doing Things
with it. And this training never comes by reading
about things, by watching other people do them.
Botany is not in the books, but in the flowers ;
mechanics are not in theorems, but the handling
of tools. The education of the labourer should be,
above all things, an education for his work ; and of
the labourer's sister a training for her work. Our
present system is one apparently for making our boys
and girls into clerks and typewriters. One of the
worst results of it all is to fill their minds with the
idea that book knowledge is higher than fact
knowledge, that to spell words is better than to
handle things. By all means let our young people
have literature, if they want it. But surely the
first thing for them is to make them effective for life's
battle, to make the school the starting-point for the
perfect craftsman, for the perfect housewife. It
should be the place also where the idea should be
instilled — an idea which will destroy our present
snobbery — that efficiency in labour is the first certi-
ficate of character and standing ; that to know how
to do things ourselves is so infinitely better than a
rote acquired knowledge of how other people have
done them. We all of us need a better education
here. Ought a man to marry until he knows how,
if occasion arises, to run the household himself, to
nurse his wife and to work for her, if need be ?
Education of the true sort is nothing more or less
than the training of us, by actual experience, to be
expert helpers over the widest area of service.
It is by doing things that life's most difficult prob-
lems are solved. The beneficence of the world order
is nowhere more effectively displayed than in the
number of things it offers us to do. Your depres-
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The Life of the Soul
sion, your black melancholy, lasts as long as you sit
idle, contemplating your woe. Shall you ever get
over the grief of this bereavement, this loss of your
dearest interest ? But your work claims you, and
its call, you find, is your salvation. As, at its com-
mand, you put forth your energy, the blood begins
to flow again in your veins, your soul lives once
more, your bruised heart finds its easement. This
blessedness of doing ! It is the magician's wand
which turns the dreariest desert into a garden.
The late William James, in one of his essays, describes
his experiences during and after the earthquake at
San Francisco. He was in the neighbourhood at
the time, and on the spot immediately after the
event. What astounded him most, he says, was the
cheerfulness, the positive high spirits of the ruined
populace. Everyone had lost something, many of
them their all. But then — everything was to be
done, and the doing of it seemed not only to have
absorbed their energies but to have filled them with
a new content. There they were ; with a huge gap
in their fortunes ; but then they had their bodies and
their brains, and everything to do! The gap, what
was it but a glorious call to show the stuff they were
made of ? What happened there is happening every-
where. Were every city in the world reduced to
ashes to-morrow our race would be little the poorer ;
its sum of happiness barely decreased. It would go
to work again, joyous in the business of making better
cities than the old ones.
Let us hail man as the maker, the doer. There
lies his pre-eminence, and also his glorious liberty.
All that is around and behind, so much of which
cramps and confines us — our laws, our institutions,
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On Doing Things
our moralities, our theologies, are, be it ever remem-
bered, man's work, and what man has made he can
unmake and remake. The old dogmatic systems,
which for long ages have had their iron hand upon us ;
what of them ? They are all a human affair ; and
we are human, as good as these old makers, perhaps
better. What they had of truth in them we will
take ; but they shall tyrannise over us not for an
hour. Our systems shall not be theirs, but ours,
such as shall fit our wider knowledge and not their
narrower one. Most of all, in making things we are
making ourselves. The deeds we do, in obedience
to the higher, the spiritual law, are forces projected
into that unseen world to which our spirits belong.
They may seem a failure here, but they are a success
there. When we follow them into that unseen
we shall find them again ; find them and ourselves
again, as part of a diviner order, an endless destiny.
285
XXXII
THE LIFE BEYOND
Man is the great adventurer of this planet. Every
new day is for him a leap into the unknown. But his
greatest adventure is death. And note here how his
surest knowledge is linked with his greatest ignorance.
Everyone of us is sure that he will die. And not
one of us knows what awaits him the moment after.
About that moment there are faiths innumerable,
some noble, some eccentric, some perverse. But
neither science, philosophy, nor religion has here
any certain answer. There is the wonder, the
mystery, the fascination of human life ; that, unlike
the races beneath it, its ancient fellow travellers,
it marches forward with a clear, overpowering
sense of the leap that has to be taken, but with
no word as to the ground on which it will land.
The ruling power, for ends of its own, has kept that
secret. The old Greek adage, " Man teaches us to
talk ; the gods teach us to keep silence," has here
its strongest illustration. The " gods " indeed, in
this matter show a magnificent reticence. Their
motto might be " Wait and see ! " But this order
of things was assuredly not to bar us off from
the theme. For the sure fact of death, and the
knowledge of it which attends us all our days, is the
most urgent of invitations to consider it, and to in-
quire into the after of it. Hoffding has here a remark
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The Life Beyond
which is true in a sense. Says he : " The exhortation
" * Take no thought for the morrow,' can be applied
with far greater justification to the life after death,
than to our attitude towards the actual morrow of
our earthly life." That is true of anxious, worrying,
morbid thought. But nature has offered no in-
junction against, she has offered the greatest possible
incitement towards a faith on this theme, and an
accordant practice. She offers us a faith without
words. She gives us life, with all its natural, moral
and spiritual contents. Into this she thrusts the
fact of death, and seems to say, " Here is your fact ;
make what you can of it ! "
Most remarkable is the thing that man has made
of it. Death has been the creator of his religious
faith. Had there been no death ; had man gone on
living permanently in this world, there would have
been no religion as we know it. The human mind
— its motives, its aspirations, its hopes, its fears —
would have been an entirely different thing. Its
whole moral structure has been determined by these
two considerations : ** You have a short life here,
a certain fact ; you have the suggestion of a further
life beyond, a matter of faith." These are the points
on which hang all our law and all our prophets. One
indubitable certainty, one enormous possibility.
But the possibility has also its certainty. You may
doubt as to the realisation of the possibility. What
is beyond doubt is the enormous, the controlling
influence which that possibility has had upon man's
inner and spiritual developm.ent. It has, we say,
created all our religions, and a vast part of our
moralities. If there is a reason, as there seems to be,
for everything in this universe ; if things work in
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The Life of the Soul
relation to ends ; there must be some reason, and a
vastly important one, for placing the soul under the
governing force of these two strangely assorted
factors.
The strange thing here is that the idea of an after
life, which has exerted this controlling effect, is one
which at every point is exposed to doubt, is opposed
to the sense verdicts, is debatable by the reason. In
place of a certainty we are offered a mystery, a riddle,
to which the mind gives various answers. Death
puts an end to all the activities with which we have
associated the living person. What is left becomes
a decaying, corrupting mass, which we put out of
our sight. And the fortunes of the inhabiting mind
seem so indissolubly bound up with the body that
the disintegration of the one irresistibly suggests the
disintegration and ending of the other. Lucretius
puts the staggering fact in his own uncompromising
way :
Praeterea, gigni pariter cum corpore et una
Crescere sentimus, pariterque senescere mentem.
" Besides, we see the mind to be born with the
body, to grow with the body, and to decay with it."
Poor Lucretius ! His doubt did not make him
happy, for he committed suicide at the end. But his
argument is a formidable one, which has had a de-
ciding weight with many minds. But his negative
solution is no final one. It has not killed the great
possibility, which lives still, and more strongly
than ever, in the hearts of men. We are full of
doubts about his doubt. He might have argued from
the facts so differently. It might have occurred
to him that if the bodily form decays and disappears,
its substance, its elements, are here still, immortal,
288
The Life Beyond
indestructible. And if that is true of the visible part
of the personality, may not that be true of the in-
visible part ? Benjamin Constant, a free-thinker,
if ever there was one, found himself up against this
possibility at the death-bed of his friend, Mme. Talma.
Seeing her as retaining all her mind and soul,
though all her bodily organs were almost destroyed,
he asks : " Why should death, which is only the
completion of this feebleness, destroy the soul which
that feebleness had not impaired ? " Doubtless the
materialist will here reply : " Ah, but her brain was
still intact. When that went, she went." Very
convincing to him doubtless. To us it is on all fours
with the argument that the destruction of the in-
strument means the destruction of the player.
Beethoven can no longer play his sonata when you
have smashed his keyboard. But is the smashing
of his keyboard the smashing of Beethoven ?
The fact is that life, as we now possess it, is in itself
so astounding a miracle, so contrary to all the ante-
cedent probabilities of there ever being such a thing,
that in comparison with it that other probability
of its prolongation beyond death offers infinitely
minor difficulties both to the reason and the im-
agination. What would the mere reason have to
say as to the antecedent likelihood of a single germ
cell, which it takes a microscope to distinguish, de-
veloping into the body, mind, soul of a cultivated
twentieth century man ? And yet this impossible
becomes a fact. It is the commonness of our miracle
that hides from us its astounding quality.
But is it the intellect that, after all, has most to
do with this idea and persuasion, so obstinate in the
human heart, of a life beyond ? We prefer to think
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The Life of the Soul
of it as something deeper than the intellect ; as an
instinct, as something wrapped up in the very essence
and fibre of the soul. Kant, than whom these later
ages have seen no deeper thinker, felt all this. After
a merciless criticism of the theoretic proofs of im-
mortality current in his time, he finds in what he
calls the moral or practical reason the evidence which
satisfied him. He recalls the fact that in animals
all the instincts have a definite aim and purpose ;
that nothing in them is superfluous and apart from
use. Then he adds: "According to this analogy
man, who alone can contain within himself the final
end of all this, must needs be the only creature that
is an exception to the principle. For not only his
native capacities, but the moral law within him, go
far beyond all advantage to be derived from them
in the present life. . . They instruct him, in the
absence of all advantages, yes, even of the shadowy
hope of posthumous fame, to esteem the mere
consciousness of rectitude above all else, and to feel
an inner call by his conduct in this world to make
himself worthy to be the citizen of a better." We
may well reiterate Kant's question here. Are the
instincts which work with such accuracy in the
animal kingdom, all abroad where man is their
subject ? Are they right when they urge the homing
swallow on its pathless way, when they make the
squirrel prepare for winter scarcity of food, and all
wrong when they urge man to ideal conduct based
on the sense of a life beyond ?
It is, perhaps, not so much the abstract idea of
a life beyond, but the consideration of the form it
may take, which has most befogged and staggered
the modern mind. All kinds of embarassing ques-
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tions crop up. Something, people say, may survive,
but what is it ? Is it a personality, the same per-
sonality that we now carry in us ? We remember
here Hume's argument that we have no continuous
personality ; that all we possess is a series of fleeting
impressions without any ascertainable causal link.
Might it not have occurred to Hume that the very fact
of his observing this moving stream required a certain
unity in himself, a punctum stans as it were, from
which he could mark this flow ? If all in him were
only a part of the movement, how could he ascertain
it was only a movement ? Can we know anything
of time movements apart from something in us that
is beyond time, and from that outside point can mark
its flow ? One has a similar feeling about Sainte
Beuve's outburst, " Every day I change . . .
Before the final death of the mobile being who calls
himself by my name, how many men will already have
died in me ? " Yes, but here again, what was it that,
in Sainte Beuve, was capable of recognising these
changes and judging them as taking place within
him ? Is there no more here than the changes ?
Is the judge that calls them changes part of them ;
or something outside and beyond them ; a unity
that, because it is a unity, can recognise and tabulate
these diversities ? And if that unity, the essential
" I " of our consciousness, subsists in us despite all
the transmutations of life, despite all the numberless
molecular changes of our body, all the varying stages
of our mental being, is it not to this centre, which has
survived so much, that we must look as survivor of
the last change of all ?
But that personality ; what, then, is to happen to
it ? The present writer has been, from time to time,
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the recipient of letters which reveal at "once the
bewilderment and the torturing interest which on
this question assail the modern mind and heart.
If our friends who pass from us survive, what will
there be left in them which we in our turn can
recognise ? Will not this very development place
an impassable gulf between them and ourselves ? A
loved child dies from the household. Its anguished
parents live on thirty, forty years after. If there
is a meeting in the after life of these sundered ones,
what will there be to meet ? People ask this with
a kind of despair. And yet the very question
suggests its answer. Supposing the child had lived,
would not the parents have as surely lost it as a
child as they do by its dying ? In the thirty follow-
ing years what is left of the child ? It is a grown
man or woman they have now with them. Of the
child there are left only the early portraits. Yet
the joy and happiness of the relationship are there
through all the changes, there with additions and
enrichments. And if the personality, working in this
way on our present side of death, amid all changes,
keeps the best of the parental and filial relationships,
why should we imagine the farther side so poor in
resource as not to have its own preservations and
adaptations there ?
Another difficulty which, if our correspondence may
be trusted, obsesses the modern mind, is what we
may call the too great generosity of the after-life
idea. " Are we to suppose that all the wretched
specimens of humanity that have dwelt on this earth
— savages, Hottentots, brutes with neither heart nor
mind, are still to go on cumbering the universe ?
What of the countless myriads of them ? Is it not
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better to consider them as cleared out, to make
room for something better ? " As to room, it is a
tolerably wide miiverse, which shows no sign of over-
crowding at present. It finds room for every particle
of matter, however low its scale. If it assures an
endless continuance of matter, what reason is there
against that of spirit ! Certainly there is room enough
for that ! We have here a curious adaptation of
the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, which
appears in the most varied forms and quarters.
Victor Hugo expresses it in his belief in a future life
for the elite, including himself. Tom Paine, the
terror of the orthodox of his day, held that good
people would certainly enjoy a life to come, the bad
people would meet there with some punishment,
while people whose lives appeared to have no sig-
nificance at all would probably drop out altogether.
This idea of inferior, insignificant people being pre-
served in their inferiority and insignificance on the
other side seems to have specially stirred the bile of
Thomas Huxley. One remembers the famous
letter of his to the Committee of the Dialectical
Society, in which he was invited to attend a stance.
After expressing his belief that mediums were hum-
bugs, he added that if he were offered a special faculty
by which he could overhear the chatter of old women
and curates of the nearest provincial town he should
decline it, having something better to do. The
chatter on the other side, as far as reported, was
entirely of that order, and he wanted none of it.
It is to be noted that the presuppositions which lie
behind all these views are of one order. They agree
in despising the mean, the undistinguished, the in-
significant, as unworthy of preservation — at least,
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in their insignificance — in another sphere. If there
is to be a supernatural, it is to be on a great scale,
something supremely grand or supremely terrible ;
at any rate, of a totally different character from
anything we know of here. We may have hell or
heaven, or annihilation outright ; anything rather
than a population of old women and curates, of no-
bodies, with all their nobodyhood about them,
on that farther side. But is that nature's way, the
nature we know now ? Natura non jacit saltus
(nature does not take leaps) is one of the working
mottoes of science. We may vary it, and so come
nearer the truth, by saying that she never makes
farther leaps than are necessary. Her changes are
the least violent that can accomplish her purpose.
And if that is her order in the sphere we know, may
we not argue that this is her way in the realms beyond
our vision ? If our old women chatter here, why
may they not chatter there ? Why may it not be
— all analogy suggests it is — that after the great
passage, we all, great and small, inferior, con-
temptible and grand, take up our lives precisely
where we left them, to start, amid these new con-
ditions, in their farther evolution ? May we not
here, in default of contrary evidence, trust to the
nature we know ; nature, which changes everything,
but destroys nothing ; nature which fits her creatures
to their environment, gives to each class and quality
its own place ; nature who, in her splendid generosity,
gives to her poorest, meanest things, as well as to
her greatest personal creations, their share of life
and of enjoyment ?
It is, of course, in a chapter of these dimensions,
impossible to discuss a theme like this on all its sides.
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It will be noted that we have left out the special
considerations of the question arising out of the
Christian theology. Our readers are acquainted
with them, and know their value. We will only re-
mark here that the contribution of Christianity to
this question is more in the direction of that moral
instinct on which Kant relied than to the reasonings
of formal logic. Christianity, in the theological
presentation of it, has often been wrong in its head.
But its errors there have been abundantly counter-
balanced by the superb quality of its heart power.
By the immense reinforcement it has offered to the
spiritual development of man it has increased in that
degree the force of the argument for a further sphere
in which the soul, which it has so immeasurably en-
riched, shall proceed to its full height of blessedness.
The resurrection faith is not only a fact of its history,
it is in the line of all that nature suggests ; it is an
answer, out of herself, to the deepest, highest instinct
of the human heart.
HEAOLEY BROTHERS, ASHFORD, KLTT ; AND BIBHOKGATE,
