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Spiritual energies in dail

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SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

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SPIRITUAL ENERGIES
IN DAILY LIFE

BY

RUFUS M. JONES, LiTT.D., D.D,

Professor of Philosophy In Haverford College

Author of Studies in Mystical Religion; The Inner Lije;

The World Within^ etc.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1922

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1922,
By the macmillan company

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1922

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AlIEEIOA

PREFACE

I wish to thank the editor of The Atlantic
Monthly for his permission to print In this volume
the chapter entitled " The Mystic's Experience
of God," also the editors of The Journal of Re-
ligion for their permission to use the article on
*' Psychology and the Spiritual Life." Some of
the shorter essays have been printed in The
(London) Friend and In The Homiletic Review.
Kind permission has been granted for their re-
production.

INTRODUCTION
RELIGION AS ENERGY

Religion is an experience which no definition
exhausts. One writer with expert knowledge of
anthropology tells us what it is, and we know as
we read his account that, however true it may be
as far as it goes, it yet leaves untouched much
undiscovered territory. We turn next to the
trained psychologist, who leads us " down the
labyrinthine ways of our own mind " and tells us
why the human race has always been seeking God
and worshiping Him. We are thankful for his
Ariadne thread which guides us within the maze,
but we feel convinced that there are doors which
he has not opened — " doors to which he had no
key." The theologian, with great assurance and
without " ifs and buts," offers us the answer to all
mysteries and the solution of all problems, but
when we have gone " up the hill all the way to
the very top " with him, we find it a " homesick
peak" — Heimwehfluh — and we still wonder
over the real meaning of religion.

We are evidently dealing here with something
vii

viii INTRODUCTION

like that drinking horn which the Norse God Thor
tried to drain. He failed to do it because the
horn which he assayed to empty debouched into
the endless ocean, and therefore to drain the horn
meant drinking the ocean dry. To probe religion
down to the bottom means knowing " what God
and man is." Each one of us, in his own tongue
and in terms of his own field of knowledge, gives
his partial word, his tiny glimpse of insight. But
the returns are never all in. There is always
more to say. " Man is incurably religious," that
fine scholar, Auguste Sabatier, said. Yes, he is.
It is often wild and erratic religion which we find,
no doubt, but the hunger and thirst of the human
soul are an indubitable fact. In different forms
of speech we can all say with St. Augustine of
Hippo : " Thou hast touched me and I am on
fire for thy peace."

In saying that religion is energy I am only
seizing one aspect of this great experience of the
human heart. It is, however, I believe, an essen-
tial aspect. A religion that makes no difference
to a person^s life, a religion that does nothing, a
religion that is utterly devoid of power, may for
all practical purposes be treated as though it did
not exist. The great experts — those who know
from the inside what religion is — always make

INTRODUCTION ix

much of its dynamic power, its energizing and pro-
pulsive power. Power is a word often on the lips
of Jesus; never used, it should be said, in the sense
of extrinsic authority or the right to command
and govern, but always in reference to an intrinsic
and interior moral and spiritual energy of life.
The kingdom of God comes with power, not be-
cause the Messiah is supplied with ten legions
of angels and can sweep the Roman eagles back
to the frontiers of the Holy Land, but it " comes
with power " because it is a divine and life-trans-
forming energy, working in the moral and spirit-
ual nature of man, as the expanding yeast works
In the flour or as the forces of life push the seed
into germination and on into the successive stages
toward the maturity of the full-grown plant and
grain.

The little fellowship of followers and witnesses
who formed the nucleus of the new-born Church
felt themselves *' endued with power " on the day
of Pentecost. Something new and dynamic en-
tered the consciousness of the feeble band and
left them no longer feeble. There was an in-
rushing, up-welling sense of Invasion. They
passed over from a visible Leader and Master to
an invisible and inward Presence revealed to
them as an unwonted energy. Ecstatic utterance.

X INTRODUCTION

which seems to have followed, Is not the all-Im-
portant thing. The Important thing is height-
ened moral quality, Intensified fellowship, a fused
and undying loyalty, an irresistible boldness in
the face of danger and opposition, a fortification
of spirit which nothing could break. This energy
which came with their experience Is what marks
the event as an epoch.

St. Paul writes as though he were an expert in
dynamics. " Dynamos," the Greek word for
power, is one of his favorite words. He seems to
have found out how to draw upon energies in the
universe which nobody else had suspected were
even there. It is a fundamental feature of his
"Aegean gospel" that God is not self-contained but
self-giving, that He circulates, as does the sun, as
does the sea, and comes into us as an energy. This
incoming energy he calls by many names: " The
Spirit," " holy Spirit," " Christ," " the Spirit of
Christ," " Christ In you," " God that worketh in
us." Whatever his word or term Is, he Is always
declaring, and he bases his testimony on experi-
ence, that God, as Christ reveals Him, Is an active
energy working with us and In us for the complete
transformation of our fundamental nature and
for a new creation In us.

All this perhaps sounds too grand and lofty,

INTRODUCTION xi

too remote and far away, to touch us with reality.
We assume that It Is for saints or apostles, but
not for common every-day people like ourselves.
Well, that Is where we are wrong. The accounts
which St. Paul gives of the energies of religion
are not for his own sake, or for persons who are
bien ne and naturally saintly. They are for the
rank and file of humans. In fact his Corinthian
fellowship was raised by these energies out of
the lowest stratum of society. The words which
he uses to describe them are probably not over
strong: "Be not deceived: neither fornicators,
nor Idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor
abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves,
nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revllers, nor ex-
tortioners shall Inherit the kingdom of God. And
such were some of you: but ye are washed, but
ye are sanctified, but ye are justified In the name
[i.e. the power] of the Lord Jesus and by the
Spirit of our God." ^

It Is to be noticed, further, that St. Paul does
not confine his list of energies to those mighty
spiritual forces which come down from above
and work upon us from the outside. Much more
often our attention Is directed to energies which
are potential within ourselves — even in the most
1 1 Cor. VI. 9-1 1.

xli INTRODUCTION

ordinary of us — energies which work as silently
as molecular forces or as " the capillary oozing
of water," but which nevertheless are as recon-
structive as the forces of springtime, following
the winter's havoc. If the grace of God — ^ the
unlimited sacrificing love of God revealed In
Christ — is for St. Paul the supreme spiritual
energy of the universe, hardly less important is
the simple human energy which meets that centri-
fugal energy and makes it operate within the
sphere of the moral will. That dynamic energy,
by which the man responds to God's upward pull
and which makes all the difference, St. Paul calls
faith.

We are so accustomed to the use of the word
In a spurious sense that we are slow to apprehend
the immense significance of this human energy
which lies potentially within us. Unfortunately
trained young folks and scientifically minded peo-
ple are apt to shy away from the word and put
themselves on the defensive, as though they were
about to be asked to believe the impossible or the
dubious or the unprovable. Faith In the sense
in which St. Paul uses it does not mean helieving
something. It Is a moral attitude and response
of will to the character of God as He has been
revealed in Christ. It Is like the act which closes

INTRODUCTION xiii

the electric circuit, which act at once releases
power. The dynamic effect which follows the
act is the best possible verification of the ration-
ality of the act. So, too, faith as a moral re-
sponse is no blind leap, no wild venture; it is an
act which can be tested and verified by moral and
spiritual effects, which are as real as the heat,
light, and horse power of the dynamo.

Faith has come to be recognized as an energy
in many spheres of life. We know what a sta-
bilizer it is in the sphere of finance. Stocks and
bonds and banks shift their values as faith in
them rises or falls. Morale is only another name
for faith. Our human relationships, our social
structures, our enjoyment of one another, our sat-
isfaction in books and in lectures rest upon faith
and when that energy fails, collapses of the most
serious sort follow. We might as well try to
build a world without cohesion as to maintain
society without the energy of faith.

We have many illustrations of the important
part which faith plays in the sphere of physical
health. The corpuscles of the blood and the
molecules of the body are altered by it. The
tension of the arteries and the efficiency of the
digestive tract are affected by it. Nerves are in
close sympathetic rapport with faith. It is never

xlv INTRODUCTION

safe to tell a strong man that he is pale and that
he looks 111. If two or three persons in succes-
sion give him a pessimistic account of his appear-
ance, he will soon begin to have the condition
which has been imagined. Dr. William McDou-
gall gives the case of a boy who was being chased
by a furious animal and under the Impulse of the
emergency he leaped a fence which he could never
afterwards jump, even after long athletic train-
ing. The list of similar instances is a very long
one. Every reader knows a case as impressive
as the one I have given. The varieties of " shell-
shock " have furnished volumes of Illustrations
of the energy of faith, Its dynamic influence upon
health and life and efficiency.

Faith In the sphere of religion works the great-
est miracles of life that are ever worked. It
makes the saint out of Magdalene, the heroic mis-
sionary and martyr out of Paul, the spiritual
statesman of the ages out of Carthaginian
Augustine, the illuminated leader of men out of
Francis of AssisI, the maker of a new world epoch
out of the nervously unstable monk Luther, the
creator of a new type of spiritual society out of
the untaught Leicestershire weaver, George Fox.
Why do we not all experience the miracle and
find the rest of ourselves through faith? The

INTRODUCTION xv

main trouble Is that we live victims of limiting
inhibitions. We hold intellectual theories which
keep back or check the outflow of the energy of
faith. We have a nice system of thought which
accounts for everything and explains everything
and which leaves no place for faith. We know
too much. We say to ourselves that only the
Ignorant and uncultured are led by faith. And
this same wise man, who Is too proud to have
faith, holds all his inhibitory theories on a basis
of faith ! Every one of them starts out on faith,
gathers standing ground by faith, and becomes a
controlling force through faith!

There are many other spiritual energies, some
of which will be dealt with specifically or implic-
itly In the later chapters of this book. Not often
In the history of the modern world certainly have
spiritual energies seemed more urgently needed
than to-day. Our troubles consist largely now
of failure to lay hold of moral and spiritual forces
that He near at hand and to utilize powers that
are within our easy reach. Our stock of faith
and hope and love has run low and we realize
only feebly what mighty energies they can be.

I hope that these short essays may help In some
slight way to Indicate that the ancient realities
by which men live still abide, and that the Invisi-

xvi INTRODUCTION

ble energies of the spirit are real, as they have
always been real. We have had an impressive
demonstration that a civilization built on external
force and measured in terms of economic achieve-
ments cannot stand its ground and Is unable
to speak to the condition of persons endowed and
equipped as we are. We are bound to build a
higher civilization, to create a greater culture, and
to form a truer kingdom of life or we must write
" Mene '' on all human undertakings. That is
our task now, and it is a serious one for which
we shall need all the energies that the universe
puts at our disposal. I am told that when the
great Hellgate bridge was being built over the
East River in New York the engineers came upon
an old derelict ship, lying embedded In the river
mud, just where one of the central piers of the
bridge was to go down through to its bedrock
foundation. No tug boat could be found that
was able to start the derelict from Its ancient bed
in the ooze. It would not move, no matter what
force was applied. Finally, with a sudden in-
spiration one of the workers hit upon this scheme.
He took a large flat-boat, which had been used to
bring stone down the river, and he chained it to
the old sunken ship when the tide was low. Then
he waited for the great tidal energies to do their

INTRODUCTION xvii

work. Slowly the rising tide, with all the forces
of the ocean behind it and the moon above it,
came up under the flat-boat, raising it inch by
inch. And as it came up, lifted by irresistible
power, the derelict came up with it, until it was
entirely out of the mud that had held it. Then
the boat, with its subterranean load, was towed
out to sea where the old waterlogged ship was
unchained and allowed to drop forever out of
sight and reach.

There are greater forces than those tidal ener-
gies waiting for us to use for our tasks. They
have always been there. They are there now.
But they do not work, they do not operate, until
we lay hold of them and use them for our present
purposes. We must be co-workers with God,

Haverford, Pennsylvania.
Mid Winter, 1922.

CONTENTS

PAGB

Introduction: Religion as Energy . vii
CHAPTER I

THE CENTRAL PEACE

I. Peace That Passes Understanding . i

II. The Search for a Refuge ... 5

III. What We Want Most .... 10

CHAPTER II

THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK

I. Trying the Better Way . . . . 15

II. He Came to Himself 23

III. Some New Reasons for "Loving Ene-
mies'' 29

CHAPTER III

THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US

I. Where the Beyond Breaks Through . 35

II. Conquering by an Inner Force . . 41

III. Living in the Presence of the Eternal 46

CHAPTER IV
the way of vision
I. Days of Greater Visibility ... 50
II. The Prophet and His Tragedies . . 54
IIL A Long Distance Call . ... .60

XX CONTENTS

CHAPTER V

THE WAY OF PERSONALITY

PAGE

I. Another Kind of Hero .... 65

II. The Better Possession .... 69

III. The Greatest Rivalries of Life . . 74

CHAPTER VI
agencies of construction

I. The Church of the Living God . . 79
II. The Nursery of Spiritual Life . . 83

III. The Democracy We Aim At . . .86

IV. The Essential Truth of Christianity 91

CHAPTER VII

the near and the far
I. Things Present and Things to Come . 98

II. Two Types of Ministry . . . .102
III. We Have Seen His Star . . . .106

CHAPTER VIII

THE light-fringed MYSTERY

I. The Religious Significance of Death hi
II. The New Born out of the Old . . 127

CHAPTER IX

THE mystic's experience OF GOD . 1 33

CHAPTER X
psychology and the spiritual life . 1 60

SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN
DAILY LIFE

CHAPTER I
THE CENTRAL PEACE

I

PEACE THAT PASSES UNDERSTANDING

We are all familiar with the coming of a peace
into our life at the terminus of some great strain
or after we have weathered a staggering crisis.
When a long-continued pain which has racked our
nerves passes away and leaves us free, we sud-
denly come into a zone of peace. When we have
been watching by a bedside where a life, unspeak-
ably precious to us, has lain in the grip of some
terrible disease and at length successfully passes
the crisis, we walk out into the fields under the
altered sky and feel a peace settle down upon us,
which makes the whole world look different. Or,
again, we have been facing some threatening
catastrophe which seemed likely to break in on

2 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

our life and perhaps end forever the calm and
even tenor of it, and just when the hour of dan-
ger seemed darkest and our fear was at its height,
some sudden turn of things has brought a happy-
shift of events, the danger has passed, and a great
peace has come over us instead of the threatened
trouble. In all these cases the peace which suc-
ceeds pain and strain and anxiety is a thoroughly-
natural, reasonable peace, a peace which comes
in normal sequence and is quite accessible to the
understanding. We should be surprised and
should need an explanation if we heard of an in-
stance of a passing pain or a yielding strain that
was not followed by a corresponding sense of
peace. One who has seen a child that was lost
in a crowded city suddenly find his mother and
find safety in her dear arms has seen a good case
of this sequential peace, this peace which the
understanding can grasp and comprehend. We
behold it and say, ''How otherwise!"

There is, St. Paul reminds us, another kind of
peace of quite a different order. It baffles the
understanding and transcends its categories. It
is a peace which comes, not after the pain is re-
lieved, not after the crisis has passed, not after
the danger has disappeared; but in the midst of
the pain, while the crisis is still on, and even in

THE CENTRAL PEACE 3

the imminent presence of the danger. It is a
peace that is not banished or destroyed by the
frustrations which beset our lives; rather it is in
and through the frustrations that we first come
upon it and enter into it, as, to use St. Paul's
phrase, into a garrison which guards our hearts
and minds.

Each tested soul has to meet its own peculiar
frustrations. All of us who work for " causes "
or who take up any great piece of moral or spir-
itual service in the world know more about de-
feats and disappointments than we do about
success and triumphs. We have to learn to be
patient and long-suffering. We must become
accustomed to postponements and delays, and
sometimes we see the work of almost a lifetime
suddenly fail of its end. Some turn of events
upsets all our noble plans and frustrates the re-
sult, just when it appeared ready to arrive.
Death falls like lightning on a home that had
always before seemed sheltered and protected,
and instantly life is profoundly altered for those
who are left behind. Nothing can make up for
the loss. There is no substitute for what is gone.
The accounts will not balance; frustration in an-
other form confronts us. Or it may be a break-
down of physical or mental powers, or perad-

4 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

venture both together, just when the emergencies
of the world called for added energy and in-
creased range of power from us. The need is
plain, the harvest is ripe, but the worker's hand
fails and he must contract when he would most
expand. Frustration looks him straight in the
face. Well, to achieve a peace under those
circumstances is to have a peace which does not
follow a normal sequence. It is not what the
world expects. It does not accord with the ways
of thought and reasoning. It passes all under-
standing. It brings another kind of world into
operation and reveals a play of invisible forces
upon which the understanding had not reckoned.
In fact, this strange intellect-transcending peace,
in the very midst of storm and strain and trial, is
one of the surest evidences there is of God. One
may in his own humble nerve-power succeed in
acquiring a stoic resignation so that he can say,

" In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed."

He may, by sheer force of will, keep down the
lid upon his emotions and go on so nearly un-
moved that his fellows can hear no groan and

THE CENTRAL PEACE 5

will wonder at the way he stands the universe.
But peace In the soul Is another matter. To have
the whole heart and mind garrisoned with peace
even In Nero's dungeon, when the Imperial death
sentence brings frustration to all plans and a
terminus to all spiritual work, calls for some
world-transcending assistance to the human spirit.
Such peace Is explained only when we discover
that It Is '' the peace of God," and that It came
because the soul broke through the ebblngs and
Sowings of time and space and allied itself with
the Eternal.

II

THE SEARCH FOR A REFUGE

Few things are more Impressive than the per-
sistent search which men have made in all ages
for a refuge against the dangers and the ills that
beset life. The cave-men, the cliff-dwellers, the
primitive builders of shelters In Inaccessible tree
tops, are early examples of the search for human
defenses against fear. Civilization slowly per-
fected methods of refuge and defense of elaborate
types, which, in turn, had to compete with
ever-increasing Ingenuity of attack and assault.

6 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

But I am not concerned here with these material
strongholds of refuge and defense. I am think-
ing rather of the human search for shelter against
other weapons than those which kill the body.
We are all trying, in one way or another, to dis-
cover how to escape from " the heavy and weary
weight of all this unintelligible world," how to
bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
We are sensitively constructed, with nerves ex-
posed to easy attack. We are all shelterless at
some point to the storms of the world. Even
the most, perfectly equipped and impervious
heroes prove to be vulnerable at some one un-
covered spot. Sooner or later our protections
fail, and the pitiless enemies of our happiness get
through the defenses and reach the quick and
sensitive soul within us. How to rebuild our
refuge, how to find real shelter, is our problem.
What fortress Is there in which the soul is safe
from fear and trouble?

The most common expedient is one which will
drug the sensitive nerves and produce an easy
relief from strain and worry. There is a magic
in alcohol and kindred distillations, which, like
Aladdin's genie, builds a palace of joy and, for
the moment, banishes the enemy of all peace.
The refuge seems complete. All fear is goae>

THE CENTRAL PEACE 7

worry Is a thing of the past. The jargon of life
Is over, the pitiless problem of good and evil
drops out of consciousness. The shelterless soul
seems covered and housed. Intoxication is only
one of the many quick expedients. It is always
possible to retreat from the edge of strenuous
battle into some one of the many natural Instincts
as a way of refuge. The great Instinctive emo-
tions are absorbing, and tend to obliterate every-
thing else. They occupy the entire stage of the
Inner drama, and push all other actors away from
the footlights of consciousness, so that here, too,
the enemies of peace and joy seem vanquished,
and the refuge appears to be found.

That multitudes accept these easy ways of de-
fense against the ills of life is only too obvious.
The medieval barons who could build themselves
castles of safety were few in number. Visible
refuges in any case are rare and scarce, but the
escape from the burdens and defeats of the world
In drink and drug and thrilling instinctive emo-
tion Is, without much difficulty, open to every man
and within easy reach for rich and poor alike, and
many there be that seize upon this method. The
trouble with it is that it Is a very temporary
refuge. It works, if at all, only for a brief span.
It plays havoc in the future with those who resort

8 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

to It. It rolls up new liabilities to the Ills one
would escape. It Involves far too great a price
for the tiny respite gained. And, most of all, It
discounts or fails to reckon with the Inherent
greatness of the human soul. We are fashioned
for stupendous Issues. Our very sense of failure
and defeat comes from a touch of the Infinite In
our being. We look before and after, and sigh
for that which Is not, just because we can not be
contented with finite fragments of time and space.
We are meant for greater things than these
trivial ones which so often get our attention and
absorb us; but the moment the soul comes to It-
self, Its reach goes beyond the grasp, and it feels
an Indescribable discontent and longing for that
for which It was made. To seek refuge, there-
fore. In some narcotic joy, to still the onward
yearning of the soul by drowning consciousness,
to banish the pain of pursuit by a barbaric surge
of emotions, Is to strike against the noblest trait
of our spiritual structure; It means committing
suicide of the soul. It cannot be a real man's
way of relief.

In fact, nothing short of finding the goal and
object for which the soul, the spiritual nature In
us. Is fitted will ever do for beings like us. St.
Augustine, In words of Immortal beauty, has said

THE CENTRAL PEACE 9

that God has made us for himself, and our hearts
are restless until we rest in him. It is not a the-
ory of poet or theologian. It is a simple fact of
life, as veritable as the human necessity for food.
There is no other shelter for the soul, no other
refuge or fortress will ever do for us but God.
" We tremble and we burn. We tremble, know-
ing that we are unlike him. We burn, feeling
that we are like him."

In hours of loss and sorrow, when the spurious
props fail us, we are more apt to find our way
back to the real refuge. We are suddenly made
aware of our shelterless condition, alone, and in
our own strength. Our stoic armor and our
brave defenses of pride become utterly Inade-
quate. We are thrown back on reality. We
have then our moments of sincerity and Insight.
We feel that we cannot live without resources
from beyond our own domain. We must have
God. It Is then, when one knows that nothing
else whatever will do, that the great discovery is
made. Again and again the psalms announce
this. When the world has caved in; when the
last extremity has been reached; when the billows
and waterspouts of fortune have done their
worst, you hear the calm, heroic voice of the
lonely man saying: " God is our refuge and fort-

lo SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

ress, therefore will not we fear though the earth
be removed, though the mountains be carried
into the midst of the sea." That is great expe-
rience, but it is not reserved for psalmists and
rare patriarchs like Job. It is a privilege for
common mortals like us who struggle and agonize
and feel the thorn in the flesh, and the bitter
tragedy of life unhealed. Whether we make the
discovery or not, God is there with us in the fur-
nace. Only it makes all the difference if we do
find him as the one high tower where refuge is
not for the passing moment only, but Is an eternal
attainment

III

WHAT WE WANT MOST

There are many things which we wantr-r-
things for which we struggle hard and toil pain-
fully. Like the little child with his printed list
for Santa Claus, we have our list, longer or
shorter, of precious things which we hope to see
brought within our reach before we are gathered
to our fathers. The difference is that the child
is satisfied if he gets one thing which is on his list.
We want everything on ours. The world is full

THE CENTRAL PEACE ii

of hurry and rush, push and scramble, each man
bent on winning some one of his many goals.
But, in spite of this excessive effort to secure the
tangible goods of the earth, it is nevertheless true
that deep down in the heart most men want the
peace of God. If you have an opportunity to
work your way into that secret place where a
man really lives, you will find that he knows per-
fectly well that he is missing something. This
feeling of unrest and disquiet gets smothered for
long periods in the mass of other aims, and some
men hardly know that they have such a thing as
an immortal soul hidden away within. But, even
so, it will not remain quiet. It cries out like the
lost child who misses his home. When the hard
games of life prove losing ones, when the stupid-
ity of striving so fiercely for such bubbles comes
over him, when a hand from the dark catches
away the best earthly comfort he had, when the
genuine realities of life assert themselves over
sense, he wakes up to find himself hungry and
thirsty for something which no one of his earthly
pursuits has supplied or can supply. He wants
God. He wants peace. He wants to feel his
life founded on an absolute reality. He wants
to have the same sort of peace and quiet steal
over him which used to come when as a child he

12 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

ran to his mother and had all the ills of life ban-
ished from thought in the warm love of her em-
brace.

But it is not only the driving, pushing man, am-
bitious for wealth and position, who misses the
best thing there is to get — the peace of God.
Many persons who are directly seeking it miss it.
Here is a man who hopes to find it by solving all
his difficult intellectual problems. When he can
answer the hard questions which life puts to him,
and read the riddles which the ages have left
unread, he thinks his soul will feel the peace of
God. Not so, because each problem opens into
a dozen more. It is a noble undertaking to help
read the riddles of the universe, but let no one
expect to enter into the peace of God by such a
path. Here is another person who devotes her-
self to nothing but to seeking the peace of God.
Will she not find it? Not that way. It is not
found when it is sought for its own sake. He
or she who is living to get the joy of divine peace,
who would " have no joy but calm," will probably
never have the peace which passeth understand-
ing. Like all the great blessings, it comes as a
by-product when one is seeking something else.
Christ's peace came to him not because he sought
it, but because he accepted the divine will which

THE CENTRAL PEACE 13

led to Gethsemane and Calvary. Paul's peace
did not flow over him while he was in Arabia
seeking it, but while he was in Nero's prison,
whither the path of his labors for helping men
had led him. He who forgets himself in loving
devotion, he who turns aside from his self-seek-
ing aims to carry joy into any life, he who sets
about doing any task for the love of God, has
found the only possible road to the permanent
peace of God.

There are no doubt a great many persons
working for the good of others and for the bet-
terment of the world who yet do not succeed in
securing the peace of God. They are in a fre-
quent state of nerves; they are busy here and
there, rushing about perplexed and weary, fussy
and Irritable. With all their efforts to promote
good causes, they do not quite attain the poise
and calm of interior peace. They are like the
tumultuous surface of the ocean with Its combers
and Its spray, and they seldom know the deep
quiet like that of the underlying, submerged
waters far below the surface. The trouble with
them Is that they are carrying themselves all the
time. They do not forget themselves In their
aims of service. They are like the 111 person
who is so eager to get well that he keeps watch-

14 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

ing his tongue, feeling his pulse, and getting his
weight. Peace does not come to one who is
watching continually for the results of his work,
or who is wondering what people are saying
about it, or who is envious and jealous of other
persons working in the same field, or who is
touchy about " honor " or recognition. Those
are just the attitudes which frustrate peace and
make it stay away from one's inner self.

There is a higher level of work and service
and ministry, which, thank God, men like us can
reach. It is attained when one swings out into
a way of life which is motived and controlled by
genuine sincere love and devotion, when conse-
cration obliterates self-seeking, when in some
measure, like Christ, the worker can say without
reservations, " Not my will but thine be done.''

CHAPTER II
THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK

I

TRYING THE BETTER WAY

A VERY fresh and unusual type of book has re-
cently appeared under the title, *' By An Un-
known Disciple." It tells in a simple, direct,
impressive way, after the manner of the Gospels,
the story of Christ's life and works and message.
It professes to be written by one who was an
intimate disciple, and who was therefore an eye-
witness of everything told in the book. It is a
vivid narrative and leaves the reader deeply
moved, because it brings him closer than most
interpretations do into actual presence of and
companionship with the great Galilean. The
first chapter is a re-interpretation of the scene on
the eastern shore of Gennesaret, where Jesus
casts the demons out of the maniac of Geresa.
A man on the shore of the lake told Jesus, when
he landed there with his disciples In the early
morning, that It was not safe for any one to go

IS

i6 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

up the rugged hillside, because there were mad-
men hidden there among the tombs: " people pos-
sessed by demons, who tear their flesh, and who
can be heard screaming day and night/'

" How do you know they are possessed by
demons? " asked Jesus.

"What else could It be?*' said the man,
" There are none that can master them. They
are too fierce to be tamed."

"Has any man tried to tame them?" asked
Jesus.

" Yes, Rabbi, they have been bound with chains
and fetters. There was one that I saw. He
plucked the fetters from him as a child might
break a chain of field flowers. Then he ran
foaming into the wilderness, and no man dare
pass by that way now. . . ."

" Have men tried only this way to tame him? "
Jesus asked.

" What other way Is there, Rabbi? " asked the
man.

" There Is God's way," said Jesus. " Come,
let us try It."

As Jesus spoke, " His gaze went from man to
man," the writer continues, " and then his eyes
fell upon me. It was as If a power passed from
him to me, and Immediately something Inside me

THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK 17

answered, ' Lead, and I follow.' " The narra-
tive proceeds to describe the encounter with the
demoniac man whose name was " Legion."
" He ran toward us, shrieking and bounding in the
air. He had two sharp stones in his hand, and
as he leaped he cut his flesh with them and the
blood ran down his naked limbs. The men be-
hind us scattered and fled down the hill-side; but
Jesus stood still and waited." The effect of the
calm, undisturbed, unfrightened presence of Jesus
was astonishing. It was as though a new force
suddenly came into operation. The jagged
stones were thrown from his hands, for he recog-
nized at once in Jesus a friendly presence and a
helper with an understanding heart. His fear
and terror left the demoniac man and he became
quiet, composed and like a normal person.
Meantime some of the men who ran away in fear,
when the madman appeared, frightened a herd of
swine feeding near by, and in their uncontrolled
terror they rushed wildly toward the headland
of the lake and pitched over the top into the
water where they were drowned. " Fear is a
foul spirit," said Jesus, and it seemed plain and
obvious that the ungoverned fear which played
such havoc with the man had taken possession
also of the misguided swine. It was the same

i8 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

" demon," fear. A little later in the day when
the companions of Jesus found him they saw the
man who had called himself " Legion " sitting at
Jesus' feet, clothed and in his right mind — a
quieted and restored person.

We now know that this disease, called " pos-
session," which appears so often in the New Tes-
tament accounts, is a very common present-day
trouble. The name and description given to it
in the Bible make it often seem remote and un-
familiar to us, but it is, in fact, as prevalent in
the world to-day as it was in the first century.
It is an extreme form of hysteria, a disorganiza-
tion of normal functions, often causing delusions,
loss of memory, the performance of automatic
actions, and sometimes resulting in double, or
multiple, personality, a condition in which a for-
eign self seems to usurp the control of the body
and make it do many strange and unwilled things.
This disease is known in very many cases to be
produced by frights, fear, or terror, sometimes
fears long hidden away and more or less sup-
pressed.

The famous cases of Doris Fischer and Miss
Beauchamp were both of this type. They were
only extreme instances of a fairly common form
of mental trouble, generally due to fears, and

THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK 19

capable of being cured by wise, skillful under-
standing and loving care, applied by one who
shows confidence and human interest and who
knows how to use the powerful influence of sug-
gestion. Dr. Morton Prince, who has reported
these two cases, has achieved cures and restora-
tions that read like miracles, and his narratives
tell of minds, " jangling, harsh, and out of tune,**
broken into dissociated selves, which have been
unified, organized, harmonized and restored to
normal life. Few restorations are more won-
derful than that effected upon a Philadelphia girl
under the direction of Dr. Lightner Witmer.
The girl was hopelessly incorrigible, stubborn,
sullen, suspicious, and stupid. She screamed,
kicked, and bit when she was opposed, and she
utterly refused to obey anybody. So unnatural
and dehumanized was she that she was generally
called *' Diabolical Mary." She was examined
by Dr. Witmer, underwent some simple surgical
operations to remove her obvious physical handi-
caps, and then was put under the loving, tender
care of a wise, attractive, and understanding
woman. The girl responded to the treatment at
once and soon became profoundly changed, and
the process went on until the girl became a wholly
transformed and re-made person.

20 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

The so-called shell-shock cases which have
bulked so large in the story of the wastage of
men In all armies during the World War, turn
out to be cases of mental disorganization, occa-
sioned for the most part by Immense emotional
upheaval, especially through suppressed fear.
The man affected with the trouble has seemed to
master his emotion. He has not winced or
shown the slightest fear In the face of danger;
but the pent-up emotion, the suppressed fear and
terror. Insidiously throw the entire nervous
mechanism out of gear. The successful treatment
of such cases Is, again, like that for hysteria, one
that brings confidence, calm, liberation of all
strain and anxiety. The poor victim needs a pa-
tient, wise, skillful, psychologically trained physi-
cian, who has an understanding mind, a friendly.
Interested, Intimate way, a spirit of love, and who
can arouse expectation of recovery and can sug-
gest thoughts of health and the right emotional
reactions. This method of cure has often been
tried with striking effect upon the so-called crim-
inal classes. Prisoners almost always respond
constructively to the personal manifestation of
confidence, sympathy, and love. Elizabeth Fry
proved this principle in an astonishing way with
the almost brutalized prisoners In Newgate.

THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK 21

Thomas ShlUltoe's visit to the German prisoners
at Spandau, who were believed to be beyond all
human appeals, though not so well known and
famous, is no less impressive and no less con-
vincing.

There was perhaps never a time in the history
of the world when an application of this prin-
ciple and method — God's way — was so needed
in the social sphere of life. \Vhole countries have
the symptoms which appear in these nervous dis-
eases. It is not merely an individual case here
and there; it takes on a corporate, a mass, form.
The nerves are overstrained, the emotional stress
has been more than could be borne, suppressed
fears have produced disorganization. There are
signs of social " dissociation." The remedy in
such cases is not an application of compelling
force, not a resort to chains and fetters, not a
screwing on of the " lid," not a method of starv-
ing out the victims. It is rather an application of
the principle which has always worked in indi-
vidual cases of " dissociation " or " possession "
or " suppressed fear " — the principle of sym-
pathy, love and suggestion — what Jesus, In the
book mentioned above, calls " God's way." The
" dissociation " of labor and employers in the so-
cial group, with its hysterical signs of strikes and

22 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

lockouts, upheaval and threats, needs just now a
very wise physician. Force, restraint, compul-
sion, fastening down the " lid," imprisonment of
leaders, drastic laws against propaganda, will not
cure the disease, any more than chains cured the
poor sufferer on the shores of Gennesaret. The
situation must first of all be understood. The
inner attitude behind the acts and deeds must be
taken into account. The social mental state must
be diagnosed. The remedy, to be a remedy, must
remove the causes which produce the dissociation.
It can be accomplished only by one who has an
understanding heart, a good will, an unselfish pur-
pose, and a comprehending, I.e., a unifying, sug-
gestion of cooperation.

This way Is no less urgent for the solution of
the most acute international situations. It has
been assumed too long and too often that these
situations can be best handled by unlimited meth-
ods of restraint, coercion, and reduction to help-
lessness. Some of the countries of Europe have
been plainly suffering from neurasthenia, dissocia-
tionj and the kindred forms of emotional, fear-
caused diseases. Starvation always makes for
types of hysteria. It will not do now to apply,
with cold, precise logic, the old vindictive principle
that when the sinner has been made to suffer

THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK 23

enough to " cover " the enormity of his sin he
can then be restored to respectable society. It
IS not vindication of justice which most concerns
the world now; it is a return of health, a restora-
tion of normal functions, a reconstruction of the
social body. That task calls for the application
of the deeper, truer principles of life. It calls
for a knowing heart, an understanding method, a
healing plan, a sympathetic guide who can obliter-
ate the fear-attitude and suggest confidence and
unity and trustful human relationships. Those
great words, used in the Epistle of London Yearly
Meeting of Friends in 19 17, need to be revived
and put to an experimental venture : '' Love knows
no frontiers/* There is no limit to its healing
force, there are no conditions it does not meet,
there is no terminus to its constructive operations.

II

HE CAME TO HIMSELF

Was there ever such a short-story character
sketch as this one of the prodigal son ! No real-
Ism of details, no elaboration of his sins, and yet
the immortal picture is burned forever into our
Imagination. The debacle of his life is as clear

24 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

and vivid as words can portray the ruin. Yet
the phrase which arrests us most as we read the
compact narrative of his undoing is not the one
which tells about '' riotous living," or the reck-
less squandering of his patrimony, or his hunger
for swine husks, or his unshod feet and the loss
of his tunic; it is rather the one which says that
when he was at the bottom of his fortune *' he
came to himself."

He had not been himself then, before. He was
not finding himself in the life of riotous indul-
gence. That did not turn out after all to be the
life for which he was meant. He missed himself
more than he missed his lost shoes and tunic.
That raises a nice question which is worth an
answer: When is a person his real self? When
can he properly say, " At last I have found my-
self; I am what I want to be?" Robert Louis
Stevenson has given us in Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde a fine parable of the actual double self in
us all, a higher and a lower self under our one
hat. But I ask, which is the real me? Is it
Jekyll or is it Hyde? Is it the best that we
can be or is it this worse thing which we just
now are?

Most answers to the question would be, I
think, that the real self is that ideal self of which

THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK 25

In moments of rare visibility we sometimes catch
glimpses.

" All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel
the pitcher shaped."

" Dig deep enough into any man," St. Augus-
tine said, " and you will find something divine."
We supposed he believed in total depravity, and
he does in theory believe In It; but when It is a
matter of actual experience, he announces this
deep fact which fits perfectly with his other great
utterance : " Thou, O God, hast made us for thy-
self, and we are restless (dissatisfied) until we
find ourselves In thee."

Too long we have assumed that Adam, the fail-
ure, is the type of our lives, that he is the normal
man, that to err is human, and that one touch, that
Is, blight, of nature makes all men kin. What
Christ has revealed to us is the fact that we
always have higher and diviner possibilities In us.
He, the overcomer, and not Adam, is the true
type, the normal person, giving us at last the
pattern of life which Is life indeed.

Which is the real self, then? Surely this higher
possible self, this one which we discover in our
best moments. The Greeks always held that sin

26 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

was " missing the mark '^ — that Is what the
Greek word for sin means — failure to arrive at,
to reach, the real end toward which life alms.
Sin Is defeat. It Is loss of the trail. It Is undo-
ing. The sinner has not found himself, he has
not come to himself. He has missed the real
me. He cannot say, " I am."

If that Is a fact, and if the life of spiritual
health and attainment Is the normal life, we
surely ought to do more than Is done to help
young people to realize it and to assist them to
find themselves. We are much more concerned
to manufacture things than we are to make per-
sons. We do one very well and we do the other
very badly. Kipling's " The Ship that Found
Itself " Is a fine account of the care bestowed
upon every rivet and screw, every valve and
piston. He pictures the ship In the stress and
strain of a great storm and each part of the ship
from keel to funnel describes what It has to bear
and to do in the emergency and how it has been
prepared In advance for just this crisis. Nansen
was asked how he felt when he found that the
Fram was caught In the awful jam of the Arctic
ice-floe. " I felt perfectly calm," he said. "I
knew she could stand It. I had watched every
stick of timber and every piece of steel that went

THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK 27

into her hull. The result was that I could go to
sleep and let the ice do its worst.'^ With even
more care we build the airplane. There must be
no chance for capricious action. The propeller
blades must be made of perfect wood. There
must be no defect in any piece of the structure.
The gasoline must be tested by all the methods of
refinement. The oil must be absolutely pure, free
of every suspicion of grit.

But when we turn from ships and airplanes to
the provisions for training young persons we are
in a different world. The element of chance now
bulks very large. We let the youth have pretty
free opportunity to begin his malformation be-
fore we begin seriously to construct him on right
lines. We fail to note what an enormous fact
" disposition " is, and we take little pains to form
It early and to form it in the best way. We are
far too apt to assume that all the fundamentals
come by the road of heredity. We overwork this
theory as much as earlier theologians overworked
their dogma of original sin from poor old Adam.

The fact is that temperament and disposition
and the traits of character which most definitely
settle destiny are at least as much formed in
those early critical years of Infancy as they are
acquired by the strains of heredity. Education,

28 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

which is more essential to the greatness of any-
country than even Its manufactures, Is one of the
most neglected branches of life. We take it as
we find it — ■ and lay its failures to Providence
as we do deaths from typhoid. It must not al-
ways be so. We must be as greatly concerned to
form virile character in our boys and girls and
to develop in them the capacity for moral and
spiritual leadership in this crisis as we are con-
cerned over our coal supply or our industries.
There are ways of assisting the higher self to
control and dominate the life, ways by which
the Ideal person can become the real person.
Why not consider seriously how to do that?

He that overcomes, the prophet of Patmos
says, receives a white stone with a new name
written on it, which no man knoweth save he that
hath it. It is a symbolism which may mean many
things. It seems at least to mean that he who
subdues his lower self, holds out in the strain of
life, and lives by the highest that he knows, will
as a consequence receive a distinct individuality,
a clearly defined self, instead of being blurred in
with the great level mass — a self with a name
of its own. And that self will not be the old
familiar self that everybody knows by traits of
past achievement and by the old tendencies of

THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK 29

habit. It will be the self which only God and
the person himself in his deepest and most inti-
mate moments knew was possible — and here at
last it is found to be the real self. The man
can say, " I am." He has come to himself.

We ask, at the end, whether It may not be
that the world will soon come to Itself and dis-
cover the way back to some of its missed ideals.
Here on a large scale we have the story of a des-
perate hunger, squandered wealth, lost shoes, lost
tunics, and even more precious things gone — a
world that has missed its way and is floundering
about without sufficient vision or adequate leader-
ship. If It could only come to Itself, discover
what its true mission Is and where Its real sources
of power and Its line of progress lie, It would
still find that God and man together can rebuild
what man by his blunders has destroyed.

Ill

SOME NEW REASONS FOR " LOVING ENEMIES "

Nobody ever amounts to anything who lives
without conflict with obstacles. It seems to be a
law of the universe that nothing really good can
be got or held by soft, easy means.

30 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

The Persians were so impressed with this stern
condition of life that they interpreted the uni-
verse as the scene of endless warfare between hos-
tile powers of the invisible world. Ormuzd, the
god of light, and Ahriman, the god of darkness,
were believed to be engaged in a continual Arma-
geddon. There could be no truce in the strife
until one or the other should win the victory by
the annihilation of his opponent. This Persian
dualism has touched all systems of thought and
has left its influence upon all the religions of the
world. The reasons why it has appealed so pow-
erfully to men of all generations are, of course,
that there is so much conflict involved in life and
that no achievement of goodness is ever made
without a hard battle for it against opposing
forces. But if all this opposition and struggle
is due to an " enemy," we certainly ought to love
this " enemy," because it turns out to be the great-
est possible blessing to us that we are forced to
struggle with difficulties and to wrestle for what
we get.

*' Count it all joy," said the Apostle James in
substance, writing to his friends of the Disper-
sion, " when you fall into manifold testings, or
trials, knowing that the proving of your faith
worketh steadfastness, and let steadfastness have

THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK 31

its perfect work, that ye may be perfect and en-
tire, lacking in nothing." St. Paul thought once
that his " thorn in the flesh " was conferred upon
him by Satan and was the malicious messenger of
an enemy; but in the slow process of experience
he came to see that the painful " thorn " exer-
cised a real ministry in his life, that through his
suffering and hardship he got a higher meaning
of God's grace; and he discovered that divine
power was thus made perfect through his weak-
ness, so that he learned to love the " enemy "
that buffeted him.

The Psalmist who wrote our best loved psalm,
the twenty-third, thought at first that God was
his Shepherd because he led him in green pas-
tures and beside still waters where there was no
struggle and no enemy to fear. But he learned
at length that in the dark valleys of the shadow
and on the rough jagged hillsides God was no
less a good Shepherd than on the level plains and
In the lush grass ; and he found at last that even
" in the presence of enemies " he could be fed
with good things and have his table spread. The
overflowing cup and the anointed head were not
discovered on the lower levels of ease and com-
fort; they came out of the harder experiences
when " enemies " of his peace were busy supply-

32 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

Ing obstacles and perplexities for him to over-
come.

It is no accident that the book of Revelation
puts so much stress upon " overcoming." The
world seemed to the prophet on the volcanic
island of Patmos essentially a place of strife and
conflict — an Armageddon of opposing forces.
There are no beatitudes in this book promised to
any except " overcomers."

" Not to one church alone, but seven
The voice prophetic spake from heaven;
And unto each the promise came,
Diversified, but still the same;
For him that overcometh are
The new name written on the stone,
The raiment white, the crown, the throne,
And I will give him the Morning Star!"

But the conflict that ends in such results can
not be called misfortune, any more than Hercules'
labors through which the legendary hero won his
immortality can be pronounced a misfortune for
him. Once more, then, the saint who has over-
come discovers, at least in retrospect, that there
Is good ground for loving his " enemies " !

The farmer, in his unceasing struggle with
weeds, with parasites, with pests visible and In-

THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK 33

visible, with blight and rot and uncongenial
weather, sometimes feels tempted to blaspheme
against the hard conditions under which he labors
and to assume that an " enemy " has cursed the
ground which he tills and loaded the dice of na-
ture against him. The best cure for his " mood '*
IS to visit the land of the bread-fruit tree, where
nature does everything and man does nothing but
eat what Is gratuitously given him, and to see
there the kind of men you get under those kindly
skies. The virile fiber of muscle, the strong
manly frame, the keen active mind that meets
each new " pest " with a successful invention, the
spirit of conquest and courage that are revealed
In the farmer at his best are no accident. They
are the by-product of his battle with conditions,
which if they seem to come from an " enemy,"
must come from one that ought to be loved for
what he accomplishes.

These critics of ours who harshly review the
books we write, the addresses we give, the
schemes of reform for which we work so strenu-
ously— do they do nothing for us? On the con-
trary, they force us to go deeper, to write with
more care, to reconsider our hasty generaliza-
tions, to recast our pet schemes, to revise our
crude endeavors. They may speak as " enemies."

34 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

and they may show a stern and hostile face; but
we do well to love them, for they enable us to
find our better self and our deeper powers. The
hand may be the horny hand of Esau, but the
voice is the kindly voice of Jacob.

All sorts of things " work " for us, then, as
St. Paul declared. Not only does love " work,"
and faith and grace; but tribulation "works,"
and affliction, and the seemingly hostile forces
which block and buffet and hamper us. Every-
thing that drives us deeper, that draws us closer
to the great resources of life, that puts vigor into
our frame and character Into our souls, is in the
last resort a blessing to us, even though it seems
on superficial examination to be the work of an
" enemy," and we shall be wise if we learn to
love the " enemies " that give us the chance to
overcome and to attain our true destiny. Perhaps
the dualism of the universe is not quite as sharp
as the old Persians thought. Perhaps, too, the
love of God reaches further under than we some-
times suppose. Perhaps in fact all things " work
together for good," and even the enemy forces
are helping to achieve the ultimate good that shall
be revealed " when God hath made the pile com-
plete."

CHAPTER III
THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US

I

WHERE THE BEYOND BREAKS THROUGH

If we sprinkle iron filings over a sheet of paper
and move a magnet beneath the paper, the filings
become active and combine and recombine in a
great variety of groupings and regroupings. A
beholder who knows nothing of the magnet un-
derneath gazes upon the whole affair with a sense
of awe and mystery, though he feels all the time
that there must be some explanation of the ac-
tion and that some hidden power behind is oper-
ating as the cause of the groupings and regroup-
ings of the iron particles. Something certainly
that we do not see is revealing its presence and its
power.

Our everyday experience is full of another
series of activities even more mysterious than
these movements of the iron. Whenever we open
our eyes we see objects and colors confronting
us and located in spaces far and near. What

35

36 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

brings the object to us? What operates to pro-
duce the contact? How does the far-away thing
hit our organ of vision? This was to the ancient
philosopher a most difficult problem, a real mys-
tery. He made many guesses at a solution, but
no guess which he could make satisfied his judg-
ment. Our answer is that an invisible and in-
tangible substance which we call ether — lumini-
ferous ether — fills all space, even the space oc-
cupied by visible objects, and that this ether which
is capable of amazing vibrations, billions of them
a second, is set vibrating at different velocities by
dif][erent objects. These vibrations bombard the
minute rods and cones of the retina at the back
of the eye and, presto, we see now one color and
now another, now one object and now another.
This ether would forever have remained unknown
to us had not this marvelous structure of the re-
tina given it a chance to break through and reveal
Itself. In many other ways, too, this ether breaks
through into revelation. It is responsible ap-
parently for all the immensely varied phenomena
of electricity, probably, too, of cohesion and
gravitation. Here, again, the revelations re-
mained inadequate and without clear interpreta-
tion until we succeeded in constructing proper In-
struments and devices for It to break through into

THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US 37

active operation. The dynamo and the other
electrical mechanisms which we have invented do
not make or create electricity. They merely let it
come through, showing itself now as light, now as
heat, now again as motive power. But always
it was there before, unnoted, merely potential,
and yet a vast surrounding ocean of energy there
behind, ready to break into active operation when
the medium was at hand for it.

Life Is another one of those strange mysteries
that cannot be explained until we realize that
something more than we see is breaking through
matter and revealing itself. The living thing Is
letting through some greater power than itself,
something beyond and behind, which is needed to
account for what we see moving and acting with
Invention and purpose. Matter of itself is no ex-
planation of life. The same elemental stuff is
very different until it becomes the instrument of
something not itself which organizes it, pushes
It upward and onward, and reveals itself through
it. Something has at length come Into view which
Is more than force and mechanism. Here Is in-
telligent purpose and forward-looking activity
and something capable of variation, novelty, and
surprise. And when living substance has reached
a certain stage of organization, something higher

38 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

still begins to break through — consciousness ap-
pears, and on its higher levels consciousness be-
gins to reveal truth and moral goodness. It is
useless to try to explain consciousness — espe-
cially truth-bearing consciousness — as a function
of the brain, for it cannot be done. That way of
explanation no more explains mind than the Ptole-
maic theory explains the movements of the heav-
enly bodies. Once more, something breaks
through and reveals itself, as surely as light breaks
through a prism and reveals itself in the band
of spectral colors. This consciousness of ours,
as I have said, is not merely awareness, not only
intelHgent response; it lays hold of and appre-
hends, i. e., reveals, truth and goodness. What
I think, when I really think, is not just my pri-
vate "opinion," or "guess," or "seeming"; it
turns out to have something universal and abso-
lute about it. My multiplication-table is every-
body's multiplication-table. It is true for me and
for beyond me. And what is true of my mathe-
matics is also true of other features of my think-
ing. When I properly organize my experience
through rightly formed concepts, I express as-
pects that are real and true for everybody — I
attain to something which can be called truth.
The same way in the field of conduct: I can dis-

THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US 39

cover not only what is subjectively right, but I
can go farther and embody principles which are
right not only for me but for every good man.
Something more than a petty, tiny, private con-
sciousness is expressing itself through my person-
ality. I am the organ of something more than
myself.

Perhaps more wonderful still is the way in
which beauty breaks through. It breaks through
not only at a few highly organized points, it
breaks through almost everywhere. Even the
minutest things reveal it as well as do the sublim-
est things, like the stars. Whatever one sees
through the microscope, a bit of mould for exam-
ple, is charged with beauty. Everything from a
dewdrop to Mount Shasta is the bearer of beauty.
And yet beauty has no function, no utility. Its
value is intrinsic, not extrinsic. It is its own ex-
cuse for being. It greases no wheels, it bakes no
puddings. It is a gift of sheer grace, a gratuitous
largess. It must imply behind things a Spirit that
enjoys beauty for its own sake and that floods
the world everywhere with it. Wherever it can
break through it does break through, and our joy
in it shows that we are in some sense kindred to
the giver and revealer of it.

Something higher and greater still breaks

40 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

through and reveals a deeper Reality than any
that we see and touch. Love comes through —
not everywhere like beauty, but only where rare
organization has prepared an organ for It. Some
aspects of love appear very widely, are, at least,
as universal as truth and moral goodness. But
love In Its full glory, love In Its height of unselfish-
ness and with Its passion of self-giving is a rare
manifestation. One person — the Galilean —
has been a perfect revealing organ of it. In his
life It broke through with the same perfect natu-
ralness as the beam of light breaks through the
prism of waterdrops and reveals the rainbow.
Love that understands, sympathizes, endures. In-
spires, recreates, and transforms, broke through
and revealed itself so Impressively that those who
see It and feel It are convinced that here at last
the real nature of God has come through to us
and stands revealed. And St. Paul, who was abso-
lutely convinced of this, went still further. He
held, with a faith buttressed in experience, that
this same Christ, who had made this demonstra-
tion of love, became after his resurrection an In-
visible presence, a life-giving Spirit who could
work and act as a resident power within recep-
tive, responsive, human spirits, and could trans-
form them into a likeness to himself and continue

THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US 41

his revelation of love wherever he should find
such organs of revelation. If that, or something
like it, is true it Is a very great truth. It was this
that good old William Dell meant when he said:
" The believer is the only book In which God him-
self writes his New Testament."

II

CONQUERING BY AN INNER FORCE

There are few texts that have been more dy-
namic In the history of spiritual religion than tke
one which forms the keynote of the message of
the little book of Habakkuk: "The righteous
man lives by faith'' (2:4). It became the cen-
tral feature of St. Paul's message. It was the
epoch-making discovery in Luther's experience,
and It has always been the guiding principle of
Protestant Christianity.

The profound significance of the words Is often
missed because the text Is so easily turned Into a
phrase that Is supposed just of itself to work a
kind of magic spell, and secondly because the
meaning of " faith " is so frequently misinter-
preted. When we go back to the original experi-
ence out of which the famous text was born we

42 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

can get fresh light upon the heart of its meaning.
The little book begins with a searching analysis
of the conditions of the time. With an almost
unparalleled boldness the prophet challenges God
to explain why the times are so badly out of joint,
why the social order is so topsy-turvy, and why
injustice is allowed to run a long course un-
checked. God seems unconcerned with affairs —
the moral pilot appears not to be steering things.
Then comes a moment of mental relief. The
prophet hits upon the conclusion, arrived at by
other prophets also, that God is about to use the
Chaldeans as a divine instrument to chastise the
wicked element in the nation, to right the wrongs
of the disordered world, and to execute judgment.
But as he begins to reflect he becomes more per-
plexed than ever. How can God, who is good, use
such a terrible instrument for moral purposes?
This people, which is assumed to be an instru-
ment of moral judgment In a disordered world,
is Itself unspeakably perverse. It Is fierce and
wolfish. Its only god is might. It cares only for
success. It catches men, like fish, In Its great
dragnet, and '' then he sacrlficeth unto his net and
burneth Incense unto his drag." How can such a
pitiless and Insolent people, dominated by pride
and love of conquest, be used to work out the ends

THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US 43

of righteousness and to act for God who is too
pure even to look upon that which is evil and
wrong? Here the prophet finds himself suddenly
up against the ancient problem of the moral gov-
ernment of the universe and the deep mystery of
evil in it. He cannot untangle the snarled
threads of his skein. No solution of the mystery
lies at hand. He decides to climb up into his
" watch-tower " and wait for an answer from
God. If it does not come at once, he proposes
to stay until it does come — " if it tarry, wait for
it; it will surely come." At length the vision
comes, so clear that a man running can read it.
It is just this famous discovery of the great text
that a man cannot hope to get the world-difficul-
ties all straightened out to suit him, he cannot
In some easy superficial way justify the ways of
God in the course of history; but, at least, he can
live unswervingly and victoriously by his own
soul's insight, the Insight of faith that God can
be trusted to do the right thing for the universe
which he is steering. It Is beautifully expressed in
a well-known stanza of Whittier's :

" I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care."

44 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

Many things remain unexplained. The mys-
teries are not all dissipated. But I see enough
light to enable me to hold a steady course on-
ward, and I have an inner confidence In God
which nothing in the outward world can shatter.
This Is the message from Habakkuk's watch-
tower: There is a faith which goes so far Into
the heart of things that a man can live by It and
stand all the water-spouts which bre^ak upon him.

Josiah Royce once defined -faith as an Insight
of the soul by which one can stand everything that
can happen to him, and that Is what this text
means. You arrive at such a personal assurance
of God's character that you can face any event
and not be swept off your feet. If this is so. It
means that the most Important achievement in a
man's career Is the attainment of just this inner
vision, the acquisition of an Interior spiritual con-
fidence which itself Is the victory.

William James used often to close his lecture
courses at Harvard with what he called a " Faith-
ladder." Round after round it went up from a
mere possibility of hope to an Inner conviction
strong enough to dominate action. He would be-
gin with some human faith which outstrips evi-
dence and he would say of it: It is at least not
absurd, not self-contradictory, and, therefore, It

THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US 45

might be true under certain conditions, In some
kind of a world which we can conceive. It may-
be true even In this world and under existing con-
ditions. It Is fit to be true; It ought to be true.
The soul In Its moment of clearest Insight feels
that It must be true. It shall be true, then, at
least for me, for I propose to act upon It, to live
by It, to stake my existence on It.

This watch-tower of Habakkuk Is a similar
faith-ladder. He sees no way to explain why the
good suffer, or to account for the catastrophes of
history, but at least he has found a faith In God
which holds him like adamant : " Although the
fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be In
the vines; the labor of the olive shall fall, and the
fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut
off from the fold and there shall be no herd In the
stalls: Yet I will rejoice In the Lord, I will joy In
the God of my salvation. . . . He will make me
to walk upon mine high places." Faith like that Is
always contagious. The unshaken soul kindles an-
other soul who believes In his belief, and the torch
goes from this man on his watch-tower to St.
Paul, and from him on to the great reformer, and
then to an unnamed multitude, who through their
souPs Insight can stand everything that may
happen !

46 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

III

LIVING IN THE PRESENCE OF THE ETERNAL

Some time ago I received a letter from a young
minister who was about to settle for religious
work In a large manufacturing town. He and I
were strangers to each other In the flesh but
friends through correspondence, and because we
were kindred spirits he wrote to me to say: "I
have before me the great work of living In the
eternal God and in a humanity toiling In factories
and shops. Oh, If I could only make the pres-
ence of the Eternal real to myself and to my
people ! " Another minister, laboring In a large
suburb of New York City, also a stranger to me
except through correspondence, wrote to say that
he was glad for every voice which holds up before
men the reality of the invisible Church and the
Idea of the universal priesthood of believers.
These letters coming within a week — and they
are samples of many similar ones — are signs
of the times, and show clearly that thoughtful
men all about us are done with the husk of re-
ligion and are devoting themselves to the heart of
the matter. There Is a deep movement under
way which touches all denominations and is stead-

THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US 47

ily preparing in our busy, hurrying, materialistic
America a true seed of the vital, spiritual religion
that will later bear rich blossoms and ripe har-
vest.

I want for the moment to return to the central
desire of the young minister, In the hope that It
may Inspire some of us, especially some of our
young ministers who are facing their new spiritual
tasks : " I have before me the great work of liv-
ing In the eternal God and In a humanity toiling
in factories and shops. Oh, If I could only make
the presence of the Eternal real to myself and to
them!"

It is perhaps a new idea to some that living
In the eternal God is " work." We are so accus-
tomed to the Idea that all that is required of us
is a passive mind and a waiting spirit that we
have never quite realized this truth: No person
can live In the eternal God unless he is ready for
the most intense activity and for the most strenu-
ous life. Gladstone, in his old age, surprised his
readers with his Impressive phrase, " the work of
worship." The fact is, no man ever yet found
his way into the permanent enjoyment of God
along paths of least resistance or by any lazy
methods. How many of us have been humiliated
to discover, in the silence or in the service, that

48 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

nothing spiritual was happening within us. Our
mind, unbent and passive enough, was like a stag-
nant pool, or, if not stagnant, was darting its feel-
ers out and following in lazy fashion any line of
suggestion which pulled it. Instead of finding our-
selves " living In the eternal God " and in the high
enjoyment of him, we catch ourselves wondering
what the next strike will be, or thinking about the
mean and shabby way some one spoke to us an
hour ago ! There is no use blaming a mind be-
cause it wanders — everybody's mind wanders —
but the real achievement is to make it wander in
a region which ministers to our spiritual life; and
that can be done only by getting supremely in-
terested in the things of the Spirit. That is where
the "work" lies; that is where the effort comes
in. Attention is always determined by the funda-
mental interest. What we love supremely we at-
tend to. It gets us, It holds us. One of the collo-
quial phrases for being in love with a person is
" paying attention to " the person. It is a true
phrase and goes straight to reality. If we are to
discover and enjoy the eternal Presence we must
become passionately earnest in spirit and glowing
with love for the Highest.

My friend brings two important things to-
gether: He proposes to undertake the work of

THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US 49

living in the eternal God and in toiling humanity.
The two things go together and cannot be safely
separated. It is in the actual sharing of life
through love and sympathy and sacrifice, in going
out of self to feel the problems and difficulties and
sufferings of others, that we find and form a life
rich in higher interests and centered on matters of
eternal value. A man who has traveled through
the deeps of life with a fellow man comes to his
hour of worship with a mind focused on the Eter-
nal and with a spirit girded for the inward
wrestling, without which blessings of the greater
sort do not come. And every time such a man
finds himself truly at home in the eternal God
and fed from within, he can go out, with the
strength of ten, to the tasks of toiling humanity.
This is one of those spiritual circles which work
both ways: He that dwells in God loves, and
he that loves finds God, St. John tells us.

It is fine to see a strong man, trained in all his
faculties, going to his work with the quiet prayer:
** Oh, that I may make the presence of the Eternal
real to myself and to my people.'* It is a good
prayer for all of us.

CHAPTER IV
THE WAY OF VISION

I

DAYS OF GREATER VISIBILITY

From the porch of my little summer cottage in
Maine I can see, across the beautiful stretch of
lake in the foreground, the far-distant Kennebago
Mountains in their veil of purple. But we see
them only when all the conditions of sky and air
are absolutely right. Most of the time they are
wrapped in clouds or are lost in a dim haze. Our
visitors admire the lake, are charmed with the
Islands, the picturesque shore and the surround-
ing hills, but they do not suspect the existence of
this added glory beyond the hills. We often tell
them of the mountains " just over there,'* which
come out Into full view when the sky clears all
the way to the horizon and the wind blows fine
from the northwest. They make a casual re-
mark about the sufficiency of what Is already in
sight, and go their way In satisfied Ignorance of
the " beyond."

SO

THE WAY OF VISION 51

Next day, perhaps — Oh wonder I The
morning dawns with all the conditions favorable
for our distant view. The air is altogether right
for far visibility. The clouds are swept clean
from the western rim, the blue is utterly trans-
parent — and there are the mountains ! We wish
our skeptical visitors could be with us now. We
guess that they would not easily talk of the suffi-
ciency of the near beauty, if they could once see
the overtopping glory of these mountains now
fully unveiled and revealed. Something like that,
I feel sure, is true of God and of other great
spiritual realities which are linked with his being.
Most of the time we get on with the things that
are near at hand; the things we see and handle
and are sure of. The world is full of utility and
we do well to appreciate what is there waiting to
be used. There Is always something satisfying
about beauty, and nature is very rich and lavish
with it. Friendship and love are heavenly gifts,
and when these are added to the other good things
which the world gives us, It would seem, and it
does seem, to many that we ought to be satisfied
and not be homesick for the glory which lies be-
yond the horizon-line of the senses. I cannot help
It; my soul will not stay satisfied with this near-at-
hand supply. A discontent sweeps over me, an

52 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

uncontrollable Heimweh — homesickness of soul
— surges up within me and I should be compelled
to call the whole scheme miserable failure, if the
near, visible skyline were the real boundary of all
that Is.

Sometimes — Oh joy! When the inward
weather is just right; when selfish impulse has been
hushed; when the clouds and shadows, which sin
makes, are swept away and genuine love makes
the whole inner atmosphere pure and free from
haze, then I know that I find a beyond which be-
fore was nowhere in sight and might easily not
have been suspected. I cannot decide whether
this extended range of sight is due to alterations
In myself, or whether it is due to some sudden
Increase of spiritual visibility in the great reality
itself. I only know the fact. Before, I was oc-
cupied with things; now, I commune with God and
am as sure of him as I am of the mountains be-
yond my lake, which my skeptical visitor has not
yet seen.

There can be no adequate world here for us
without at least a faith in the reality beyond the
line of what we see with our common eyes. We
have times when we cannot live by bread alone,
or by our Increase of stocks; when we lose our
Interest in cosmic forces and need something more

THE WAY OF VISION 53

than the slow justice which history weighs out on
its great judgment days. We want to feel a real
heart beating somewhere through things; we want
to discover through the maze a loving will work-
ing out a purpose; we want to know that our
costly loyalties, our high endeavors, and our sacri-
fices which make the quivering flesh palpitate with
pain, really matter to Someone and fill up what is
behind of his great suffering for love's sake. We
can not get on here with substitutes; we must have
the reality Itself. Religion is an awful farce if
it is only a play-scheme, a cinematograph-show,
which makes one believe he Is seeing reality when
he is, In fact, being fooled with a picture. We
must at all costs Insist on the real things. It is
God we want and not another, the real Face and
not a picture.

** We needs must love the highest when we see it ;
Not Lancelot nor another."

He is surely there to be seen, like my mountain.
Days may pass when we only hope and long and
guess. Then the weather comes right, the veil
thins away and we see ! It is, however, not a rare
privilege reserved for a tiny few. It Is not a
grudged miracle, granted only to saints who have

54 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

killed out all self. It belongs to the very nature
of the soul to see God. It Is what makes life
really life. It Is as normal a function as breath-
ing or digestion. Only one must, of all things,
intend to do it !

II

THE PROPHET AND HIS TRAGEDIES

There will always be in the world a vast num-
ber of persons who take the most comfortable
form of religion which their generation affords.
They are not path-breakers; they have nothing in
their nature which pushes them into the fields of
discovery — they are satisfied with the religion
which has come down to them from the past.
They accept what others have won and tested,
and are thankful that they are saved the struggle
and the fire which are involved in first-hand ex-
perience and in fresh discovery.

The prophet, on the contrary, In whatever age
he comes, can never take this easy course. He
cannot rest contented with the forms of religion
which are accepted by others. He cannot enjoy
the comforts of the calm and settled faith which
those around him inherit and adopt. His soul

THE WAY OF VISION 55

forever hears the divine call to leave the old
mountain and go forward, to conquer new fields,
to fight new battles, to restate his faith in words
that are fresh and vital, in terms of the deepest
life of his time. We used to think — many people
still think — that a prophet is a foreteller of fu-
ture events, a kind of magical and miraculous per-
son who speaks as an oracle and who announces,
without knowing how or why, far-off, coming oc-
currences that are communicated to him. To
think thus is to miss the deeper truth of the
prophet's mission. He is primarily a religious
patriot, a statesman with a moral and spiritual
policy for the nation. He is a person who sees
what is involved in the eternal nature of things
and therefore what the outcome of a course of
life is bound to be. He possesses an unerring eye
for curves of righteousness or unrighteousness, as
the great artist has for lines of beauty and har-
mony, or as the great mathematician has for the
completing lines of a curve, involved in any given
arc of it. He is different from others, not in the
fact that he has ecstasies and lives in the realm
of miracles, but rather that he has a clearer con-
viction of God than most men have. He has
found him as the center of all reality. He reads
and interprets all history in the light of the in-

56 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

dubitable fact of God, and he estimates life and
deeds In terms of moral and spiritual laws, which
are as Inflexible as the laws of chemical atoms or
of electrical forces. He looks for no capricious
results. He sees that this Is a universe of moral
and spiritual order.

If he Is an Amos, he will refuse to fall In line
with the easy worshipers of his age, who are
satisfied with the old-time religion of " burnt of-
ferings " and *' meat offerings " and " peace of-
ferings of fat beasts." His soul will cry out for
a religion which makes a new moral and spiritual
man, " makes righteousness run down as a mighty
stream," and sets the worshiper Into new social
relations with his fellows. If he Is an Isaiah, he
will refuse " to tramp the temple " with the mass
of easy worshipers; he will have his own vision
of " the Lord high and lifted up," with his glory
filling not only the temple but the whole earth,
and he will dedicate himself to the task of prepar-
ing a holy people and a holy city for this God who
has been revealed to him as a thrlce-holy God.
If he Is a Jeremiah, he will not accept the view
that the traditional religion of Jerusalem Is ade-
quate for the crisis of the times. He will Insist
that true religion must be Inwardly experienced;
that the law of God must be written in the heart.

THE WAY OF VISION 57

and that the life of a man must be the living fruit
of his faith. He will cry out against the idea
that the moral wounds and spiritual sores of the
daughter of Jerusalem can be healed with easy
salves and cheap panaceas.

The supreme example of this refusal to go
along the easy line of contemporary religion is
that of One who was more than a prophet. His
people prided themselves on being the chosen
people of the Lord. The scribal leaders had suc-
ceeded in drawing up a complete and perfect cata-
logue of religious performances. They supplied
minute directions for one's religious duty in every
detail, real or imaginary, of daily life, and the
world has never seen a more elaborate form of
religion than this of the Pharisees. But Christ
refused to follow the path of custom; he could
not and he would not do the things which the
scribes prescribed. He broke a new path for the
soul, and called men away from legalism and the
dead routine of " performances " to a life of in-
dividual faith and service, which Involves suffer-
ing and self-sacrifice, but which brings the soul
into personal relation with the living God.

St. Paul, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a rabbini-
cal scholar of the first rank, a man rising stage
by stage to fame along the path marked out by the

58 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

traditions of his people, came back from his event-
ful journey to Damascus to take up the work of a
path-breaker and to set himself like a flint against
the old-time religion In which he was born and
reared. Luther, a devout monk, an ambassador
to the papal court, a professor of scholastic the-
ology, discovered that he could not find peace
to his soul along the path of the prevailing tra-
ditional religion, and he swung, with all the fer-
vor of his powerful nature, into a fresh track
which has blessed all ages since. These are some
of the supreme leaders, but every age has had its
quota of minor prophets, who have heard the call
to leave the old mountain and go forward and
who have fearlessly entered the perilous and un-
tried path of fresh vision. As we look back and
see them In the perspective of their successful mis-
sion to the race, we thank God for their bravery
and their valiant service, but we are apt to forget
the tragedies of their lives.

Nobody can enter a fresh path, or bring a new
vision of the meaning of life, or reinterpret old
truths — In short, nobody can be a prophet — '
without arousing the suspicion and, sooner or
later, the bitter hatred of those who are the keep-
ers and guardians of the existing forms and tradi-
tions, and the path-breaker must expect to see his

THE WAY OF VISION 59

old friends misunderstand him, turn against him,
and reproach him. He must endure the hard ex-
perience of being called a destroyer of the very-
things he is giving his life to build. Christ is, for
example, hurried to the cross as a blasphemer,
and each prophet, in his degree, has had to hear
himself charged with being the very opposite of
what he really is in heart and life. To be a
prophet at all he must be a sensitive soul, and yet
he must live and work in a pitiless rain of mis-
understanding and attack. Still more tragic, per-
haps, is the necessity which the prophet is under
of doing his hard tasks without living to see the
triumphant results. He is, naturally, ahead of his
time — a path-breaker — and his contemporaries
are always slow to discover and to realize what
he is doing. Even those who love him and appre-
ciate him only half see his true purpose, and thus
he feels alone and solitary, though he may be in
the thick of the throng. It is only when he is
long dead and the mists have cleared away that he
is called a prophet and comes to his true place.
While he lived he was sure of only one Friend
who completely understood him and approved of
his course, and that was his invisible and heavenly
Friend. But in spite of the tragedy and the pain
and the hard road, the prophet, " seeing him who

6o SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

is invisible," prefers to all other paths, however
easy and popular, the path of his vision and call.

Ill

A LONG DISTANCE CALL

Just when life seems peculiarly crowded with
items of complexity and importance, the telephone
rings a determined, significant kind of ring. This
is evidently no ordinary passing-the-time-of-day
affair. I interrupt my weighty concerns and take
up the receiver with expectation. I say " Hello ! "
but there is no answer, no human recognition.
The wire hums and buzzes, instruments click far
away, plugs are pulled out and pushed in. Little
tiny scraps of remote, inane, unintelligible conver-
sation between unknown mortals furnish the only
evidence I get that there is any human purpose
going forward in this strange world inside the
telephone system where I can see nothing happen-
ing.

Suddenly a voice which is evidently hunting for

me breaks in: "Is this Mr. ?" "Yes."

" Hold the wire, please." I am led on with in-
creasing Interest and confidence. Somebody some-
where miles away in this invisible world of elec-

THE WAY OF VISION 6i

trical connections Is seeking for me. I forget the
multitudinous problems that were besieging me
when the telephone first rang, and I listen with
suppressed breath and strained muscles. All I
get, however, Is an Immense confusion. There Is
no coherence or order to anything that reaches
me. Faint and far away In some still remoter
center than at first I hear clicks and buzzes, vague
unmeaning noises, and the dull thud of shifting
plugs that connect the lines. Once more a kindly
voice breaks in on the confusion, a voice seeking
after me from some distant city: *' Is this Mr.

?" ''Yes." "Walt a minute."

I do wait a minute as patiently as I can. I
dimly feel that we are plunging out Into yet re-
moter space, and that I am being connected up
with the person who all the time has been seeking
me. A low hum of the far-away wire is all I
get to repay me for the long wait. I grow impa-
tient. I shout " Hello ! " " Is anybody there? "
" Do you want me? " Not a word comes back,
only endless, empty murmurs of people who have
found one another and are talking so far off that
the sense is lost In the mere broth of sounds.
This dull world inside the telephone seems to be
a mad world of noise and confusion but no sub-
stance, no real correspondence. I am on the

62 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

verge of giving the whole business up and of re-
turning to my Interrupted tasks, which at least
were rational.

Suddenly a voice breaks In, this time a voice I
know and recognize. The person who had been
seeking me all the time, across these spaces and
over this network of Interlaced wires, calls me by
name, speaks words of Insight and intelligence,
and gives me a message which moves me deeply
and raises the whole tone of my spirit. When
finally I ** hang up " and return to the things in
hand, I have renewed my strength and can work
with clearer head and faster pace. The pause has
been like a pause in a piece of music. It has been
full of significance, and it has helped toward a
higher level.

Something like this telephone experience hap-
pens in another and very different sphere — a
sphere where there are no wires. In the hush and
silence, when the conditions are right for It, it
often seems as though some one were trying to
communicate with us, seeking for actual corre-
spondence with us. We turn from the din and
turmoil of busy efforts and listen for the voice.
We listen Intently and we hear^ — our own heart
beating. We feel the strain of our muscles across
the chest. We push back a little deeper and try

THE WAY OF VISION 63

again. We feel the tension of the skin over the
forehead and we note that we are pulling the
eyeballs up and inward for more concentrated
meditation. All the muscles of the scalp are
drawn and we notice them perhaps for the first
time. Strange little bits of thought flit across the
threshold of the mind. We catch glimpses of
dim ideas knocking at the windows for admission
to the inner domain where we live. Then, all
of a sudden, we succeed in pushing further back.
We forget our strained muscles and are uncon-
scious of the corporeal bulk of ourselves. We
get in past the flitting thoughts and the proces-
sion of ideas contending for entrance. The track
seems open for the Someone who is seeking us
no less certainly than we are seeking him. If we
do not hear our name called, and do not hear
distinctly a message in well-known words, we do
at least feel that we have found a real Presence
and have received fresh vital energy from the
creative center of life itself, so that we come back
to action, after our pause, restored, refreshed,
and " charged " with new force to live by.

Some time ago a long distance call came to my
telephone and I went through all the stages of
waiting and of confusion and finally heard the
clear voice calling me, but I could not get any

64 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

answer back. I heard perfectly across the five
hundred intervening miles, but my correspondent
never got a single clear word from, me. We
found that something was wrong with our trans-
mitter. The connection was good, the line was
pervious, the seeking voice was at the other end,
but I did not succeed in transmitting what ought
to have been said. Here is where most of us fail
in this other sphere — this inner wireless sphere
• — we are poor transmitters. We make the con-
nection, we receive the gift of grace, we are
flooded with the incomes of life and power and
we freely take, but we do not give. We absorb
and accumulate what we can, but we transmit
little of all that comes to us. Our radius of out-
giving influence is far too small. We need, on
the one hand, to Hsten deeper, to get further in
beyond the tensions and the noises, but on the
other hand we need to be more radio-active, bet-
ter transmitters of the grace of God.

CHAPTER V
THE WAY OF PERSONALITY

I

ANOTHER KIND OF HERO

A GENERATION ago almost everybody read, at
least once, Carlyle's great book on heroes. He
gave us the hero as prophet, as priest, as poet, as
king, and he made us realize that these heroes
have been the real makers of human society. I
should like to add a chapter on another kind of
hero, who has, perhaps, not done much to build
cities and states and church systems, but who has,
almost more than anybody else, shown us the
spiritual value of endurance — • I mean the hero as
invalid.

It is the hardest kind of heroism there is to
achieve. Most of us know some man — too often
it is oneself — -who is a very fair Christian when
he Is In normal health and absorbed in interesting
work, who carries a smooth forehead and easily
drops into a good-natured smile, but who becomes
*' blue " and irritable and a storm center In the

65

66 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

family weather as soon as the bodily apparatus
IS thrown out of gear. Most of us have had a
taste of humiliation as we have witnessed our
own defeat In the presence of some thorn In the
flesh, which stubbornly pricked us, even though
we prayed to have It removed and urged the doc-
tor to hurry up and remove It.

What a hero, then, must he be, who, with a
weak and broken body, a prey to pain and doomed
to die daily, learns how to live In calm faith that
God Is good and makes his life a center of cheer
and sunshine ! The heroism of the battlefield and
the man-of-war looks cheap and thin compared
with this. We could all rally to meet some glo-
rious moment when a trusted leader shouted to us,
*' Your country expects you to do your duty!"
But to drag on through days and nights, through
weeks and months, through recurring birthdays,
with vital energy low, with sluggish appetite, with
none of that ground-swell of superfluous vigor
which makes healthy life so good, and still to
prove that life Is good and to radiate joy and
triumph — that Is the very flower and perfume of
heroism. If we are making up a bead-roll of
heroes, let us put at the top the names of those
quiet friends of ours who have played the man
or revealed the woman through hard periods of

THE WAY OF PERSONALITY 67

invalidism and have exhibited to us the fine glory
of a courageous spirit.

One of the hardest and most difficult features
to bear is the inability to work at one's former
pace and with the old-time constructive power.
The prayer of the Psalmist that his work, the con-
tribution of his life, might be preserved is very
touching: " Establish thou the work of our hands
upon us, yea, the work of our hands establish
thou it.'' What can be more tragic than the cry
of Othello : " My occupation is gone !" So long
as the hand keeps its cunning and the mind re-
mains clear and creative, one can stand physical
handicap and pain, but when the working power
of mind or body Is threatened, then the test of
faith and heroism indeed arrives.

A man whose life meant much to mc and whose
intimacy was very precious to mc made me sec
many years ago how wonderfully this test could
be met. He was a great teacher, the head of a
distinguished boys' school. He was experiencing
the full measure of success, and his influence over
his boys was extraordinary. He realized, as his
work went on, that his hearing was becoming dull
and was steadily failing. He went to New York
and consulted a famous specialist. After making
a careful examination the specialist said, with per-

68 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

feet frankness : " Your case Is hopeless. Nothing
can be done to check the disaster. You are hard
of hearing already, but in a very short time you
will have no hearing at all." Without a quaver
the teacher said: " Don't you think, doctor, that
I shall hear Gabriel's trumpet when It blows ! '*
He went back to his school, learned to read lips,
reorganized his life, accepted without a murmur
his loss of a major sense, and finished his splendid
career of work In an undefeated spirit and with a
grace and joy which were envied by many persons
in possession of all their powers.

All my readers will think of some " star
player " In this hard game of patience and endu-
rance, and will have watched with awe and rever-
ence the glorious fight of some of those unre-
corded heroes who won but got no valor medal.
The only person who ranks higher In the scale
of heroism than the hero as Invalid Is possibly the
person who patiently, lovingly nurses and cares
for some Invalid through years of decline and suf-
fering. Generally, though not always. It Is a
woman. Not seldom she Is called upon to con-
secrate her life to the task, and often she gives
what Is much more precious than life Itself. We
build no monuments to daughters who unmur-
muringly forego the joy of married life, who re-

THE WAY OF PERSONALITY 69

fuse the suit of love in order to be free to ease
the closing years of father or mother, grown help-
less; but where is there higher consecration or
finer heroism? Men sometimes complain that the
days of chivalry and heroism are past. On the
contrary, they are more truly dawning. As Chris-
tianity ripens love grows richer and deeper, and
where love appears heroism is always close at
hand. Our best heroes are mothers and wives
and daughters, fathers and husbands and sons.

II

THE BETTER POSSESSION

During one of the intense persecutions by which
an early Roman emperor harried the Christians
of the first century, some unknown writer (Har-
nack thinks it w^as a woman) wrote an extraordi-
nary little book to hearten those who were under-
going the trial of their faith. I mean, of course,
the Epistle to the Hebrews. It is marked by rare
genius and by undoubted inspiration. It is full of
vital messages and it contains passages of great
power. Just before the most loved section of the
little book — the account of the faith-heroes —
the author, in a passage open to a variety of

70 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

translations, refers to the fact that those to whom
he is writing have suffered, and have suffered
joyfully, the spoiling of their possessions, " know-
ing," he says, "that you have your own selves for
a better possession " — you yourselves are a bet-
ter possession than any of those goods which you
have lost for your faith.

I wonder if the readers fully realized the truth,
or if we should to-day realize it had we suffered
a similar stripping. We are very slow to take
account of that type of stock. We are very keen
about our own assets, but we often fail to prize
this supreme ownership, the possession of our-
selves. There is a story, both sad and amusing,
of an Insane man who was seen wildly rushing
about the house, from room to room, looking in
cupboards and clothes-presses, craw^ling under
beds, obviously searching for something. When
questioned as to what he was so frantically look-
ing for, he replied, " I am trying to find my
self! " It is not as mad as it seems. I am not
sure but that we who are not trying to find our-
selves are after all more crazy still.

Old Burton, who wrote The Anatomy of Mel-
ancholy, well said :

" Men look to their tools ; a painter will wash his
pencils; a smith will look to his hammer, anvil, and

THE WAY OF PERSONALITY 71

forge; a husbandman will mend his plow-irons and grind
his hatchet, if it be dull; a musician will string and un-
string his lute; only scholars neglect that instrument,
their brains and spirits I mean, which they daily use."

Not scholars only, but all classes and conditions
of men are guilty of this strange insanity. If the
Duke of Westminster should offer to transfer to
us his estates, we would rush with all conceivable
speed to acquire our new potential possessions.
We would go as with wings of an aeroplane to get
the transaction accomplished before anything
could occur to keep us from entering into our
fortune. But here we are already within reach
of a vastly better possession, of which we are
strangely negligent. If it came to a choice be-
tween himself and his outward possessions, this
duke who owns so much would not hesitate a min-
ute which to prefer. If In a crisis of illness he
could save himself by surrender of his goods, they
would Instantly go. " Give me health and a day,"
Emerson said, " and I will make the pomp of
emperors ridiculous."

What w^e would do In a crisis we often fail to
do when no crisis confronts us, and It Is a fact
that too often we miss and even squander that
better possession, ourselves. The best way to win
it and enjoy It Is to cultivate those Inner experl-

72 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

ences and endowments which make us independent
of external fortune. All Christ's beatitudes at-
tach to some inherent quality of life itself. The
meek, the merciful, the pure, are " happy," not
because the external world conforms to their
wishes, but because they have resources of life
within themselves and have entered upon a way
of life which continually opens out into more life
and richer life. They have found a kind of
Canaan that " comes " in continuous instalments.
One of the simplest ways to heighten the total
value of life is to form a habit of appreciating
the world we have here and now. It presents
occasional inconveniences, no doubt, but think of
the amazing donations which come to us : the tilt-
ing of the earth's axis twenty-three and a half de-
grees to the ecliptic by which contrivance we have
our seasons; the fact that the proportion of earth
and water is just right to give us a fine balance of
rain and sunshine; the extraordinary way in which
the entire universe submits to our mathematics
so that every movement of matter and every vi-
bration of ether conforms to laws which we for-
mulate; the accumulation and storage of fuel and
motor power, with the prospect of even greater
resources of energy to be had from the unoc-
cupied space surrounding the earth. Then, again.

THE WAY OF PERSONALITY 73

It cannot be a matter of unconcern that there is
such a wealth of beauty lavished upon us every-
where, waiting for us to enjoy It. There Is here
a strange fit between the outer and the Inner.
The more one draws upon the beauty of the world
and enjoys It, so much the more does he Increase
his capacity to discover and enjoy beauty. Coal
and oil may become exhausted, but beauty Is In-
exhaustible. The only trouble is that we are so
limited In our range of appreciation of it. We
turn to cheaper values and miss so much of this
free gift of loveliness.

Greater still should be our resources of love
and friendship. Nothing could be stranger or
more wonderful than that In a world where strug-
gle for existence Is the law this other trait should
have emerged. It is easy to explain selfishness;
love Is the mystery. Love forgets itself; it scorns
double-entry bookkeeping; It gives, it bestows, it
shares. It sacrifices without asking whether any-
thing Is coming back. And It turns out to be a
fact that nothing else so enhances and Increases
the value of this " better possession which is our-
selves."

Even more wonderful, If that is possible. Is the
way we are formed and contrived to have In-
tercourse with the Eternal. With all our ma-

74 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

terlal furnishings we strangely open out into the
Infinite and partake of a spiritual nature. God
has set eternity in our hearts. We cannot win this
better possession nor hold it permanently unless
we exercise these spiritual capacities, which ex-
pand our being and add the richest qualities of
life. " Thou hast made us for thyself," Augus-
tine acknowledged in his great prayer at the open-
ing of the Confessions and " we are restless until
we find thee as our true rest." It is as true now
as in the fourth century. Barns and houses, lands
and stocks, mortgages and bonds, do not consti-
tute life unless one learns how to win and possess
his soul and to keep that best of all possessions
• — himself.

Ill

THE GREATEST RIVALRIES OF LIFE

" After experience had taught me that all
things which are encountered in human life are
vain and futile. ... I at length determined to
Inquire If there was anything which was a true
good." Those are the words of a great philoso-
pher who says that he found himself " led by the
hand up to the highest blessedness."

THE WAY OF PERSONALITY 75

Not everybody finds the choice of ends so easy
as Spinoza did; not all of us are carried along
Into sustained and unmistakable blessedness. Life
Is full of rivalries which tend to divide our In-
terest and to dissipate our attention. We wake
up, perhaps, with surprise to discover that we are
being carried, by the hand or by the hair, straight
away from " the highest blessedness." Not sel-
dom the sternest tragedies of human life are oc-
casioned by success. Failure overtaking one In
his aim will often shake him awake and make him
see that he was pursuing an end In sharp rivalry
with his highest good. But success often dulls the
vision for other issues and gives one the specious
confidence that he Is on the right track and " all's
well."

Christ has a vivid parable which touches upon
the rivalries of life. It Is the story of a great
feast to which many guests are Invited. When
the critical moment for the dinner comes the other
rivalries begin to operate. One man, attracted
by his possessions, " begs off," to use the graphic
phrase of the original. Another, occupied with
the complex interests of business and busy with
the affairs of trade, prays to be excused. A third
Is immersed In the joys and responsibilities of
married life and he abruptly dispatches his "re-

76 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

grets." It was not that they were unconcerned
about the sumptuous feast, but that they were
carried along by rival interests.

The feast in this parable plainly stands for the
" true good," the " highest blessedness " of life.
It symbolizes the goal and crown of life, the full
realization of our best human possibilities, the
attainment of that for which we were made as-
piring beings. The invitation is a mark of amaz-
ing grace and the recipient of it has the clearest
evidence that the feast would satisfy him. But
there are the other things with their rival at-
tractions ! Possessions and business and domestic
life pull us in a contrary direction. We send our
cards of regret and beg off from the great feast.

The real mistake lies in treating these things as
rivals. If we only knew it, an affirmative response
to the great invitation of life would prepare us
for all the other things and would heighten the
value of all we own, of all we do, and of all we
love. Salvation is not some remote and ghostly
thing that has to do with another world. It Is
the Infusion of new life and power into all the
concerns and affairs of this present world where
we are. It means, as Christ said, receiving " a
hundredfold now in this time, houses and breth-
ren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and

THE WAY OF PERSONALITY 77

lands, with persecutions ; and in the world to come
eternal life."

Nothing could be a more mistaken way than
to regard human love as a rival to the highest of
all relations, the love of the soul for God. One
of the medieval saints said : " God brooks no
rival " ; but that phrase shows that the saint was
caught napping, and in any case did not quite un-
derstand what love is. The way up to the highest
love is not to be found by turning away from
those experiences which give us training and
preparation for the highest; but rather it is found
in and through the experience of loving some per-
son who, however imperfectly, Is a revelation of
the beauty and divineness of love. Not by some
sheer leap from the earth does the soul arrive at
its height of blessedness, but by steps and stages,
by processes which bring illumination and richness
of life. The man who has married a wife will do
well to say when he answers the great invitation :
" I have just married a wife and therefore I am
peculiarly glad to come to thy feast, since fellow-
ship with thee will make my love more real and
true as that in turn will enable me to rise to a
more genuine appreciation of thy love."

The same is true of houses and lands, of busi-
ness and trade. There is no necessary rivalry

78 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

here. Religion does not rob us of earthly inter-
ests, it does not strip us of the good things of this
world. It only corrects our perspective and en-
ables us to see the true scale of values. The triv-
ial and fragmentary things of the world no longer
absorb us. We refuse now to allow them to own
us and drive us, or drag us. We see things stead-
ily and we see them whole. We discover through
our higher contacts and inspirations how to flood
light back upon our occupations and upon the
things we own, and how to make these subordi-
nate things minister to the higher functions and
attitudes of life. We get not some other world,
but this world here and now transmuted and
raised a httle nearer to the ideal and perfect
world of our hopes and dreams. We get it back
item for item increased a hundredfold, raised to
a higher spiritual level. The wise owner of prop-
erty and the intelligent man of affairs will not beg
off when the great invitation comes to him. He
will say: " I have just come into possession of a
piece of land, I have bought five yoke of oxen,
and therefore I want to come to thy divine feast
so that I may learn how to turn all I possess into
the channels of real service and to make these
things which thou hast given me help me find the
way to the highest joy and blessedness of Hfe."

CHAPTER VI
AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION

I

THE CHURCH OF THE LIVING GOD

We have all been asking, '' What Is the matter
with the Church? Why is it so weak and inef-
fective? Why does it exercise such a feeble in-
fluence in the world to-day? Why do men care
so little for its message and its mission? " There
are no doubt many answers to these questions, but
one answer concerns us here. It is this : We who
compose the Church do not sufficiently realize
that God is a living God and that the Church is
intended to be the living body through which he
works in the world and through which he reveals
himself. We think of him as far away In space
and remote In time, a God who created once and
who worked wonders In ancient times long past,
but we do not, as we should, vividly think of him
as a living reahty, as near to us as the air Is to
the flying bird or the water to the swimming fish.

79

8o SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

We suppose that the Church Is made up of just
people, and Is a human convenience for getting
things done In the world. We do not see as wc
should that It is meant to be both divine and hu-
man and that it never Is properly a Church unless
God lives in It, reveals himself by means of it and
works his spiritual work in the world through it.

This truth of the real Presence breaks through
many of Christ's great sayings and was one of
the most evident features of the experience of the
early Church. "Wherever in all the world two or
three shall gather in my name there am I in the
midst of them.'' "Lo, I am with you always, even
unto the end of the world." " Wherever there is
one alone," according to the newly found " say-
ing " of Jesus, " I am with him. Raise the stone
and there thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and
there am I."

Not once alone was the early Church invaded
by a life and power from beyond itself as at
Pentecost. The consciousness which character-
ized this " upper room " experience was repeated
In some degree wherever a Church of the living
God came into existence, as " a tiny island in a sea
of surrounding paganism." To belong to the
Church meant to St. Paul to be " joined to the
Lord in one spirit," while the Church itself in his

AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION 8i

great phrase is the body of Christ and each indi-
vidual a member in particular of that body.

What a difference it would make if we could
rise to the height of St. Paul's expectation and
be actually " builded together for an habitation
of God through the Spirit! " We try plenty of
other expedients. We popularize our message;
we take up fads; we adjust as far as we can to
the tendencies of the time; but only one thing
really works after all and that is having the
Church become the organ of the living God, and
having it " charged " with what Paul so often
calls the power of God — *^ the power that
worketh in us."

I saw a car wheel recently that had been run-
ning many miles with the brake clamped tight
against it. It was white hot and it glowed with
heat and light until it seemed almost transparent
In Its extraordinary luminosity. Those Christians
in the upper room at Pentecost were baptized
with fire so that the whole personality of each of
them was glowing with heat and light, for the fire
had gone all through them. They suddenly be-
came conscious that their divine Leader who was
no longer visible with them had become an in-
visible presence and a living power working
through them. It Is no wonder that all Jerusalem

82 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

and its multitudinous sojourners were at once
awakened to the fact that something novel had
happened.

Our controversies which have divided us have
been controversies about things out at the peri-
phery, not about realities at the heart and center.
We disagree about baptism, and we are at vari-
ance over problems of organization, ministry, and
ordination, but the thing that really matters is
the depth of conviction, consciousness of God,
certainty of communion and fellowship with the
Spirit. These experiences unite and never divide.

There is after all, In spite of all our gaps and
chasms, only one Church. It Is the Church of
the living God. We are named with many names.
We bear the sign of a particular denomination,
but If we belong truly to the Church, then we
belong to the great Church of the living God.
It Is built upon the foundation of the apostles
and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief
cornerstone, In whom the building, fitly framed to-
gether, grows Into an holy temple In the Lord.
This is " the blessed community," the living, ex-
panding fellowship of vital faith, and It has the
promise of the future, whether conferences on
" faith and order " succeed or not, because It Is
the Church of the living God.

AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION 83

II

THE NURSERY OF SPIRITUAL LIFE

We are coming more and more to realize that
religion attaches to the simple, elemental aspects
of our human life. We shall not look for it In a
few rare, exalted, and so-called " sacred " as-
pects of life, separated off from the rest of life
and raised to a place apart. Religion to be real
and vital must be rooted in life itself and It must
express itself through the whole life. It should
begin, where all effective education must begin. In
the home, which should be the nursery of spiritual
life.

The Christian home Is the highest product of
civilization; In fact there Is nothing that can be
called civilization where the home Is absent. The
savage Is on his way out of savagery as soon as
he can create a home and make family life at all
sacred. The real horror of the " slums " In our
great cities is that there are no homes there, but
human beings crowded indiscriminately Into one
room. It is the real trouble with the " poor
whites " whether In the South or In the North that
they have failed to preserve the home as a sacred
center of life.

84 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

One of the first services of the foreign mis-
sionary Is to help to establish homes among the
people whom he hopes to Christianize. In short,
the home is the true unit of society. It deter-
mines what the individual shall be; it shapes the
social life; It makes the Church possible; it Is
the basis of the state and nation. A society of
mere Individual units is Inconceivable. Men and
women, each 'for self, and with no holy center for
family life, could never compose either a Church
or a State.

Christianity has created the home as we know
It, and that Is Its highest service to the world, for
the kingdom of heaven would be reaHzed if the
Christian home were universal. The mother's
knee Is still the holiest place in the world; and
the home life determines more than all influences
combined what the destiny of the boy or girl
shall be. The formation of disposition and early
habits of thought and manner as well as the fun-
damental emotions and sentiments do more to
shape and fix the permanent character than do
any other forces in the world.

We may well rejoice In the power of the Sun-
day school, the Christian ministry, the secular
school, the college, the university; but all together
they do not measure up to the power of the homes

AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION 85

which are silently, gradually determining the fu-
ture lives of those who will compose the Sunday
school, the Church, the school, and the college.

The woman who is successful in making a true
home, where peace and love dwell. In which the
children whom God gives her feel the sacredness
and holy meaning of life, where her husband re-
news his strength for the struggles and activities
of his life, and In which all unite to promote the
happiness and highest welfare of each other —
that woman has won the best crown there is In
this life, and she has served the world In a very
high degree. The union of man and woman for
the creation of a home breathing an atmosphere
of love is Christ's best parable of the highest pos-
sible spiritual union where the soul Is the bride
and he is the Eternal Bridegroom, and they are
one.

It seems strange that these vital matters are so
little emphasized or regarded. Few things in fact
are more ominous than the signs of the disinte-
gration of the home as a nursery of spiritual life.
We can, perhaps, weather catastrophes which may
break down many of our ancient customs and even
obliterate some of the institutions which now
seem essential to civilization; but the home is a
fundamental necessity for true spiritual nurture

86 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

and culture, and if it does not perform its func-
tion the world will drift on toward unspeakable
moral disasters.

Ill

THE DEMOCRACY WE AIM AT

Democracy was in an earlier period only a
political aim; it has now become a deep religious
issue. It must be discussed not only in caucuses
and conventions, but in churches as well. For a
century and a quarter " democracy " has been a
great human battle word, and battle words never
have very exact definitions. It has all the time
been charged with explosive forces, and it has
produced a kind of magic spell on men's minds
during this long transitional period. But the
word democracy has, throughout this time, re-
mained fluid and ill-defined — sometimes express-
ing the loftiest aspirations and sometimes serv-
ing the coarse demagogue in his pursuit of selfish
ends.

The goal or aim of the early struggle after
democracy was the overthrow of human inequali-
ties. Men were thought of in terms of individual
.units, and the units were declared to be intrinsi-

AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION 87

cally equal. The contention was made that they
all had, or ought to have, the same rights and
privileges. This equality-note has, too, domi-
nated the social and economic struggles of the last
seventy-five years. The focus has been centered
upon rights and privileges. Men have been
thought of, all along, as individual units, and the
goal has been conceived in political and economic
terms. Democracy is still supposed, in many
quarters, to be an organization of society in which
the units have equal political rights. Much of the
talk concerning democracy is still in terms of
privileges. It is a striving to secure opportunities
and chances. The aim is the attainment of a
social order In which guarantee Is given to every
individual that he shall have his full economic
and political rights.

I would not, in the least, belittle the importance
of these claims, or underestimate the human gains
which have been made thus far In the direction of
greater equality and larger freedom. But these
achievements, however valuable, are not enough.
They can only form the base from which to start
the drive for a more genuine and adequate type
of democracy. At its best this scheme of
" equahty " Is abstract and superficial. Nobody
win ever be satisfied with an achievement of flat

88 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

equality. Persons can never be reduced to homo-
geneous units. There are individual differences
woven into the very fiber of human life, and no
type of democracy can ever satisfy men like us
until it gets beyond this artificial scheme and
learns to deal with the problem in more adequate
fashion.

A genuinely Christian democracy such as the
rehgious soul is after can not be conceived in eco-
nomic terms, nor can it be content with social
units of equality or sameness. We want a democ-
racy that is vitally and spiritually conceived,
which recognizes and safeguards the irreducible
uniqueness of every member of the social whole.
This means that we can not deal with personal
life in terms of external behavior. We can not
think of society as an aggregation of units pos-
sessing individual rights and privileges. We shall
no longer be satisfied to regard persons as beings
possessing utilitarian value or made for economic
uses. We shall forever transcend the instru-
mental idea. We shall begin rather with the in-
alienable fact of spiritual worth as the central
feature of the personal life. This would mean
that every person, however humble or limited in
scope or range, has divine possibihties to be real-
ized; is not a '* thing" to be used and exploited,

AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION 89

but a spiritual creation to be expanded until its
true nature is revealed. The democracy I want
will treat every human person as a unique, sacred,
and indispensable member of a spiritual whole, a
whole which remains imperfect if even one of its
** little ones " is missing; and its fundamental
axiom will be the liberation and realization of the
Inner life which is potential in every member of
the human race.

On the economic and equality level we never
reach the true conception of personal life. Men
are thought of as units having desires, needs, and
wants to be satisfied. We are, on this basis, aim-
ing to achieve a condition in which the desires,
wants, and needs are well met, in which each in-
dividual contributes his share of supplies to the
common stock of economic values, and receives in
turn his equitable amount. I am dealing, on the
other hand, with a way of life which begins and
ends, not with a material value-concept at all, but
rather with a central faith in the intrinsic worth
and infinite spiritual possibilities of every person
In the social organism — a democracy of spiritual
agents.

It Is true, no doubt, as Shylock said, that we
all have " eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses,
affections, passions," are " subject to diseases,"

90 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

and " warmed and cooled by summer and winter."
" If you prick us we bleed, if you tickle us we
laugh, if you poison us we die," and so on. We
do surely have wants and needs. We must con-
sider values. We must have food and clothes
and houses. We must have some fair share of
the earth and Its privileges. But that Is only the
basement and foundation of real living, and we
want a democracy that Is supremely concerned
with the development of personality and with the
spiritual organization of society. We shall not
make our estimates of persons on a basis of their
uses, or on the ground of their behavior as animal
beings; we shall live and work, if we are Christ's
disciples. In the faith that man Is essentially a
spiritual being. In a world which Is essentially
spiritual, and that we are committed to the task
of awakening a like faith In others and of helping
realize an organic solidarity of persons who prac-
tice this faith. Our rule of life would be some-
thing like the following: to act everywhere and
always as though we knew that we are members
of a spiritual community, each one possessed of
Infinite worth, of Irreducible uniqueness, and indis-
pensable to the spiritual unity of the whole — a
community that Is being continually enlarged by
the faith and action of those who now compose

AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION 91

it, and so In some measure being formed by our
human effort to achieve a divine ideal.

The most important service we can render our
fellow men is to awaken in them a real faith in
their own spiritual nature and in their own po-
tential energies, and to set them to the task of
building the ideal democracy in which personality
Is treated as sacred and held safe from viola-
tion, infringement, or exploitation, and, more than
that, in which we altogether respect the worth and
the divine hopes inherent In our being as men.

IV

THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY

There are few questions more difficult to an-
swer than the question. What is Christianity?
Every attempt to answer It reveals the peculiar
focus of interest In the mind of the writer, but it
leaves the main question still asking for a new
answer.

" Always it asketh, asketh," and each answer,
to say the least, is Inadequate. Harnack, Loisy,
and Tolstoy have given three characteristic an-
swers to the great question. Their books are
touched with genius and will long continue to be

92 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

read, but, like the other books, they, too, reveal
the writers rather than solve the central problem.

One of the greatest difficulties about the whole
matter Is the difficulty of deciding where to look
for the essential traits of Christianity. Are they
to be found in the teaching of Jesus? Are they
revealed in the message of St. Paul? Are they
embodied In the Messianic hope? Are they ex-
hibited in the primitive apostolic Church? Are
they set forth In the great creeds of orthodoxy?
Are they expressed In the imperial authoritative
Church? Are they to be discovered In the Protest-
antism of the modern world? This catalogue
of preliminary questions shows how complicated
the subject really Is. To start In on any one of
these lines would be of necessity to arrive at a
partial and one-sided answer.

Nowhere can we find pure and unalloyed Chris-
tianity; always we have It mixed and combined
with something else, more or less foreign to It.
The creeds contain a larger element of Greek
philosophy than of the pure original gospel. The
Messianic hope is far more Jewish than It Is
" Christian." The Imperial authoritative Church
Is Christianity Interpreted through the Roman
genius for organization and merged and fused
with the age-long faiths and customs of pagan

AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION 93

peoples. Protestantism Is an amazingly complex
blend of Ideas and ideals and everywhere Inter-
woven with the long processes of history. Even
this did not drop from the sky ready-made ! Nor
did St. Paul's message flash In upon him with the
Damascus vision, as a pure heaven-presented
truth. It proves to be a very difficult task to find
one's way back to the pure, unalloyed teaching of
Jesus, and, strangely enough, the moment one en-
deavors to constitute this by Itself " Christianity,"
and undertakes to turn It into a set of commands
and to make It a " new law," he ends with a dry
legaHsm and not a vital, universal Christianity.

What, then, is Christianity? In answering this
question we can not confine ourselves to the teach-
ing and the work of Jesus. Important as it is to
go " back to Jesus " that is not enough. We can
not fully comprehend the meaning of Christianity
until we take into account the fact that the in-
visible, resurrected Christ is the continuation
through the ages of the same revelation begun in
the life and teaching of Jesus. Galilee and Judea
mark only one stage of the gospel, which is, in its
fullness, an eternal gospel. The Christian reve-
lation which came to light first In one Life — its
master interpretation and incarnation — has since
been going forward in a continuous and unbroken

94 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

manifestation of Christ through many lives and
through many groups and through the spiritual
achievements of all those who have lived by him.
Christianity is, thus, the revelation of God
through personal life — God humanly revealed.
St. Paul and the writer of the Fourth Gospel were
the first to reach this profound insight into its ful-
ler meaning, though it is plainly suggested in some
of the sayings of Jesus and in the pentecostal ex-
periences of the first Christians. It is the very
heart of the Pauline and the Johannine Christian-
ity. Important as is the backward look to Jesus
in both these writers, the central emphasis is un-
mistakably upon the inward experience of the in-
visible, spiritual Christ. This is the expectation
in the Fourth Gospel: Greater things than these
shall yc do when the Spirit comes upon you. This
is the mystery, the secret of the gospel, St. Paul
says, Christ In you.

If this Is the right clew, Christianity Is not a
new law, nor an Institution, nor a creed, nor a
body of doctrine, nor a millennial hope. It Is a
type of life, It is a way of living. The most
essential thing about It is the fact of the Incursion
of God Into human life, the revelation of the
eternal In the midst of time, the new discovery
which It brought of God's nature and character.

AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION 95

We nowhere else come so close to the essential
truth of Christianity as we do in the life and
experience of Jesus. The life at every point
floods over and transcends the teaching. He is
the most complete and adequate exhibition of
what I have called the incursion of God into hu-
man life, but even so he is the beginning, not the
end, of the revelation of God through human-
ity— the Christ-revelation of God — ^and this
Christ-revelation of God is God, so far as he is
at all adequately known.

Some persons talk as though God were a kind
of composite Being, got by adding up the God of
the natural order, the God of the Old Testament,
and the God as Father about whom Jesus taught.
He is, according to this scheme, in some way a
compound aggregate of infinite power, irresist-
ible justice, and eternal love. Sometimes one
" attribute " is predominant, and sometimes an-
other, while in some mysterious way all the dis-
sonant attributes get " reconciled." This Is
surely boggy ground to build upon.

Christianity is essentially, I should say, a
unique revelation of God. Here for the first
time the race discovers that God identifies him-
self with humanity, is in the stream of it, is suf-
fering with us, is in moral conflict with sin and

96 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

evil, Is conquering through the travail and trag-
edy of finite persons, and is eternally, in mind and
heart and will, a God of triumphing Love. No
texts adequately *' prove " this mighty truth.
We cannot tie it down to " sayings," though there
are '' sayings " which declare it. The life of
Jesus, the supreme decisions through which he
expresses his purpose, the spirit which dominates
him and guides his decisive actions, make the
truth plain that God meant that to him and that
his way of life revealed that kind of God.

Through all the fusions and confusions of his-
tory and through all the vagaries of man's tortu-
ous course since the Church began to be built,
Christ as eternal Spirit has gone on revealing this
truth about God and demonstrating the victorious
power of this way of life. The making of a
kingdom of God in the world, the spread of the
brother-spirit, the expansion of the love-method,
the increase of cooperation, sympathy, and serv-
ice, the continued incursion of the divine into the
life of the human, these are the things now and
always which indicate the vitality and progress of
Christianity, and the uninterrupted revelation of
God.

Always, In every period of history, the essen-
tial truth of Christianity must be revealed and

AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION 97

expressed in and through a medium not altogether
adapted to it. It is always living and working
in a world more or less alien to it. It has at any
stage only partially realized its ideal, and only
achieved in a fragmentary way the goal toward
which it is moving. It means endless conquest
and ever fresh winning of unwon victories. It
must be for us all a vision and a venture, it must
be a thing of faith and forecast. At the same
time it is, in a very real sense, experience and
achievement. God has entered into humanity.
Love has revealed its redeeming power. Grace
is as much a reality as mountains are. The
kingdom of God though not all in sight yet is, I
believe, as sure as gravitation. The invisible,
eternal Christ, living in the soul of man, reveal-
ing his will in moral and spiritual victories in
personal lives, is, I am convinced, as genuine a
fact as electricity is. But we shall see all that
Christianity means only when the living totality
of the revelation of God through humanity is
complete.

CHAPTER VII

THE NEAR AND THE FAR

I

THINGS PRESENT AND THINGS TO COME

Anaxagoras said twenty-five hundred years
ago that men are always cutting the world In two
with a hatchet. William James, in one of his
living phrases, says with the same import that
everybody dichotomizes the cosmos. It Is so.
We all incline to bisect life Into alternative pos-
sibilities. We split realities Into opposing
halves. We show a kind of fascination for an
" either-or " selection. We are prone to use the
principle of parsimony, and to be content with
one side of a dilemma. History presents a mul-
titude of duallstic pairs from which one was sup-
posed to make his individual selection. There
was the choice between this world and the next
world; the here and the yonder; the flesh and
the spirit; faith and reason; the sacred and the
secular; the outward and the Inward, and many

98

THE NEAR AND THE FAR 99

more similar alternatives. This " either-or "
method always leaves its trail of leanness behind.
It makes life thin and narrow where it might be
rich and broad, for in almost every case it is just
as possible to have a whole as to have a half, to
take both as to select an alternative. St. Paul
found his Corinthians bisecting their spiritual
lives and narrowing their interests to one or two
possibilities. One of them would choose Paul
as his representative of the truth and then see no
value in the interpretation which Apollos had to
give. Another attached himself to Apollos and
missed all the rich contributions of Paul. Some
of the *' saints " of the Church selected Cephas
as the only oracle, and they lost all the breadth
which would have come to them had they been
able to make a synthesis of the opposing aspects.
St. Paul called them from their divided half to a
completed whole. He told them that instead of
" either-or " they could have both. " All things
are yours; whether Paul or Apollos, or Cephas,
or the world, or life, or death, or things present
or things to come, all are yours; and ye are
Christ's and Christ is God's." This is the
method of synthesis. This is the substitution of
wholes for halves, the proffer of both for an
" either-or " alternative.

loo SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

That last pair of alternatives Is an Interesting
one, and many persons make their bisecting choice
of life there. One well-known type of person
focuses on the near, the here and now, the things
present. Those who belong to this class pro-
pose to make hay while the sun shines. They
glory In being practical. They have what doc-
tors call myopia. They see only the near. Their
lenses will not adjust for the remote. They be-
lieve in quick returns and bank upon practical
results. Those of the other type have presby-
opia, or far-sightedness. They are dedicated to
the far-away, the remote, the yonder. They are
pursuing rainbows and distant Ideals. They are
so eager for the millennium that they forget the
problem of their street and of the present day.
Browning has given us a picture of both these
types:

" That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.

That low man goes on adding one to one,

His hundred's soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,

Misses an unit."

THE NEAR AND THE FAR loi

Browning's sympathies are plainly with the
*' high man " who misses the unit, but it is one
more case of unnecessary dichotomy. What we
want Is the discovery of a way to unite Into one
synthesis things present and things to come. We
need to learn how to seize this narrow Isthmus
of a present and to enrich it with the momentous
significance of past and future. Henry Bergson
has been telling us that all rich moments of life
are rich just because they roll up and accumulate
the meaning of the past and because they are
crowded with anticipations of the future. They
are fused with memory and expectation, and one
of these two factors is as important as the other.
If either dies away the present becomes a useless
half, like the divided parts of the child which
Solomon proposed to bisect for the two contend-
ing mothers.

We are at one of those momentous ridges of
time at the present moment. Some are so busy
with the near and immediately practical that they
cannot see the far vision of the world that is to
be built. Others are so Impressed with past
issues that have become paramount, with the
glorious memories of the blessed Monroe Doc-
trine, for instance, that they have no expectant
eyes for the creation of an interrelated and uni-

102 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

fied world. Another group is so concerned with
the social millennium that they discount the les-
sons of the past, the message of history, the wis-
dom of experience, and fly to the useless task of
constructing abstract human paradises and
dreams of a world-kingdom which could exist
only in a realm where men had ceased to be men.
What we want is a synthesis of things present
and things to come, a union of the practical,
tested experience of life and the inspired vision
of the prophet who sees unfolding the possibili-
ties of human life raised to its fuller glory in
Christ, the incarnation of the way of love, which
always has worked, is working now, and always
will work.

II

TWO TYPES OF MINISTRY

Most people like to be told what they already
think. They enjoy hearing their own opinions
and ideas promulgated, and no amens are so
hearty as the ones which greet the reannounce-
ment of views we have already held.

The natural result is that speakers are apt to
give their hearers what they want. They take

THE NEAR AND THE FAR 103

the line of least resistance and say what will
arouse the enthusiasm of the people before them,
and they get their quick reward. They are pop-
ular at once. There is a high tide of emotion
as they proceed to tell what everybody present
already thinks, and they soon find themselves in
great demand.

The main trouble with such an easy ministry
Is that it isn't worth doing. It accomplishes next
to nothing. It merely arouses a pleasurable emo-
tion and leaves lives where they were before.
And yet not quite where they were either, for the
constant repetition of things we already believe
dulls the mind and deadens the will and weakens
rather than strengthens the power of life. It is
an easy ministry both for speakers and hearers,
but it is ominous for them both.

The prophet has a very different task. He
cannot give people what they want. He Is under
an unescapable compulsion to give them what his
soul believes to be true. He cannot take lines
of least resistance; he must work straight up
against the current. He cannot work for quick
effects; he must slowly educate his people and
compel them to see what they have not seen be-
fore. The amens are very slow to come to his
words, and he cannot look for emotional thrills.

104 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

He must risk all that is dear to himself, except
the truth, as he sets himself to his task, and he
Is bound to tread lonely wine-presses before he
can see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied.

Every age has these two types of ministry.
They are both ancient and familiar. There are
always persons who are satisfied to give what Is
wanted, who are glad to cater to popular taste,
who like the quick returns. But there are, too,
always a few souls to be found who volunteer for
the harder task. They forego the amens and
patiently teach men to see farther than they have
seen before. Their first question Is not, What
do people want me to say? but. What Is God's
truth which to-day ought to be heard through
me? and knowing that, they speak. They do
not move their hearers as the other type does;
they do not reach so many, and they miss the
popular rewards — but they are compassed
about by a great cloud of witnesses as they fight
their battles for the truth, and they have their
joy.

But this Is not quite all there Is to say. It Is
not possible to teach the new effectively without
linking it up with the old. The wholly new Is gen-
erally not true. New, fresh truth emerges out
of ancient experience; It does not drop like a

THE NEAR AND THE FAR 105

shooting star from the distant skies. The great
prophets in all ages have lived close to the peo-
ple. They have not had their " ear to the
ground," to use a political phrase, but they have
understood the human heart. They have lived
in the great currents of life. They have heard
the going In the mulberry trees, and have felt
the breaking forth of the dawning light just be-
cause of their double union with men and God.

All sound pedagogy recognizes this principle.
The good teacher knits the new material which
he wishes learned on to the old and familiar.
He takes his student forward by gradual stages,
not by leaps and bounds, and he binds the known
and unknown together by rational synthesis, not
by some strange, foreign, magical glue. The
more we wish to belong to the prophet-class and
to raise our hearers to new and greater levels of
truth and Insight, the more we shall strive to
understand the truth that has already been re-
vealed, to saturate ourselves with It, to fuse and
kindle our lives with those Immense realities by
which men in past ages have lived and conquered.
So, and only so, can we go forward and take
others forward with us to new experiences and
to new discoveries of the light that never was on
sea or land.

io6 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

III

" WE HAVE SEEN HIS STAR "

Every time the Christmas anniversary returns,
the heart renews Its youthful joy In the thrllhng
stories of the nativity. We cannot be too thank-
ful for the inspiration and poetry and imagination
which touch and glorify every aspect of our re-
ligious faith. Some dull and leaden-minded
pedants appear to think that the " real " Christ
Is the person we get when we take, for the con-
struction of our figure, only those facts about
him which can be rationalistically, historically,
and critically verified. We are thus reduced to
a few^ religious Ideas, a little group of " sayings,"
a tiny body of events, which explain none of the
Immense results that followed. The real Christ,
on the contrary, Is this rich, w^onderful, mysteri-
ous, baffling person whose life was vastly greater
even than his deeds or his words, who aroused
the wonder and imagination of all who came in
contact with him, w^ho touched everything with
emotion, and fused religion forever with poetry
and feeling. He, in a very true sense,

"... touches all things common,
Till they rise to touch the spheres."

THE NEAR AND THE FAR 107

Not only over the manger, but over the entire
story of his Hfe, hovers the glory of the star.
It is a life that will not stay down on the dull
earth of mere fact; it always rises into the region
of idealism and beauty. It always transcends the
things of sight and touch. We have a religion
which cannot be confined in a system of doctrine
or a code of ethics; it partakes too intimately of
life for that. It is, like its Founder, a full
rounded reality, rich in inspiration and emotion
and wonder, as well as in intellectual ideas and
truth. When the star wanes and imagination
falls away, and we hold in our thin hands only
the husks of a dead system, the power of religion
is over.

The same thing is true of the cross. Its power
lies in the fullness and richness of the reality. We
do not want to reduce it, but to raise it to its full
meaning and glory as a way of complete life.
The direction of present-day Christianity is cer-
tainly not away from Calvary, but quite the op-
posite. The men who are in these days trying
to deliver our religion from formalism and tra-
dition find not less meaning in the cross than a
former generation did, but vastly more. The
atonement remains at the center, as it has always
done, in vital Christianity. All attempts to re-

io8 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

duce Christianity to a dry and bloodless system
of philosophy, with the appeal of the heart left
out, fail now as they have always failed. It is
a Savior that men, tangled in their sins and their
sorrows, still want — not merely a great thinker
or a great teacher.

The Church has, no doubt, far too much
neglected the idea of the kingdom of God as
Christ expounded it in sermon and parable, and
hosts of prominent Christians do not at all under-
stand what this great, central teaching of the
Master meant then and means now. His trans-
forming revelation of the nature of God has, too,
been missed by multitudes, who still hold Jewish
rather than Christian conceptions of God. But
patient study of the gospel is slowly forcing these
ideas into the thought of men everywhere, and
books abound now which make his teaching clear
and luminous.

What is needed above everything else now is
that we shall not lose any of our vision of Christ
as Savior, and that we shall live our lives in his
presence. It is through the cross that we touch
closest to the Savior-heart, and it is here that we
feel our lives most powerfully moved by the cer-
tainty of his divine nature. Arguments may fail,
but one who looks steadily at this voluntary Suf-

THE NEAR AND THE FAR iO^

ferer, giving himself for us, will cry out, with
one of old, " My Lord and my God."

Nothing short of that will do, I believe, if
Christianity is to remain a saving religion. Good
men have died in all ages; great teachers have
again and again gone to their deaths in behalf
of their truth or out of love for their disciples.
It touches us as we read of their bravery and
their loyalty, but we do not and we cannot build
a world-saving religion upon them. Christ is
different! We feel that in him the veil is lifted
and we are face to face with God. When we
hear with our hearts the words, " In the world
ye shall have tribulation; but fear not, for I have
overcome the world," we feel that we are hearing
the triumph of God in the midst of suffering- —
we are hearing of an eternal triumph. Christ
can not be for us less than God manifested here
in a world of time and space and finiteness, doing
in time w^hat God does in eternity — • suffering
over sin, entering vicariously into the tragedy of
evil, and triumphing while he treads the wine-
press. No one has fathomed the awfulness of
sin, until, in some sense, he feels that his sin
makes God suffer, that It crucifies him afresh.
If Christ is God revealed In time — made visible
and vocal to men — then, through the cross, we

no SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

shall discover that we are not to think of God
henceforth as Sovereign — not a Being yonder,
enjoying his royal splendor. We must think of
him all the time in terms of Christ. He is an
eternal Lover of our hearts. We pierce him
with our sins; we wound him with our wicked-
ness. He suffers, as mothers who love suffer,
and he enters vicariously Into all the tragic deeps
of our lives, striving to bring us home to him.
Jan Ruysbroeck says;

" You must love the Love which loves you everlastingly,
and if you hold fast by his love, he remakes you by his
Spirit, and then joy is yours. The Spirit of God breathes
into you, and you breathe it out in rest and joy and love.
This is eternal life, just as in our mortal life we breathe
out the air that is in us and breathe in fresh air."

CHAPTER VIII
THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY.

I

THE RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE OF DEATH

The Greeks had their story of Tithonus, a
deeply significant myth of a man who could not
die, but who grew ever older and more decrepit
until the tragedy became unendurable and he
envied those " happy men that have the power
to die." Methuselah's biography is brief and
compact, but it is full of pathos: " He lived nine
hundred and sixty-nine years and he died."
There was nothing more to add. Somebody has
invented a radium motor which strikes a little
bell every second and is warranted to go on doing
that for thirty thousand years. The Methuselah
monotony and tedium seem much like that thin
seriatim row of items. It just goes on with no
novelty and no cumulation, and finally the one
relieving novelty is introduced — "he died."
What a happy fact it was ! The wandering Jew

III

112 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

stands out in Imaginative fiction as one of the
saddest of all men — a being who endlessly goes
on. The angel of death seems a gentle, gracious
messenger when one thinks of the prospect of un-
ending life, going on in a one-dimensional series,
with no new values and no fresh powers of ex-
pansion. To many persons the idea of heaven
is simply an expanded Methuselah biography.

Biologists have completely reversed the theory
that death is an enemy. It has long ago taken
its place in the system of teleology, among " the
things that are for us." Death has, beyond
question, and has had, " a natural utility." It
has played an Important role in raising life from
the low unicellular type to the rich complex forms
of higher organisms, from " the amoeba that
never dies of old age " to the new dynasty of be-
ings that have greater range and scope, but which
nevertheless do die. Edwin Arnold in his strik-
ing essay on Death says: "The lowest living
thing, the Protamoeba, has obviously never died !
It Is a formless film of protoplasm, which multi-
plies by simple division; and the specimen under
any microscope derives, and must derive. In
unbroken existence from the amoeba which moved
and fed forty aeons ago. The slime of our near-
est puddle lived before the Alps were made ! "

THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY 113

Methuselah was a mere child In a perambulator
compared to an amoeba.

In cases where the continued process of cell-
division produced a lowered and weakened type
of amoeba a rudimentary form of union of cells
took place, which resulted in raising the entire
level of life and eventually carried the biological
order up to wholly new possibilities. So that
the threatened approach of death was met with an
Increase of life. " It Is more probable that death
is a consequence of life," says the famous biolo-
gist, Edward Cope, " rather than that the living
is a product of the non-living." ^

But in any case the testimony of biology can
give us little help. Even if death has had a
function in the process of evolution, as seems
likely, that In no way eases the situation when the
staggering blow falls into our precious circle and
removes from It an intimate personal life that
was indispensable to us. It is poor, cold com-
fort to be told that death has assisted through the
long asons in the slow process of heightening the
entire scale of life, if there is nothing more to say
regarding the future of this dear one whose frail
bark has now gone to wreck. We must somehow
rise above the level of brute facts and discover

^Primary Factors of Organic Evolution, p. 483.

114 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

some spiritual significance which death has re-
vealed, before we can arrive at any source of
comfort. We are all agreed with Shakespeare's
Claudio that " 'tis too horrible " to think of death
as a sheer terminus:

"... to die and go we know not where ;
To lie In cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe In fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of rock-ribbed ice;
To be Imprisoned In the viewless winds.
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world."

Death has undoubtedly brought to conscious-
ness, as has perhaps no other experience, the
deeper meaning and significance of personal life.
This and not its biological function is what con-
cerns us now. It has been said that " freedom,"
so far as it is achieved, " is the main achievement
of man in the past." ^ I should be incHned rather
to hold that man's main achievement on the
planet so far has been to discover that personal
life reveals within itself an absolute value and
possesses unmistakable capacity to transcend the
finite and temporal, an experience which makes
1 Bosanquet, Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 320.

THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY 115

freedom possible. I believe death has ministered
more than any other single fact that confronts us
in bringing those truths to clear consciousness.
We cannot, of course, dissociate death and sep-
arate it from pain, suffering, struggle and danger,
which are essentially bound up with it. If the
world were to be freed completely from death it
would at once ipso facto be freed from the dan-
ger of it and by the same altered condition strug-
gle would to a large degree be eliminated, and
likewise those other great tests of life — pain
and suffering, which culminate in death. These
things are all " perilous incidents " of finiteness,
but of a finiteness which transcends itself and is
allied to something beyond itself. To eliminate
these things would be to miss the discovery of
this strange finite-infinite nature of ours which
makes life such a venture and so full of mystery
and wonder. If we had been only naturalistic
beings, curious bits of the earth's crust merely
capable of recording the empirical facts as they
occurred, death would have taken an unimpor-
tant place as one more event in a successive series
of phenomena. Built as we are, however, with
a beyond within ourselves, the fact of mutability
and mortality has occasioned a transformation of
our entire estimate of life and has led us by the

ii6 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

hand to a Pisgah view which we should never have
got if there had been no invasion of death into
our world.

" It is a venerable commonplace," as Professor
Schiller of Oxford has said, " that among the
melancholy prerogatives which distinguish man
from the other animals and bestow a deeper sig-
nificance on human life is the fact that man alone
is aware of the doom that terminates his earthly-
existence, and on this account lives a more spirit-
ual life, in the ineffable consciousness of the
* sword of Damocles ' which overshadows him
and weights his lightest action with gigantic im-
port. Nay, more; stimulated by the ineluctable
necessity of facing death, and of living so as to
face it with fortitude, man has not abandoned
himself to nerveless inaction, to pusillanimous
despair; he has conceived the thought, he has
cherished the hope, he has embraced the belief,
of a life beyond the grave, and opened his soul to
the religions which baulk the king of terrors of
his victims and defraud him of his victory. Thus,
the fear of death has been redeemed, and en-
nobled by the consoling belief in immortality, a
belief from which none are base enough to with-
hold their moral homage, even though the debil-

THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY 117

ity of mortal knowledge may debar a few from
a full acceptance of Its promise." ^

The early animistic views of survival, which
were the first forecasts of a life beyond, were due
not so much to the consciousness of the moral
grandeur of life as to actual experiences which
gave to primitive man a confident assurance of
some form of life after the death of the body.
Dreams had an Important part In leading man to
this naTve and yet momentous discovery. In a
world which had no established criterion of
*' reality," the experiences of vivid dreams were
taken to be as real as any other experiences, and
In these dreams the dreamer often found his dead
ancestors and friends and tribesmen once more
present with him, active In the chase or the fight
and as real as ever they were In life. Trance,
hallucination, telepathy, medlumship, possession,
are not new phenomena; they are very primitive
and ancient. These things are as old as smiling
and weeping. These psychic experiences had
their part to play also In giving the early races
their belief that the dead person still existed
though in an altered and attenuated form as an
animus or " spirit " or '' shade." This empirical
* F. C. S. Schiller, Humanism, pp. 228-9.

ii8 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

view of survival, built on actual experiences, was
more or less incapable of advance. No further
knowledge could be acquired and the construc-
tions fashioned by Imagination, In reference to
*' the scenery and circumstance " of the departed
soul, could satisfy only an uncritical mind. These
constructions were, too, often crude and bizarre,
and tended, in the hands of priests, to hamper
man's moral development rather than to further
it. But in any case man had made the moment-
ous guess that death did not utterly end him or
his career. Poor and thin as this dimly con-
ceived future world of primitive man's hope may
have been, the psychological effect of the hope
was by no means negligible. Professor Shaler
of Harvard was probably speaking truly when
he wrote:

*' If we should seek some one mark, which In
the intellectual advance from the brutes to man,
might denote the passage to the human side, we
might well find it in the moment when it dawned
upon the nascent man that death was a mystery
which he had in his turn to meet. From the
time when man began to face death to the pres-
ent stage of his development there has been a
continuous struggle between the motives of per-
sonal fear on the one hand, and valor on the

THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY 119

other. That of fear has been constantly aided by
the work of the Imagination. For one fact of
danger there have been scores of fancied risks to
come from the unseen world. Against this great
host of imaginary ills, which tended utterly to
bear men down, they had but one helper — their
spirit of valiant self-sacrifice for the good.of their
family, their clan, their state, their race, or, in
the climax, for the Infinite above.*' ^

It marked a still greater intellectual advance
when primitive man came to the immense con-
clusion not only that death was a mystery which
he m turn must meet, but that he was a being
that would survive death.

It Is, however, In another field that we must
look for the most important spiritual results from
the contemplation of death, that is In what we
may call the field of spiritual values. I have
already contended that man's greatest discovery
was his discovery of the absolute value of moral
personality. Of course, it came fairly late In the
development of the race and by no means has
everybody made It yet! But at any rate there
came a time somewhere In the process of history
when man did discover a beyond within himself,

1 Shaler, The Individual, p. 194.

120 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

a greater Inclusive self present within his own
fragmentary, finite spirit, revealed as a passion
for perfection not yet attained or experienced, a
prophesying consciousness of eternity within his
often baffled and defeated temporal life. No one
has expressed the fact of this inner beyond within
us better than old Sir Thomas Browne did in the
seventeenth century : " We are men and we know
not how; there Is something in us that can be
without us and will be after us, though It Is
strange that It hath no history of what It was
before us, nor can tell how It entered in us. . . .
There Is surely a piece of Divinity In us, some-
thing that was before the elements and owes not
homage unto the Sun."

The sublimity and grandeur revealed In nature,
the majesty of mountains, the might of seas, the
mystery of the ocean, the glory of the sun and
stars, the awe Inspired by the thunderstorm,
awakened man's own spirit and made him dimly
conscious of a kindred grandeur In his own an-
swering soul. The greatest step of all was taken
when man awoke to the meaning and value of
love. In some dim sense love preceded the
emergence of man. The evolution of a mother
and of a father, as Drummond showed, began
far back in forms of life below man. But the

THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY 121

type of love which transcends Instinct, which is
raised above sex-assertion, and is transmuted Into
an unselfish appreciation of the beauty and worth
of personal character — that type of love is one
of the most wonderful flowers that has yet blos-
somed on our Igdrasil tree of life and It was late
and slow to come, like flowers on the century-
plant.

When death broke In and separated those who
loved in this great fashion the whole problem of
death at once became an urgent one. In fact
death received attention In proportion as the
higher values of life began to be realized. Walt
Whitman's fiery outburst reveals clearly his esti-
mate of the worth of personality. " If rats and
maggots end us, then alarum ! for we are be-
trayed" — he might have said " if microbes end
us." Emerson's poignant outcry of soul is found
in his greatest poem — • " Threnody " :

" There's not a sparrow or a wren,
There's not a blade of autumn grain,
Which the four seasons do not tend
And tides of life and increase lend ;
And every chick of every bird,
And weed and rock-moss is preferred.
O ostrich-like forgetfulness!
O loss of larger in the less!

122 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

Was there no star that could be sent,
No watcher in the firmament,
No angel from the countless host
That loiters round the crystal coast,
Could stoop to heal that only child,
Nature's sweet marvel undefiled,
And keep the blossom of the earth.
Which all her harvests were not worth?'*

No such high revolt of spirit was occasioned so
long as death was a mere biological event, ter-
minating one life to give room for another. This
cry of soul means the discovery of the Infinite
preclousness of personal life. The mind now
turns In on Itself and takes a new account of Its
stock, and as a result man began to solve the
problem of death In an enlarged way. He was
no longer satisfied with a form of survival based
upon his experiences In dreams, trance and hallu-
cination; he came to feel that he must have a
destiny which fitted his spiritual worth as a man.
He finds within himself Intimation of powers and
possibilities beyond those required for the strug-
gle of life here. He feels by that same Insight
which carries him out beyond the seen to a ra-
tional faith In the unseen that Is necessary to com-
plete It, that this little arc of earthly life with Its
revelations of spiritual value and Its transcend-

THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY 123

ent prophecies of more must find fulfillment some-
where In a form of life that rounds It out full
circle.

The argument does not build on a passion of
desire, as some doubters have said. We do not
assume Immortality just because we want It. It
rests upon the moral consistency of the universe,
upon the trustworthy character of the eternal
nature of things. The moral values which are
revealed In fully developed personality are cer-
tainly as real, as much a fact of the universe, as
are the tides or the orbits of planets. If we can
count upon the continuity of these occurrences
and upon our predictions of them, just as surely
can we count on the consistency of the universe
in reference to spiritual values. If there Is con-
servation of matter there Is at least as good
ground for affirming conservation of moral val-
ues. If biological life can pass over the
slender bridge of a microscopic germ-plasm and
can carry with Itself over that feeble bridge the
traces of habit and feature, the curve of nose and
the emotional tone of some far-off dead ancestor,
and all the heredity gains of the past, may we not
count upon the permanence of that in us which
allies us to that Infinite Spirit who Is even now
the Invisible environment of all we see and touch?

124 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

It Is not a matter of reward or of " wages "
that concerns us. It is not " happy Isles " or
care-free " Edens " that we seek, not " golden
streets " and endless comfort to make up for the
stress and toil of the lean years here below. We
want to find the whole of ourselves, we ask the
privilege of seeing this fragmentary being of ours
unfold into the full expression of Its gifts and
powers. The new period may be even more
strenuous and hazardous than this one has been —
still we want the venture. We ask for the cul-
minating acts that will complete the drama, so
far only fairly begun. It must be not a mere
serial, or straight line, existence; It must be the
opening out and expansion of the possibilities
which we feel within ourselves — new dimensions,
please God.

I am not wrong, I am sure, in claiming that
this postulate, this rational faith in the conserva-
tion of values. Is an asset which death has re-
vealed to the race. The shock of death has
always made love appear a greater thing than we
knew before the baffling crisis came upon us. It
has, too, by the same shock of contrast, awakened
man to the full comprehension of the moral sub-
limity of the good life. Kant maintained that the
sense of the sublime is due to the fact that when

THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY 125

we are confronted with the supreme powers of
nature we then become aware of something un-
fathomable in ourselves, and feel that we are
superior to the might of the storm, or the moun-
tain or the cataract. Nowhere is this truer than
when man — man in his full, rich powers — is
confronted by death. Instead of cringing in fear,
he rises to an unaccustomed height of greatness
and is utterly superior to death and aware of
some quality of being in himself which death can-
not touch. It is just then in that moment of seem-
ing disaster and dissolution that a brave, good man
is most triumphant and ready to burn all bridges
behind him in his great adventure. Mrs. Brown-
ing, all her life an invalid, says about this so-
called gigantic enemy : " I cannot look on the
earthside of death. When I look deathwards I
look over death and upwards." Her husband,
who was " ever a fighter," has this way of an-
nouncing the triumph :

" And then as, 'mid the dark, a gleam
Of yet another morning breaks,

And like the hand which ends a dream,
Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
Touches the flesh and the soul awakes." ^

i/The Flight of the Duchess."

126 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

Here is the testimony of a French soldier who
writes at a moment when death is close beside him :
'' I had often known the joy of seeing a spring
come like this, but never before had I been given
the power of living in every instant. So it is that
one wins, without the help of any science, a vague
but Indisputable intuition of the Absolute. . . .
These are hours of such beauty that he who em-
braces them knows not what death means."

Having come upon the higher values of per-
sonal life which death has forced upon us we can
never again, as men, be satisfied with such facts
of survival as may come to light through dreams,
hallucinations, telepathy and mediums, or in fact
through any empirical experiences. Even if the
evidence were vastly greater than it Is for some
form of animistic survival, It would fall far short
of our moral and spiritual demands. We already
have some Intimations In us of " the power of an
endless life," and we seek for a chance to bring It
full into play, for the " heavenly period " to
" perfect the earthen," for an ampler life that will
reveal what we have all the time meant life to be.

Winifred KIrkland In The New Death well
says: "The New Death, i.e.j the new view of
death, Is the perception of our mortal end as the
mere portal of an eternal progression and the

THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY 127

immediate result is the consecration of all liv-
ing. ... It is a new illumination, a New Death,
when dying can be the greatest inspiration of our
everyday energy, the strongest impulse toward
daily joy.'*

II

THE NEW BORN OUT OF THE OLD

Walking across the fields in the spring I found
the empty shell of a bird's egg. The tiny bird
that once was In it was lying still and happy under
its mother's wings, or was chirping its new-born
song from the limb of a nearby tree, or was try-
ing its new-found wings on the buoyant air. The
empty shell was utterly worthless, a mere play-
thing for the wind. The miracle of life that had
stirred within it and had used it for Its shelter
had gone on and left it deserted. There Is a fine
proverb which says, " God empties the nest by
hatching out the eggs," and the world Is full of
this gentle, silent, divine method of abolishing
the old by setting free to higher ends all that was
true and living in It.

" To-day I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.

128 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

An Inner Impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk: from head to tall
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.
He dried his wings: like gauze they grew;
Through crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living flash of light he flew."

In the water below, the " old husk " lay empty
and useless, while the bright-colored living thing
found its freedom in the invisible air. I never
go to a funeral without thinking of this miracle
of transformation which brings the bird out of
the egg, the flower out of the seed, the dragon-
fly out of its water-larva. In his own mysterious
way God has emptied the nest by the hatching
method, and all that was excellent, lovable, and
permanent in the one we loved has found itself
in the realm for which it was fitted. The body
Is only the empty shell, the shattered seed, the
old husk, which the silent forces of nature will
slowly turn back again Into Its original elements,
to use over again for Its myriad processes of
building:

" And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land."

Those who treasure up the outworn dust and
ashes, who make their thoughts center about the

THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY 129

empty shell, are falling to read aright the deeper
fact, which life everywhere is trying to utter, that
that which belongs in the higher sphere cannot
be pent up In the lower.

This divine hatching method may be seen, too,
in the progress of truth, as it unfolds from stage
to stage. Nothing is more common than to see
a person holding on to a shell in which truth has
dwelt, without realizing that the precious thing
he wants has gone on and reembodled itself in
new and living ways which he fails to follow and
comprehend. While he is saying in melancholy
tones, " They have taken away my Lord and I
know not where they have laid him," the living
Lord Is saying, " Have I been so long time with
thee and yet dost thou not know me? "

Truth can no more keep a fixed and perma-
nent form than life can. It lives only by hatch-
ing out into higher and ever more adequate ex-
pressions of Itself, and the old forms In which It
lived, the old words through which it uttered
Itself, become empty and hollow because the warm
breath of God has raised the Inner life, the spir-
itual reality, to a higher form of expression.

The wTlter of the Epistle to the Hebrews was
very much Impressed with this crumbling of old
forms and expressions to give place to the new.

130 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

God spoke, he says, to our fathers In sundered
portions and In a variety of manners, but he Is
speaking to us now by his Son. The things that
can be shaken, he writes, are being removed that
the things which cannot be shaken may remain.
Luther must have felt this shaking process In his
day; and when he saw the old forms of religion
crumbling, he wrote that great hymn of the
Reformation, " A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He had found something that could not be shaken.
He could stand his ground and face the seen and
unseen world in faith, because he knew that the
hatching was going on, and the new was being
born in higher, truer, and more adequate forms
as the old was vanishing.

Let us hope that this ancient divine method
may still operate in this momentous hour of hu-
man history. Never, perhaps, since the fall of
Rome, has there been such a world-shaking pro-
cess affecting every country and all peoples. Im-
mense changes are under way. Nothing will ever
be quite the same again. The old Is vanish-
ing before our eyes and the new Is being born.
So much was wrong and outworn, and unjust and
inhuman, that the changes must go very far, and
they will necessarily involve some breakage. But
even now, In this most dynamic period of modern

THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY 131

history, that which Is to mark permanent prog-
ress will come forth, not by a smashing process,
but by the hatching of the eggs, by the emergence
of the underlying forces of life and the realization
of those human hopes and aspirations that have
long been held in and suppressed.

There is always the gravest danger from blind
rage and sullen wrath. The passionate resent-
ment for the suffering of immemorial wrongs,
when once It breaks through the dams of re-
straint, is an almost irresistible force; but sooner
or later the sound, serious sense of the intelligent
human race comes Into play and brings the world
back to order and system. The real gains in
these crises are made not by the smashlngs and
the blind iconoclastic blows, but by the wise, clear-
sighted fulfillment of the slowly formed Ideals
which have been the Inspiration of many lives
before the crisis came. May It be so now! It
must not be, It cannot be, that these millions of
men shall have unavaillngly faced death and
mutilation. It was not wreckage and chaos they
sought In their brave adventure with death. They
went out to build a new world and to destroy, only
that a new re-creation might begin. This is the
time of Incubation and birth, for ripening into
reality those mighty hopes that make us men.

132 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

It means at once that we must deepen down
our lives Into the life of God, that we must sup-
press our petty Individual passions and feel the
sweep of God's purposes for the new age. In a
multitude of ways the world moves on, and as It
moves the Spirit of God ends old forms and
methods and brings fresh and living ways to light.
May we have eyes to see what Is of his divine
hatching and what is empty shell!

CHAPTER IX

THE MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD

I

The revival of mysticism which has been one
of the noteworthy features In the Christianity of
our time has presented us with a number of in-
teresting and important questions. We want to
know, first of all, what mysticism really Is. Sec-
ondly, we want to know whether it is a normal
or abnormal experience. And omitting many
other questions which must wait their turn, we
want to know whether mystical experiences
actually enlarge our sphere of knowledge, I. e.,
whether they are trustworthy sources of authentic
Information and authoritative truth concerning
realities which lie beyond the range of human
senses.

The answer to the first question appears to be
as difficult to accomplish as the return of Ulysses
was. The secret Is kept in book after book.
One can marshall a formidable array of defini-
tions, but they oppose and challenge one another,

133

134 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

like the men sprung from the dragon's teeth. For
the purposes of the present consideration we can
eliminate what is usually included under psychical
phenomena, that is, the phenomena of dreams,
visions and trances, hysteria and dissociation and
esoteric and occult phenomena. Thirty years
ago Professor Royce said: "In the Father's
house are many mansions, and their furniture is
extremely manifold. Astral bodies and palmistry,
trances and mental healing, communications from
the dead and ' phantasms of the living ' — such
things are for some people to-day the sole quite
unmistakable evidences of the supremacy of the
spiritual world." These phenomena are worthy
of careful painstaking study and attention, for
they will eventually throw much light upon the
deep and complex nature of human personality,
are in fact already throwing much light upon it.
But they furnish us slender data for understand-
ing what Is properly meant by mystical experience
and its religious and spiritual bearing.

We can, too, leave on one side the metaphysi-
cal doctrines which fill a large amount of space
in the books of the great mystics. These doc-
trines had a long historical development and they
would have taken essentially the same form if the
exponents of them had not been mystics. Mys-

THE MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 135

tical experience Is confined to no one form of
philosophy, though some ways of thinking no
doubt favor and other ways retard the experi-
ence, as they also often do In the case of religious
faith in general. Mystical experience, further-
more, must not be confused with what technical ex-
pert writers call '' the mystic way." There are as
many mystical *' ways " as there are gates to the
New Jerusalem: "On the east three gates, on
the north three gates, on the south three gates,
and on the west three gates." One might as well
try to describe the way of making love, or the way
of appreciating the grand canyon as to describe
the way to the discovery of God, as though there
were only one way.

I am not Interested in mysticism as an ism.
It turns out In most accounts to be a dry and ab-
stract thing, hardly more like the warm and In-
timate experience than the color of a map Is like
the country for which It stands. " Canada Is very
pink," seems quite an inadequate description of
the noble country north of our border. It is
mystical experience and not mysticism that is
worthy of our study. We are concerned with the
experience itself, not with second-hand formula-
tions of It. " The mystic," says Professor
Royce, ** Is a thorough-going empiricist; " '* God

136 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

ceases to be an object and becomes an experience,"
says Professor Pringle-Pattlson. If it is an ex-
perience we want to find out what happens to the
mystic himself inside where he lives. According
to those who have been there the experience which
we call mystical is charged with the conviction of
real, direct contact and commerce with God. It
is the almost universal testimony of those who
are mystics that they find God through their ex-
perience. John Tauler says that in his best mo-
ments of *' devout prayer and the uplifting of
the mind to God," he experiences " the pure pres-
ence of God in his own soul," but he adds that all
he can tell others about the experience is " as poor
and unlike it as the point of a needle is to the
heavens above us." " I have met with my God;
I have met with my Savior. I have felt the
healings drop upon my soul from under His
wings," says Isaac Penington In the joy of his
first mystical experience. Without needlessly
multiplying such testimonies for data, we can say
with considerable assurance that mystical experi-
ence Is consciousness of direct and immediate re-
lationship with some transcendent reality which
in the moment of experience is believed to be God.
*' This is He, this is He," exclaims Isaac Pening-
ton, " there is no other: This is He whom I have

THE MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 137

waited for and sought after from my childhood."
Angela of Follgno says that she experienced God,
and saw that the whole world was full of God.

II

There are many different degrees of Intensity,
concentration and conviction In the experiences of
different Individual mystics, and also In the vari-
ous experiences of the same Individual from time
to time. There has been a tendency In most
studies of mysticism to regard the state of ecstasy
as par excellence mystical experience. That Is,
however, a grave mistake. The calmer, more
meditative, less emotional, less ecstatic experi-
ences of God are not less convincing and possess
greater constructive value for life and character
than do ecstatic experiences which presuppose a
peculiar psychical frame and disposition. The
seasoned Quaker In the corporate hush and still-
ness of a silent meeting Is far removed from ec-
stasy, but he Is not the less convinced that he Is
meeting with God. For the essentia of mysti-
cism we do not need to Insist upon a certain "sa-
cred" mystic way nor upon ecstasy, nor upon any
peculiar type of rare psychic upheavals. We do
need to Insist, however, upon a consciousness of

138 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

commerce with God amounting to conviction of
his presence.

' Where one heard noise
And one saw flame,
I only knew He named my name."

Jacob Boehme calls the experience which came
to him, " breaking through the gate," Into ** a
new birth or resurrection from the dead," so that,
he says, " I knew God." " I am certain," says
Eckhart, " as certain as that I live, that nothing
is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me
than I am to myself." One of these experiences
— the first one — was an ecstasy, and the other,
so far as we can tell, was not. It was the flood-
ing In of a moment of God-consciousness In the
act of preaching a sermon to the common people
of Cologne. The experience of Penlngton,
again, was not an ecstasy; It was the vital surge
of fresh life on the first occasion of hearing
George Fox preach after a long period of waiting
silence. A simple normal case of a mild type is
given in a httle book of recent date, reprinted
from the Atlantic Monthly: " After a long time
of jangling conflict and Inner misery, I one day,
quite quietly and with no conscious effort,
stopped doing the dis-lngenuous thing [I had been

THE MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 139

doing]. Then the marvel happened. It was as
if a great rubber band which had been stretched
almost to the breaking point were suddenly re-
leased and snapped back to its normal condition.
Heaven and earth were changed for me. Every-
thing was glorious because of its relation to some
great central life — nothing seemed to matter but
that life." Brother Lawrence, a barefooted lay-
brother of the seventeenth century, according to
the testimony of the brotherhood, attained " an
unbroken and undisturbed sense of the Presence
of God." He was not an ecstatic; he was a quiet,
faithful man who did his ordinary daily tasks
with what seemed to his friends " an unclouded
vision, an illuminated love and an uninterrupted
joy." Simple and humble though he was, he
nevertheless acquired, through his experience of
God, '* an extraordinary spaciousness of mind."
The more normal, expansive mystical experi-
ences come apparently when the personal self is
at its best. Its powers and capacities are raised
to an unusual unity and fused together. The
whole being, with its accumulated submerged life,
finds itself. The process of preparing for any
high achievement Is a severe and laborious one,
but nothing seems easier in the moment of suc-
cess than is the accomplishment for which the

I40 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

life has been prepared. There comes to be
formed within the person what Aristotle called
*' a dexterity of soul," so that the person does
with ease what he has become skilled to do.
Clement of Alexandria called a fully organized
and spiritualized person " a harmonized man,"
that is, adjusted, organized and ready to be a
transmisslve organ for the revelation of God.
Brother Lawrence, who was thus " harmonized,"
finely says, " The most excellent method which I
found of going to God was that of doin^ my com-
mon business, purely for the love of God." An
earlier mystic of the fourteenth century stated the
same principle in these words : " It is my aim to
be to the Eternal God what a man's hand is to

a man."

There are many human experiences which carry
a man up to levels where he has not usually been
before and where he finds himself possessed of
Insight and energies he had hardly suspected were
his until that moment. One leaps to his full
height when the right inner spring is reached. We
are quite familiar with the way In which instinc-
tive tendencies in us and emotions both egoistic
and social, become organized under a group of
ideas and Ideals Into a single system which we
call a sentiment, such as love, or patriotism, or

THE MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 14!

devotion to truth. It forms slowly and one hardly
realizes that it has formed until some occasion
unexpectedly brings it into full operation, and
we find ourselves able with perfect ease to over-
come the most powerful inhibitory and opposing
Instincts and habits, which, until then, had usually
controlled us. We are familiar, too, with the
way in which a well-trained and disciplined mind,
confronted by a concrete situation, will sometimes
— alas not always — in a sudden flash of imagi-
native insight, discover a universal law revealed
there and then in the single phenomenon, as Sir
Isaac Newton did and as, in a no less striking way,
Sir William Rowan Hamilton did in his discovery
of Quaternions. Literary and artistic geniuses
supply us with many Instances in which, in a sud-
den flash, the crude material at hand is shot
through with vision, and the complicated plot of
a drama, the full significance of a character, or
the complete glory of a statue stands revealed, as
though, to use R. L. Stevenson's Illustration, a
genie had brought it on a golden tray as a gift
from another world. Abraham Lincoln, striking
off in a few intense minutes his Gettysburg ad-
dress, as beautiful in style and perfect in form
as anything in human literature, is as good an il-
lustration as we need of the way in which a highly

142 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

organized person, by a kindling flash, has at his
hand all the moral and spiritual gains of a life
time.

There is a famous account of the flash of inspi-
ration given by Philo, which can hardly be im-
proved. It is as follows: " I am not ashamed to
recount my own experience. At times, when I
have proposed to enter upon my wonted task of
writing on philosophical doctrines, with an exact
knowledge of the materials which were to be put
together, I have had to leave off without any work
accomplished, finding my mind barren and fruit-
less, and upbraiding it for its self-complacency,
while startled at the might of the Existent One,
in whose power it lies to open and close the wombs
of the soul. But at other times, when I had come
empty, all of a sudden I have been filled with
thoughts, showered down and sown upon me un-
seen from above, so that by Divine possession I
have fallen into a rapture and become ignorant
of everything, the place, those present, myself,
what was spoken or written. For I have received
a stream of interpretation, a fruition of light, the
most clear-cut sharpness of vision, the most
vividly distinct view of the matter before me,
such as might be received through the eyes from
the most luminous presentation.'*

THE MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 143

The most important mystical experiences are
something like that. They occur usually not at
the beginning of the religious life but rather in
the ripe and developed stage of it. They are the
fruit of long-maturing processes. Clement's " the
harmonized man " is always a person who has
brought his soul into paralleHsm with divine cur-
rents, has habitually practiced his religious in-
sights and has finally formed a unified central
self, subtly sensitive, acutely responsive to the
Beyond within him. In such experiences which
may come suddenly or may come as a more grad-
ual process, the whole self operates and masses
all the cumulations of a lifetime. They are no
more emotional than they are rational and vo-
litional. We have a total personality, awake, ac-
tive, and " aware of his life's flow." Instead of
seeing in a flash a law of gravitation, or the plot
and character of Hamlet, or the uncarven form of
Moses the Law-giver in a block of marble, one
sees at such times the moral demonstrations of a
lifetime and vividly feels the implications that are
essentially involved in a spiritual life. In the high
moment God is seen to be as sure as the soul is.

" I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anj^where, sky or sea or world at all:

144 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

But the night's black was burst through by a blaze —
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow."

To some the truth of God never comes closer
than a logical conclusion. He is held to be as a
living item in a creed. To the mystic he becomes
real In the same sense that experienced beauty is
real, or the feel of spring is real, or that summer
sunlight is real — he has been found, he has
been met, he is present.

Before discussing the crucial question whether
these experiences are evidential and are worthy of
consideration as an addition to the world's stock
of truth and knowledge I must say a few words
about the normality or abnormality of them.
Nothing of any value can be said on this point
of mystical experience in the abstract. One must
first catch his concrete case. Some instances are
normal and some are undoubtedly abnormal.
Trance, ecstasy and rapture are unusual experi-
ences and in that sense not normal occurrences.
They usually indicate, furthermore, a pathologi-
cal condition of personality and are thus abnormal
in the more technical sense. There Is, however,

THE MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 145

something more to be said on this point. It seems
pretty well estabhshed that some persons — and
they have often been creative leaders and religious
geniuses — have succeeded in organizing their
lives, in finding their trail, in charging their whole
personality with power, in attaining a moral dy-
namic and in tapping vast reservoirs of energy by
means of states which, if occurring in other per-
sons, would no doubt be called pathological. The
real test here is a pragmatic one. It seems hardly
sound to call a state abnormal if it has raised the
experiencer, as a mystic experience often does, into
a hundred horse-power man and through his in-
fluence has turned multitudes of other men and
women into more joyous, hopeful and efficient per-
sons. This question of abnormality and reality Is
thus not one to be settled off-hand by a super-
ficial diagnosis.

An experience which brings spaciousness of
mind, new interior dimensions, ability to stand the
universe — and the people in it — and capacity
to work at human tasks with patience, endurance
and wisdom may quite intelligently be called nor-
mal, though to an external beholder It may look
like what he usually calls a trance of hysteria, a
state of dissociation, or hypnosis by auto-sugges-
tion. It should be added, however, as I have

146 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

already said, that mystical experience is not con-
fined to these extremer types. They may or may
not be pathological. The calmer and more re-
strained stages of mysticism are more important
and significant and are no more marked with the
stigma of hysteria than is love-making, enjoyment
of music, devotion to altruistic causes, risking
one's life for country, or any lofty experience of
value.

Ill

We come at length to the central question of
our* consideration: Do mystical experiences settle
anything? Are they purely subjective and one-
sided, or do they prove to have objective refer-
ence and so to be two-sided? Do they take the
experiencer across the chasm that separates
" self " from " Other " ? Mystical experience un-
doubtedly feels as though it had objective refer-
ence. It comes to the individual with indubitable
authority. He is certain that he has found some
thing other than himself. He has an unescapable
conviction that he is in contact and commerce with
reality beyond the margins of his personal self.
" A tremendous muchness is suddenly revealed,"
as William James once put it.

We do not get very far when we undertake to

THE MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 147

reduce knowledge to an affair of sense-experience.
" They reckon ill who leave me out," can be said
by the organized, personal, creative mind as truly
as by Brahma. There are many forms of human
experience in which the data of the senses are so
vastly transcended that they fail to furnish any
real explanation of what occurs in consciousness.
This is true of all our experiences of value, which
apparently spring out of synthetic or synoptic ac-
tivities of the mind, I. e., activities In which the
mind is unified and creative. The vibrations of
ether which bombard the rods and cones of the
retina may be the occasion for the appreciation of
beauty In sky or sea or flower, but they are surely
not the cause of it. The concrete event which
confronts me Is very likely the occasion for the
august pronouncement of moral Issues which my
conscience makes, but It can not be said that the
concrete event In any proper sense causes this
consciousness of moral obligation. The famous
answer of Leibnitz to the crude sense-philosophy
of his time is still cogent. To the phrase : '' There
Is nothing In the mind that has not come through
the senses," Leibnitz added, " except the mind it-
self." That means that the creative activity of
the mind Is always an Important factor in ex-
perience and one that can not be Ignored In any

148 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

of the processes of knowledge. Unfortunately we
have done very little yet in the direction of com-
prehending the interior depth of the personal
mind or of estimating adequately the part which
mind itself in its creative capacity plays in all
knowledge functions. It will only be when we
have succeeded in getting beyond what Plato
called the bird-cage theory of knowledge to a
sound theory of knowledge and to a solid basis
for spiritual values that we shall be able to dis-
cuss intelligently the " findings " of the mystic.

The world at the present moment is pitiably
*' short " in its stock of sound theories of knowl-
edge. The prevailing psychologies do not ex-
plain knowledge at all. The behaviorists do not
try to explain it any more than the astronomer or
the physicist does. The psychologist who reduces
mind to an aggregation of describable " mind-
states '' has started out on a course which makes
an explanation forever impossible, since knowl-
edge can be explained only through unity and in-
tegral wholeness, never through an aggregation
of parts, as though It were a mental " shower of
shot." If we expect to talk about knowledge and
seriously propose to use that great word truth,
we must at least begin with the assumption of
an intelligent, creative, organizing center of self-

THE MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 149

consciousness which can transcend itself and can
know what is beyond and other than Itself. In
short, the talk about a " chasm " between subject
and object — knower and thing known — is as
absurd as it would be to talk of a chasm between
the convex and the concave sides of a curve.
Knowledge is always knowledge of an object and
mystical experience has all the essential marks of
objective reference, as certainly as other forms
of experience have.

Professor J. M. Baldwin very well says that
there is a form of contemplation in which, as in
aesthetic experience, the strands of the mind's di-
verging dualisms are '^ merged and fused/* He
adds: "In this experience of a fusion which is
not a mixture but which Issues in a meaning of its
own sort and kind, an experience whose essential
character is just this unity of comprehension, con-
sciousness attains Its completest. Its most direct,
and its final apprehension of what Reality is and
means." It really comes round to the question
whether the mind of a self-conscious person has
any way of approach, except by way of the senses,
to any kind of reality. There is no a priori an-
swer to that question. It can only be settled by
experience. It is, therefore, pure dogmatism to
say, as Professor Dunlap in his recent attack on

I50 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

mysticism does, that all conscious processes are
based on sense-stimulation and all thought as well
as perception depends on reaction to sense-stimu-
lus. It is no doubt true that behavior psychology
must resort to some such formula, but that only
means that such psychology Is always dealing with
greatly transformed and reduced beings, when it
attempts to deal with persons like us who, in the
richness of our concrete lives, are never reduced
to '' behavior-beings." We have Interior dimen-
sions and that is the end on'tl Some persons —
and they are by no means feeble-minded individ-
uals — • are as certain that they have commerce
with a world within as they are that they have
experiences of a world outside in space. Thomas
Aquinas, who neither In method nor In doctrine
leaned toward mysticism, though he was most cer-
tainly " a harmonized man," and who In theory
postponed the vision of God to a realm beyond
death, nevertheless had an experience two years
before he died which made him put his pen and
inkhorn on the shelf and never write another word
of his Summa Theologiae. When he was re-
minded of the Incomplete state of his great work
and was urged to go on with it, he only replied,
"I have seen that which makes all that I have
written look small to me."

THE MYSTICS EXPERIENCE OF GOD 151

It may be just possible that there is a universe
of spiritual reality upon which our finite spirits
open inward as inlets open into the sea.

" Like the tides on the crescent sea-beach
When the moon is new and thin
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come welling and surging in;
Come from that mystic ocean
Whose rim no foot has trod.
Some call It longing
But others call it God."

Such a view is perfectly sane and tenable ; It con-
flicts with no proved and demonstrated facts
either In the nature of the universe or of mind.
It seems anyway to the mystic that there Is such
a world, that he has found it as surely as Colum-
bus found San Salvador, and that his experience
is a truth-telling experience.

IV

But granting that It is truth-telling and has ob-
jective reference, Is the mystic justified In claiming
that he has found and knows God? One does not
need to be a very wide and extensive student of
mystical experience to discover what a meager

152 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

stock of knowledge the genuine mystic reports.
William James' remarkable experience In the
Adirondack woods very well Illustrates the type.
It had, he says, " an Intense significance of some
sort, If one could only tell the significance. . . .
In point of fact, I can't find a single word for all
that significance and don't know what it was sig-
nificant of, so that it remains a mere boulder of
Impression." ^ At a later date James refers to
that " extraordinary vivacity of man's psychologi-
cal commerce with something Ideal that feels as if
It were also actual." - The greatest of all the
fourteenth century mystics, Meister Eckhart,
could not put his impression Into words or ideas.
What he found was a " wilderness of the God-
head where no one Is at home," I. e., an Object
with no particular differentiated, concrete char-
acteristics. It was not an accident that so many
of the mystics hit upon the via negativa, the way
of negation, or that they called their discovery
'' the divine Dark."

" Whatever your mind comes at
I tell you flat
God is not that."

'^Letters of William James, Vol. II. p. y6.
2 Ibid, Vol. II. p. 269.

THE MYSTICS EXPERIENCE OF GOD 153

Mystical experience does not supply concrete in-
formation. It does not bring new finite facts, new
items that can be used in a description of ** the
scenery and circumstance " of the realm beyond
our sense horizons. It is the awareness of a
Presence, the consciousness of a Beyond, the dis-
covery, as James puts it, .that "we are continu-
ous with a More of the same quality, which is
operative in us and in touch with us."

The most striking effect of such experience is
not new fact-knowledge, not new items of empiri-
cal information, but new moral energy, heightened
conviction, increased caloric quality, enlarged
spiritual vision, an unusual radiant power of life.
In short, the whole personality, in the case of the
constructive mystics, appears to be raised to a
new level of life and to have gained from some-
where many calories of life-feeding, spiritual sub-
stance. We are quite familiar with the way in
which adrenalin suddenly flushes into the physical
system and adds a new and incalculable power to
brain and muscle. Under its stimulus a man can
carry out a piano when the house is on fire. May
not, perhaps, some energy from some Source with
which our spirits are allied flush our inner being
with forces and powers by which we can be forti-
fied to stand the universe and more than stand

154 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

It! " We are more than conquerors through Him
that loved us," is the way one of the world's
greatest mystics felt.

Mystical experience — and we must remember
as Santayana has said, that " experience is like a
shrapnel shell and bursts into a thousand mean-
ings '' — does at least one thing. It makes God
sure to the person who has had the experience.
It raises faith and conviction to the n^^ power.
" The God who said, ' Let light shine out of
darkness,' has shined into my heart to give the
light of the knowledge of the glor^^ of God," is
St. Paul's testimony. " I knew God by revelation,"
declares George Fox. " I was as one who hath
the key and doth open." " The man who has at-
tained this felicity," Plotinus says, " meets some
turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, but
there is not the slightest lessening of his happi-
ness for that " (En. Iriv.y). But this experience,
with its overwhelming conviction and its dynamic
effect, can not be put into the common coin of
speech. Frederic Myers has well expressed the
difficulty:

" Oh could I tell ye surely would believe It!
Oh could I only say what I have seen!
How should I tell or how can ye receive It,

How, till He bringeth you where I have been?"

THE MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 155

There is no concrete "Information" which can
be shared with others.

When Columbus found San Salvador he was
able to describe it to those w^ho did not sail with
him in the Santa Maria, but when the mystic finds
God he can not give us any " knowledge " in plain
words of everyday speech. He can only refer
to his boulder, or his Gibraltar, of impression.
That situation is what we should expect. We can
not, either, describe any of our great emotions.
We can not Impart what flushes into our con-
sciousness In moments of lofty intuition. We
have a submerged life within us which is certainly
no less real than our hand or foot. It Influences
all that we do or say, but we do not find It easy
to utter it. In the presence of the sublime we
have nothing to say — or if we do say anything
it is a great mistake ! Language is forged to deal
with experiences which are common to many per-
sons, i. e., to experiences which refer to objects
in space. We have no vocabulary for the subtle,
elusive flashes of vision which are unique, indi-
vidual and unsharable, as for instance is our per-
sonal sense of " the tender grace of a day that
is dead." We are forced in all these matters to
resort to symbolic suggestion and to artistic de-
vices. Coventry Patmore said with much Insight:

156 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

*' In divinity and love
What's best v^^orth saying can't be said.'*

I believe that mystical experiences do In the
long run expand our knowledge of God and do
succeed In verifying themselves. Mysticism Is a
sort of spiritual protoplasm that underlies, as a
basic substance, much that Is best In religion, In
ethics and In life itself. It has generally been the
mystic, the prophet, the seer that has spotted out
new ways forward In the jungle of our world, or
lifted our race to new spiritual levels. Their ex-
periences have In some way equipped them for
unusual tasks, have given supplies of energy to
them which their neighbors did not have, and
have apparently brought them Into vital corre-
spondence with dimensions and regions of reality
that others miss. The proof that they have found
God, or at least a domain of spiritual reality,
does not He In some new stock of knowledge, not
in some gnostic secret, which they bring back; It
is to be seen rather In the moral and spiritual
fruits which test out and verify the experience.

Consciousness of beauty or of truth or of good-
ness baffles analysis as much as consciousness of
God does. These values have no objective stand-
ing ground in current psychology. They are not

THE MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 157

things in the world of space. They submit to no
adequate casual explanation. They have their
ground of being in some other kind of world than
that of the mechanical order, a world composed of
quantitative masses of matter in motion. These
experiences of value, which are as real for con-
sciousness as stone walls are, make very clear the
fact that there are depths and capacities in the na-
ture of the normal human mind which we do not
usually recognize and of which we have scant
and imperfect accounts in our text-books. Our
minds taken in their full range, in other words,
have some sort of contact and relationship with
an eternal nature of things far deeper than atoms
and molecules. Only very slowly and gradually
has the race learned through finite symbols and
temporal forms to interpret beauty and truth and
goodness which in their essence are as ineffable
and indescribable as the mystic's experience of
God is. Plato often speaks as though he had
high moments of experience w^hen he rose to the
naked vision of beauty — beauty "alone, sepa-
rate and eternal," as he says, and his myths are
very likely told, as J. A. Stewart believes, to as-
sist others to experience this same vision — a
beauty which " does not grow nor perish, is with-
out increase or diminution and endures for ever-

158 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

lasting." But as a matter of fact, however exalted
heavenly and enduring beauty may be in its es-
sence we know what it is only as it appears in
fair forms of objects, of body, of soul, of ac-
tions; in harmonious blending of sounds or colors;
in well-ordered or happily-combined groupings of
many aspects in one unity which is as it ought to
be. Truth and moral goodness always transcend
our attainments and we sometimes feel that the
very end and goal of life is the pursuit of that
truth or that goodness which eye hath not seen
nor ear heard. But whatever truth we do attain
or whatever goodness we do achieve is always
concrete. Truth is just this one more added fact
that resists all attempts to doubt it. Goodness
is just this simple every-day deed that reveals a
heroic spirit and a brave venture of faith in the
midst of difficulties. So, too, the mystic knowl-
edge of God is not some esoteric communication,
supplied through trance or ecstasy; it is an intui-
tive personal touch with God, felt to be the essen-
tially real, the bursting forth of an intense love
for him which heightens all the capacities and
activities of life, followed by the slow laboratory
results which verify it. "All I could never be"
now is. It seems possible to stand the universe —
even to do something toward the transformation

THE MYSTICS EXPERIENCE OF GOD 159

of it. The bans are read for that most difficult
of all marriages, the marriage of the possible with
the actual, the ideal with the real. And if the
experience does not prove that the soul has found
God, it at least does this: it makes the soul feel
that proofs of God are wholly unnecessary.

CHAPTER X

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

I

Twenty years ago in A Dynamic Faiths after
reviewing the new questions which the great
sciences had raised for religion, I said: "There
are still harder problems than any of these. Psy-
chology has opened a series of questions which
make the boldest tremble for his faith in an end-
less life or in any spiritual reality." The twenty
years that have intervened have made my point
much more clear. It is now pretty generally rec-
ognized that the deepest Issues of the faith are
to be settled in this field. The problem of the
real nature of the human soul is at the present
moment probably the most important religious
question before us, for upon the answer to it all
our vital spiritual interests depend. If man has
no unique interior domain, if he is only a tiny bit
of that vast system of naturalism in which every
curve of process and development Is rigidly de-
termined by antecedent causes, then *' spiritual "

i6o

PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUAL LIFE i6i

IS only a high-sounding word with a metaphorical
significance, but with no basis of reality in the
nature of things. There is certainly no " place "
in the external world of space where we can ex-
pect to find spiritual realities. They are not to be
found by going " somewhere." Olympus has been
climbed, and it was as naturalistic as any other
mountain peak. Eden is only a defined area of
Mesopotamia, and that blessed word can work no
miracles for us now. The dome of the sky is
only an optical illusion. It is no supersensuous
realm on which we can build our hopes. The be-
yond as a spiritual reality is within, or it is no-
where. Psychology, however, has not been very
encouraging in promises of hope. It has gone
the way of the other sciences and has taken an
ever increasing slant toward naturalism. The re-
sult is that most so-called " psychologies of re-
ligion " reduce religion either to a naturalistic
or to a subjective basis, which means in either case
that religion as a way to some objective spiritual
reality has eluded us and has disappeared as a
constructive power. Many a modern psycholo-
gist can say with Browning's Cleon :

" And I have written three books on the soul,
Proving absurd all written hitherto,
And putting us to ignorance again."

i62 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

Two of the main tendencies in what is usually
called scientific psychology are (i) the " behav-
iorist " tendency and (2) the tendency to reduce
the inner life to a series of " mind states." Let
us consider behaviorism first. This turns psy-
chology into " a purely objective experimental
branch of natural science." ^ It aims at " the
prediction and control of behavior." " Introspec-
tion forms no essential part of its method." One
is not concerned with " interpretation in terms of
consciousness," one is interested only in reactions,
responses — in short, in behavior In the presence
of stimuli which produce movements. The body
is a complicated organ and " mind " is merely a
convenient term to express its " activities." ^ The
behaviorist " recognizes no dividing line between
man and brute." Psychology becomes " the
science of behavior," ^ the study of " the activity
of man or animal as it can be observed from the
outside, either with or without attempting to de-
termine the mental states by inference from these
acts." Emotions become reduced forthwith to
*' the bodily resonance " set up in the muscular
and visceral systems by instinctive movements in

1 Watson, Behavior, p. i.

2 See Ralph Barton Perry's article " A Behavioristic View
of Purpose" in the Journal of Philosophy, February 17, 192I.

3 Pillsbury, Fundamentals of Psychology, p. 4.

PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUAL LIFE 163

the presence of objects, these curious movements
being due entirely to the inheritance of physio-
logical structure adapted at least in the early
stages to aid survival. There is no way by which
behaviorist psychology can give any standing to
religion or to any type of spiritual values. " ^Es-
thetics is the study of the useless,'^ as William
James baldly states the case. Conscience disap-
pears or becomes another name for the inheri-
tance or acquisition of certain types of social be-
havior. Everything which we call ethics or mor-
ality changes into well-defined and rigidly deter-
mined behavior. There is nothing more " spirit-
ual " about It than there Is In the fall of a raindrop
or in the luminous trail of a meteor, or In any form
of what has happily been called " cosmic weather."
This reduction of personality to a center of ac-
tivity Is a reaction from the dualistic sundering
of mind and body Inherited from Descartes. The
theory of psycho-physical parallelism Is utterly
bankrupt. Idealism, which Is an attempt to get
round the impasse of dualism by treating mind as
the only reality, Is abhorrent to scientists and un-
popular with young philosophers, especially In
America. Some other solution Is therefore ur-
gent. The easiest one at hand, though It Is ob-
viously temporary and superficial, Is to cut across

i64 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

the mind loop, ignore its unique, originative, crea-
tive capacity and its interior depth, to deal only
with body plus body's activities, and to call that
" psychology."

The *' mind-state '' psychology takes us little
farther on. It also is a form of naturalism.
" Mind-state " psychology makes more of intro-
spection than behaviorist psychology does, and it
works more than the latter does in terms of con-
sciousness, which for the behaviorist can be almost
ignored or questioned as an existing reality. Ac-
cording to this view, mind or consciousness is
composed of a vast number of " elemental units,'*
and the business of psychology is to analyze and
describe these units or states and to discover the
laws of their arrangement or succession. Mind,
on this theory, is an aggregate or sum total of
'* states." Professor James, who gives great
place to " mind states," will, however, not admit
that they are permanent and repeatable *' units,"
passing and returning unaltered. In his usual
vivid way he says that " a permanently existing
* idea ' [i. e., mental unit] which makes its ap-
pearance before the footlights of consciousness at
periodical intervals is as mythological an entity
as the Jack of Spades." ^ And yet he continues
'^Psychology (Briefer Course), p. 197.

PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUAL LIFE 165

to deal with mind as a vast series of more or less
descrlbable states. Some states are " substan-
tive," such as our " perceptions," our " memo-
ries," or our definite " images," when the mind
perches and rests upon some clear and descrlbable
thought, and on the other hand there are " transi-
tive states " which are vague, hard to catch or
hold or express, and which reveal the mind In
flight, in passage, on the way from one substan-
tive state to another.

When we ask the '' mind-state " psychologist
to tell us about the soul or to supply us with a
working substitute for it, he relegates it to the
scrap heap where lie the collected rubbish and the
antiquated mental furniture of the medieval cen-
turies. We have no need of it. It is only a word
anyhow. It has always been an expensive luxury
and a continual bother. We are better off with
It gone. When we look about for a " self as
knower," or for a guardian of our identity, we
find all that we need In these same " passing states
of consciousness." They not only know things
and facts, but they also know themselves, and suc-
cessively inherit and adapt all the preceding
" states " have gained and acquired. The state
of the present moment owns the thoughts and ex-
periences which preceded it, for " what possesses

i66 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

the possessor possesses the possessed." '' In our
waking hours," Professor James says, " though
each pulse of consciousness dies away and is re-
placed by another, yet that other, among the
things it knows, knows its own predecessor and
finding it ' warm,' greets it saying, * Thou art
mine and part of the same self with me/ " It
seems, then, this famous writer concludes, that
" states of consciousness are all that psychology
needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or the-
ology may prove the soul to exist; but for psy-
chology the hypothesis of such a substantial prin-
ciple of unity is superfluous." ^ We are certainly
hard up if we must depend on proofs which the-
ology can give us!

We are thus once more reduced to a condition
of sheer naturalism. Our stream of conscious-
ness is only a rapid succession of passing states,
each " state " causally attached to a molecular
process In the brain. " Every psychosis is the
result of a neurosis.'^ There is no soul, there is
no creative spiritual pilot of the stream, there is
no freedom, there are no moral values, there is
nothing but passing " cosmic weather," sometimes
peeps of sunshine, sometimes moonshine, some-
times drizzle or blizzard, and sometimes cyclone
^ Ibid, p. 203.

PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUAL LIFE 167

or waterspout! To meet the appalling thinness
of this " cinema " of mind states, we are given
the comfort of believing that there is an under-
threshold world within, possibly more real and
surely more important than this little rivulet of
states which make up our conscious life. There
Is a '' fringe " to consciousness more wonderful
than that which adorned the robe of the high
priest. This " fringe " defies description and baf-
fles all analysis. It is a halo or penumbra which
surrounds every " state '' and holds all the states
vitally together, so that ^' states " turn out to be
unsundered in some deeper mysterious currents of
being. Others would call this same underlying,
mysterious part of us the subliminal " self," i. e.,
under-threshold " self." It is a kind of semi-
spiritual matrix where the states of consciousness
are formed and gestated. It is the source to
which we may trace everything that can not be
explained by the avenues of the senses. Demons
and divinities knock at its doors and visitants
from superterrestrial shores peep in at its win-
dows. It Is often treated, especially of course
by Frederic Myers, as a deeper " self," more or
less discontinuous with our conscious upper self,
the self of mind states. All work of genius is
due to " subliminal uprushes," " an emergence

i68 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

into the current of ideas which the man is con-
sciously manipulating of other ideas which he has
not consciously originated, but which have shaped
themselves beyond his will in profounder regions
of his being." As is well known, Professor James
resorts to these " subliminal uprushes " for his
explanation of all the deeper religious experiences
and he has done much to give credit to these
" profounder regions of our being " and to make
the subliminal theory popular. He does not, how-
ever, as Myers does, treat it as another "self,"
an intermediary between earth and heaven, a mes-
senger and a mediator of all those higher and di-
viner aspects of life which transcend the sphere
of sense and of the empirical world.

II

No theory certainly is sound which begins by
cutting the subconscious and the conscious life
apart into two more or less dissociated selves.
There is every indication and evidence of contin-
uity and correlation between what is above and
what is below the threshold which in any case is
as relative and artificial a line as is the horizon.
The so-called " uprushes " of the genius are finely
correlated with his normal experience into which

PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUAL LIFE 169

they " uprush." The " uprushes " which convey
truth to Socrates beautifully fit, first, the char-
acter of the man and, secondly, the demands of
the temporal environment. Dante's '* uprushes "
correspond to the psychological climate of the
medieval world, and Shakespeare's " uprushes "
are well suited to the later period of the Renais-
sance. All subliminal communications are con-
gruent and consonant with the experience of the
person who receives them. The visions of apoca-
lyptic seers are all couched in the imagery of the
apocalyptic schools, and so, too, the reports of
mediums are all in terms of spiritualistic beliefs.
We shall never find the solution of our religious
problems by dividing the inner life of man into
two unrelated selves, by whatever name we call
them, for any religion that is to be real must go
all the way through us, must unify all our powers,
and must furnish a spring and power by which
we live here and now In the sphere of our con-
sciousness, our character, and our will.

It proves to be just as Impossible to cut con-
sciousness up into the fragmentary bits or units
called mind states, or to sunder it Into a so-called
'' self as knower " and " self as known." Con-
sciousness Is never a shower of shot — a series
of discontinuous units. It Is the most completely

I/O SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

Integral unity known to us anywhere In the uni-
verse. There are no "parts" to it; it is with-
out breaks or gaps. It Is one undivided whole.
The only unit we can properly talk about Is our
unique persisting personal self In conscious rela-
tion to an environment. We can, of course, treat
consciousness in the abstract as an aggregate of
states and we can formulate a scientific account
of this constructed entity as we can of any other
abstracted section of reality. But this abstracted
entity is forever totally different from the warm
and Intimate Inner life within us, as we actually
live it and feel its flow. Any state or process
which we may talk about Is only an artificial frag-
ment of a larger, deeper reality which gives the
" fragment " its peculiar being and makes It what
it Is. Underneath all that appears and happens
in the conscious flow is the personal self for whom
the appearances occur. Any psychologist who ex-
plicitly leaves this out of his account always im-
plicitly smuggles it in again.

The most striking fact of experience is knowing
that we know. The same consciousness which
knows any given object in the same pulse of con-
sciousness knows Itself as knowing It. Self-con-
sciousness Is present In all consciousness of ob-
jects. The thinker that thinks Is Involved In and

PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUAL LIFE 171

Is bound up with all knowledge, even of the sim-
plest sort. Every idea, every feeling, and every
act of will Is what it is because it Is in living
unity with our entire personal self. If any such
" state " got dissociated, slipped away and under-
took to do business on Its own hook, It would be
as unknown to us as our guardian angel is. The
mind that knows can never be separated from
the world that is known. One can think in ab-
straction of a mind apart by itself and of a world
equally isolated — but no such mind and no such
world actually exist. To be a real mind, a real
self. Is to be in active commerce with a real world
given in experience. One thinks his object in
the same unified pulse of consciousness in which
he thinks himself and vice versa. There is no
self-consciousness without object-consciousness,
and there is no object-consciousness without self-
consciousness. Outer and Inner, know^er and
known, are not two but forever one. The " soul,"
therefore, is not something hidden away in behind
or above and beyond our ideas and feelings and
will activities. It is the active living unity of per-
sonal consciousness — the one psychic Integer
and unit for a true psychology. It binds all the
Items of experience into one indivisible unity, one
organic whole through which our personal type

172 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

of life is made possible. At every moment of
waking, intelligent life we look out upon each
fact, each event, each experience from a wider
self which organizes the new fact in with its for-
mer experiences, weaves it into the web of its
memories and emotions and purposes, makes the
new fact a part of itself, and yet at the same time
knows itself as transcending and outliving the
momentary fact.

When we study the personal self deeply
enough, not as cut up into artificial units, but as
the living, undivided whole, which Is Implied in
all coherent experience, we find at once a basis
for those ideal values that are rightly called spir-
itual and for " those mighty hopes that make us
men." The first step toward a genuine basis
of spiritual life is to be found in the restoration
of the personal self to Its true place as the ulti-
mate fact, or datum, of self-conscious experience.
As soon as we come back to this central reality,
our unified, unique, self-active personality, we find
ourselves in possession of material enough; as
Browning would say,

" For fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,

PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUAL LIFE 173

Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again, —
The grand Perhaps!"

What we find at once, even without a resort to
a subliminal self, or to " uprushes," Is that our
normal, personal self-consciousness is a unique,
living, self-active, creative center of energies,
dealing not only with space and time and tangible
things, but dealing as well with realities which are
space- and time-transcendlng. " The things
that are not " prove to be Immense factors
In our lives and constantly " bring to naught the
things that are." The greatest events of
history have not been due to physical forces;
they have been due to plans and Ideals which were
real only In the viewless minds of men. What
'vcas not yet brought about what was to be. Alex-
ander the Great with his physical forces, sweeping
across the ancient world like a cataclysm of na-
ture, was certainly no more truly a world-builder
than was Jesus, who had no armies, who used no
tangible forces, but merely put Into operation
those '* things that were not," I.e., his Ideas of
what ought to be and his conviction that love Is
stronger than Roman legions. The simplest and
humblest of us, like the Psalmist, find the

174 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

Meshech where we sojourn too straitened and
narrow for us. We have all cried, " Woe is me
that I sojourn In Meshech!" The reason that
we discover the limits and bounds of our poor
Meshech is that we are all the time going beyond
the hampering Meshech that tries to contain and
imprison us.

The thing which spoils all our finite camping
places is our unstilled consciousness that we are
made for something more than we have yet real-
ized or attained. Our ideals are an unmistakable
intimation of our time-transcending nature. We
can no more stop with that zvhich is than Niagara
can stop at the fringe of the fall. All conscious-
ness of the higher rational type Is continually car-
ried forward toward the larger whole that would
complete and fulfill its present experience. We
are aware of the limit only because we are already
beyond it. The present is a pledge of more; the
little arc which we have gives us a ground of faith
in the full circle which we seek. A study of man's
life which does not deal with this Inherent Idealiz-
ing tendency is like Hamlet with Hamlet left out.
Martineau declared:

" Amid all the sickly talk about ' ideals ' which has
become the commonplace of our age, it is well to remem-

PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUAL LIFE 175

ber that so long as they are dreams of future possibility
and not faiths in present realities, so long as they are a
mere self-painting of the yearning spirit and not its per-
sonal surrender to immediate communion with an in-
finite Perfection, they have no more solidity or steadiness
than floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine and broken
by the passing wind. . . . The vtry gate of entrance
to religion, the moment of its new birth, is the discovery
that your ideal is the everlasting Real, no transient brush
of a fancied angel wing, but the abiding presence and
persuasion of the Soul of souls." ^

In the same vein Pringle-Pattison, one of the
wisest of our living teachers, has said:

" Consciousness of imperfection, the capacity for prog-
ress, and the pursuit of perfection, are alike possible to
man only through the universal life of thought and good-
ness in which he shares and which, at once an indwelling
presence and an unattainable ideal^ draws him * on
and always on.' '' ^

It is here in these experiences of ours which
spring out of our real nature, but which always
carry us beyond ivhat is and which make It im-
possible for us to live in a world composed of
" things," no matter how golden they are, that

1 Martineau, A Study of Religion (2d ed.), I, 12.

2 The Philosophical Radicals, pp. 97-98.

176 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

we have the source of our spiritual values. When
we talk about values we may use the w^ord In two
senses. In the ordinary sense we mean some-
thing extrinsic, utilitarian. We mean that we
possess something which can be exchanged for
something else. It is precious because we can sell
it or swap It or use it to keep life going. In the
other sense we see value in reference to some-
thing which ought to he^ whether it now is or not.
It is pt to be, It would justify Its being In relation
to the whole reality. When we speak of ethical
or spiritual values we are thinking of something
that will minister to the highest good of persons
or of a society of persons. Value in this loftier
meaning always has to do with Ideals. A being
without any conscious end or goal, i. e., without
an Ideal, would have no sense of worth, no spir-
itual values. It does not appear on the level of
Instinct. It arises as an appreciation of what
ought to be realized In order to complete and
fulfill any life which Is to be called good. Ob-
viously a person with rich and complex interests
will have many scales of value, but lower and
lesser ones will fall into place under wider and
higher ones, so that one forms a kind of hierarchi-
cal system of values with some overtopping end of
supreme worth dominating the will.

PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUAL LIFE 177

It becomes one of the deepest questions in the
world what connection there Is between man's
spiritual values or ideals and the eternal nature of
things in the universe. Are these ideals of ours,
these values which seem to raise us from the natu-
ralistic to the spiritual level, just our subjective
creations, or are they expressions of a cooperat-
ing and rational power beyond us and yet in us,
giving us intimations of what is true and best in
a world more real than that of matter and mo-
tion? These ideal values, such as our apprecia-
tion of beauty, our confidence in truth, our dedi-
cation to moral causes, our love for worthy per-
sons, our loyalty to the Kingdom of God, are not
born of selfish preference or individual desire.
They are not capricious like dreams and visions.
They attach to something deeper than our per-
sonal wishes, In fact our faith in them and our
devotion to them often cause us to take lines of
action straight against our personal wishes and
our Individual desires. They stand the test of
stress and strain, they weather the storms of time
which submerge most things, they survive all
shock and mutations and only Increase In worth
with the wastage of secondary goods. They rest
on no mere temporary Impulse or sporadic whim.
They have their roots deep In the life of the race.

178 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE

They have lasted better than Andes or Ararat,
and they are based upon common, universal as-
pects of rational life. They are at least as sure
and prophetic as are laws of triangles and rela-
tions of space. If we can count on the perma-
nence of the multiplication table and on the con-
tinuity of nature, no less can we count on the
conservation of values and the continued signifi-
cance of life.

They seem thus to belong to the system of the
universe and to have the guardianship of some
invisible Pilot of the cosmic ship. The streams
of moral power and the spiritual energies that
have their rise in good persons are as much to
be respected facts of the universe as are the rivers
that carry ships of commerce. Moral goodness is
a factor in the constitution of the world, and the
eternal nature of the universe backs it as surely
as It backs the laws of hydrogen. It does not
back every ideal, for some Ideals are unfit and do
not minister to a coherent and rationally ordered
scheme of life. Those Ideals only have the august
sanction and right of way which are born out of
the age-long spiritual travail of the race and which
tend to organize men for better team efforts, i. e.,
which promote the social community life, the or-
ganism of the Spirit. Through these spiritual

PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUAL LIFE 179

forces, revealed in normal ethical persons, we are,
I believe, nearer to the life of God and closer to
the revealing centers of the universe than we are
when we turn to the subliminal selves of hysterics.
The normal interior life of man is boundless and
bottomless. It is not a physical reality, to be meas-
ured by foot rules or yardsticks. It is a reality
of a wholly different order. It is essentially spir-
itual, 1. e., of spirit. In its organized and differ-
entiated life this personal self of ours is often
weak and erratic. We feel the urge which be-
longs to the very nature of spirit^ but we blunder
in our direction, we bungle our aims and purposes,
we fail to discover what it is that we really want.
But we are never insulated from the wider spir-
itual environment which constitutes the true inner
world from which we have come and to which we
belong. There are many ways of correspondence
with this environment. No way, however, is more
vital, more life-giving than this way of dedication
to the advancement of the moral ideals of the
world.

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