Things I Know In Religion A Preface To Faith

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Things I Know
in Religion

THINGS TKMC5W
IN RELIGION

A Preface to Faith

BT

JOSEPH FORT NEWTON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

THINGS I KNOW IN RBtlGION

Copyright, 1930, by Harper &;

Brothers Printed in the XL S. A.

FIRST EDITION

I-E

To

FREDERICK W. NORWOOD

My Beloved Successor in the

Pulpit of the City Temple

With Admiration and

Affection

CONTENTS

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION i

WHY WE BELIEVE 21

GOD OUR ETERNAL REFUGE 43

WHEN GOD Is NEAR 57

THE CRISIS OF CHRIST 67

THE RETURN TO THE ALTAR 85

RELIGION IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS 103

OUR NEIGHBOR 119

THE NEXT STEP IN RELIGION 135

WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES 147

THE CHALLENGE OF LENT 161

THE IMMORTAL LIFE 175

Vll

FOREWORD

F THE SERMONS HERE SELECTED, ONE Ap-
peared in the Atlantic Monthly and two in
The Christian Century, while the title ser-
mon formed a part of a symposium entitled
What Religion Means to Me, edited by Sherwood Eddy,
who kindly allows me to use it. The first two sermons
have been used effectively in various colleges and uni-
versities Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Iowa, Vassar
in chapel services and group discussions. The under-
lying emphasis all through is an appeal to experience,
as over against outward authority and arid argument,
as the basis of faith, seeking the roots of religion in
the nature and need of man, and its fulfillment and
verification in the struggles we pass through in fellow-
ship with God and our fellows,

J, F. N.

St. James's Church,
Philadelphia.

Things I Know
in Religion

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

Now I know m part; but then shall
I know even as also 1 am known.
i Cor, 13:12.

IT. PAUL DID NOT PROFESS TO
KNOW EVERYTHING. IN REGARD
TO MANY THINGS OF VAST IMPORT
HE HAD HONESTLY TO ADMIT

that he did not know. He saw in a glass darkly, he
prophesied in fragments. That is to say, respecting
much that he deeply desired to know, he was a Chris-
tian agnostic, as we all must be. Our human mind is
limited, our vision is dim. On this bank and shoal of
time we can see but a little way ahead, and every ray
of light is tipped with darkness.

There was a time in the life of St. Paul when he
knew much more than he did when he wrote this Hymn
of Love; a time when he knew more and loved less.
Like some of the rest of us, St. Paul had been trained
in a system of theology in which little was left un-
known. His teachers knew the nature of God, the
names and number of the angels, and the end of all
things. As often happens, his knowledge made him
narrow, bigoted, and intolerant, as if it were not sure
of itself. Uncertainty lies at the heart of all intolerance,
doubt is the basis of bigotry. Happily, an explosive ex-

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

perience had blown the old theology of St. Paul to bits,
leaving his house of dogma an utter and hopeless
wreck. He was never able to pick up the pieces and
put them together again.

Nor did he care to do so. Old things had passed
away; all things had become new. Something strange
and wonderful had happened, defying analysis and
baffling speech. Life had now another basis, a deeper
meaning, and a new dynamic. He himself was "a new
creation/' as he tells us, living in a new world of
lengthening vistas and lifting skies. If he knew less and
loved more, finding in love the way to the truth most
worth knowing, the things he now knew were far more
vital and profound than the dogmas of other days. He
humbly admitted that he knew only in part, perhaps
,a tiny part, but his knowledge was not only more real
as far as it went, but, somehow, more vivid and satis-
fying. If he still had a habit of trying to prove by logic
what he had learned by love, it was hardly more than
a habit. His argument always ended in an anthem, and
often in an ecstasy of joy.

A Christian saint here used the same word that a
modern agnostic uses, albeit with a different accent and
emphasis. Much depends upon the tone of voice and
heart in which we say that we do not know. It may be
said in a tone of sad finality, if not dogmatic denial,
implying that there is nothing to know, and that we
are doomed to perpetual spiritual idiocy. Such an atti-
tude was alien to the mind of St. Paul, who was neither
negative nor neutral, as so many are today. The issues
involved were too profound, too f ar-reachiiig. One can-

4

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

not think of St. Paul singing the plaintive minor mu-
sic of our time, half query and half protest. Never! His
music was akin to that high, heroic, lonely voice echo-
ing across the ages, "I know that my Redeemer liv-
eth," flinging out his faith in the teeth of tragedy. As
he himself said elsewhere, "I know whom I have be-
lieved, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that
which I have deposited with him." In other words, he
thought expectantly, as one who knew that there is
always truth ahead, mote truth to be known, truth more
amazing than we have yet imagined.

/Such should be our attitude today, in the midst of
thfc amazing advance of knowledge; and it would be
but for the extraordinary spiritual inferiority complex
which afflicts us. How strange that the human mind,
in the very hour of its triumph, should be smitten with
spiritual paralysis, ending in obfuscarion, as if bludg-
eoned by bulk and suffocated by size. Surely the mind
capable of the scientific discoveries of our generation
is not untrustworthy in its spiritual adventures the
soul of Jesus is surely as much to be trusted as the reve-
lations of a test tube! It is obviously more difficult for
one who begins to believe today than it was for one
whose faith was matured in the tiny, cozy, more
friendly universe in which some of us grew up, before
science had pushed the walls of the world back out of
sight and taken the roof off. But that is only temporary,
and asks for a more thrilling adventure. Foe the mo-
ment the old religious charities are blurred^ but the
realities remain, and the mist will lift
greater faith.

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

In the meantime there is confusion, and inevitably so,
because our religious insight has not adjusted itself to
the new universe which science has unveiled. Nor has
science, for that matter it is dumb and amazed as its
basic ideas are analysed and found to be only symbols
and shadows. They err who imagine that science is all
fact and religion all faith. At bottom all our thinking
rests upon faith faith in the reality of truth, faith in
the power of the mind to reach the truth; and what
is learned by faith becomes, in turn, the basis of fur-
ther faith. It is a paradox but not a contradiction, since
faith and fact mingle in our quest of truth in every
field. Faith is "reason grown courageous"; and facts
point the direction in which faith flies. The truth is that
both science and religion have become more modest,
each finding that it needs the other the one to find
facts, the other to find meanings. Hence my desire to
tell not what I believe, but what I know in religion,
the facts upon which my beliefs are based and built,
and may have to be rebuilt. If I tell it as a personal
experience, it is because that is what it is.

I

Here we are in an amazing universe, alive, active,
thinking, dreaming, loving, seeking to know the mean-
ing of the world and our place and duty in it. Mani-
festly, then, if there is any key to the riddle it must
be found in something within ourselves, since we can-
not leap outside ourselves to discover it. Nor do we
need to do so, because we are within nature, not op-
6

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

posed to it but a part of it. Man is not an alien in the
universe but a child, not exotic but indigenous; and
this means that in values, as in consciousness, we are
on the inside, and have in our own nature a clue to its
meaning. Nay, more; we are agents, actors, partici-
pants in the actual life of the universe, not mere spec-
tators of reality but part of it part of "the thing-in-
itself," as the philosophers say. Since this is so, what is
part and parcel of ourselves is unassailable by any
uncertainty, and to the measure of our capacity we can
know what the universe is by what it is in us and to us.
By the same token, if there is a spiritual element
in man, which no one denies, it must have come from
the universe itself, if not from physical nature then
from some Power behind and within physical nature,
else it would not be in man. Also, the spiritual quality,
so to name it, must be greater in the universe than in
man, since its development in man is still so incom-
plete. Here, truly, is a firm basis of faith, built into the
very structure of our being, and the first jact upon
which I build is the moral sense in man. Here it is,
Booted in the very bottom of our being, interpret it as
you like an impulse, an insight, an inner censor, an
awful whisper of command as much a part of the
universe as pig iron or potash; something which has
never accepted utter identification with outer force or
brute fact. At the core of consciousness is conscience,
a sense of right and wrong, an inexorable demand for
obedience to an inner law. If it be only an agnostic
resignation to a# inner decency, it is here within us,
unmistakably so. Like everything else, it may vary with

7

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

race, custom, depth of insight and degree of develop-
ment, but it is a fact of nature and life. The mystery
of man is not that he does wrong, but that he is aware
of it. Somehow, no one knows how though one may
have beliefs about it man is aware that he is made
for righteousness, and that he can never be a man, much
less a happy man, until he is a righteous man.

The two overwhelming mysteries, as Kant said, are
the still depth of a starlit sky and the silent whisper of
the moral law in the soul of man; and one is as real as
the other. Explain the moral life of man how you will,
describe it as infantile inhibition of humanity, as the
fashion now is; declare it to be only an echo within us
of an old ancestral memory, or the shadow of an an-
cient fear that is only to push the mystery further
back and deeper down. The origin of the moral life,
the initial bias toward righteousness remains to be ac-
counted for. There is in man what Woolman called "a
stop in the mind," something which arrests us and
compels us to pass moral judgment upon our thoughts
and acts. It is here within me, unaccountably. I did not
create it. Whether I can destroy it or not I do not know.
It commands me, whether I will or no. When I obey
it, I am happy; when I disobey it, I am thwarting my
own nature and defying the law of my very being. To
explain it away is not to send it away. If I drive it out
the door, it comes in at the window and issues its edict.

Upon this fact, then, we may build, as Robertson did
when, as a young man, sorely troubled about his faith
and the meaning of his life, he went to the Alps to fight
it out. The only thing which the analysis could not
8

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

dissolve and destroy was the moral law within, and
so, "clinging obstinately to moral good/' in spite of
himself, he built upon that firm basis the edifice of his
faith. As he put it picturesquely: if vice should lead to
some white heaven, and virtue plunge us into some red
hell, still virtue is better than vice, and honor is nobler
than dishonor. Something deep in us, profound beyond
our ken, answers, "Yes, it is true." Of course, if so
much is true, much more must be true about ourselves
and the universe; but I am dealing only with what I
know, not with the details of belief. At any rate, con-
science is the corner-stone of theology, the basis and be-
ginning of any belief worth holding; the fact upon
which and about which we may organize our faith.

II

The second thing that I know is no less sure; it is that
I have the power to choose what is right and to refuse
what is wrong) or, contrariwise, to choose the wrong
and refuse the right. Having done both, I know that
it is true. At once we are faced by a vague fatalistic
philosophy now in vogue, albeit hoary with age, which
tells us that we are no more responsible for what we
do than we are for the shape of our heads and the
color of our eyes. No doubt it is plausible and many
facts may be arrayed in its behalf; but every man knows
that it is false. When Dr. Johnson had heard all the
facts in favor of fatalism, he brought his old cane down
with a thump and said: "I know I am free, aad that
is the end of it"

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

Fate is a fact, and so is freedom. Much of our life
is ordered for us by fate, and runs in grooves which it
must follow; most of it is fixed before we arrive. The
time and place of our birth, our race, nationality, par-
entage, color, constitution, early environment all are
arranged without our knowledge or desire. Hands cold
and dead seem to shape our lives from the grave.
Tethered alike by nature and history, and inured to our
bondage, we are not aware how beset we are until we
awake to the facts. Still, as Emerson asks, if Fate is all,
who and what is it that pries into the facts? Even limi-
tation has its limits, and it is the fate of man to be
free. Hedged about, restricted, enmeshed in a network
of laws, his liberty is none the less real because it is
limited, as it must be of necessity by the fact that he
is finite, as well as by the nature and purpose of his life.

Just the same, as Tennyson said, if we are birds in a
cage, we decide whether we are to sit on the upper
perch or the lower. If Fate is supreme, then there must
be a Higher Fatalism which includes moral law and
the quest of truth, obedience to which sets us free. Or
perhaps we may say that the will of man is free in that
it is not compelled, but limited in the sense that it is
impelled by the law of its own being, as well as by the
pervasive and ultimately persuasive influence of the
good, which is stronger than evil. However we explain
it, surely a limited liberty is better by far than the sla-
very of a fetterless freedom. One often thinks of the
words of St. Theresa when she wished for a torch and
a bucket of water. With one she would burn up heaven
and with the other put out the fires of hell, in order
10

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

that man might choose the good because it is good,
and reject evil because it is evil.

Any sort of liberty is a danger, and may be a disaster.
Huxley said he was quite willing to be an automaton,
if he could be wound up and set going, assured that
he would always do right; it would make life more
simple. Happily, it is impossible. Man is not a machine,
he is an organism; a moral being who must take the
risk and peril of liberty, winning a good character or
losing it, falling to rise, often baffled but still fighting
on. Every man knows it is true; it is a fact given us by
life and our own souls attest it. The record of human
experience, as far back as we can go, confirms the real-
ity and peril of the moral life, its glory and its pathos.
Whole civilizations have "withered into tired dust" be-
cause they did not obey the moral law, turning life
into a form of death.

Ill

Even the moral life, with its awful law and its per-
ilous liberty, is not all that we find within these "little,
infinite human souls." There is something else; some-
thing elusive, ineluctable, irresistible, unconscious oft,
unsatisfied ever; something free and flaming a mo-
tion and a passion that runs beyond duty,, beyond right-
eousness., in 'quest of goodness. It is linked with our
love of beauty; it is akin to poetry, if by poetry we
mean "distance, loneliness and singing"; a sense of the
Beyond by which we know that the horizons are not
garden walls and the stars are more than lights in a

ii

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

cottage window. A wild, sad joy, an unutterable sigh
lying in the depths of the soul, one hears it breathing
through the literature and liturgy of man; a loneliness
that wakes with him in the morning, a wistfulness that
haunts him at eventide. What art may hope to ensnare
this thing that stirs us deeper than any words can tell,
a mystery, a wonder and a divine desire? As Chesterton
said it in song,

For men are homesick in their homes,

And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land

Whenever the day is done.

No one can define religion; it breaks through all
language and escapes. At once a mystery and a mad-
ness, no one can tell what it will do or become next,
except that it will do some impossible thing and talk
about it in parables. One day it gives us a militarist
like Cromwell, the next a pacifist like Tolstoi or
Gandhi. It turns Fra Angelico to art, and the Puritans
against art. In one age it created the drama, and in the
next prohibited it. It fashions a stately Roman proces-
sion and a quaint Quaker bonnet; the Gothic glory of
a cathedral its tower a nesting place of dreams and
the drabness of a country meetinghouse. It inspired
Peter the Hermit, who led hosts across a continent to
fight for an empty tomb, and Francis of Assisi who
kissed a leper and preached to the doves a vision to
haunt our dreams. It contrives theologies and composes
anthems. Clinging in its conservatism, it yet dares the
far reach and search after the final goal and good of

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

life, passing all frontiers in "the cold, high glory of the
watch."

An acute awareness of unattained possibility, a sense
of "the beyond that is within," religion is to morality
what genius is to talent, as love is to duty. Talent does
what it can, toiling terribly at its task, and proud of its
work. Genius does what it must, moved by a swift,
N creative impulse, with an effortless ease that is un-
* aware of toil. No wonder talent is vain, and genius
humble. Duty does what is required; love does all it
can, pouring out its treasure even upon the most un-
worthy object, bearing all things, believing all things,
,p hoping all things. No moral law would have sent Jesus
to the Qoss, or Damien to serve the lepers. If left to
^itself, untaught by reason and unrestrained by moral
law, religion may be a plague, sinking into all sorts of
superstition. When the three toil together, it is re-
ligion that makes life now a lyric, now an epic, lifting
our fleeting days on wings until they blend with the
(UEternal Life.

[P A gleam, if nothing more, of this eternal mysticism
*jls in all of us, though we may not be aware of it;
^ something of the strange power that draws stones to-
gether into the mellow beauty of an old cathedral, its
steps worn by myriad feet. It makes us at home in all
places where men lift hands in prayer, where bums
"the lamp of poor souls" to guide the wandering feet
of humanity. Pity and piety are akin, and they blsnd
in a tender pathos such as made me want to stop at
every wayside shrine left standing on the battlefields
of Flanders and pray for friend and foe alike, lost in a

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

night of war, dark, dreadful and confused. If religion
seems to divide, at last, set free, it will link into unity
all holy places of all ages, giving thanks for the one
truth that hallows the earth, rejoicing in each shrine
for the beauty entrusted to it.

IV

There is another thing that I know, as I know noth-
ing else: both my moral sense and my religious nature
shy, lonely, wistful, adventurous find fulfillment
and satisfaction in the life, personality and character
of Jesus, as nowhere else. To me Jesus is a mystery/ he
outtops my knowledge. A friend of mine asked Ber-
trand Russell two questions: Do you fully understand
the Einstein theory of relativity? and do you go with
him all the way? Quick as a flash the great mathema-
tician replied: "I answer the first question in the nega-
tive, and the second in the affirmative." That is exactly
my attitude toward Jesus. He baffles my mind, but he
searches my heart and sways it as no one else cai> do.
His tragic Figure of heroic moral loveliness subdues
me, chastens me, challenges me, redeems me. His moral-
ity is so spiritual, and his spirituality so moral, so, high
yet so haunting at once pure and purifying and so
winsome withal, and dyed in all the hues of human life.
Without him moral law seems stern, awful, impossible;,
with him it walks beside me, incarnate in a Friend,
who seeks and finds me, teaching me to follow him
by making me love him. Such purity, such heroism,

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

such love-anointed goodness, such healing sympathy
and fearless faith break my heart and mend it.

To me Jesus is a dream come true, a vision verified,
the lost, ineffable Word made flesh and then spirit
again; the Life that interprets life, revealing a tender
love hidden in a terrible mystery. A thousand ques-
tions about him baffle me utterly, yet even my per-
plexity about him is precious. Besides, the questions
which he seems to ask me are far more searching than
any I can ask about him. Others seem able to draw the
mystic line which divides the human and the divine, but
I cannot. I have no such skill. An old, craggy creed
tells me that Jesus is of one substance with God, and
I believe it is true; but I do not know it. Indeed, I do
not know what the substance of man is, much less
what the substance of God may be. In fact, I do not
know what any kind of substance is. We do not think
in such terms today. With us a thing is what it does.
Even matter has become a mystery; it melts under our
very gaze into a whirling energy, leaving the material-
ist nothing to stand on. Such thoughts and things ;^re
beyond my competence, outside my ken.

But Jesus is very real and near, at once august and
intimate, in spite of piled-up ages, and his words move
me like great music, as if they knew all my hopes and
fears and dreams. Nay, more; in a way I cannot explain
even to myself, he is able to unlock doors in my nature
accessible to no one else and enter, a dear, implacable
Friend. When he is with me, faith is not the pressure of
a veiled hand hidden in the unseen, much less an act
of pure intellect, but a deep friendship. More than that

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

my words cannot tell. A student in the Harvard Di-
vinity School, of the class of 1913, wrote the following
lines, which have been set to music by Lowell Mason.
They tell what we can know about Jesus, which we may
learn of his fellowship, summing up in simple words
things for which words were never made:

I know not how that Bethlehem's Babe

Could in the Godhead be;
I only know the Manger-Child

Has brought God's life to me.

I know not how that Calvary's Cross

A world from sin could free;
I only know its matchless love

Has brought God's love to me.

I know not how that Joseph's Tomb

Could solve death's mystery;
I only know the living Christ

Our immortality.

One other thing I know, too, beyond the shadow of
doubt or cavil: soon or late I must obey the vision of
moral power and spiritual beauty I have seen in Jesus:
1 can never be happy until I do. But, if we needs must
follow the highest when we see it, we must have help
for the adventure, and we can get it. This, too, I know
with an assurance made doubly sure by the testing of
time and trial. The church, in spite of its faults and
failings, is a profound help. Of course a man can edu-
cate himself as Lincoln did, through lonely years of
16

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

study. But the quest is much more inspiring in the
stimulating air of a university, in the fellowship of men
seeking light. The church is "a society for the promo-
tion of goodness in the world/* as Arnold said, and to
unite in an historic fellowship of men seeking goodness
is both an inspiration and a consecration. It is like
climbers of the Alps who tie themselves together, so
that if one slip all hold him up.

Times without number, in the midst of the years, I
have had reason to thank God that I entered the Church
as a boy, bowed at its altar, and took upon me its high
vows. It has been a restraint, a reinforcement, a refine-
ment. As Swinburne said of Tennyson in old age, before
he crossed the bar: "It is an inspiration just to know
that he is there"; just to know that he is keeping the
light of poetry aglow. Again and again it has been a
help to me, and a challenge, just to know that a society
of men seeking goodness exists, humble folk keeping
the faith, loyal to the ideal, following with faltering
steps a heavenly vision. How often in history men have
reviled the church, only to find in a wild and fateful
hour that it is the keeper of all the sanctities. Few are
happy about the church as it is today. Its petty debates
repel, its archaic methods annoy, its theological mu-
seum is a lumber room of antiques. But it is the House
of God, the place where His name is holy and where we
may hallow it in our hearts.

The Bible is a help, too, though, alas, it is so little
known and used by those who would love it best if
they sought its counsel. Of theories about the Bible
there are many, but none of them account for its age-

17

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

enduring influence and power. The theories pass, but
the Bible remains the supreme book of the soul, more
like a force of nature than a work of artless art.
Whether it is infallible or not nobody knows. In order
to know that I should have to be infallible myself, and
then I would not need it. One thing is true: the Bible
grew out of a deep spiritual life, and when rightly used
and obeyed it will create in us, infallibly, the kind of
life which created it. It speaks with an authority of
insight, of ages of tragic and triumphant experience,
alike in the granitic solidity of its prose and in the
flaming splendor of its poetry and prophecy. It is a wise
and faithful guide; some of its pages are bread and
meat and milk to me.

Also, there is help for all who ask for it in prayer;
I know it because I have tried it. No philosophy can
fathom the secret of prayer. Any theory of it is but an
outer scaffolding on the wall of the temple, far from
the inmost altar where the fret and btrden of life are
taken away. At once a fact and a mystery, it is as blessed
as it is baffling. Whether we call it fellowship with
God or adjustment to the universe, it deals directly
with reality wherein, as Dante told us, lies our peace.
Of all forms of human effort, prayer is the most pro-
foundly practical, if we add the will to listen and work
for its answer. One reads the life of St. Theresa with
mingled awe and joy, remembering the eighteen years
she devoted to the mastery of this highest of all arts.
What amateurs we are, hardly knowing the alphabet
of prayer as if the disciplines of the life of the spirit
were less exacting than those of art!

18

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

These things I know beyond a doubt, and upon them
I build a working faith for today and a singing hope
for the morrow. Moral law and liberty, the sense of
the Infinite in the finite, the fascination and challenge
of the life of Jesus, and what the Prayer Book calls
"the means of grace" life cannot be ignoble or worth-
less when it gives us such guidance in a world where
there is truth to seek, love to win, work to do, and
beauty to adore. It is a capacity for the highest, and
by faith founded on f act we can make it a happy, high-
hearted adventure, and bring down to the Gate in the
Mist something that ought not to die.

Why
We Believe

Notes oj a sermon-address to a student group
at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a
forum discussion. If the address covered a vast
territory, the questions asked- traversed a much
wider area. However, the thesis remained un~
shaken, and it disarmed much debate.

WHY WE BELIEVE

Lord, increase our faith.

Luke 17:5.

O MAN IS SO APT TO BELIEVE TOO
LITTLE AS THE MAN WHO BEGAN
BY BELIEVING TOO MUCH, OR
RATHER TOO MANY THINGS, AS IF

trying to see in detail the fashion of things to be, mak-
ing theology an Atlas of Eternity. In reaction against
what it deems the overbelief of the last generation our
age has fallen into an underbelief, far below what is
its right. If our fathers asked how good is the most that
we can mean by the word "God/' their sons inquire
how real is the least we can mean by it. Today men are
haunted by the fear that faith is too good to be true,
whereas in other days they felt that even the highest
faith is not good enough to be true.

One result of the underbelief of our day is the trag-
edy of trying to live a maximum life on a minimum
faith; and it cannot be done. No wonder men go to
pieces under the strain of it. AUjqrajrf jllsJbeskjis^
^becau^e^we lack support from a source hid in the un-
seen. How strange: in an age which will have no in-
hibitions many are actually inhibiting the finest faculty,
if not the supreme capacity, of human nature. They
ignore or suppress an unseen element of thought and
yearning out of which is born the quest for a Reality

23

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

which inspires, justifies and satisfies the best in us.
What we need is not faith in more things, but more
faith in a few profound things which make us men,
whence men in all ages have derived inward sustaining
and hope.

What makes us believe anything at all? There must
be some necessity in us which requires faith and begets
it, otherwise man would not make such amazing af-
firmations about the worth and meaning of life. Why
do we believe? Is it because our fathers before us be-
lieved? Partly, no doubt; and that is a good enough
reason, lest we break the mystic continuity of inherit-
ance in respect to the highest life. Our finest hope, said
George Eliot, is our finest memory. But why did our
fathers believe? Had they learned to understand? Em-
phatically not. Really we understand next to nothing
in the universe even matter is a mystery, and the
nature of gravitation and cohesion is a closed book.
Many things are inscrutable, if not utterly incredible,
yet they are true, and, if true, they cannot be absurd.
Clearly it was not understanding, but experience, that
led our fathers to hold a high, heroic faith.

Nor do we believe because we have proved the truths
of faith. Very far from it. Proof! Proof! is the cry of
our generation, not knowing what it asks. Faith can
neither be demonstrated nor argued down, else it would
not be faith. If we could prove God in the manner of
a theorem of geometry, He would be only a theorem,
and not the God we need and seek. God is God just
because a proof that would put Him beyond the reach
of all possible denial is impossible and absurd just

2 4

WHY WE BELIEVE

because He can and does confirm Himself against all
denials and contradictions, being Himself the author
of the issues which prompt those denials and contra-
dictions. Also, such proof as men demand, and think
they are wise in demanding, is by nature a compul-
sion; and nowhere is compulsion more out of place than
in the life of the spirit since both God and man must
be free.

Why, then, do we believe? Let us dig down to the
roots of religion down below the dogmas of every
creed and discover, if possible, the basis of belief.
For, every man knows that we are moved most deeply
not by the many things we try to believe, but by the
elemental things which we cannot persuade ourselves
to deny, without resigning our manhood. Obviously
man would not need religious faith, still less invent it
let alone embark upon its adventures if the Object
of it did not exist, since he did not create the condi-
tions which evoke and require it. There would be noth-
ing to suggest it, nothing to sustain it. Manifestly, so
vast a fact and force as religion is a part of the reality
and sanctity of life, having its warrant in the order
of the universe, as well as in the nature and need
of man.

Life is first; philosophy follows after. The Reality
with which religious faith has to do is given us by life
itself, as a primary experience, and it has about it an
immediacy and an ineffability which belong to all pri-
mary perceptions. That is to say, there is a mystical
element in it which knowledge can never wholly cap-
ture, much less formulate. What is given in primary

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

experience furnishes the data and sets the problems for
reflection, but it is not exhausted in any exposition.
There is always a margin of mystery baffling the
thinker, as there is a haunting beauty which eludes the
artist. As Goethe said, the Ultimate Reality can never
be uttered; it can only be~ acted, and m our efforts to
ehs'nare it in a web of words we may lose the Unut-
terable Truth, before which silence is wisdom and
wonder becomes worship.

I

Let us begin at the beginning, taking the first Truth
and the last, God the Eternal; God infinitesimally vast.
Our faith in God involves our whole being, and is
born of feelings, yearnings, hauntings, intuitions and
thoughts which defy analysis; it is the account which
life gives of itself when it is healthy, wholesome and
free. Life and love, joy and sorrow, pity and pain and
death, the blood in the veins of man, the milk in the
breast of woman, the laughter of little children, the
coming and going of days, radiant beauty and blinding
tragedy, all the old, sweet, sad, human things which
make up our mortal lot these are the basis of our
faith in God. It is older than argument, profounder
than debate, as old as the home and the family, as ten-
der as infancy and old age, as deep as love and death.

It is so historically, as far back as human records
go. Men lived and died by faith in God the Nameless
One of a hundred names long before philosophy was
born, or ever theology had learned its alphabet. If we
26

WHY WE BELIEVE

have ears, we may hear penitential psalmists praising
God on yonder side of the pyramids; and in the Valley
of the Kings, five thousand years ago, Ikhnaton wrote
of the unity and purity of God, celebrating a Presence
revealed, yet also concealed, in the strange and solemn
beauty of the world. So run the annals of the ages,
testifying to the verity of God in the life of man. Yes,
there has been denial of God in every age, because,
as Tolstoi told Gorki, man thwarts his own soul, in-
hibits his finest impulses, and inflicts injury upon his
highest nature. One thinks of the old saint and the
young nobleman in War and Peace, and how, when
the Count said with a sneer that he did not believe in
God, the old philosopher smiled, as a mother might
smile at the silly sayings of a child. Then in a gentle
voice the old man said:

"You do not know Him, sir, and that is
why you are very unhappy. But He is here, He ;
is within me, He is in my words, He is in
thee, and even in these scoffing words that
thou hast just uttered. If He were not, we
would not be speaking of Him. Of Whom
were we speaking? Whom dost thou deny?
Who invented Him, if He be not? How came
there within thee the conception that there is
such an incomprehensible Being?* ' Something
in the eyes of the Count betrayed his long-
ing to know God, and the old man, reading
his face, answered the unasked question of
his heart. "Yes, God exists, but to know Him

27

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

is hard. It is not attained by reason, but by
life. The highest wisdom and truth is like
the purest dew, which we try to hold within
us. Can I hold in an impure vessel that pure
dew and judge of its purity? Only by inner
purification of myself can I bring that dew
contained within me to some degree of
purity."

Not only is God implied in our very thought, He is
affirmed even in our denials, and without Him we are
left with a God-shaped void in our hearts; as men
who have had an arm or a leg amputated say they
still feel an ache in the absent member. In his beguiling
tale, Where the Blue Begins, Christopher Morley in-
vested his dog Gissing with human passions and per-
plexities, the better to show how man is harassed by
the inscrutable issues of life and destiny. With a dog-
nose, as sensitive as the spirit of a poet, Gissing sought
tojsc&it-th& footsteps of God through the mire and
maze of human affairs, in cathedral and counting-
fyouse, on land and sea, driven by a hunger for "a
horizon that would stay blue when he reached it." He
^ eit t sometimes as though his heart had been broken
from some great whole, to which it yearned to be
tfeunited like a bone that had been buried which God
would some day dig up. Always it is so, especially in
our day, when a shallow skepticism has amputated
God from so many souls. For, until we are led or lifted
into a sense of union with the Whole of life, which
gives unity and meaning to all its parts, the urge to

28

WHY WE BELIEVE

completeness, so deeply rooted in the soul, can never
be fulfilled.

God is a Reality given us in experience; our idea of
Him is an effort to make Him richly real and vivid
in our lives. Of course, God is far above and beyond
any idea of Him that ever dwelt in the soul of man,
as the heaven is high above the earth. Therefore, we
ought to think of God in the light of the highest truth
our minds can know and the purest ideal our hearts can
dream, the while we learn to find Him everywhere, in
our own souls, and in all the shapes which life and
love and duty take. Never has it been so difficult to
think of God as it is today, not because He is less real
or less necessary, but because, as has often happened
before, the old symbols of faith have become inade-
quate, if not impossible. Inevitably, our dogmas are
only "words thrown out toward a great Object of con-
sciousness"; not descriptions, but ascriptions. Still, be-
cause we cannot know all about God does not imply
that we are unable to know anything about Him. To
the measure of our capacity we can know God by what
He is in us and to us, and our knowledge increases as
far and as fast as we are ready and willing to go. Only
God is permanently interesting, and to know Him is to
know what life is and what it means.

No man was ever ^^edintoigili.injGo^; no man
was ever argued out of it. The sources of belief, and
unbelief, lie further back and deeper down, and no
logic can take out of the soul what logic did not put
into it. When a man loses faith in God, it is due not to
argument no matter how he may rationalize his de-

29

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

nial but to some inner disaster, betrayal or neglect,
or else some acid distilled in the soul has dissolved
the Pearl of Great Price. What we need, then, is not
argument about God, which avails nothing, but ad-
justment to Him in whom we live and with whom we
have to do every day, everywhere. If it be asked hovv
we can adjust ourselves to God until we know what
He is, the answer is not far to seek we are doing it all
the time. Nobody knows what electricity is. Some say
it is a kind of fluid; others that it is an ether tension.
But nobody really knows. Yet we adjust ourselves to
it, making it run our errands and light our houses.
Jesus, who based everything on experience, said that
by single-hearted devotion to the best we know, we
may learn the Truth most worth knowing; and to that
high quest he calls us.

II

Why do we believe in Jesus? Why did men ever
think that a peasant Teacher walking our human way,
browned by sun, wet by the rain, weary in the heat
of the day, is God of very God? A story of old Japan,
as told by Lafcadio Hearn, may give us a clue. When
the people of a tiny village by the sea were out work-
ing in their low-lying rice fields, an earthquake came.
Happily, one man, whose farm was on the hill behind
the village, was not working with his neighbors, and
from his higher level he saw what the others did not
see. He saw the sea draw swiftly back beyond its usual
limits of retreat, and he knew at once that it meant

30

WHY WE BELIEVE

the coming of a tidal wave. Not an instant was to be
lost; the people must be gathered to the hills or perish.

Hastily he set fire to his rice ricks all that he had
and furiously rang the temple bell. His neighbors in
the fields below heard the sound, and looked up and
saw the smoke of the burning ricks. They rushed to
the hills to help their neighbor, as they thought, in his
dire plight. Then, looking seaward, they saw the wild
waters rushing in over the place where they had been
working, overwhelming their fields in ruin, and under-
stood how they had been saved. The story tells how,
after the disaster was over and the ruin repaired the
man who had done this heroic, self-sacrificing act being
still alive and their neighbor the folk of the village
used to go to their temple and worship his spirit. It
was as though in the saving act of a neighbor and
friend there had been revealed to them a swift touch
and vivid glimpse of "A Living God/' which is the title
of the story.

In the same manner, as men walked with Jesus in
the days of His flesh, watched His works of mercy and
heard his words of beauty, they became aware of the
Living God revealed, as Turgenev said, in a "face that
looked like the faces of all other men, just a common
human face/' As they followed Him in those swift and
gentle years, God became real, vivid, neat, ever ready
to welcome the erring, to receive the sinful, to heal the
afflicted; a Father whose love may be known in the
simple joys of the lowly, no less than in the vision of
the seer. Jesus did not argue about God who, because
He is love, is known only by love but his friends saw

31

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

in him something more Godlike than they had ever
known. In fellowship with him a change was wrought
in their inner life; new power came into their hearts,
life was deeper and death less final. Up to the Cross
they saw him go, facing all that fate and his foes could
do, trusting the power of love alone; and it won* turn-
ing defeat into victory. In spite of all obstacles, no
power was able to stand against its irresistible might
not even death itself!

As his disciples looked back at the days spent in the
company of Jesus, it was plain that a new element had
entered into the life of man through his life. He was
not simply another kind of man, but a new spiritual
species, in whom the center of gravity had shifted from
selfishness to otherness, not fitfully but in constant and
creative urge. His words were the same, fresh as the
dew and bright with color, less like images than ac-
tions, as if life itself were speaking; and their meaning
grew until they shone like stars. His death was the
same dark mystery, but it detached itself from its place
in time and became an unveiling of the law of love
hidden behind the hardness of life. Yet he was so
richly human, and so winsome withal, as if God had
waited and worked for man to become pure enough
to embody His spirit and life: "Man toward God, God
toward Man," to put it so. To such a profound para-
dox of faith and fact men were led by the love of God
in the life of Jesus. How is he related to us, standing so
close to us while towering so high above us, and how
is he related to God whom he brings so near, and of
32

WHY WE BELIEVE

whom he compels us to think with a new intimacy
and insight?

To answer these questions many dogmas have been
devised, but they do not explain the mystery. Nor is
it solved by denying all dogmas about Jesus; we may
even be brought nearer to him, with demands which
we can neither meet nor evade. We do not escape
Jesus by casting aside the creeds, as so many do in
our day. Still he confronts us, enthralls us, haunts us.
In our far-off age we read his Life anew, seeking the
sources of that stream of sweetness and light and
lightning! which entered the world with his advent;
but we are baffled. We ponder his words, as simple as
the prayer of a child, yet profounder than any phi-
losophy, and our hearts ache with awe. Why do we
believe in Jesus? Because we cannot help it; because
we cannot deny his purity, his pity, his holy kindness,
his intrepid love, his relentless mercy, his incredible
faith in us even when we have no faith of our own.

Ill

Who do we believe in the Bible? The only treasure
of a material kind which my mother left me when she
went away was her Bible, old and well-nigh worn out
by much use. If I had not known her life of faith, and
had not seen her kneeling figure down the years, I
would have known the history of her heart by turning
the pages of the Book she loved, lived with, and sought
to obey. Certain Psalms were like springs of bright
water along her pilgrim way, where she found rest

33

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

and refreshment. Passages from the Prophets stirred
her like great music. The life of Jesus especially the
fourteenth chapter of St. John gave her light in dark-
ness, fellowship in loneliness, help for today and hope
for tomorrow. She had a deep affinity with the Christ-
mysticism of St. Paul, and understood the idiom of his
experience. Yet she had no theory about the Bible, be-
yond its beauty and blessing and the fact that it spoke
the Word of God to her heart.

What was true of one devout soul has been true of
millions of men and women, all down the ages; and
that is why we believe in the Bible. In this wise and
faithful Book is the very stuff of life itself, the realities
out of which, not as a theory, but as a fact, faith in
God grows. The writers of the Bible did not argue;
they obeyed. They lived before they wrote. They were
men of like passions as ourselves, of like faiths and
fears and failings. They wrestled with reality; they
were sorely tried, and their cries of anguish echo to
this day deathless trumpets from the oblivion of olden
time. In weakness they were made strong; in darkness
they saw "the brightness on the other side of life"; in
death they were not dismayed. They needed forgive-
ness for sin, solace in sorrow, courage in defeat, and
guidance in a tangled, troubled world. What they
needed they found in God the Eternal, and in God
alone, and they set down in simple words gritty with
reality, wet with tears what they learned of His will,
His love, His plans for them and their duty to Him.
In short, they showed us in actual life how the victory
is won, how truth is known by living, and how the face

34

WHY WE BELIEVE

of God shines in the purest vision of man, as the clouds
contain the sunlight.

What about today? One thing at least is true: God
is not dumb that He should speak no more, and the
Bible teaches us how to read His newer "Word in the
facts, forces, events, and persons of our time. Is the
Bible inspired? Manifestly, if only because it inspires
us, lightens our darkness, rebukes our vanity, and heals
the old hurts of life. For the same reason we may say
that it is infallible, if we adopt the old Saxon word
in-]ull-kem, in the sense in which our forefathers em-
ployed it in early English, as meaning "that which will
not fall down/' No argument is needed; the fact proves
it. Ages of experience attest the strength and wisdom
of the Bible as the Book of the Will of God in the
life of man, outlasting all dogmas devised to defend it

IV

Why do men believe in prayer? To ask why men
pray is like asking why birds sing; they are made so.
Men are made for prayer, as sparks ascending seek the
sun. As William James said, men pray "because they
cannot help praying"; because they are seeking a Great
Companion; and he adds, "men will continue to pray
until the end of time, unless their inner natures change
in a manner which nothing we know leads us to ex-
pect/' It is because we and God have business with
each other, and down in our hearts, when we are forced
to face our own souls, each of us knows that in that
business our highest destiny is fulfilled. The proof of

35

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

prayer is prayer itself; all argument about it is absurd.
As Meredith said, "Who rises from prayer a better
man, his prayer is answered" and that is as far as we
need to go. Here experience is the first and the final
test.

No matter how far back we go in the human story,
we find an altar set up in the center of the life of man.
Through all altering fashions of life and thought," in
the midst of all desolations and disasters, there is one
constant and abiding reality upon which men may rely.
What is it? What is the root of religion which defies
each age afresh to discover and assess its secret? Some
call it mysticism, some use other names; it does not
matter what we call it, since it baffles all words. But
the fact remains today as in all the past: whenever men
hunger and thirst after God and truly seek Him, there
is a response of peace and power; and by that tokejji the
soul lives. It is a primary experience, the bedrock of
all religion, at once the basis of its faith and the foun-
tain of its fellowship; and many waters cannot cjuench
it. Mayhap the next great step in human advance will
be a further dimension of this power of prayer, and
the discovery that the problems of the world are solved
by it.

For what is prayer? It is not getting from God but
getting to God through the mists and fogs of the mind;
not asking God to do something for us, but to do some-
thing in us and with us. It is not beseeching God to
give us what we want, but to make us worthy aad
willing to receive what is already our own, and to do
what He wants us to do. If we try to use God for our

36

WHY WE BELIEVE

own ends instead of being used by Him for His ends,
our prayer fails we cannot exploit God. Nor must
we ask anything for ourselves that we do not ask for
our fellow souls; even in our private prayer, as in the
little liturgy which Jesus gave us for the closet, it is our
Father, and not my Father. Our final solitude must be
a fellowship, since no man can find God for another
and no one can find Him alone. God knows what we
are and what we need as we do not know, and it is
always ready for us when we are humble enough to
take it and good enough to share it.

Jesus did not argue about prayer; he prayed. If he
needed it in living his good life needed nourishing
nights of prayer to empower him for busy days of labor
it is sheer vanity of us to neglect it, still more to say
that we do not need it. For prayer is at once an art and
an adventure, and those who learn its laws and dare
its high reaches find sources of power unguessed by
those who stay behind; to them the porter openeth.
Aye, prayer is the art and adventure whereby we lay
hold of that in God and in ourselves which enables us
to do our duty and labor, and to endure and triumph
over anything that life or death can do to us.

Why do we believe in life further on? By what
process did man ever imagine that the still, strange
sleep which falls upon us all at last, covering our fad-
ing faces with a soft, fascinating darkness, is not the
end? Over the piled-up ages we hear a voice in the

37

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

desert asking the question, "If a man die, shall he live
again?" Surely there is no "if" about death; other
things may happen, but death is inescapable. Yet from
the far time when the Pyramid Texts were written man
has defied death, disputed its verdict, and refused to
admit that the grave is the gigantic coffin-lid of a dull
and mindless world descending upon him. It is mag-
nificent, but what is the basis of such an incredible
faith?

As Martineau put it picturesquely, we do not believe
in immortality because we have proved it, but we are
forever trying to prove it because we cannot help be-
lieving it. To refer once more to the Tolstoi story of
War and Peace, when Pierre set forth the theory of
Herder in respect to immortality, the Prince replied:
"But it is not that, my dear boy, convinces me; but life
and death are what have convinced me. Not by argu-
ment, but when one goes hand-in-hand with some one,
and all at once that some one slips away yonder into
nowhere, and you are left facing an abyss. There is a
Yonder and there is Someone God." That is to say,
he believes because God is God, and man is man, and
life is what it is. These three found focus and became
incandescent in Jesus, in whom we see what God is,
what man may be, and to what fine issues life ascends.
Once we see what it is that gives dignity, worth and
meaning to life, argument for immortality is not needed
Until we do see it, argument is useless.

In the Antarctic wastes, in order to save his friends
the necessity of carrying his helpless, frost-bitten body,
Captain Gates rose one night, while the others were

38

WHY WE BELIEVE

sleeping, and walked out into the icy air and was seen
no more. It was a calm self-immolation for the sake of
others, with no hot emotion, no public audience, no
ecstatic vision to urge him on. In a ghastly tragedy at
sea, a young Salvation Army officer, in order to make
room for a man to join his wife and little ones in an
already overcrowded boat, slipped quietly overboard
into a wild sea and disappeared. Or, turning to fiction,
in Les Miserable*, in order to save an innocent man
from being condemned in his place, Jean Valjean de-
nounced himself for a crime of which he had not been
accused; and Hugo adds, "all were dazzled in their
hearts/' It is this divine quality in man, manifested
alike in high and humble lot, which defeats death and
attests the eternal quality of the soul, either on the
Cross or in a wintry sea.

As if by some sure instinct, man has felt the force
of this quality in our race from the first, and the proph-
ecy of it. To put it succinctly, if God is a God to whom
such sacred values have worth, we cannot doubt immor-
tality. If He is not such a God, nobody wants im-
mortality; it would be a doom, not a destiny. To think
otherwise is to make life a horror and a chaos, in which
Jesus and Judas are alike erased in a blur of indistin-
guishable dust. In obedience to a clear intuition of
realities, as well as of values, man has been wise enough
to trust the sanity and sanctity of life, repudiating blind
fears which rob life of its meaning. For, if life is worth-
less, so is immortality.

My thesis, all through, has been to show that ex-
perience is profounder than argument, as life is deeper

39

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

than logic. Long ago Pascal said, "the heart has its
reasons which the reason knows not of"; which means
that what is truly religious is ultimately reasonable, but
that reason alone does not discover it. By the same
token, if we would live by the faith which makes life
heroic and happy, we must keep our hearts with all
diligence, lest they become too hard, too crowded, or
too careless to bear the fruits of the spirit, as Jesus
warned us in the Parable of the Soils. For, literally,
out of the heart are the issues of life, whether we lose
the treasure most worth keeping, or learn the truth
that makes us free, which is known only to the pure of
heart and the doers of the will of God.

(The adolescent mind is appalling alike in its cocksmreness
and in its confusion; but it may not be amiss to name some
of the issues raised in the discussion following the sermon.
First, the idea is widespread that the church, because it af-
firms the Reality of God, professes to know all about Him.
Whereas the church once issued an anathema against anyone
who should declare that God is comprehensible. Obviously,
God is incomprehensible, but indefinitely apprehensible and
that is all we really need. Second, of course all the dark facts
of life which seem to belie faith in God were brought up, for-
getting that while those facts destroy the faith of many today
perhaps because their faith is traditional and at second-hand
those very facts created faith in God in the beginning.
"Tribulation worketh faith," said the Apostle; and it was by
facing the bitter, old and haggard worst that the masters of
the spiritual life have always found the best whereof the
Cross is the eternal symbol. Third, a number in the group
declared themselves to be atheists, but when asked to describe
the kind of God they denied, it turned out to be such a carica-
ture as to provoke laughter. One realized anew why there is
so much theophobia in our day, because no worthy idea of God

40

WHY WE BELIEVE

has replaced the childish thought of a Big Man in the sky.
Fourth, the mechanists described at length the intricacy of the
world machine, only to discover that they were thereby making
it the more impossible to think that it is mindless. Fifth, the
humanists made themselves heard, affirming that God is only
an idea in the mind as if the same were not true of the uni-
verse, too, which we know only as it is reflected in our minds,
since we cannot jump out of our skins; but that is no reason
for "moving out of the house of God into a bleak orphan-
age." It was odd to hear the melodramatic rhetoric of Bertrand
Russell quoted like Holy Scripture, as if his glib and glittering
dogmatism settled the issue. He is as dogmatic as Athanasius ;
only his dogma is different. Sixth, it was plain that much of
the revolt of modern youth is due to resentment against
parental authority, in other connections, and is directed at
parental religious ideas by way of retaliation. Seventh, it is
extraordinary to see a generation throwing the Christian faith
lightly aside, without any understanding of the history and
meaning of that faith; yet so it is. Eighth, the most vivid
impression of the evening was the assumption amounting
almost to an obsession that science inhibits all spiritual faith;
due not to men of science, but to immature minds using sec-
ond-hand knowledge to belabor the Church. When asked
which science inhibits faith, and how and why? there was
no reply. Ninth, in contrast with the devastating "smartness"
of a few, there were those who are convinced that Jesus saw
straight and knew what he was talking about, and have sworn
allegiance to his vision.)

God Our Eternal
Refuge

GOD OUR ETERNAL REFUGE

The Eternal God is thy refuge, and
underneath are the everlasting arms.
Deut. 33*27-

(HESE WORDS, SO FREQUENT IN THE
BIBLE, ESPECIALLY IN THE PSALMS,
TELL US OF A FAR TIME WHEN LIFE
WAS FULL OF PERIL AND MAN SO
often had to seek shelter. They take the form of double
repetition, so familiar in Hebrew poetry, as if to make
doubly sure the Divine reality over against our human
need. Indeed, if we turn tcfc the context we learn not
only that God is beneath our necessity, but also that He
is behind us to protect, before us to guide, and above
us to bless. So encompassed, we make our way through
the world like the people which were of old, albeit,
like them, we so often forget "Him in whose great
hand we stand," our truest Refuge, our surest Pro-
tection.

SucE a text might have been written yesterday, so
true it is to the facts of life and the deep need of the
soul. Today, as of old, our life is in jeopardy every
hour, haunted by a s&tse of insecurity, beset by perils
of many kinds physical, moral, and spiritual. The
weather of the world is rough, and even the bravest
man must sometimes long for the shadow of a great
rock in a weary land, a shelter in the time of storm.

45

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

True, we dwell in a far-flung universe, in the midst of
measureless forces, but also in the presence of pro-
found necessities. Nor has all our wisdom taught us a
deeper truth than that told us in this couplet of ancient
song. It is because God is eternal that He is our refuge;
and it is because His arms are everlasting in their
strength, in their nearness, in their faithfulness, that
there is comfort in their underneathness. Living in an
age so troubled, so distraught, we need to know that
those mighty arms are about us.

Men seek out many places of refuge, none of which
are to be despised, and some of which it is worth our
while to name. Some years ago Maxim Gorki told us of
his childhood in that strange land of Russia, and more
recently he has been telling us of his advent In the
World how he was kicked into it and told to make
his own way. There is much in the book that is terrible,
but not a little beauty, too, including a vivid portrait
gallery of those whom he met in his wayfaring. It may
be noted that this record of adolescent years, spent amid
so much that was uncontrolled, vicious, and cruel, is a
singularly pure chronicle. The j boy was thoroughly
healthy, in mind as well as bodj^l All the men he knew
had the same ^attitude toward women, and it filled him
with disgusts So did the drinking, the thieving, the
quarreling, the useless cruelty. He thought about these
things, and he saw that people with whom he lived, in
one place as in another, were cruel and vicious from
sheer emptiness of life. The shadow that lies over his
pages is the shadow, not of actual oppression, not of
ill-nature not of poverty even but of dreariness, of

GOD OUR ETERNAL REFUGE

meaninglessness. Life was so dull, so stupid, so color-
less, so hideous that men sought escape from its monot-
ony in malicious diversions. From such a lot, from such
a fate the lad sought a refuge, and he found it in books,
especially in books of poetry. Blessed be books, because
they thus offered to a sensitive, aspiring soul a refuge
from the foulness of the world. All through the years
of his youth the vast importance of books is empha-
sized, and we trace his slowly developing power as a
maker of books. Then through later experiences among
rough folk, vulgar folk, books were literally his sal-
vation. From all the weariness and brutality of his en-
vironment the lad had always a place of retreat, for
which he was grateful. Of some of his readings he
writes in words the trjith of which some of us .can
confirm:

"These books laved my soul, washing awayi
the husks of barren and bitter reality. I felt
that they were good books, and realized that
they were indispensable to me. One result of
reading them was that I gained a firm convic-
tion that I was not alone in the world, and
the fact that I should not be lost took firm
root in my soul. . . . While not hindering
me from seeing reality, such as it was, nor
cooling my desire to understand living people,
nevertheless this bookish chaos hid me by a
transparent but impenetrable cloud from
much of the infectious obscenity, the venom-
ous poison of life. Books rendered many
evils innocuous to me/'

47

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

And speaking of books, if we open the Life and
Poetry of James Thomson, by Meeker, we learn how
another man, walking a shadowy way, found refuge.
It is a pity that Thomson is known only for his one
great pessimistic poem, 'The City of Dreadful Night,"
the terrible 'city London! made the more terrible by
too much Scotch whiskey in the poet. He had more
than one string to his harp. Happily, his biographer
shows us his life through his poems, and this unveiling
of his heart discloses a secret sanctuary. It was a ro-
mance not unlike that of Dante and Beatrice, and it
was the unifying influence of his character and his art.
The "one woman" whom Thomson loved died when
he was nineteen, and for the remaining thirty years
of his life her image never left his heart. She became
the embodiment of all the supreme loveliness of the
world, and softened much of the sadness into which
his way of living and his inherent tendency to despair
would else have plunged him. Thus "into every poem
that he wrote this memory of Matilda Weller's love is
subtly but unfailingly woven. With her death, he, too,
began a new life." When life pressed upon him, and
when foes seemed too many to fight, he betook him-
self to that sanctuary of love and memory for refuge.

Different men find escape and shelter in different
ways, but every man must have a place of refuge,
George Eliot said "The human heart finds shelter no-
where but in human kind"; with which agrees the
strange statement of Darwin that religion is unneces-
sary to those surrounded by domestic affection. Surely
the exact opposite of this statement is true. Not one of

GOD OUR ETERNAL REFUGE

us will undervalue the strength, the sweetness, the
joy of what Whitman calls "the dear love of man for
his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend." But
there is in no human being an actual or potential self-
sufficiency. Besides, no one need be reminded that death
is never far away, and the very fleetingness of our hu-
man fellowship adds to its insecurity. Heine was one
of the keenest wits of his day, and a sharp critic of
religion the quality of his thought being a smile, a
tear, and a sneer all mixed up. Despite his skepticism
and his genius, we find him confessing his helplessness
at the bedside of his dying mother:

"I thought over all the great and little in-
ventions of man, but nothing would answer.
Then I commended her to God, and com-
posed a prayer that she might read it. She
was my mother, and she had always loved
me dearly, and she was going away from me,
and this was all I could do for her. We are
not great, and our happiness is when we can
believe in something greater and better than
ourselves."

Even so. God is our last refuge, but he is wise who
learns the first truth first and does not wait until the end
to learn it. Therefore, as the Master taught us, let us
seek God first first in order of time, when life is new
and habits are formed; first in order of importance,
that the spell of the eternal may lie upon our fleeting
days; and first in order of interest, that our life may
have unity, purpose and peace. Here is a reality, not

49

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

simply to die by, but to live by day by day, because
it enables us to rest back upon the Eternal. When we
are most worn, when we are least sufficient in ourselves,
then we find His unceasing and unwithdrawn protec-
tion all that we need. Thus we shall be able to meet the
duties of life, bear its burdens, win its conflicts, and
find its meaning. Such a truth helps one to live rever-
ently, and with a profound sense of responsibility, but
also with abiding confidence in One greater, wiser, and
holier than himself. Like Luther of old, when he nailed
his theses upon the cathedral door, we may sing:

A mighty fortress is our God,
A refuge never failing.

Here lies the tragedy of the new Humanism, using
the word in its modern anti-theistic sense, in which
there in no God except as He exists in the mind of
man a shadow of mortal desire cast upon the screen
of faith and fancy. Religion, in turn, is regarded as
an embellishment of the imagination, an artist drawing
radiant horizons around our cottage door, a poet weav-
ing a gold fringe upon an else drab and dingy pattern
of life. It is a necessity, since the grind of the world
and the bufferings of fate would be too much for us,
without the touch of unseen hands and the gleam of
celestial visions; a necessity, but not a reality. 1 How

*For example in his new book entitled God which, alas, tells us
more about its author than about its subject Middleton Murry writes:
"God does not exist; but we shall never be able to do without Him
unless we know in ourselves the reason why He was created. That
knowledge is dynamic; for no one can know in himself the demands
which God was created to satisfy without determining that for his part
his life shall be devoted to the perpetuating of those values which
God was created to secure."

50

GOD OUR ETERNAL REFUGE

strange it is, reversing all the processes of insight and
experience, the result at once of self-sufficiency and
self-obsession, a surrender of thought and a bank-
ruptcy of faith. Wherefore such a necessity, and whence
the august idea of God, and how did it ever enter the
mind of man? What a pitiful obfuscation, man trying
to lift himself by his own shoe-laces, trying to warm a
frigid universe with his own breath how unlike the
triumphant march of the dynasty of mighty thinkers
of the past, who found in God, the Eternal, the basis

With which agrees the insight of Bojer in his glorious story, The
Great Hunger, and again in The New Temple: "There is no God ex-
cept as he exists in the mind of man, but neither is there any mis-
fortune so great that you cannot conquer it by calling on the eternal
forces within yourself. It is you, oh man, who gives existence a
meaning and a goal ; you who hare created what there is of the great
and beautiful upon earth; aye, you hare warmed the cold universe
with your faith in an all-loving God. Lift up your heart) and show
yourself conscious of your greatness."

No doubt it is a mood, a passing phase of thought, due to the
disillusionment and distraction of our generation; but it is an ex-
traordinary debacle. It is an obvious truth that man makes God in
his own image of necessity so, since he must think in terms of his
own experience, and is justified in taking his own soul as a token of
ultimate reality, as well as a stick, a stone, or an electron; but that
there is no other God save our mental image no real God who is
slowly making man in His image is an amazing inversion of thought;
in short, sheer atheism.

It is of a piece with another favorite dogma of our day, promul-
gated by Hardy and taken up by lesser lights: that in man the uni-
verse, by some freak or fluke, has cast up a being better and finer than
itself, with needs it cannot satisfy and dreams it cannot fulfill, whose
life is a splash of glory against a black background and whose death
is a tragedy. As a dramatization of vanity and self-pity, the history
of philosophy has nothing to equal it. For a description and dis-
cussion of this odd aspect of contemporary faith, or untaith, see The-
ism and the Modern Mood, by W. H. Horton, An Emerging Christian
Faith, by Justin W. Nixon, The Christian God, by Richard Roberts,
Humanism, edited by W. P. King, and by no means least, the chapter
on "The Future of Religion," by W. E. Hocking, in Religion and
Modern Life.

51

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

of thought, the fulfillment of faith, and the final solace
of mortal hope.

Surely nothing is more impressive than the testimony
of the history of philosophy that the quest of truth
can end in final satisfaction nowhere short of God.
Plato and Aristotle were perhaps the greatest, the
most original, as they were among the purest minds in
their love of truth, in the whole history of human
thought. Forever memorable is their witness to the
reality and glory of God as the sovereign necessity of
the intellect. Their fine minds toiled always under the
spell of an Eternal Mind, and their final conclusion
was not an argument, but a vision of God. Indeed, the
beatific vision of Dante of "the love that moves the
sun and all the stars" was nothing but the insight of
Aristotle wearing the robe of poetry. Timid minds may
hesitate, and small minds may wrangle, but when we
come to the end of thought and face the Infinite mys-
tery, wise men take refuge in God like homing doves
at eventide.

Happily, we do not have to go back to the dim past
to learn that God is the final home, as He is the first
beginning, of the highest thought. Indeed, we need go
no further than to the man who embodied so perfectly,
both in the dignity of his character and the nobility of
his intellect, the spirit and culture of Britain, and in
whose words we heard the finer mind of his race
Arthur James Balfour, so recently fallen asleep. Versa-
tile, practical, spiritual, he had that common sense that
never parts company with reverence, and saw the high-
est reality as it is related to the life of everyday. Like

52

GOD OUR ETERNAL REFUGE

William James, he revolted from the scientific agnos-
ticism of years ago, repelled by its mock modesty.
Agnosticism, by its profession, should have been most
humble, but in practice it took enormous pride in its
humility, and regarded positive belief with contempt.
James and Balfour made themselves champions of be-
lief, one finding in religion the reservoir of the finer
energies of man, the other the long span of thought
and hope, and the sense of relation to a perfect Being,
which gives value to life.

Few would deny that the original element in the
work of Balfour as a religious thinker is the way in
which he shows how the substance leaks away from
the values of life when the eternal horizon is shut out.
This is to say, we cannot have the value of religion
without its truth. What we think about the origin of
man and his destiny makes a vital difference in how
we feel about him, and the pursuits of knowledge,
beauty, and righteousness that seem to him important.
Man has a faculty of knowledge, and that implies that
the world to which he belongs is spiritual, having truth
as its light. Also, the love of beauty which has so
.large a place in the life of this thinker must have
explanation, and he finds it to be a way of access to the
Divine. Thus his ripe conclusion is that "all we think
best in human culture, whether associated with beauty,
goodness, or knowledge, requires God for its support/'

In the same way, God is the support, as He is the
high sanction, of the moral life of man. When we
regard the still small voice of the moral sense in us
as only an echo of old custom, its whisper becomes

53

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

faint and less commanding, and the feeling of accounta-
bility fades. Only when we find in God the sovereign
keeper of those spiritual and moral ideals which He
inspires men to seek and serve in their own lives is our
moral life strong, true and noble. No one can see the
end. Even the greatest man can see only a little way
in this dark day. Whether revival or reaction will fol-
low this age of confusion none can tell. Rapidly we are
moving into a hidden, unknown, unpredictable future.
What sustains us is our faith in the final tightness of
things. Final tightness, mark you; not that whatever
is is right, but that it can be, must be, shall be right.
Never was there greater need than now for this as-
surance, living as we are in a sorely troubled time when
there is so much that is shamefully, hideously wrong.
Hope and healing lie in that high thinking that grasps
great issues and great outlooks, and in simple trust in
a great God who has not lost control of His world.

Nor must we miss the note of intimacy in the text,
which tells us that "underneath are the everlasting
arms." While we think in large terms of the struggle of
the world, and the slow triumph of righteousness, each
of us has all the time the need of a God who loves us
as if there were but one of us to love. Truly it has
been said that a God who does not care does not
count. Still less can we find help in a God who is
fumbling His way through the ages, trying to find His
path in the dark. No; what our hearts demand is a
guiding, protecting love which shall support us in our
high moral tasks, and sweeten the unescapable sorrows
which fall to our lot as a part of life. And such a God

54

GOD OUR ETERNAL REFUGE

we have, nearer to us than our own souls, to whom
we may turn in hours of doubt, depression, and defeat,
and find refuge and renewal. How blessed it is to
know that there is One who knows us better than we
know ourselves, and who is equal to all our mortal
needs and our immortal longings.

There is no need to say that in death we must take
refuge in God. No one else can help us when "the
dumb hour brings the dreams about our couch." John
Morley gave us a rare book of Recollections, the last
line of which is a grave and gallant farewell: "So to my
home, and in the falling daylight." What home? The
great Void, black and bottomless, to which Ibsen
seemed homesick to return at the' end? No. The an-
swer is found in the old Road Book of the homeward
way: "Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place from
one generation to another." At Vimy Ridge, just be^
fore the Canadian lads went over the top, they began
singing the old hymns of the church and the home.
One of their favorites was "Jesus, Lover of my soul,"
and the lines most often on their lips were those which
gather up our human need and utter it in melodious
prayer:

Other refuge have I none,

Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;
Leave, ah! leave me not alone,

Still support and comfort me:
All my trust on Thee is stayed,

All my help from Thee I bring;
Cover my defenceless head

With the shadow of Thy wing.

55

When God
Is Near

WHEN GOD IS NEAR

Surely the Lord is in Ms place; and
I knew it not.

Gen. 28:16.

IF COURSE GOD IS ALWAYS NEAR
AND ALWAYS BLESSED, BUT MEN
ARE NOT ALWAYS AWARE OF IT.

_ THEY MAY ACCEPT IT AS A FAITH,

if not a fact, that God is everywhere, and yet have no
vivid sense of Him. They live in Him, depend upon
Him, and serve Him better than they know, but they
may not read aright the tokens of His life in their lives.
The Bible is always busy directing attention to the un-
recognized presence of God in the thoughts and im-
pulses of men.

My faith has always been that all men are in some
degree religious; in fact, mystics, if one may name it
so, though they may deny the fact and seek to hide it
even from themselves. Even the saint has no faculties
or facts that all men do not possess in some measure;
only he uses and interprets them differently. Hours of
ecstatic escaping of soul which he welcomes as lucid
vision-moments, other men fear and distrust, as if they
were dupes, not knowing their meaning or uses.

Some time ago, thinking of these things, and pon-
dering the ways of God with the soul, it occurred to
me to make trial of a little plan, the better to test my

59

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

faith. Selecting a group of close friends not pious
men, as the phrase goes, but men of all types of mind
and training, who have, in some degree, the spiritual
quality I wrote each a letter, asking them to tell me,
not why they believe in God, since no man can do such
a thing, nor what they think He is, which is beyond
the power of words to do; but when does God seem
most real, and what is it that seems to bring Him
near?

Naturally men are profoundly shy about such things,
and rightly so. None of us cares to listen to a man who
blabs about God as if He were a man in the next room.
Still, though one may sympathize keenly with such a
feeling, it is no reason why, between man and man
in the air of intimate friendship, we need to be mutes
about the highest things. Something of the sort I wrote
in my letter, vowing the while to keep all names hid-
den; and the results were most gratifying, not to say
surprising. Men who had boasted that they were ' "hard-
boiled" talked like mystics, and others who professed
to be prosaic turned poets. Here are a few testimonies;
only the work or calling of each man is indicated, and
that, alas, tells little about him.

A LAWYER: It is in the pauses of my work,
those little interludes when the rush of things
is quiet, when I look out of my window and
realize the silent, steady power of Nature; or
in the evening when I have a moment to look
up into a measureless sky full of stars; or
when I see an act of pure, disinterested good-
60

WHEN GOD IS NEAR

ness such as the little angels must run up
and whisper into the ears of God to make
Him happy; it is at such times that I have a
real sense of God.

A PHILOSOPHER: In my mind, besides com-
plete thoughts, and other thoughts which
though incomplete admit of completion, I
find still other thoughts which it is impossible
to complete; they open out fan- wise, and in
their implications reach beyond time and
sense. Yet they are very real, and in a sense
normal and necessary to the healthful work-
ing of the mind such thoughts I take to be
the shadows of God in the mind of man.

A BANKER: As you well know, I am ill at
expression in religious matters, my faith being
very simple. I think that if everyone would
every day do some kind act for some one other
than themselves, the burden of the world
would be lifted; and I try not to wait for the
others to begin. It seems to me that such a
practice leads directly to spirituality; that is,
to an experience of God, who is known not
in words but in deeds. The Kingdom of
Heaven is next door, but we go the other way.

A JOURNALIST: For me the road to God is
through beauty. There is too much beauty in
the world for any ends of mere utility. It is
this over-plus of beauty that is the best evi-
dence of the existence of God, and the token
of His presence. The song of a thrush in the

61

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

evening, a forest vista in which the slant of
trees and the shadings of light are such as to
fill the artist with a wild, sad joy; or looking
into the face of a flower its delicacy, its ex-
quisite tracery make God actual to me.

A BUSINESS MAN: I am bound to think that
a real God is working now; so I believe that
when I am working wisely and well I am in
active cooperation with God. Occasionally I
have a feeling of such cooperation; but more
often I simply think of my work in that way.
If you mean a mystical experience, I fear I
must be counted among the "missing/' But I
consider that one who is really controlled by
the thought of active co-working with God
has an actual experience of Him.

A JUDGE: There are certain convictions and
ideals which are the holiest things I know.
It is plain to me that to turn away from them
would be to close the door to all higher life
and power. If I should betray them, or give
them up, my way would be utterly dark.
When I realize this I cannot help thinking
that these holiest elements of my nature,
which are the stars in my inner sky, are a
revelation of God, bringing Him near to me.

AN ENGINEER: To me the sense of right in
my mind, the moral ideal in my soul, which I
did not create and cannot destroy without
destroying my very being the things that ar-
rest me and make me pass moral judgment

62

WHEN GOD IS NEAR

upon my thoughts and acts is the presence
of God. If I obey it, a deep, quiet joy fills my
heart; when I disobey it I am miserable. The
mystery of the moral life, like the peace of
God, is past my understanding; and for me
at least the two are one. My religion may be
stated in the words of Whittier:

By all that He requires of me,
I know what He Himself must be.

A PROFESSOR: I believe in God, but I have
no experience of Him so far as I am aware.
I accept the creed of the church and try to live
as if it were true; that is all. Yet, I know that
something deeper than philosophy lingers in
the light, in the song of a bird at dawn, in
the loves and fellowships of life, something
I can neither define nor grasp; and my hope
is that some day, somewhere, that beautiful
Something which hovers on the confines of
my mind will at last become clear. In other
words, as Stevenson said of Burns, I am not
as much devoted to religion as haunted by it.

A MAN OF SCIENCE: Every man of us has a
shy and lonely thing in his heart which he
dare not lose, on pain of no longer being a
man. One does not often speak of it, and then
only softly; but since you ask as a friend, I
will say that it is in the Holy Communion
that God is nearest and most real to me.
Under the forms of bread and wine God

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

touches me and feeds me. How it can be so
I do not know; I only know it is so. Would
that I were more worthy of such a blessing;
but if I were I should not need it.

There are others, but these are enough to show what
I had in mind and what I discovered. Surely it is not
argument that counts, but experience; not our thin
theories about God, but our contact with Him. After
all, who knows whether any of our theories are rea-
sonable or not? These simple words from the hearts
of strong men leave me haunted by the thought that
God has all sorts of ways and means of making Him-
self real to us. There are many paths in the Land
of the Spirit, and they all lead to one end if we follow
them to the end, and that end is God.

While one does not wish to analyze the heart-beats
of our fellow men, two things are taught by these
testimonies. In nearly every case it is in some lovely
little thing, some hush in the rush of life, some inter-
lude of clear insight, that God is near, as of old He
was not in the windstorm, nor in the earthquake, but
in a voice of gentle stillness. Also, it is always as an
intuition of union with Him, or of the unity of life in
Him, giving unity and meaning to its parts, that the
vision of God comes to help and heal the heart of man.

Such a study suggests a thousand thoughts, one of
which is that God must desire every man to have an
experience of Himself, but in no two men is the ex-
perience the same. A warm, impulsive nature, a cold
critical temper, a practical active outlook, promise dif-

WHEN GOD IS NEAR

ferent experiences of God, in both content and form.
Glutton-Brock, with his vivid artistic sense of harmony,
and Unamuno, with his tragic sense of discoid, must
experience God in totally different ways. Each soul
hath its song, or sweet or sad, and each must utter
its note in the divine orchestration, and go its way
to the God of whom it sings.

By the same token, each soul must respect the vision
and melody of others, whose music is no less authentic,
even if it does not strike our key or cadence. The
shepherds, at the first Christmas, did not see the pil-
grim Star leading from east "to west, nor did the Magi
hear the angels sing of peace on earth. Each followed
the gleam or melody granted by the good grace of
God, and each arrived at the new-born truth, albeit by
different paths.

If each is loyal to the vision granted him betimes,
and loving with his fellow souls, in a finer fellowship
yet to be achieved we may hear, if only for a brief
time, an undertone of all-sustaining harmony running
through our tangled time, prophesying a fair, far day
when sorrow and sin shall cease, and the soul of man
shall be free learning in love the truth it has lost in
hate.

For my own part, if I may add my testimony, two
things open the windows of heaven wider than any-
thing else. When I read the Life of Jesus, in "the 'book
of white samite, mystical and wonderful" especially
the story of the walk to Emmaus and feel the unut-
terable loveliness of his spirit of simple goodness, his
heroic sincerity, his exquisite and healing pity, his im-

65

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

passioned yet serene fidelity to his ideal, even to death
and beyond then God is real and near, at once inti-
mate and august. A radiant personality touches me;
there is a human accent as of a friend the light shines,
and there are footsteps by my side.

Next to Jesus, who brings God to me, music is both
priest and prophet to my soul, uttering those wistful
yearnings which well up in every human heart, vaguely
or clearly, but which no tongue can speak. When I
listen to the Sanctus or the Agnus Dei by Gounod, or
some of the great hymns, or certain strains from the
masters, like the Largo, I know the Truth for which
words were never made. Then I see a glimpse, if noth-
ing more, of a meaning in the turbid ebb and flow of
human misery about me, only the vague shape of a
reason that floats in my heart, and melts as quickly
away. .

Aye, 'sometimes, by the mercy of God, when a great
organ, with its keys of white and black like the joys
and woes of life pours out its soul at the touch of
a spiritual artist; sometimes life drops its veil, the
tumult of time is hushed, those who have vanished
seem near Eternity murmurs on all my horizons, and
the noiseless knocking of a Presence is at my Gate. ,

66

The Crisis
of Christ

Preached in the City Temple, London, May 14,
1930, at the Anniversary of the Colonial Mis
sionary Society. The Preacher had the honor of
delivering the Anniversary sermon bejore the same
society on May 7, 1918 t while Minister of the City
Temple.

THE CRISIS OF CHRIST

Will ye also go away? Lord, tq
whom shall we go?

John 6:67, 68.

I

HE EARLY MINISTRY OF JESUS IN
GALILEE WAS A SPRINGTIME OF
BLOSSOM AND BIRD-SONG. IN THE
POWER OF THE SPIRIT HE RE-
turned from the Wilderness of Temptation, his heart
aglow, his mind made up, preaching the Gospel of God.
Throngs hung upon his lips, drawn by the winsomeness
of his personality, the lyric loveliness of his words, and
the wonder of his works of mercy. He made men glad
about God, glad about life, equally by his incredible
approachableness and his understanding kindness, no
less than by the warmth and wealth of his vision. In
unclouded glory the love and power of God shone ia
his face, and wrought in his healing hands.

The vision of the Kingdom of God was so vivid
in the mind of Jesus, and so radiant in his heart, that
he had hope that the people of his fathers would see,
hear and heed, and so avert the doom which he saw
impending. But, alas, it was not to be so. When he be-
gan his work in Judea, at first there was response, and
then an icy hostility, an enmity made the more implac-

69

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

able by the fear that the whole nation might be led off
after him. As between the restless political radicalism
of Galilee and the rigid religious bigotry of Judea, he
did not fit into the scheme of his age. There was no
room for his gospel of truth working by love, which re-
vealed the futility of violence in reaching any high
social end. His effort to win the synagogue from the
Pharisees failed; his attempt to cleanse the Temple met
defeat. Before the end of the first summer he knew
that with the majority of his generation his ministry
was doomed to be misunderstood, and he himself to "be
despised and rejected of men.

Such was the scene and setting of the Crisis of Christ.
It was the old temptation again; and even while the
people were trying to press upon his head the crown of
rebellion against Rome, he knew that he must walk
the high, hard way of the Cross, wearing a crown of
thorns. Suddenly he turned and put the fickle, sensa-
tion-loving crowds to the test those who wanted him
to turn stones into bread and dazzle them with signs
and if they had been fascinated by his charm, they were
staggered by his challenge when he said: "Except ye eat
my flesh and drink my blood, ye have no life in you/'
Truly, it is one thing to come to the point of religion,
and another thing to come religiously to every point. It
was a hard saying; the multitudes melted away, fright-
ened by his strange, stern demands, leaving the dis-
ciples themselves bewildered and half-terrified. "Will
ye also go away?" Jesus asked, ready to be deserted and
left alone, as he was at the last. The little group re-
newed their vows in a kind of awed desperation: ''Lord,

70

THE CRISIS OF CHRIST

to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal
life."

It was no mere mood of irritation or depression,
but a quick and piercing insight into the human realities
about him. While his faith in God was serene, he had
no illusions about human nature, and he knew that
mankind may any day suffer a swift and ghastly slip
backward, losing its vision of the best. Jesus, appar-
ently, did not believe in the idea of the inevitability of
the progress of man onward and upward forever. He
faced the possibility of an earth swept clean of every
trace of faith and faithfulness: "When the Son of Man
cometh, shall he find faith on earth?" If he told men
that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, he did not
mean that it will come automatically, by evolution or
otherwise. Whether the final attitude of humanity will
be Godward or not, he did not say. It can be and may
be, though there is neither certainty nor inevitability;
and Jesus did not deceive himself. He knew that there
is doubt, but he believed that there is hope.

The method of Jesus changed; he abandoned first
the synagogue, then his open-air pulpit, and last of all
the lakeside itself. In places of quiet retreat he began
to tell his disciples of the exodus soon to be accom-
plished, and to prepare them for it. Over the later para-
bles a shadow falls; we hear of "a far country/' of a
"great gulf fixed," of a hand at the window waving
away guests who have come too late, of an outer dark-
ness, of a son cast out of the vineyard and slain, of a
sword that divides father and child, of a cup of for-
sakenness drained. On the day of his triumphal er&ty

7*

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

into Jerusalem, Jesus sought to dramatize, in an acted
parable, the genius of his enterprise; but to no' avail
His disciples thought he had won, mistaking applause
for approval, but he knew that he had lost. There was
no fruit on the barren fig tree; "nothing but leaves."
It was his last appeal to his people, and all that re-
mained was the love that lives on when faith and hope
are dead the Love which endureth all things, and
therefore cannot be defeated.

II

Once again, as in every generation since his advent,
it is the Crisis of Christ in our age. Just before the
World War, Harnack said in Germany: "If darkness
shall ever come over the world, and God and every
spiritual virtue grow dim, it may be that the personality
of Jesus will save us/' Darkness did come over the
world, as we well know darkness and confusion, and
the face of God was hidden in a red mist and the
personality of Jesus did save us from utter despair.
Again it is an hour of decision and destiny for the
church. It is not that we have failed to take Jesus liter-
ally; the tragedy is that we have failed to take him seri-
ously. For ages we have had a religion of what others
said about Jesus, worshiping an image of him graven
by our logic, making a Christ of our opinion and ador-
ing it. The day has now dawned when we must draw
nearer to Jesus himself, enter into his mind, obey his
law of love, though it lead us to the Cross, and act
upon his vision of the love of God and the Kingdom

J2

THE CRISIS OF CHRIST

of Heaven, or religion, as he taught it, will disappear
from among us.

Again the multitudes melt away, disillusioned and
distracted, leaving the followers of Jesus in dire dismay.
Either we must live dangerously in the world today,
making an unprecedented adventure toward Jesus, re-
lying wholly on the guidance of his living Spirit, as, at
the beginning, or the church will disintegrate. Our
ancient contending theologies, and their counterpart
in the disunion and woe of the peoples, are doomed;
they do not signify. They are not refuted; they are simply
passed by and forgotten as having no relation to the life
of our age. No, there must be a new advance in faith
and fellowship, a new dimension of insight and under-
standing, a spiritual revolution which will save the
world from its recurring disasters of war which break
the heart of humanity and blaspheme the name of God,
Else religion will be cast aside as an obsolete futility,
as it is in Russia, and man will try to build his life
upon another basis, with what results no one knows,
One thing must be plain to all: religion as we now
have it, impotent and uncreative a mere huddle of
seas is not equal to the issues of this strange, stu-
pendous age.

What is the real issue before our age? Briefly and
basically it is the issue between a materialistic, de-
terministic, nationalistic outlook and the vision of
spiritual reality, the ethics of moral freedom, and the
hope of world fellowship. J>eeper down is the deepest
issue of all, whether man is hereafter to think of his
life in terms of cosmic meaning and concern* and that

73

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

involves no less a matter than the life and death of
society as we know it. The advent of atheism in our age,
amounting almost to theophobia, is not an accident;
and it shows that our thought of God has gone tragi-
cally awry. It is a new temper, very different from the
agnosticism of the last generation, many of whose
teachers were exemplars of the devout. Mill, Huxley
and Morley were agnostics, but they regretted it.
Whereas the modern atheist, glibly skeptical and gaily
cynical, proudly affirms that there is no God, and that
he is glad of it. A militant atheism will be a blessing
if it forces us to take our faith in God seriously and
makes us re-dig the wells of living water down to a ,
permanent fountain.

For, without a new vision of God as the unity of
humanity in our age, without a deeper experience o^
God as the truth that makes all other truth true, what
hope have we of building a stable peace and a creative
good will among men, which is the supreme social task
of today? How else can we reach and melt the sinister
faith, the dark fear, which dictated the desperate say-
ing of Chiras in the Laws of Plato, a faith held by
many good and honest men in our day: that what men
call peace is an empty name, since "there is ever be-
tween all states a secret war." Manifestly it is faith,
and yet again faith, on which our hope rests; faith in
a God above man and within man, faith that man
exists to surpass himself, faith in the vitality of moral
forces and the efficacy of ideas. If our faith fades, if
God becomes only the shadow of man cast upon the
screen of his fear or fancy, our hope is doomed to de-

74

THE CRISIS OF CHRIST

feat. Here again the personality of Jesus, and his vision
of God, saves us, keeping alive the faith that there is,
at the heart of things, a sure ground of hope and a
source of power.

To try our faith to the utmost, at the very time when
we are praying and planning for peace, a horde of
divisive facts and forces are acutely active. In the small
world in which we are now living, its vast distances
abolished by the magic of science, the races, of men are
drawn together, jammed together, and rancor runs rife.
In the British Commonwealth this problem is widely
distributed, yet not the less urgent, but in America it; is
at our door and may not be evaded. There is less color
feeling, less racial hatred, in Russia than in America.
The late Lord Morley thought the race problem in
America "insoluble"; and so it is, without a religion of
brotherhood. Rabindranath Tagore put the matter
pointedly when he asked: "Do you really think that
so long as America has such racial prejudice it has any w
Christianity to export?" If our religion fails here as,
alas, our Protestantism seems well-nigh to have failed
in America it fails fundamentally and fatally, no mat-
ter how unctuous and eloquent its profession of faith
may be. Can our religion once more bring the races of
men together in the glow of fellowship, as it did in its
morning years?

As the Russian repudiation of religion in behalf of
materialism may help to renew our faith, so the uproot-
ing of humanity in economic and social affairs may
force us to put our own house in order. It is not simply
a polemic but a portent, and if it looks at first like the

75

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

idealism of hell, to ignore it is folly. It does turn the
searchlight on features of our own economic system
which are ghastly in their injustice, and brutal in their
exploitation of man by man. It shows, as in a horrible
apocalypse, that our selfish, individualistic commercial-
ism, so ready to use men to make money for private
gain and luxurious display, instead of using money to
make men, is nothing but organized atheism. It is not
only un-Christian, it is inhuman. Surely we now know
that no society has any secure future but that in which
the people, all together, learn to cooperate as part of a
common life for the common good. Our hope lies in a
practical fraternal righteousness, in which the skill of
science is employed to serve the masses of mankind. In
short, our religion must first teach us to do justly, then
to love mercy, if it is to lead men to walk humbly with
God.

By the same token, the moral chaos of modern life
warns us that we are at the end of an era, and no
prophet can predict what awaits us. One thinks of the
lines of Matthew Arnold:

"Ye live/' I cry, "ye work and plan,
And know not ye are severed!"

Severed we are, sundered from a new generation to
whom our experience is alien, our sentiment mere senti-
mentality, our ideas antiquated and our ideals unreal.
A wild, sad confusion reigns, an apotheosis of self-
assertion and self-sufficiency, a saturnalia of sex obses-
sion in life and literature, a revolt against chastity,
authority and restraint. Even our music is troubled, as

THE CRISIS OF CHRIST

we hear it in the poetry of Eliot, Gibson, Sitwell and
Sassoon, to name no other singers. Can our religion
sanctify and sublimate the basic instincts of humanity?
Can it harmonize and harness them to the service of
the Kingdom of God, making its redemption a revela-
tion of a finer morality in which inspiration transfigures
inhibition? Can it reknit the marriage tie, broken today
like a rope of sand, and save the home, now threatened
with destruction?

Ill

If these issues have been stated vividly, not to say
starkly, it is in order to put a question to your heart
and to my own; What have the questions which divide
our churches to do with issues such as these? Nothing!
Less than nothing! They do not touch the real life
of our age; they do not "speak to its condition," as
George Fox would say. What wonder that the multi-
tudes melt away, or remain indifferent, when the churdt
is so remote from the problems in which they strug-
gle, and leaves them to grope without guidance. . Whai
salvation can the church offer this tangled, turbulent
age, speeding its way in a welter of flux and confusion?
A private piety, a code of personal ethics, a vision of
the Kingdom of Heaven as something to be looked at
afar, rather than to be looked for? Can a divided church
hope to unite the world? If the church cannot realize
the brotherhood of religion in its own fellowship, how
can it creatively influence the social order? Can Chris-
tianity, as a theological and ecclesiastical affair, eve*

77

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

meet the need of this restless, ruthless, cynical modern
world, as the Gospel of Christ grasped the crumbling
classic world and reshaped it?

To ask such questions is to answer them to our con-
founding. In the Garden of Sorrow, on the night in
which he was betrayed, Jesus prayed for his disciples,
"That they all may be one, . . . that the world may
know that thou hast sent me." Here are tremendous
words, in which Jesus makes the proof of his person and
the power of his Gospel to depend upon the unity and
fraternity of his followers. Surely he is dead of soul,
or else deaf to the voice of Jesus, who can hear that
prayer and not be shaken by its pathos and challenge.
Read in the light of Christian history, it well-nigh
smites us mute; read in view of the facts of today, it
makes the heart stand still. That prayer is literally
true. The world will never believe in Christ until those
who love him love one another well enough to live
and toil together in the spirit of his life and the service
of those for whom he died. If the church cannot realize
the law of love in its own life, it will be impotent,
if not insignificant, in the days that lie ahead, and the
faith of Jesus will fulfill itself in other ways, or else
be cast aside by a hurrying, realistic world as a vision
too fair ever to have been true in the past and too
frail ever to come true in the future.

Is it not the Crisis of Christ in our day? Or, rather,
is it not the crisis of his church as it falters, hesitates
and delays to prove to the world the truth of the faith
and fealty which it professes? Is there no power in the

78

THE CRISIS OF CHRIST

Gospel of Christ to cut through the cobwebs of custom
and immemorial misunderstanding and let the light
shine out of darkness into our hearts, ''to give us the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the
face of Jesus Christ"? For half a thousand years, on
this Blessed Island, the Body of Christ has been torn
by a profound schism, the story of which we know,
and the tragedy of which has been carried to, the far
ends of the earth, even^ in its missionary labors! Let
me humbly bear, my witness in the pulpit of the City
Temple, speaking both as a Free Churchman and as an
Anglican, knowing both sides from the inside, and treas-
uring the precious thing which each seeks to conserve.
Before God and this company of my brethren, I testify
that in my own heart they are not divided, but are as the
two hemispheres of one Christian world, and what God
hath joined together we must not forever keep asunder!
Let us treasure both traditions, and reckon them equally
holy, equally vital, equally precious; but let us keep
in our hearts the words of the Lord Jesus how he said:
"Ye do make the will of God of no effect by your
traditions!"

Long ago Wesley learned, in his mellow sunset years*
that the Love of God is deeper than all dogmas, and
that the many words of religion describe one ineffable
blessing. Today, if we are to do the work of God in our
generation, we must take the whole world for our
parish, the whole Christ for our redemption, and the
whole church for our fellowship. All exclusiveness must
be excluded, as it was in the mind of Jesus who never

79

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

emphasized a little issue in his life. No partial insight,
no limited vision, will meet the need of an age which
passes all frontiers and probes all abysses. If we be-
lieve if we really believe that God is actually present
in the fellowship of men who are seeking His King-
dom on earth, then the church can be united by the
highest and holiest bond by the Spirit of God Him-
self. If we believe this passionately and profoundly, our
inertia, our pride, our historic differences about which
we make so much ado, aye, even the institutional snob-
bishness and selfishness will give way to the holy will
of God. Here, again, the personality of Jesus will save
us, when we are willing to follow where His footprints
point. Again He will lift us out of our littleness into
His largeness, giving us a vision of the Gospel which
was the purpose of His mind, the passion of His heart,
and the prophecy of His life,

IV

What of the future? The extraordinary thing about
Christianity is that no prophet can foretell what it will
do next. It is a religion of surprise, its verity attested
equally by its vitality and its variety. Again and again,
when it seemed dead or defeated and its faith a fiction,
it has recovered some neglected insight or opened a
new window of vision, and ushered in a new era. Al-
ways the Crisis of Christ is the purification, emancipa-
tion and consecration of his church. It will be so in our
generation. There are tokens to tell us that we are on
80

THE CRISIS OF CHRIST

the eve of the next heroic creative age of Christianity,
in which its audacity of adventure and its heart of fire
shall be revealed anew. No one can tell what form it
will take. Nor is the form important; it is the living
spirit that gives the light and power and victory. Old
dogmas and obsolete forms will fall away, like dead
leaves from the Tree of Life. The only Christianity
worth preserving is the Religion of Love, inexhaustible
in its ministries and magnanimities.

In an age of cruelty and confusion the Poor Little
Man of Assisi heard the words of Jesus, "provide
neither gold nor silver nor brass for your purses, nor
script for your journey/' Wedded to Lady Poverty, he
went singing through his age, saving the church from
disruption and the world from utter corruption. In an
age of superstition Luther heard the words, "the just
shall live by faith," and restored the lost sense of the
immediacy of God and the rights of the soul of man.
In an age of utilitarian complacency, a few heroic
men, attempting great things for God and expecting
great things from God, in obedience to the words, "Go
ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every
creature," launched the great enterprise of foreign mis-
sions. What is the word of God for our age? He that
hath ears to hear let him hear! "And this commandment
have we from Him, that he who loveth God Jove his
brother also."

After the passion of two thousand years, on the eve
of the nineteen-hundredth Day of Pentecost, let us
seek the source of light and power, using the old and

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

simple technique: "And they continued steadfastly in
the apostles 7 teaching and fellowship and in breaking
of bread, and in prayers." What if the church should
dare such an adventure and assemble, as of old, not to
legislate but to listen, invoking the power available to
faith and prayer and unity, the better to learn the will
of God and how to do His work? What if its leaders
should foregather, not to argue, not to patch up a plat-
form, but to seek to know the mind of Christ? What
if we should go to such an assembly, not as those who
seek for victory of opinion, but actually to yield our-
selves to the Holy Spirit to be taught by Him what He
would have us do? What might not be revealed to us
concerning the will of God for our bewildered age,
when humanity is astray in its own life, groping its
way in the darkness? The early church sought the
guidance of God in this manner, and it was permitted
it to say what we should be able to say sincerely: "It
seemed good to the spirit of God and to us."

The words of Carlyle still flash like lightning in the
sky: "The world asks of its church in these times, more
passionately than of any other institution, the question
Canst thou teach us or not?" If the old hurt and
heartache of the world are to be healed, if there is
to be love where now there is hate; if bitter racial ran-
cors are to be cleansed away, if the shadow of war is
to be lifted from the life of man, setting us free to
create a world fellowship; if the race is to be led
toward a juster, wiser, more merciful social order, and
the light of the Gospel sent into all the dark corners
of the earth; it will be by the union of those who have
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THE CRISIS OF CHRIST

found in Jesus the Way, the Truth, and the Life by a
Pentecost of Love and a Baptism of Brotherhood. Noth-
ing can save the church and make it equal to the tragic
necessities of our age, except the power of Him who
created it nothing but the red passion of the love of
God and the white fire of His Spirit in our hearts.

The Return
to the Altar

Delivered .in the First Presbyterian Church,
Philadelphia, a a Conference on Worship, under
the auspices of the Federation of Churches.

THE RETURN TO THE ALTAR
I

If we inquire of anthropology, we find that from
earliest time man has had two basic industries, tool-
making and ritual-making, and they give us a clue
to his history. The reason why man makes and uses
tools is plain enough; he wishes to extend his power
and his personality, in order to meet his need and
master his world. But why, from the beginning, in all
ages and lands, man has made rituals, is not so plain;
it is a mystery. Manifestly, at the bottom of ritual-mak-
ing there is an impulse as fundamental, a necessity as
natural, as the making of tools; something profoundly
revealing. Ritual is religion in act. As if by instinct man
felt that something must be done about God; some-
thing to invoke nay more, to enact His presence in
our fleeting life.

Let us not forget that ritual is first in order; and
theology follows. One may not be dogmatic, but it
would seem that in his sacred rites sacrifices, sacra-
ments, ceremonies of a thousand sorts, wherein magic
and mysticism were blended man endeavored to com-
plete the sequence of experience. In his rituals he spun
and wove a tie to unite cause and effect, trying tt>
find the connection in things. As Bruno said, God is
the principle of connection in things, the Meaning to
which all facts contribute; and man was seeking God.
Ritual, then, is a quest after the unity of facts., the re-
lation of events, the coherence of experience, as over
against a mere haphazard, existence or the awful mis-
cellaneousness of sheer chance. It is man interpreting

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

life, flinging across its gaps a network of meaning, act-
ing out what he believes it to be, endeavoring to bring
himself into harmony with the order of the world, and
thus to be at home in it.

If we turn to psychology, we learn that ritual has
a dual explanation, causal and functional. The rites
of religion, in their origin, we are told, were not so
much attempts to placate the gods though that ele-
ment was present as expressions of communal life,
celebrations of its great events, such as birth, marriage,
and death; an effort to secure its sanctities by social
safeguards. That is to say, man sought by ritual to
establish communion with the Divine Power not fully
attained, or broken by some sin of his own and he
sought that communion socially, through his group life,
repeating in his ritual the order of nature. So inter-
preted, his ritual is organized mysticism, and as such
appeals to the basic instincts of human nature the de-
sire for self-expression, the creative desire, and the social
desire to do things in common with his fellows seek-
ing to harmonize and harness his elemental powers in
the service of the highest life. In short, it dramatizes
the faith, hope and spiritual dream of man, giving a
reality-feeling to what otherwise easily becomes ab-
stract and unreal.

To trace in detail the varied forms of ritual and cult
is beyond my purpose here, as it is beyond my power.
But three things strike one in the study of the cere-
monies and symbols of humanity, and the first is that
worship, in all its forms, is one thing, one in aim and
ideal, however manifold its expressions may be. Also,

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THE RETURN TO THE ALTAR

worship is everywhere an effort of man to make him-
self receptive to such revelation as may be vouchsafed,
in order that God, felt to be far off, may be brought
near, and that God, feared to be unfriendly, may be
found to be friendly. Put otherwise, in worship man
seeks to make the universal particular, to overcome the
distance between himself and God, yielding himself the
while to be invaded, exalted, and commanded by One
higher and holier than himself. When, in his early
rites, he approached the dark mystery of God, wrapped
in cloud and shadow, his worship was abject and awful,
involving mutilation and blood. But when he broke
through the taboo of terror in safety, there followed an
outburst of wild gaiety to which we are well-nigh
strangers; an ecstasy in which earth and sky were felt
to flow together in joy. From afar we can still feel the
thrill of that ancient ecstasy, its ghastly offerings and
its glorious liberations.

In other words, worship, as "the practice of the pres-
ence of God/' so to define it, alternates between nega-
tion and realization, between escape and return an
escape of the soul out of the prosaic humdrum of day-
by-dayness into a larger, freer life, whence it returns
illumined and empowered. At the altar, which is a focus
alike of faith and fellowship, man is lifted above the
self of every day, with its duties, drudgeries and de-
lusions, into a Self at once more real, more clairvoyant,
and more abiding. It is the great emancipation, and as
such the supreme adventure of man, the ultimate reach
of his soul, and the finest of all arts. It cannot be
brushed aside as a mere "defense-mechanism," as it is

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

in the jargon of our day it thrusts us out on too many
daring quests. It cannot be labeled as "self-hypnosis,"
as the fashion now is, because it liberates too many
forces. It is not simply consolation, it is exploration;
and its adepts, whom we call mystics, prophets and
saints, who run ahead of us up the mountain until
they are almost hidden, live the eternal life in these
our mortal years.

On its higher level, as we see it in the masters of the
spiritual life, worship transcends art, transcends philos-
ophy, and deals directly with the Reality of which all
else is symbol and shadow. It discovers another dimen-
sion of existence, as Jeremiah, in the midst of trial and
tragedy unspeakable, rose above ritual-religion, as on a
ladder, above book-religion, into the Religion of the
Spirit, with its light and power and liberty, and became
"the Christ of the night, the Shadow Christ." If at
first it seems to be a withdrawal from the issues and in-
terests of everyday, the withdrawal is only seeming, in
order to bring a brighter vision to the darkest task; as
Raphael, in his painting of the Transfiguration, shows
us on one canvas the shining figure of Jesus on the
mouQj&io^ and the distracted father and his demon-
felmnted bo^at the base.

II

'What is worship? A glance at the Lerolle painting of

'The Arrival of the Shepherds" on the morning of the

Nativity, may give us a hint. The scene is drawn with

realistic verity, devoid of halos, but with a penetrating

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THE RETURN TO THE ALTAR

insight into the deepest intimacies and attitudes of the
soul. The herdsmen stand huddled against the rough
tree trunks which support the roof of the cavelike stable,
and over all is the hush of a mingled awe and joy.
One shepherd has dropped upon his knees in adora-
tion, lost in wonder, his feeling of unworthiness speak-
ing from his whole body. The second lifts himself on
tiptoe, gazing timidly over the shoulder of the kneeling
figure in front of him, watching with wistful, inquiring
eyes, seeking the answer' to the riddle of life in the
lighted face of Mary, and the Child at her breast. The
third shepherd, the oldest and most thoughtful of the
three, has lifted his hand, as if swearing allegiance to a
vision he has vowed to serve and obey.

These are the three elements which enter into wor-
ship as the ultimate art, Adoration, Inquiry, and Al-
legiance; and we may think of them in order. When
the late Baron von Hiigel, one of the noblest spiritual
teachers of our generation, was asked to define the es-
sence of religion, he replied in one word Adoration.
The deepest need of man, he said, deeper than duty,
honor, or happiness, deeper than petition, contrition,
or even thanksgiving, is the mood of adoring prayer,
in which the soul is lost in the Otherness of God, find-
ing rest, release and renewal in One who is like yet
profoundly unlike itself. Other forms of prayer do not,
indeed, disappear from our lives; they are caught up,
fused, and united in a detached, disinterested giving
of our being to a Being other than ourselves to be
cleansed, taught, mastered, possessed. Such prayer
yields all, asking nothing; it seeks God for Himself

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alone, as both the source of prayer and its answer, and
the end of all desire. St. Francis used to spend whole
nights in an intense stillness, uttering no words but
"God! God! God!" loving God, rejoicing in God, sur-
rendering all to God.

As Eckhart said long ago, when we seek God for
our own good and profit, we are not seeking God.
It is religion as an end in itself, like art for the sake
of art, which must be our aim and ideal if we would
be free; religion God-centered and ineffable. To attain
it man may well invoke the aid of every art, striking on
all the outward senses of the soul that from dull in-
sensibility it may be awakened to know God and live
in Him. The vista of architecture, the spell of music,
the fragrance of fellowship help us to achieve "the wise
passiveness" of which Wordsworth tells us, wherein
worship is listening. They induce pause and poise of
spirit, what another has called "a time exposure to
God," relaxing the tenseness of thought and lifting
us into a wide and quiet place of vision, above utilities
and futilities, above the clatter and confusion of life.
In such vision-moments the soul, acting as a unity, rises
above itself, and becomes spirit; it sees, knows, and
sings. Deeper impulses emerge of which we have hardly
been aware, new openings appear, old memories mingle
with new meanings, as our whole being goes out to
God in awe and joy. One such hour of insight and
self-escape > lyrical and luminous, shows us more of
what life is and what it may be than all the sages
know.

At so high a level of adoration we see life in truer

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perspective and proportion, as from a mountain height,
and read its flying days in a clearer context, no longer
clouded by our lower, shadow self which obscures the
truth. Its problems of faith and duty are plainer as we
think of it from the inside, religiously, with deeper
insight and a wider outlook. The gentle, troubled singer
of the Seventy-third Psalm, vexed by the arrogant pros-
perity of evildoers, felt his faith wavering and his feet
about to slip, until he went into the sanctuary. There,
at the altar, a longer view was unveiled, and he saw
the swift end of wicked men and the futility of their
devices. There we, too, must test our lives by One who
is the Arbiter of every perplexity and the Author of
every pure ideal, lest we sink imperceptibly into the
shame of the second-best; we who so easily forgive our
own faults and flatter our own vanity. The Bible calls
it confession of sin: "Search me, O God, and know
my heart; try me and see if there be any evil way in
me/' It is a kind of Divine psychoanalysis, so to name
it, yielding the harp to its Maker to be tested and
tuned, which is far better than letting human fingers
fumble among its delicate strings. Such an inner in-
quiry, if it be honest and fearless, tries us by a standard
other than our own, revealing our besetting sins and
our self-defeating traits in a white and healing light.
By the same token, as Tennyson said in a shining
line, we needs must love and follow the highest when
we see it, drawn equally by its beauty and its mercy.
Nay more, by the holiest compulsion of our being, by
the sway over us of spiritual ideals, we renew our
vows on our knees, as a Roman officer, in the sacra*

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mentum, repeated his oath of obedience every year.
Thus at the altar of worship, in the sacrament of faith
and fealty, we celebrate in a holy rite the vision shown
us in the light of a purified spirit, swearing allegiance
to its pure service; whence we return to the hard task
of the day, or its bitter tragedy, with a clearer insight
and a stouter loyalty. Alas, because we are frail and
faltering, fitful in our faith and fortitude, we must re-
turn again and again to the place of hearing and heal-
ing to renew our vows. Nor are we safe until, by a high
habit of heart, we have ordered and established our
lives in strength and quietness; and that is why the art
and practice of worship, as an act of emancipation and
consecration, is so vital to the best life of society and
the soul. It is not a luxury but a deep necessity, if life
is to have inward unity, direction, and grace.

Ill

To describe in this manner the nature of worship is
to reveal the appalling need of a return to the altar in
our tangled, crowded, hurrying, unworshipful age,
wistful and cynical by turns, when men have well-nigh
despaired of finding any clue to the unity of life or
any key to its meaning. If there is to be a recovery of
religion, if we are to recapture its lost radiance, if it
is to renew its creative and expansive vitality in our
generation, it must be by the way of worship, its su-
preme art of adventure, exploration and interpretation.
Yet the conditions of life today, its hectic pace, its
hideous noise, its obsessive externality, its lack of rich

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inwardness, its clutter of things and its confusion of
voices, are a conspiracy against the ancient command,
"Be still, and know that I am God." Such is our di-
lemma, as if we had all gone astray in our race for the
means of living and lost the meaning of life.

Life today is an endless round of alternating strain
and diversion; our labor is largely with the external,
and there we seek, also, our recreations. It is an age
of the crowd, of mass-movement and mass-thinking, in
which the individual seems insignificant. Few know how
to be alone, much less to live by their inner resources.
The wealth and variety of the things we can do con-
trasts pitifully with the poverty of what we are. Day
by day we live under a terrific pressure of stress, one
duty handing us on to the next, as a pail of water is
passed down a long line of men fighting a fire. As
some one has said, it is not we who do our duty, but
duty that drives us to get itself done. Harnessed to the
way and will of the world, harassed by its hot haste,
we live by compulsions from without and not by initia-
tives from within, and when free of the grind we know
not how to pass our time. In no age has the soul been
so enslaved, so caught and caged in a net, lost in the
mass yet unable to be alone. It is no wonder that
spiritual reality seems unreal, and men grope blindly,
fumbling after some thread of all-sustaining truth, some
way of unity in the midst of a maze.

But unity, alas, eludes us, living as we are in an age
of specialization, when life is cut into pieces and patches
for inspection, its students working in isolation in dif-
ferent fields. The cultural whole of other rimes has

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been shattered, and lies in the disarray of a temple yet
to be built and built upon. Who understands Einstein,
or Epstein, or even Gertrude Stein? Who knows how
Whitehead gets his destination, or what the expression-
ist drama expresses? There is no one mind today, but
many minds, as divergent as they are inarticulate. Our
specialists do not understand each other, yet specialists
they must be, each with his own technique and dialect,
since no one can follow the whole field of vision. Never
again will any man be a "master of those who know/*
as Aristotle was in his day, and Aquinas later. Such a
synthesis of thought is impossible today; the volume
of knowledge is too vast, too varied. Our only hope of
a way out is by a spiritual synthesis, as in the mind
of Lincoln "the Union rose to the sublimity of a re-
ligious mysticism," to use the phrase of Stephens; as
in the ample vision of Whitman, the greatest mystic
the new world has known, our prodigal and abundant
America found transfiguration and interpretation. Un-
less we can attain to such a vision of unity in the uni-
verse as religion seeks to realize, the meaning of life
is lost in a medley, as it is for so many in our day.

For religion, to say it once more, is an experience of
union with the whole of life, which gives unity and
meaning to all its parts. Here, no doubt, is the secret
of the trend toward a richer, more colorful, more en-
thralling worship, as we see it in the emphasis on
Gothic architecture, in more stately liturgies, and in the
flood of books on the spirit and art of worship which
pours from the press. In so far as this movement means
a release from die tensions and weariness of a machine

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THE RETURN TO THE ALTAR

age, seeking power with which to meet victoriously its
issues and demands, it is prophetic of blessing. But if
it be merely a "pattern of , escape behavior/' an effort
to evade facing in a realistic way the problems which
confront us, avoiding moral perplexities and social reali-
ties by taking refuge in a dreamy emotionalism or a
fine-spun mysticism, it means not only defeat but disas-
ter. The priest is needed as we return to the altar, but
also the prophet with his merciless moral criticism and
his flaming speech, and the tie between them must be
kept taut. Otherwise, as history warns us, there will be
a lack of balance and a tragic loss of power and vision.

IV

If we are to walk the way of worship we must use all
our wisdom and all our wit, avoiding many pitfalls,
seeking God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our
mind, seeking holiness with our whole being. Worship
is, first of all, an attitude such as every soul must, in
its highest and truest moods, always assume in the
presence of this amazing universe; an attitude of wise
wonder in front of such a mystery, of exalted humility
before One in whose great hand we stand. It is the
harmonious activity of our highest faculties, and for
that reason the highest happiness man can know. Never
does earth rise so high, or heaven bend so low, as when
we worship, and nothing so transfigures life, purifying
it of fogs and fears, lifting it above the flats to which
our daily toil tends to drag us down, opening new
vistas of insight and outlook.

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

But worship is more than an attitude; it is an atmos-
phere in which the heart is made pure and the mind
clear. Air is one thing, and everywhere the same, but
an atmosphere is charged with a quality of its own,
benign or blighting. There are thoughts which we do
not think in the holy atmosphere of the altar, imagina-
tions which take flight at the mention of the name of
Jesus. Finally, worship is more than an atmosphere; it
is an act, solemn, specific, sacrificial, not merely a con-
ception but a perception of God, not simply a yearning
but a yielding of the whole being, in deliberate and
utter self-surrender, to One higher, wiser and holier
than ourselves. In his later Catholic years Newman
wrote a letter in which he tried to tell some of his old
friends the meaning of the Mass, from which we may
learn much, though it may make our more reflective
worship seem uneventful and idle

"The Mass is not a mere form of words, it
is a great action. Words are necessary, but as
means, not as ends; they are not mere ad-
dresses to the throne of grace, they are instru-
ments of what is far higher, of consecration,
of sacrifice. They hurry on as if impatient to
fulfill their mission. Quickly they go: for the
whole is quick; they are all parts of one in-
tegral action. Quickly they go, for they are
awful words of sacrifice; they are a work too
great to delay upon, as when it was said in
the beginning, "What thou doest, do quickly."
Quickly they pass, for the Lord Jesus goes
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with them, as he passed along the lake in the
days of his flesh, quickly calling first one then
another.

"Each in his own place, with his own heart,
his own wants, with his own thoughts, with
his own intentions, with his own prayers,
separate but not concordant, watching what
is going on, uniting in its consummation.
There are little children there, and old men,
simple laborers and students in seminaries,
priests making their thanksgiving, and there
are penitent sinners, but out of these many
minds rises one Eucharistic hymn and the
great Action is the measure and scope of it."

Thus, in a high and holy act, whether swiftly or
slowly, blending the mysticism of fellowship with the
awful individualism of each soul, together we seek
the One whom we need the better to serve and bless
the Many who need us. To sum up, worship is to
life what distance is to art, what the measureless is to
music. Here, under the hospitable roof of God, life
reveals its true proportions and dignity, and we recover
its vast backgrounds. Here, with the mystery of Eternity
moving to and fro in our hearts, we see the real values
of life, and our oblique judgments are corrected by
reference to Divine ideals. Here our hearts melt in
song, and those ineffable truths which on other days
seem dreamy and dim renew their reality, and we dare
to read the meaning of life by what is highest.

For the rest let us never forget what has been so

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often and so sadly forgotten that the most sacred
shrine on earth is the soul of man; that the temple
and its offices are not ends in themselves, no matter
how old and stately, but blessed means to the end that
every human soul may become "jubilant and behold-
ing/' as Emerson would say, cleansed of evil and
crowned with the glory of a God-illumined vision;
that every human heart may be an altar of faith and
hope, a sanctuary of purity and pity, a cathedral of
serenity and gladness.

102

Religion in
Public Affairs

Delivered at the opening of the Institute of
Public Affairs, University of Virginia.

RELIGION IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Render therefore unto Caesar the
things which are Caesar's; and unto
God the things which are God's.

Matt. 22:21.

S THIS IS ONE OF THE FEW OCCA-
SIONS IN THE LIFE OF JESUS WHEN,
IN ANSWER TO A DIRECT QUES-
_ TION, HE DEALT WITH A POLITI-

cal issue of his own time, it is fitting that we study it.
Doubly so because of the wise insight involved, and
as a kind of prelude to the agenda of this Institute of
Public Affairs in which sundry issues of vast import
are to be discussed. The mind of our time is cloudy
as to the relation of religion to public affairs, and if
it can be clarified in the light of the mind of Jesus,
we may find the guidance we so much need.

Of course our Lord was aware of the motive of the
inquiry, and the effort to entangle him in the mesh
of partisan feud and perhaps entrap him to his hurt.
No matter; as on other occasions he gave wise answers
to foolish questions, so here he gave an honest answer
to a question manifestly insincere in its asking. He met
the issue squarely and confounded his critics, but he
did more. He took advantage of the opportunity not
only to adjudicate on an issue acute in his own age,

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but also to set forth a truth for all ages. If his critics
were adroit, he was profoundly wise.

Even the manner of his reply is worth study, as
showing his clear eye for facts. He recalls his critics
sharply to the realities of the case by asking for a penny
and inquiring to know whose image it bore. His mean-
ing is obvious. It is idle to discuss the right of paying
taxes to Gesar when they were enjoying the protection
of Cassar, since the right of coinage implies the author-
ity to levy taxes; a principle acknowledged to be valid
by the later Rabbis. That is to say, the question in
respect to Gesar was to be answered not by a fantastic
theory, but by the acceptance of facts and the exercise
of good sense.

But Jesus did not leave the matter there, else he had
done little more than expose the hypocritical malice of
his foes, while he evaded the gravity of the issue. Be-
sides, he would have been siding with the Herodians,
who were content to accept a subject princedom as
a sufficient realization of the national hopes, and enjoy
die privileges and powers which such a policy brought.
He pointed out that the claims of God were equally
imperious and not to be denied. In other words, he
gave a spiritual answer to a practical question, and in
the end no other kind of answer is valid or wise, since
at bottom every great issue of life is spiritual No doubt
his foes took his words about God as a mere pious
gesture, as so many are wont to do in our day, though
we are beginning to see, dimly it may be, but more
clearly than formerly, that the spiritual factor cannot
be ignored.
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RELIGION IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Before we take up the principle of Jesus regarding
religion and public affairs, let us not forget the wisdom
of his general abstinence from such matters. It takes
little thought to see that the relevance and value of
the Gospel for us is due to the fact that Jesus dealt
with the perpetual needs of men, and not with their
transitory and local perplexities. When he did depart
from his usual reticence it was to deal with issues
neither local nor secular merely, but recurrent, per-
petual, and universal, and he gave most illuminating
decisions. Had he done otherwise, he would have be-
come hopelessly entangled in the feuds of parties and
sects in his own day and land, and would have little
light for our guidance in this far-off age and land. If
he touched upon local issues, as he did in a few in-
stances, it was because he saw in them questions which,
in one form or another, needs must recur to vex and
baffle men of every age.

As a fact, there are no more than five such ques-
tions dealt with in the recorded teaching of Jesus, and
it is worth while to name and state them. First, "the
Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sab-
bath/' in which he lifts a vexed issue out of the region
of the arbitrary, rigid and non-natural into the free and
vital necessities of human well-being. Second, ""not what
goes into a man, but the things which proceed out of
the man defile/' in which we are shown for all time
that in relative importance it is first the moral, then the
ceremonial. Third, "what therefore God hath joined
together, let no man put asunder," in which he sums
up once for all what is implicit in marriage, making the

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spiritual tie the secret alike of its sanctity and its se-
curity. Fourth, his answer to an apostle who sought to
justify his intolerance toward a Christian worker who
was not of the company following Jesus, but who cast
out devils in his name: "Forbid him not, for he that is
not against us is for us"; which disregards ecclesiastical
irregularity in the interest of spiritual loyalty and hu-
man service. Fifth, the passage now before us, which
sets forth the .nature and validity of the claim of the
state to the obedience and support of its citizens.

How, then, shall we interpret and apply this last
saying of Jesus which defines both the duty and the
limitation of citizenship? As a command, for such it
surely is, requiring all who would obey him to render to
Caesar his due and to God His right. It does not mean,
as it may at first appear, that Caesar and God are rival
rulers, because Caesar is a servant of God, whether he
knows it or not. Nor does it mean, as some seem to
think, that the world is cut in two, divided between a
practical worldliness and a thin otherworldliness. Jesus
did say that his kingdom is not of this world, but he
sought none the less to establish it on earth, as he
taught us to pray in the little liturgy which he gave
us for our daily use; and not only to pray but to work.
If we join this saying of Jesus with the words of St.
Paul, when he said that "the powers that be are or-
dained of God," perhaps its meaning will be clearer.
By the "powers that be 5 ' St. Paul meant the Roman
Empire of which he was a citizen and under whose
protection he lived and labored the empire estab-
lished by the military genius of Julius Caesar and the
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RELIGION IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS

statesmanship of Augustus. It was ordained of God,
said St. Paul.

Surely he was right, since it was almost the first at-
tempt to unify and organize the world upon a basis
of law, its far-flung power making the world one,
just as its great stone roads brought the ends of the
earth together. Back of this saying of St. Paul lies a
profound philosophy of history, which sees that the will
of God is worked out in the life of man only as fast,
and in so far, as man works with the Eternal Will,
Put concretely, the Roman Empire was the form which
the will of God took in that age, because man was not
ready or willing to receive a finer form God must
wait for the developing capacity and wisdom of man.
In other words, each age, each nation has as good a
government as it deserves, or is ready and able to re-
ceive, whether it be an oligarchy, a monarchy, or a re-
public. By the same token, all men, certainly aE
Christian men, must strive by every art at their com-
mand as individuals and in their collective life to
make the state more perfect, more responsive to the
will of God; and by so much is the Kingdom of Heaven
set up on earth and among men.

If we ask how this philosophy or faith, if we call it
such worked out in the events and development of
history, the records of the ages tell us. It took three
forms, the first of which was when the Roman Empire
tried to destroy the religion of Jesus. By a sure inr
stinct the Roman rulers felt, from the first, that the
Gospel of Christ was an enemy to their power. The
refusal of the disciples of Jesus to put their Master on

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

a par with other gods la the Pantheon, and still more
their refusal to bow down to the Emperor as a deity,
confirmed the suspicions of the Roman authorities. Yet
the effort to obliterate the religion of Jesus, frightful
in its severity, failed utterly. Clearly a new influence, a
new force a strange power called weakness had been
released among men, which even Rome could not
defeat.

At last the religion of Jesus, so far from being de-
stroyed, captured the Roman Empire, and became the
state religion by law established. If it seemed a gain,
it was, alas, also a terrible loss, because it meant com-
promise, the dimming of a vision, the coarsening of
what was fine, and a surrender of its real supremacy.
Still, it must have been ordained of God, because, as
Rome reeled and staggered to its fall, the church
dropped into the saddle of the Caesars, held the world
together, and saved civilization from utter collapse.
Anyway, the union of church and state continued, with
varying vicissitudes of good and ill often so mixed
as to be impossible of disengagement all down the
ages until the founding of our Republic, an event
the full meaning of which we do not yet know. In the
New World a new beginning was made, dividing his-
tory into before and after, as regards the relation of
church and state and the public ministry of religion.

At the University of Virginia, his pride and the idol
of his "later, wiser years," as he called it, there is no
need to tell the story of the heroic fight led by Jeffer-
son in behalf of a free church in a free state. It was
memorable and magnificent, and its results are no less

no

RELIGION IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS

benign because they are taken for granted, like so much
else won for us in the past at so dear a cost. Still, we
ought to remember that in the buffer states of New
York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to call them such,
there was less need for such a struggle, due to the wise
Dutch and to the gentle folk of the Society of Friends,
who founded their early communities upon a basis of
absolute freedom and toleration. Indeed, it is not too
much to say that no single group in our history has been
more fruitful of good than the Society of Friends; and
its influence has been out of all proportion to its size
touching with intellectual and spiritual fineness so much
of the life, literature and legislation of our land.

Nor is it necessary, even if it were possible, to at-
tempt to trace the creative and restraining power of
religion in the public life of our nation. Such an under-
taking is beyond human competence, since we cannot
measure such forces, but we know that it has been
vital and formative; and that, too, in spite of the ever-
present temptation and tendency of a false otherworld-
liness to abdicate the right and "duty of moral criticism,
when it has not actually tried to provide religious sanc-
tions for social selfishness. In the past as in our own
day, though happily in less degree in later years re-
ligion has been lamentably content to serve as an am-
bulance cart, following in the wake of industrial and
military strife, when it ought as well to have been
thundering, like the old prophets or like St. James, at
the strongholds of tyranny and injustice which were so
many.

In these despites, the power of religion in public

in

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

affairs in our land has been mighty, and it is not to be
wondered at. Surely he reads history to little account
who does not know that the two great forming agencies
in the story of man have been the Religious and the
Economic; and it always will be so. Here and mere the.
ardor of the military or the artistic spirit has been for
a while predominant, but religious and economic in-
fluences have nowhere been displaced from the front
rank even for a brief time; and they have nearly always
been more important than all others put together. Be-
cause this is so, truly the crux of all our social problems
is to get these two factors the Religious and the
Economic into right relations. Here, as elsewhere, the
Bible, if we are wise enough to listen to it, will be our
best prophet and guide, because its religion was re-
vealed in the midst of a great struggle for social jmce,
and if rightly studied and used it will be a lamp to our
feet in a troubled time.

If now we look more closely at the f acts and forces
of our own age and land, what is the truth revealed?
One thing, at least, is true; the separation of church
and state does not and must not mean the separation
of religion and public life. Rather it should manifestly
mean that the church is set free from the shackles of the
state the better to serve its own high, prophetic pur-
pose. Yet there is need of dear thinking and careful
handling in such matters, if we are not to do injury
while we are trying to do good. Just now it is said,
not for the first time, that we must not "mix religion
and politics," and there is truth in the saying, though
much depends on who says it, why they say it, and in

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what tone of voice. If it means that religion is merely
private piety and has nothing to do with the social
and public life of man, it is false.

For some of us the words have a familiar echo, tak-
ing us back to the days when we were fighting the
saloon, when we were told to preach the gospel of the
Kingdom of Heaven and not mix in politics as if
the Kingdom of Heaven had nothing to do with a moral
and social pesthouse! No, what was meant in those
days was that religion should betake itself to another
world and let the saloon run our politics, as in fact it
did, with what results we know. Indeed, it ran our
politics with so high a hand that it finally hung itself
as high as Haman, and its effort at resurrection today
will be abortive. If only we did mix religion with
politics the religion of purity, justice, honor, and
brotherly kindness our public life would be nobler,
finer, andlnore fruitful for the common good.

None the less, as has been said, there is a sharp
truth in the saying that we ought not to mix religion
and politics, in so far as it means that the church should
be a place of worship and not a weapon of warfare. To
win a temporary gain at the cost of a permanent injury
is bad bargain. Efforts are always afoot sincere and
high-minded, but misguided seeking either to use the
state to enforce the moral precepts of the church, or else
to use the church to coerce the state. Already we have
gone further in both directions than it is wise or safe
to go, putting in jeopardy the rights of the minority as
well as the rightful influence and work of the church.
Ardent minds, impatient of moral suasion, if they have

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not actually lost faith in it, may easily do more harm
than good. A great prophet-bishop God in His mercy
does sometimes allow a prophet to become a bishop, in
spite of the church has recently said:

"Measurement and publicity are the best
weapons for social redemption precise judg-
ments according to a standard and the publica-
tion of the results. The church has exalted
standards which it can use with increasing
precision, and it has organs of publicity. Any-
thing beyond this lobbying, propaganda,
political maneuvers may well be subjected to
scrutiny, especially when we are tempted to
enter into cooperation with some evil forces
against other evil forces. It is in my judgment
imperatively necessary for the church to fight
now as never before against the liquor traffic,
but I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable
about some of the alliances die church is at
least half-way forming in this warfare, such
as those with political parties and reactionary
commercial and industrial organizations. If
we get the devil to pull the cart, it will go at
his pace, over his road, and in his direction.
At the very least, such policy of co-working
begets in the church too kindly a sentiment
toward allies of doubtful moral standards. I
know a farmer who shot a watch-dog that had
become 'too friendly.' " *
1 Bishop Francis J. McConnell of the Methodist Church.

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RELIGION IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS

This, plainly and picturesquely said, means that the
erxd does not consecrate or justify the means, but that
right ends may be delayed, if not defeated, by wrong
methods. In other words, if we are ever to build the
Kingdom of Heaven on earth, it must be by heavenly
means and methods. If we try to do it by earthly meth-
ods by repression rather than creation, by organiza-
tion rather than inspiration, to say nothing of statutory
substitutes for character we fail utterly and in the na-
ture of things. Even the force of righteousness cannot
make men righteous until they are ready and willing
to yield to it, else the power of God would have made
men righteous long ago. God works from within out-
ward, and only in His way can we build His Kingdom
on earth. At first it seems a slow way, requiring a long
time and so it does just as it takes a long time to
grow a tree; but in all high matters the slow way is
the quickest way, because it is the only way.

A famous and far-reaching instance will bring this
truth to a glow-point. Gandhi is a spiritual splendor
in our generation, a voice to echo in the ears of men,
a vision to haunt thek hearts, long after the principali-
ties and powers that oppose him are but dust blown bjf
the random winds. Yet, when Gandhi set up a boycott
against the British Empire using a force none the less
powerful for that it was passive he did what Jesus
refused to do. Jesus, too, was a member of a subject
and tormented race, but he fought only with the
weapons of the spirit. Folly? No, because he released
an influence which, in the end, saved the good Caesar

115

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

had done. Futile? Apparently, but not so in fact and
the outworking of events. Today both wisdom and
truth are ranged on the side of "him who is the eternal
symbol, sacred even to those who question his very
historicity, of the lonely might of the spirit opposing
itself to the federated forces of the world."

How does this strange might of the spirit, as elusive
as it is ineluctable, work and after what manner? Let
us see. Macaulay tells us that the evangelical revival
improved the quality of doth woven in the mills of
England; but it is not of record that it improved the
conditions under which the weavers worked. But, hap-
pily, in the mid years of the last century, the spirit of
God moved upon the hearts of a group of the elect,
Maurice, Kingsley, Ruskin, and others. When Maurice
said, "I confess the sins of my age as my own," there
was born a sense of social solidarity so vivid that the
physical misery of the many became the spiritual torture
of the few; and there was no rest until wrongs were
righted. Our hope lies in an increasing spiritual sensi-
tiveness, an ever more vivid social imagination. To-
gether they will make war intolerable, and the Golden
Rule a necessity in the life of man.

No one can read the words of Jesus, much less fol-
low in his footsteps even a little way, and not discover
that he lived in a world of which Caesar knew nothing.
All the strange powers of the soul were assembled in
him, held in harmony by a sanity of mind and a purity
of heart, transfiguring the dark mystery of life with
meaning and mercy. The unseen, unknown empire of
the spkit, over which the legions of Caesar had no

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RELIGION IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS

authority, was his dominion. He heard the voices of
the world; he read the heart of man; he reached and
ruled that inner realm where abide the issues of life and
destiny. His dazzling conception of the Kingdom of
Heaven has no equal in its depth and grasp and gran-
deur. It has in it the breadth of the sky, the curve of
the earth, and all the journeying years. The dream of
Caesar was vast, but the vision of Christ is vaster. All
the wandering races of men are embraced in his humane
and heavenly vision of a redeemed Humanity; and he
saw in a far time his vision fulfilled.

Caesar ruled from without; Christ reigns within. At
the center of humanity he sits enthroned, holding for-
ever his scepter of love and pity and joy. Men follow
for love of him, led and lifted, they know not how, out
of hate into love, out of doubt into faith. And thus the
ages have followed him with song and art*

The glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome,

have vanished, have melted into the stream of time, but
the power of Christ grows and abides, and will have no
end. Caesar died and Rome decayed. The state can re-
strain, it cannot regenerate. Something deeper is needed,
something that softens and purifies the heart of man,
and builds a temple in the secret place of the soul.

Caesar needs Christ to fulfill his dream of an ordered
world; and Christ needs Caesar too his large world-
mind, his high heroic quality, his fine practical capacity
if the Kingdom of Heaven is to be set up on earth,

"7

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

Our spiritual-mindedness must become public-minded-
ness; the skill of science and the power of religion must
work together; and faith must be translated into truth.
These things shall be, because 'the Power of Love is
greater than the love of power, and in the long last
Love cannot fail, for God is Love.

118

Our Neighbor

Commencement Sermon, State University of
Iowa.

OUR NEIGHBOR

Luke 10:25-37.

NE CAN READ THE PARABLE OF THE
GOOD SAMARITAN IN A MINUTE
AND A HALF, READING DELIB-
ERATELY; AND YET IN THE LIVING
wisdom of the world there is no story that touches life
more vitally or with a more sparkling vividness. It be-
gins with a debate about a point of theology, but it is
soon giving first aid to a wounded man by the road-
side. If it has to do with the question of Eternal Life,
it ends by paying room and board at a hotel. So practical
is religion in the mind of Jesus; so near are eternal
realities to the affairs of everyday.

The story was told* in reply to a man who thought
it much easier to love God than to love man. He was
willing to be neighborly, but he wanted to select his
neighbors. He thought that some line ought to be
drawn, some limit set beyond which one is not required
or expected to go. There are many who want religion
to be a kind of limited liability company, lest they be
too deeply involved. But Jesus drew no lines and set
no limits to the duty of man to help man. He wanted
the lawyer to know that his neighbor was the man next
to him who needed his aid, wherever he might be, re-
gardless of race or religion.
There is no need to say that the story was told by

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

an incomparable artist; it is a picture painted by die
twist of a wrist. Dipped and dyed in the colors of hu-
man life, no essential fact is omitted, no unnecessary
item added. Even the lawyer agreed that his question
was answered neatly and completely, with no possibil-
ity of evasion. The scene is located on a lonely road
where only God saw what went on. No audience was
present to modify any motive. Each man acted out the
actual spirit and principle of his life, uninfluenced by
anything outside his own heart.

I

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is steep and
dangerous; it descends three thousand feet in twenty
miles, from the shoulder of Mount Olivet to the Jordan
valley. In imagination one can see those bandits hiding
in a limestone cave, their dark faces silhouetted against
the cliff, waiting for their victim symbols of the black
fringe of crime on the borders of society. When the
hapless traveler came in sight, they leaped out, sur-
rounded him, beat him into insensibility, took his
money, stripped him of his clothing, and left his bleed-
ing body at the side of the road. They intended to kill
him, because dead men tell no tales. Cruelty is one of
the most distressing and depressing facts in life. It was
a bloody, brutal business.

But that is "rough stuff," to use the touch-the-spot
language of our day. One does not have to break a
man's head to be a bandit. One can break his heart.
One can break his home. One can break his business.
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OUR NEIGHBOR

One can subtly and cynically break down his religious
faith. One can besmirch his good name, and destroy an
honorable reputation built up through long years.
Every day men are robbed of things far more precious
than gold. The amount of polite banditry and refined
cruelty that goes on in the world is appalling. Many a
man respectable in society and in the church is nothing
but a bandit, and would be so described if we called
things by their right names. Alas, too often success
softens criticism and muffles speech. To put it plainly,
any man who deals with his fellow man for what he
can get out of him and nothing else, is a bandit.

One of the greatest of German thinkers laid it down
as a principle, in tune with all the teaching of Jesus,
that to treat a human being as merely a means to an
end, no matter how high and holy the end is supposed
to be, is immoral. It does not matter that such a prin-
ciple throws a white and searching light upon much
that we are pleased to call civilization, it is none the
less valid. To think of working folk as so many "hands"
and nothing else, forgetting that they are immortal
souls, precious to God and for whom God died, is im-
moral. To think, even if we do not speak, of young men
as "cannon fodder," is a ghastly and cynical sacrilege.
Of course we are shocked when some blunt man blurts
out the brutal truth, stripped of the glamour of senti-
ment and fine phrases. As one of the characters in Saint
Joan said, it would horrify us if we could see what we
think about as it really is.

The two men of religion in the parable have been
the targets of scathing scorn, and rightly so. But let us

123

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

be careful, lest we impale ourselves before we know it.
One was a Priest, who hardly glanced at the wounded
man by the road, and passed on, hurrying to the Tem-
ple to take up his office. In his mind a misplaced collect
in the temple service would have been a serious matter,
but he could leave a fellow man in dire plight without
a qualm. The hypocrite, we are ready to say. But we
have no right to use such a word. Jesus might use it,
because he knew the human heart as we do not. No,
the priest was not a hypocrite, not conscientiously so at
any rate. He honestly did not see any connection be-
tween religion and the service of humanity. To him
religion was the rhythm of a ritual. He thought that
God lived in the Temple, listening to prayers and
hymns. It did not lie in his mind to think of God as
brooding over a broken man by the roadside.

Not long ago a friend of mine was preaching at
Harvard, and he closed his sermon by quoting a stanza
of the stately hymn, "In the Cross of Christ I Glory/'
After the service President Lowell asked him if by any
chance he remembered who wrote the hymn from which
he had quoted. He did, lucky man. He said it was writ-
ten by Sir John Bowring. The president pressed the
matter by asking if he recalled when, where, and "under
what circumstances the hymn was written. He did not
remember, if indeed he ever knew. The president told
htm that it was written at the very time when Sir John
Bowring was forcing opium down the throats of the
people of China at the mouth of the British cannon. It
seemed incredible to my friend, but in the afternoon he
and the president looked it up and found that it was so.

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OtJll NEIGHBOR

A hypocrite? No, it was a blind spot. Sir John Bow-
ring saw no inconsistency in writing a noble and tender
hymn in praise of the Cross of Christ with one hand,
while with the other he was engaged in an infamous
undertaking. He saw no connection between his pri-
vate spiritual-mindedness and his public life. He was
not pretending to be religious in order to make polit-
ical capital out of one of the most frightful iniquities
that ever cursed mankind. Such an explanation is too
simple, too easy. His piety was fragrant and sincere,
but he honestly did not see that it had anything to do
with his public acts. To Sir John Bowring, as to many
another man, religion was an inner ecstasy or peace,
an escape from harsh reality, a merciful cleansing from
acts required by his position from which his better na-
ture may have revolted. There are many such. It is a
strange astigmatism, but before we condemn it let us
be sure that we are not afflicted with it. For my own
part, I have too many blind spots to pass judgment
upon others. Only in recent time have we begun to see
that religion and life are one and the same, or neither
is of any worth. For, manifestly, if piety does not issue
in human service, in juster laws and a more merciful
society, its dogmas are a delusion and its ritual a rig-
marole.

Take the example of the Earl of Rochester, of whom
Macaulay tells us. In order to influence James II for
political purposes, the Earl employed a dissolute woman
to whose charms the king was susceptible. Yet at the
very time of the intrigue, Rochester was writing in his
diary devout prayers and exquisite spiritual medita-

125

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

tions, with no thought of the public they were found
among his private papers. A contemptible hypocrite?
No, it was the same ghastly gap, the same horrible hia-
tus which has made so much of the tragedy of history.
Men are not as wicked as the things they do. The pages
of history are blacker than the hearts of the men who
made history. With merciful clarity Jesus saw that men
do awful things without seeing or knowing what they
do. "Eyes they have, but they do not see/' he said. How
many tragedies it explains, how many bigotries and
brutalities it accounts for. Most of the crueL wrongs we
inflict upon each other are the blows and blunders of
blindness.

The Levite who passed by the wounded man in the
parable was a musician, a member of the Temple choir.
At least he did -stop and look at the unfortunate man
in his misery that is, he made a survey of the situa-
tion, as we are apt to do. Indeed, it is a fad today to
make such surveys, to gather data, to count the number
of babies that die undernourished in city slums, filing
the report for future reference. No doubt such surveys
are needed, and their findings have value as informa-
tion; but it is a pity to do nothing about it. Who will
say that the stinging rebuke of a poet about "organized
charity, scrimped and iced, in the name of a cautious
and statistical Christ/' is not deserved? The Levite got
the facts, and he may have reported the incident to the
Temple authorities when he arrived in the city; but that
was the end of it. Nothing was done to help the man
in desperate need, and the bandits were left free to
attack the next pilgrim who journeyed that way.

12(3

OUR NEIGHBOR

The attitude of the Innkeeper toward the wounded
man in the parable was a purely professional one. He
was paid for his services, and rightly so. There is no
intimation that he did not take good care of the un-
fortunate man, or that he overcharged the Samaritan,
who agreed to pay more if need required. Without the
inn and its keeper the Samaritan could not have cared
for the victim of the bandits. He was away from home,
sixty miles or more something in the story makes one
feel that he was going in the opposite direction. He
had no facilities for relief. The inn may stand as a
symbol of the hospital, the orphanage, the asylum, the
home for the aged all the benign agencies with which
we care for the wounded and world-broken. Such agen-
cies did not exist in the time of Jesus, but they hallow
the earth today, largely through his influence; and
within their beneficent walls the finest skill of science
is'brought to the service of suffering humanity.

What shall we say of the Samaritan? We do not
know his name. He did not advertise his philanthropy.
He found a fellow man in dire plight, wounded, help-
less, by the side of the road. He was a man of another
race, another religion. No matter; he picked him up,
gave him such immediate aid as he could, put him on
his own beast, took him to the next inn, and paid for
his keep. He did the natural, fundamental human thing,
made a clean job of it, and went on about his business.
Truly did Mohammed say that when man will not help
man the end of the world has come. Certainly the end
of the human world has come when the most basic obli-
gations are ignored, for whatever reason. The bottom

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

drops out of society. There is nothing upon which to
build. If religion fails here, it fails fatally and becomes
a mockery.

To us the very word Samaritan is like incense in the
temple of humanity, by virtue of an artless act en-
shrined by an inimitable art. But to the lawyer to whom
the parable was told it was not so. Upon his lips the
word was a term of contempt and scorn, describing a
man of a mean and mongrel race. To call a man a
"Samaritan" was the worst thing he could think of, like
some of the words we are wont to use Jap, Chink,
Dago, Nigger! With exquisite irony Jesus made a Sa-
maritan the hero of his story, finding in the breast of a
despised outcast man an alabaster box of precious oint-
ment with which he anointed a fellow man in distress
as if to show us the loveliness which humanity hides
from us because we do not love it enough. Alas and
alack, bigotry blinds us to brotherhood, and racial snob-
bery robs us of beauty. How much unguessed, anony-
mous goodness there is in the world, if we look for it.
Without it human life would rot and fall to pieces.

n

The Samaritan befriended a man of another race,
forgetting ages of profound, unreasoning antipathy;
and here the parable speaks to us. Upon this earth there
is no human fact more dark and terrible than racial
rancor. It is a thing slithered with blood, a breeder of
bitterness and the mother of wars. What havoc it has
wrought! Yet even in America, of all places on earth,

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OUR NEIGHBOR

it runs rife, making an undertone of irritation in all of
our larger communities. It mars private fellowship, it
poisons public life. Such a spirit is alien to the whole
genius of America, if we remember that our country, in
its settlement and development, is a racial symposium,
in which many peoples took part, each adding some-
thing precious to the commonwealth. There is room
for everything in America except hatred, upon which
nothing can be built

One has only to study the providential strategy in the
history of America to see that it is a great fraternal
enterprise. Eight nationalities set sail on the Mayflower,
a ship so well advertised that one would think that no
other boat ever sailed the seas in the brave days of old.
Seventeen nationalities took part in the settlement and
development of our central eastern states, like Penn-
sylvania, New Jersey, and New York. It was fortunate
that we had such buffer states between the psalm-sing-
ing Yankees in New England and the fox-hunting
squires of the South. By happy fortune the population
of the central states along the far-flung eastern co^st
line was made up of folk of many races, and that made
for toleration and fraternity. The oppressed and per-
secuted of many lands took refuge among us, finding
a more liberal and kindly fatherland.

Later, men of many races poured in upon us, flood-
ing our land. As early as 1650 eighteen languages were
spoken on Manhattan Island, and today there must
be eighteen hundred it is a polyglot boarding-house
of the human race. All of us remember the sentimental
talk of a Melting Pot, a striking phrase which became

129

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

a thought-saving slogan, until we were suddenly awak-
ened to racial realities. According to this curious fancy
America was meant to melt many races into one, after
the manner of the old button-maker in Peer Gynt, and
make a new kind of man; whereas the result would
surely be a monstrosity, as undesirable as it is impos-
sible. When this foolish fiction exploded, we were well-
nigh frightened out of our wits by racial f acts to which
we had been blind. Alas, fear begat hatred, as it al-
ways does, and all the old rancors returned to tor-
ment us.

What we need is not amalgamation but brotherhood,
not a melting together of races but fellowship a sense
of the sanctity of unlikeness and the value of different
races and peoples as adding to the richness and pic-
turesqueness of life. Each race has a genius of its own,
and by that token a treasure to contribute to the com-
munity, if we have the insight to see it and the sense
to value it. In America the religion of brotherhood Is
not a theory, or a fine phrase, but a necessity; and here
the Gospel of Jesus, in which fraternity is vital and
fundamental, meets our need. If Jerusalem was the city
of Faith, and Athens the city of Philosophy, and Rome
the city of Law, and London the city of Liberty, then
New York, the great city of the future, must be the
city of Fraternity.

America is not a New England, as so many think;
it is not a new Europe; it is a New World. Never since
time began has there been such a flowing together of
peoples from the uttermost parts of the earth and the
isles of the sea. For that reason America must know
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OUR NEIGHBOR

no Saxon race, no Teutonic race, no Slavic race, but only
the Human Race, of which it is actually a symbol and,
prophetically, a symphony. Never has there been such
an adventure in fraternity, so many races living so close
together on equal terms brothers by necessity, as they
must at last learn to be in spirit and purpose. There
is no room in this land for hate, prejudice, or contempt
of man for man, if we are to build a Beloved Com-
munity, in which many races mingle without rancor,
and many faiths without feud.

For, remember: the Samaritan was merciful in his
ministry to a man of another religion, and here he has
something to say to us. Next to racial rancor, religious
bigotry to use a contradiction of words has been the
most terrible scourge of mankind. Even in America we
have always been bigoted and narrow-minded in mat-
ters of religion, to a degree almost unbelievable. Those
who came early to our shores to escape persecution did
not hesitate to persecute others. In New England a man
had to be a Congregationalism or he was not allowed
to vote. In Virginia, if he was not an Episcopalian, he
suffered many disabilities both as to his life and his
goods. Gentle-hearted folk of the Society of Friends
were put to death on Boston Common, not for any
crime, but for their religious beliefs! ~

Once more, it was in the buffer states that a better
spirit prevailed, due in no small part to the Quakers,
led by Penn, who held that "men who fight about
religion have no religion to fight about/* In New Am-
sterdam the Dutch planted their wise principle of tol-

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

eration, making it a haven for the harassed of the earth.
Even Peter Stuyvesant, whose theology was as un-
bending as his wooden leg,, knew how to live and let
live, to think and let think. At last, led by Jefferson,
the spirit of toleration was written into the organic law
of the land, and we have a free church in a free state.
At any rate we have a democracy of religion, in which
all faiths have equal rights. The religion of democracy
lies ahead of us, awaiting a spiritual interpretation and
expression of American life and ideals. It is a pitiful
picture at present, sea set over against sea, some of
them small enough to be inseas.

Surely the religion of brotherhood must begin with
the brotherhood of religion. But it must be unity, not
uniformity; fellowship, not fusion; fraternity, not mere
federation. Just as we do not want all races melted
and run into one mold, neither do we want the various
religious communions merged into one mush of con-
cession and compromise. It would mean the impov-
erishment of all, each losing its distinctive grace in an
indistinguishable blur. There is an old Wiltshire song
that I used to hear in England

If all the world were of one religion
Many a living thing should die.

Toleration is not enough; what we want is insight, ap-
preciation, understanding, by which the unique aud
precious treasure of each communion becomes the con-
secration of all each bringing the wine grown in its
vineyard to the Cup of the Universal Communion,
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OUR NEIGHBOR
III

The Good Samaritan wrought his work of mercy and
went on his way, leaving a blessing and benediction
upon us. The question asked by the lawyer was an-
swered, but a larger problem was unsolved. Alas, the
road to Jericho was just as unsafe the day after the
robbery as it had been the day before. The bandits were
still at large, ready to prey upon any luckless traveler.
The Samaritan, alone, could not capture and punish
the robbers. It was beyond his power. No one could do
it. Today, we carry the principle of the parable fur-
ther, or else add another dimension to it. While tak-
ing care of the bruised and broken by the wayside, we
organize, set up an office in Jerusalem, and unite to
clear the whole region of bandits, making all roads
safe for any who may use them on their lawful avo-
cations.

No one race, no one nation, no one sect can do the
big things that need to be done in the world of today.
Only a creative cooperation of many races and sects
can meet the issues that confront us. It is not a dream;
it is a desperate necessity and fact. If, for example, we
are to abolish war, before war brings the civilization
built up since the fall of the Roman Empire down in
a charred and smoking ruin, it must be by mobilizing
the moral intelligence and practical capacity of the race.
It must begin with the recognition of the fact that the
good of mankind as a whole does actually exist, and
that no race, no nation, can be happy and secure alone.
For this we need the brotherhood of religion, by the

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

grace of God flowering into the religion of brother-
hood, in which the good of all shall become the duty,
the prayer, and the labor of each.

Only, such large issues must not thin our thought out
until it melts into a mist of vague sentiment with no
grip upon facts. It is idle to talk of world-unity, if we
cannot keep the peace with our neighbors least of all
when the world has shriveled to the size of the noisy,
gossipy neighborhood, in which the races live next
door to each other. It is futile to dream of a fellowship
of faiths, if in our own community we cannot worship
God each in the way his heart loves best, while working
together for His Kingdom. The priest in the parable
was no doubt intent on saving the world, but he did
nothing to save one man from despair and death by the
wayside.

The power of an endless life, about which the lawyer
asked Jesus, is not a vague something off up in the
sky, remote for the dust and tragedy of human life. It
is life here upon earth from day to day, since eternity
is now/ like the sky which begins at the top of the
ground; a life of faith, of love, of duty and mercy and
joy. It is one with all dear fellowships, with every ten-
der tie uniting us with those we love; and wider still,
with every growing bond of justice and pity and hope
which binds us with humanity, by which every man
who needs is a neighbor and should be discovered as
a brother. And it is by living a neighborly life in these
short days of sun and frost that we come, at last, to
know "our old neighbor, God.

134

The Next Step
in Religion

THE NEXT STEP IN RELIGION

And he made as though he would
have gone -further.

Luke 24:28.

ODAY, AS OF OLD, A FIGURE IS
STANDING AT THE COTTAGE DOOR
AT EMMAUS, MAKING AS THOUGH
HE WOULD GO FURTHER. HE IS A
Pilgrim Christ, and the history of Christianity is the
story of his journey adown the centuries, a commentary
on the words, "He appeared unto them in another
form." Only, alas, as at Emmaus, he is not recognized,
and men do not know who is leading them until he is
leaving them to continue his great errand in the world.
Humanity, if left to itself, would stand still, dwell in
a cottage, and keep Christ with it; but it cannot be,
though he will tarry for an hour to bless the Bread
of Fellowship.

Evermore the wind is on the heath, and the Great
Adventurer makes advance into new lands and new
times. All through the years we trace his footsteps; in
the joyous heroism of the early church, with its "strange
power called weakness"; in the five centuries follow-
ing the formative period of theology, when the issues
of faith were thought through; in the Middle Ages,
rich in art and full of beautiful and strange personali-
ties; in the Reformation, with its affirmation of the

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

sanctity of the home, the worth of personality, and the
competence of man in religion. Often the sky was over-
cast and the way dim, but that shining Figure was ever
on before, beckoning a laggard church to follow.

By its very nature the Gospel of Christ is an expand-
ing, unfolding power in the life of man, revealing new
wonders as "the thoughts of men are widened with
the process of the suns." Only, we must remember the
profound paradox in the words of St. John, confirmed
many times in the history of our faith: "Whosoever
advances and abideth not in the teaching of Christ hath
not God." Advancing and abiding, liberty and loyalty
in that sign the church has conquered in days agone.
Ardent but misguided leaders break with the truth as it
is in Jesus, but their movements end in futility. Always
the power of renewal emerges from the deep heart of
the church itself, not from the outside, as so many im-
agine; and so it will be in the ages ahead. An out-
standing fact of our day is the number of choice spirits
who have broken with Christian tradition only to find
themselves in the presence of Jesus, and enthralled by
his personality. They have rejected many dogmas about
Jesus, but they dare not reject him, since he has the
words of eternal life. But, alas, such souls are few, since
the plain fact is that most of those who hold aloof from
the church do so because they do not want to be dis-
turbed by the claims of religion, or plagued by its ideals.
The fortunes of Christianity and the church are almost,
though not quite, one.

Today, as in other days, a living Christ is trying
to lead a timid, fearful church into a new age of adven-

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ture and enterprise; but it holds back. Always it has
been so. Winslow reports of John Robinson, the pastor
of the Pilgrim Fathers, that he "bewailed the state and
condition of the Reformed Churches, who had come to
a period in religion, and would go no further than the
instruments of their reformation as, for example, the
Lutherans; they could not be drawn to go beyond what
Luther saw. And so also the Calvinists they stick
where he left them. For though Luther and Calvin were
precious, shining lights in their times, yet God hath
not revealed His whole will to them, and were they
now living they would be as ready and willing to em-
brace further light to that they had received/' Those
words might have been written yesterday or this morn-
ing, so true are they to the inertia of the church, and
its desire to stay where its last leaders left it. Man, even
Christian man, if not totally depraved, is at least totally
lazy, or else is the victim of fear.

Never was the truth set forth more picturesquely
than by Joseph Parker in his striking sermon on "Faith
Self-Enlarging/' in which he shows that faith of neces-
sity must grow, by its own inner logic, and that it is
only real when it does grow. His text was the words of
Jesus to the men of his day who professed to believe
in Moses: "Had ye believed in Moses ye would have
believed in me"; because a living faith will recognize
its own fruits and fulfillments in new forms of faith.
A faith, if it is alive, always modernizes itself, catches
the last vision, the last phase of revelation. Faith is not
final; it is a beginning, a dawn, a seed, a spring with
many summers in its heart. A church does not really

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believe its own creed until it is willing, and even eager,
to add to it, restate it, following it into new revela-
tions and applications. Today a, new vision of God is
transfiguring a changing church which professes to re-
main unchanged, and denounces the changes as in all
the past.

Much has happened betimes; a world-view is pass-
ing away, and- the inner ideal and outlook of man has
altered. Besides, a wild s storm of war has swept over
us, shattering old dogmatisms and optimisms, and leav-
ing a black swirl of wreckage in its wake. The hearts
of men are deeply troubled, wanting to believe but
finding it difficult. Our age has an intense, eager, wist-
ful longing for spiritual reality, for a more satisfying
sense of God. Men want religion, but they do not know
where or how to get it. Often they seem to want its
consolations without its high commitments, its delight
without its discipline. But they want it, knowing that
the human problem will not work without the spiritual
factor. There has never been so vast a force of incipient
spiritual activity, to be influenced for good or ill, as
there is today.

JEetr-eddly enough, if religion attracts, the church
iepels. An obsolete sectarianism no longer expresses
the real religion of our time which, so far as it reveals
itself, is more a practical mysticism than a system of
dd>gma. There is not a sect whose original reason for
b'eing is valid today, or whose central insistence has
any relation to the actual issues of our time. The dif-
ferences which divided our fathers are not resolved;
they are forgotten. They do not signify. Such debates

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seem idle alongside the acute sense of injustice social,
racial, industrial which festers in the very souls of
people of all ranks, rich and poor, high and low. One
detects an eclipse of faith in the hearts of many in the
church, who carry on by the momentum of memory
and habit; a pathetic scanning of the sky line for a new
portent, a strained intentness of listening for a new
accent of faith. What an opportunity for a pilot-voice
at the prow of our Ship of the Spirit, sailing in new
and strange waters!

Alas, temporarily at least, we are deadlocked be-
tween an archaic orthodoxy and an arid, negative mod-
ernism, both alike impotent to deal with the problem
of redemption in its tragic and gigantic modern set-
ting. One abides but does not advance; the other ad-
vances but does not abide. One looks backward and
loses the vision of the Pilgrim Christ; the other tries
to trim a titanic Christ down to fit its fastidiousness.
Modernism, as it now stands^ is no more a Gospel than
were the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. A plague on
both their houses! What we need is a further step in
religion, an altogether other dimension of faith and
fellowship, if we are to get on with the Christian en-
terprise. Either we must go forward to a greater Chris-
tianity or be forced out of religion altogether by the
tide of cynical materialism now flowing losing, first
of all, the loyalty and service of a generation of virile
and educated youth.

Is Christianity dying, as Arnold Bennett and others
tell us it is, almost as if it were a bit of good news?
Yes, of course it is, though for a reason they do not

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understand. It is the genius of Christianity to die, like
its Master, and rise again radiant and new-born. Ever-
more it must die to outworn forms of creed and rite,
and rise to a new vision of Truth; must die to its nar-
row sectarianism, and rise to a sense of the unity of
things which differ; must die to an inadequate individ-
ualism, and rise as a "Beloved Community." We are
on the eve of great change and advance; new id6as of
the spiritual world and its laws are at the door. Men of
spiritual awareness detect a spirit moving in the cur-
rents of our time, like the Ezekiel vision of a spirit in
the wheels, prophesying a new demand of the human
soul. More light will yet break forth, if we have eyes
to see and a heart for high adventure in the fellow-
ship of him who is going further.
" What is the next step in religion? We have tried
dogma, and it involves us in endless debate, and
bigotries unbelievable. ,The time is at hand when we
must advance from philosophy to fellowship, from
Faith to Love; because religion is love, as God is Love,
and faith attains reality only in love. The word Credo,
1 believe, does not solve the crossword puzzle, unless
we add the word Amo, I love, in which Jesus summed
up his Gospel. "Love one another" how much, how
long, how far? "as I have loved you" There is the
measure, the standard, the prophecy of our love. If only
the arms of Christ, still outstretched on the Cross, might
be unloosed to clasp us in one embrace and draw us
nearer to his heart! Then we should know a truth
deeper than dogma, holier than ritual, and as inclusive
as the love of God, uniting us in a creative, cooperative,

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invincible fellowship. Here truth, goodness and beauty
blend. Love in thought is Truth; love in action is
Goodness; love in expression is Beauty. Love is indeed
the fulfillment of the law, as it is the confirmation of
faith and the realization of life, wherein liberty and
loyalty join with "the deep power of joy/'

But is love enough? Something deep and drastic is
needed, as all agree, if the church is to meet the issues
and master the demands of our day. No restatement of
dogma, no rearrangement of machinery, will do. A
vague otherworldliness, with its cult of selfish ecstasy,
is as impotent as the effort to make up in "pep" what
is lacking in prophecy. No, there must be a daring and
heroic advance from Truth to Power, if our quest is
to become a conquest. A line from Unamuno, the Span-
ish seer, may give us a hint: "My religion is to know
the truth in life and the life in truth" Truth we have
in richness, truth enough to set us free from all our
ills, once we know how to release its pent-up power
and how to use it. St. Paul said that the Gospel is "the
dynamite of God unto salvation," and it is equal to all
the wild forces of an age of reaction and revolt, as it
has been in other ages gone by.

How can these things be? One of the richest books
of recent years is the Selected Letters of Baron
von Hugel, who pondered much on our plight and
pointed to a way out. A mystic by genius and experi-
ence, he was also a philosopher, and not unaware of
science and its meaning. He knew that God is not only
the supremely spiritual but also the supremely con-
crete, as Lotze was wont to say. He saw that the older

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mysticism, by seeking absorption in the , abstract, be-
came hazy and empty, despite many white flowers of
the spirit which it grew. By the same token, if we ad-
journ the mystic quest of the Eternal, our religion be-
comes earthy and heavy. Science and mysticism belong
together, he said, as twin activities of the soul, each to
correct and confirm the other. The tragedy of our age is
that they are at odds, whereas they ought to be the two
wings of the human spirit. If we obey the law of tKe
power, the power will obey us. Men of science are try-
ing to tap the atom, or the ether, seeking new sources
of energy. Just so we ought to learn that the law of the
spirit brings the life that is in Christ; and that life is
power even the power of an Endless Life.

If we turn to the New Testament we find that the
key-word is power, and its echoes fill us with awe.
Jesus spoke with power, and his words had the force
of deeds. He was more than the Truth, he was the
power of Truth, evoking new energies and new capaci-
ties, it almost seems, in the life of man. In his fellow-
ship men found themselves able to do what hitherto
they were unable to do. There was a new mastery of old
tyrannies, and ancient enemies sin, disease, fear,
death were flung in the dust. So it has been, in some
degree, in all the great ages of the church; and such
power awaits our use when we seek it and are ready and
worthy to use it power from on high to lift our fee-
bleness and failure. Nothing can save the church and
make it equal to its task today but the Power that cre-
ated it. The vast and restless mood now upon us may
be divinely intended to drive us back from secondary

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methods and devices to the source of consecration and
conquest.

Only such love and power as were in Jesus can lead
our faith jorth from Dogma to Deed, making the
church a center of unity and service, in which men live
together as sons of God in gladness and good will. The
religion of Jesus is love, comradeship, fellowship, min-
istry, or it is nothing. It is not first a theology, but a *
friendship. If it is impossible for men to unite in the
love of Christ, then Christianity is impracticable, and
had better be given up. But it will not be given up.
Sooner or later the church will realize the will to fel-
lowship and draw to itself those who are worthy to be
called the disciples of Christ. Unless the power of Chris-
tian love fulfills itself in the church, healing our envies,
rebuking our schisms, and melting the bigotries that
blind us to brotherhood, how can it influence the struc-
ture of the social order? Our business is not to do some-
thing for the church, but to do something with it.

Here is the challenge of a sad and distracted age to
the. followers of Christ today. Are we ready to meet it?
The words of Jesus are as true of a church as they are
of an individual: " Whosoever will save his life shall
lose it; and whosoever will lose his life for my sake
shall find it/' As Edward Irving said long ago, what ',
our age needs more than all else is a "demonstration ,
of a higher style of Christianity something more mag-j
nanimous, more heroic, than this age is accustomed to/'
That is to say, what we need is an adventurous church,
daring to make trial of the law of love first in its own
life, and then in its ministry to human need. Let us

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give ourselves to it utterly, nor think it too great an
achievement for the church of today, with its plodding
and faltering advance toward the prophetic vision of
the Love of God that cannot fail!

Where is Christ in the tumult of our time? The an-
swer is, look for him where the struggle for justice is
fiercest, where human need is most piteous, where the
tragedy of life is sharpest look there and you will
behold, as in the fiery furnace of old, a form like unto
the Son of Man. There, too, is our post of duty and of
danger, if we are to make the church truly Christian
that is to say, a sacramental fellowship of those who
love in the service of those who need. Evermore our
Leader makes as though he would go further, and still
further, along the Road of the Loving Heart a Pil-
grim in the twilight, in his hand the nail-prints of the
Cross, in his heart die hope of the world.

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When Christmas
Conies

WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES

He took a little child, and set him
m the midst of them.

Mark 9:36.

HAT IS CHRISTMAS, IF IT BE NOT A
PROPHECY OF A TIME TOWARD
WHICH BOTH FAITH AND WISDOM

POINT? FOR ONE BRIEF DAY, SO

swift to go, another spirit broods over us, healing our
broken hearts and jarring wills. Strife, anger, and van-
ity fall away, awhile we live in a gentler world where
love is law. If it might abide with us it would be well
with our humanity, and pity and joy would walk the
common ways of life. But, alas, we are not ready for
its simple faith and wise humility, and the day is gone
while the welcome is still on our lips.

Yet it means much, it means everything, to have a
prophetic day, symbol of the Eternal Child and "the,
cradle endlessly rocking/' It is needed in this hard
world, if only to keep alive the souls of us, and to re-
new our faith in things well-nigh forgotten. May it
flourish to the confounding of all unkindness, in a time
of bitter cynicism and blurred ideals, when men play
lackey to fear and put their dreams on allowance. It
brings us back to the profounder faith, free of the
shadow of old Night and the dread of the Morrow. It
takes us down from our towering pride, and teaches

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us humility and sweet charity. Aye, it rescues us from
our own. tyranny, and gives us hope that we may find
our lost child-heart again.

For, even in fairyland no one ever heard such a story
as Christmas tells; it must be true, because no one
could have imagined it. Beside this tale, every romance
in the world is tedious and tame, and the record is as
amazing as the history: the perfect art of the story fits
the perfect poetry of the fact. Only an ultimate art,
nobly artless, is equal to such audacity of insight and a
truth so fantastic. If, as Keats tells us, beauty is truth,
and truth beauty, no other evidence of its authenticity
is needed. It is beyond human invention; only God
could have dreamed it.

I

What a story as incredible as it is ineffable telling
how, in a tiny town, in a stall in a stable, under a sing-
ing sky, at "the end of the way of a wandering star,"
God was born a Babe, bringing a new pity and joy into
the life of man, dividing time into before and after!
Once aloft and aloof, cloud-robed and shrouded in awe,
God drew near, striving to enter our fleeting life, try-
ing all doors, and finally making Himself small as a lit-
the child and lying down on the doorstep of the world,
until the world, moved by the cry of a Babe, opened the
door that had been barred to threats and thunders, and
took the Child in. Was any story ever more fantastic 3
at once more impossible and more enchanting!

It is unthinkable, say the wise knowing not what

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WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES

they say because the Infinite One who inhabits eter-
nity cannot take the form of man. But God is not truly
great unless He can reveal Himself in little things, in
a cozy room and a hearthside, in the love of the home
and the family. If He is too high to be lowly, He is too
small to be God. Love is lost in immensities; it comes
in simple, gentle ways, and that is why, on Christmas,
religion is so homey and full of caresses, showing how
we are "caught in the coil of God's romances/' and
held in His arms. Hence the joy that sets the world
singing, and a haunting loveliness in the heart; warm,
tender, glad. God did not come a giant to little folk;
He took our tiny shape and let us hold Him in our
arms.

If there were no Christmas, our id#*of God might
be august and awful; it could never be homey and
happy. A God who revealed Himself only in suns and
systems would remain remote; He could never be inti-
mately near. Such words as "eternity" and "infinity"
chill our spirits and make our minds reel. They tell of
a God who sits in silence on the far away hills of won-
der, dim and unapproachable, a dweller in the distance.
But Christmas reveals a Little God, joyous and gentle,
at once eternal and humble, nestling in the heart.

If, stated starkly, the story reads like a leaf out of a
fairy-book, we must remember that only the thinnest
of veils divides fairyland from the truth. Alas, the veil
may be as thick as a stone wall, unless we have kept
something easily lost in the rough ways of the world, as
a page from a well-beloved book will show. In the
Journal of Amiel we meet a man sensitive, shy, smitten

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with the malady of thought, and often sad, albeit rich
in varied insight. One entry tells of the tumult of his
mind as he finished reading Schopenhauer, now so much
in vogue, as if the petulant pessimism of the philoso-
pher had infected his spirit. It left him all awry, grop-
ing amid dim dogmas, cloudy creeds, and a wisdom
that is not wise. When he asked himself, as so many ask
today, "What, then, do I believe in?" he did not know.
Then, suddenly, in the depth of his heart he felt a stir,
and heard the laugh of a child:

"Folly! I believe in goodness, and hope that
goodness will prevail. Deep within this iron-
ical and disappointed being of mine there is
a child hidden a frank, sad, simple creature,
who believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness,
and all the heavenly superstitions. A whole
millennium of idyls sleep in my heart: I am a
pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer."

Ay, happy is the man deep down in whose heart the
gay laugh of a child free, trustful, joyous makes his
grim, gray philosophy foolish. It is to a hidden child
in us, sleeping but never dead, that the story makes its
appeal, and that is why, when the clouds are off our
souls and we are most truly ourselves, free from the
pose of being wise, we know that it is true. The highest
truth is never known by logic, but by love. God is an
artist and does not hang His pictures in a cold, dim
light. The life of God, which is beyond our ken, may
be more like the heart of an unspoiled child than a
king on his throne, to whom cringing men bow down.
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WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES

There may be nothing in the universe, even with its
light-year measurements, greater than the love that for-
gives a penitent man and binds up a broken heart. So
Jesus taught he whose generation and affinity are with
elemental and eternal things and by following him
we come at last, not to the child that once we were,
but to the child we never yet have been.

II

For, in a true sense, the urge into childhood, as it
is called, is not backward but forward, not a return into
an old but a growth and unfolding into a new child-
hood. After all, children, as some one has said, are
rather symbols of youth than youth itself; they are un-
consciously young. Whereas, in later life, if we be truly
wise, we have the power of converting the symbol into
the reality, and of being young and knowing it. As
Jesus told us, unless we become, not little children, but
as little children, we shall in no wise enter the King-
dom of Heaven. Such words should give us pause,
since Jesus, whom our age is trying so hard to under-
stand, so often insists that unless we have the child-
attitude toward God and life and man, we cannot even
see His Kingdom, much less enter it.

Put plainly, if the words of Jesus mean anything,
they mean that if we are losing or, rather, if we have
failed to attain the spirit of the child, we are losing the
Gospel, or can never find it; losing it utterly, and need
to be born again, as the Teacher told the grave and
courteous scholar who visited him by night, if we are

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

to regain or find it. Our scholarship, it would seem, of
which we are so proud, is quite futile. Some artist ought
to paint the puzzled look on the face of Nicodemus
when he asked how a man, who is old, can be born
again, and the sweet wonder on the face of Jesus, who
was astonished that a teacher of faith should not know
what he meant.

Here, no less, is the pathos of our generation, with
its bright, brittle, bitter sophistication, and the tiresome
egotism of an all-analyzing self-consciousness which
has brought it to the verge of spiritual paralysis and
futilitarianism. It is fascinated with Jesus, haunted by
him, pitying and patronizing him by turns, trying to
know him but failing, finding his mind naive, childish
and primitive, and his faith in a divine Father an infan-
tile complex. Yet even those who have broken with the
Christian tradition find themselves in the presence of
Jesus, unable to escape him, enthralled by his person-
ality, as if he knew a secret which our super-cleverness
has missed, and without which life loses its meaning
and luster. Evermore Jesus passes by on his errand, and
men follow his figure with wistful eyes, but not with
their minds and feet.

Life is in little fragments today, set under a micro-
scope for inspection when it is not being flung on a
screen so that we may watch our heart beat, note its
score, and check its response to injected stimuli. Ac-
tually, we have a race that knows itself and is so fas-
cinated with the knowledge that it cannot stop looking
at itself. There is no longer any privacy, scarcely sincer-
ity all is pose and posture. Jesus warned us not to do

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WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES

our alms or prayers to be seen of men, but, alas, that is
the least of our troubles the awful trouble is that we
do everything to be seen of ourselves! Has a self-con-
scious self-knowledge robbed us of that wholeness and
simplicity which alone makes Jesus intelligible? Has
his word, "The kingdom of heaven is within you," taken
up by the devil of introspection, become not a haven but
a horror? Have we looked into everything and through
everything so long that we now overlook the little
door that leads into the land of Christmas where love
is just love, and beauty is just beauty?

Ill

To say it otherwise: can the sophisticated modern
mind, so wise in its own estimate, so mature in its own
judgment, and so emancipated, ever enter into the sim-
plicity, the humility, the wonder and sweet wisdom of
the Jesus way of thinking? Most of the elements in
its make-up run exactly counter to His faith and the
spirit of His life. Take the story of Tolstoi, so typical
of our restless age, going without arriving, seeking
without finding; a great, God-haunted soul the man
was humanity! to whom the most terrible shadow was
not death, but the meaninglessness of life. After try-
ing everything, after going everywhere, and finding
neither truth nor peace,* he turned to Jesus, as all must
do, sooner or later. But, alas, unable to become as a
little child, like Dostoievski who kept, or won, the
child-heart, and saw all souls as troops of little chil-
dren, some with dirty faces and bedraggled frocks

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

Tolstoi came to Jesus not in humility, but in humilia-
tion; and so missed a great secret. Let us not chide
Tolstoi; his quest is also our quest, and happy is he who
finds. There is mystery enough in life to rebuke the
proud, and light enough, if we follow the gleam, to
revive the spirit of the humble.

If the wise and witty mind of our day, so bewilder-
ingly intelligent and capable, will not bow at the Man-
ger, like the Magi of old, what has it to offer? Surely
it dare not give up the quest and resign itself to the re-
ligion of despair, lest its own wisdom be impeached as
the ultimate folly, ending in obfuscation. It is only fair
to ask that it set to work to discover a meaning in life,
or to invent a meaning for it, else we all fall together
into a hound's ditch. For, if life is futile and without
meaning, by the same token our seal to know about it
is futile and silly, since the true is no better than the
false, both being vanity. In the past Wisdom might
dwell in an ivory tower, aloof from direct interest in
actual life, a kind of umpire of its issues. But that is
no longer possible, if only because the very value of
Wisdom itself is in debate, and it must defend its
tower. For the first time the real issue is clearly seen,
and may not be evaded: the fact of an adequate value in
life, and a valid worth in human effort, is as much an
issue for the wise men of the world as it is for those
who follow the Christmas star. Which way, then, lies
the clearest light and the ttuest vision?

For some of us, something in the spirit of Christ-
mas makes it plain that the cocksure sophistication of
our day is pathetically superficial, its glittering clever-

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WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES

ness profoundly stupid, and its towering pride tragi-
cally pitiful. As one listens again to the old, immortal
story, and sings carols that echo adown the ages, the
scene which many think is only a fairy-dream which
we have agreed to dream for a day, and then forget,
seems nearer to the truth than all our dim philosophies,
if only because it does not seek too high for what is
near by.

After all, perhaps the most awful error of our smart
and giddy-paced age is that we have mistaken knowl-
edge for truth, and cleverness for wisdom, and have
forgotten to distinguish between the "childish things"
which St. Paul said should be put aside, and the great
childlike things which abide, and to which we owe the
strength and sanity of life.

IV

By an odd freak of fact, the men in our day who are
nearest to the spirit and mind of Jesus in their method
and approach are men of science. Long ago Huxley
said the older Huxley, not his descendant who shows
us in an exquisite art the humor, irony and pathos of
futility that the words of Jesus, "Except ye become
as a little child," are the most perfect description of the
spirit of science in its search for reality. If a man would
know scientific truth, Huxley said, he must sit down
before fact as a child, eager, humble, teachable, rich
in wonder and pure in heart; and such a spirit is no
less the secret of finding the truth of faith. And it is
the glory of Christmas that it makes known a truth

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

which can never be uttered, but can only be incarnated
and acted.

To the man of science, to say it once more, the sim-
plicity and wonder of a childlike faith is no difficulty;
it is his habit of mind and heart. In his laboratory today
he is like Alice in Wonderland, only his findings are
more fantastic. Nor is he averse to imagery as an aid,
since his world-view is far remote from that of the
rationalist, with its neat logical perfection, and he
must be content with imperfect symbols of truth, if
that is the only alternative available. For example, the
Rutherford-Bohr atom is an inherently impossible en-
tity; but every physicist believes in it as the best picture,
so far devised, of ultimate facts. The only alternative is
to feign contentment with a mass of dynamical equa-
tions, which mean little and suggest nothing in the ab-
sence of the mental image of the atom.

In other words, as a man of science has to content
himself with conceptions which are consciously sym-
bolic, inadequate and lacking even in consistency, so a
religious man is justified in adopting a childlike faith,
unless some more perfect knowledge is available to him.
And if, in exchange for such a faith, he is offered the
commonplaces of thought, or high-flown metaphysics,
or dull dogma decked out in fine phrases, a sound in-
stinct will justify him in rejecting it, trusting a deeper
prompting, and knowing that the time when he need
no longer "see in a glass, darkly," has not yet arrived.
Nor may he hope to find an imagery of reality at once
more intimate and august than the Christmas picture,

WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES

with the brooding beauty of Mother and Child, and
the white star of the ideal in the sky.

For, unless our race is love-lifted and star-led, what
hope have we that war will ever end, and the slum be
cleansed, and mankind attain to a collective life that is
just and merciful and full of joy? There is no valid fact
against a great-spirited cooperation of nations and races
but this, that we have a childish fear and lack a happy,
childlike faith in the impossible things, which are alone
worth the doing. Like the boys and girls in the market-
place, whom Jesus watched at play, envy, spite, greed,
petty prides and, above all, jealousy these are the real
obstacles to those brave large reconstructions, those dar-
ing brotherly feats of generosity that will yet turn hu-
man life of which our lives are tiny parts into a
glad, gracious and triumphant fraternity all around this
sunlit earth.

Ages ago Julian of Norwich, whose name is still as
fair and as fragrant as a blackthorn against a sky of
vivid blue, and as tender as mother love and child
trust, wrote this line: "To me was shown no higher
stature than childhood' '; and all the great mystics agree
with her vision. They know what Jesus meant when he
said: "Whosoever shall receive a little child in my
name, receiveth me; and whosoever shall receive me,
receiveth him that sent me/' George MacDonald, who
was half a child and half an angel, tried in his Un-
spoken Sermons to expound that text, and failed in-
evitably so, because it is a white truth which human
words discolor!

159

The Challenge
of Lent

In Appleton Chapel, Harvard University, the
first Sunday in Lent.

THE CHALLENGE OF LENT

Create in me a clean heart, O God;
and renew a right spirit within me.
Psalm 51:10.

HIS IS THE MEDITATIVE SEASON OF
THE CHRISTIAN YEAR, WHEN THE
THOUGHTS OF ALL LOVERS OF
_____ CHRIST LOOK FORWARD TO THE
Passion Week, and its commemoration of the great sac-
rifice. As men realize once more that their hope is
rooted in divine suffering, a certain instinct in them re-
coils from self-indulgence. For that is what Lent im-
plies and involves, if it be taken seriously and in a mood
befitting its solemnity and beauty. It Is a challenge to
honest inner inspection and the cultivation of those dis-
ciplines of the soul without which spiritual reality may
become as unreal as a mirage. The ancient saying, "The
beginning of wisdom is the desire for discipline," is as
true in the art of life as it is in the life of art.

No doubt to the sleek modern man, with his wor-
ship of comfort, it may seem absurd that any mortal
should forego a dinner for the sake of his soul. To me,
even in its crudest aspect, it is eloquent of the fact that
man does not live by bread alone. Surely any man, to
whom the Garden of Gethsemane is more sacred than
the garden of Epicurus, must be arrested by the spec-
tacle of millions of his fellows setting themselves to

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

face, even for a brief time, the duty of self-denial.
Admit that Lenten forms often obscure the idea they
seek to embody, and that merit is too easily attached
to means rather than to ends, it is none the less impres-
sive. Abstinence, as such, may have little value, but
that it may be put to high ends no one will deny. Lent
may at least remind us that Christ does call us to some-
thing far higher and nobler than physical ease.

What a shame, cried St. Bernard, to be a delicate
member of the Head crowned with thorns! Habitual
temperance is more religious, and more wholesome,
than recurrent austerities, but we have not attained to
that grace. Normally, no doubt, the conditions most fa-
vorable to holiness result from the healthy interaction
of body and soul, but life in our age is not normal. It is
sodden with materialism and soured with cynicism. We
may rightly reject the ascetic theory as a mistaken dual-
ism, but there is another side to that truth. Nor must
we forget that some of the loftiest and loveliest souls this
earth has known used strange, stern means as helps to
the holy life. A call for a week of self-denial in Paris
some years ago was accompanied by an extract from a
letter by Wilfred Monod running thus:

"How is it that Protestants have produced,
on a man like Pere Gratry, the impression
which he formulates as follows? 'Protestant-
ism is, in essence, the abolition of sacrifice.
To abolish abstinence and fasting; to abolish
the necessity of good works, effort, struggle,
virtue; to shut up sacrifice in Jesus alone and

164

THE CHALLENGE OF LENT

not let it pass to us; no more to say, as St.
Paul did, I fill up what is wanting in the suf-
ferings of Christ, but rather to say to Jesus
on his cross, Suffer alone, O Lord there is
Protestantism/ "

Of course, sacrifice means more than doing without
food, and it is going too far to say that Protestantism
abolishes good works, effort, virtue; but the latter part
of the statement is only too true. Both in theory and in
practice we have shut up sacrifice in Jesus alone, hold-
ing that the merit of his suffering is imputed to us with-
out our sharing his suffering. Not so St. Paul, whose
passion it was to be a partaker of the fellowship of the
sufferings of Christ, if so that he might win the high
prize of the life eternal. St. Bernard, not less than
Wesley, taught the goodly gospel of free grace, but he
did not feel that it exempted him from a habit of aus-
tere living. Nor did Wesley, who fasted every Friday
as long as he lived, and partook of the Holy Com-
munion fifteen times in the last six weeks of his life,
because he needed such aids in the practice of salvation.
Neither of these masters of the spiritual life neglected
the stern culture of the soul, as so many of us are wont
to do, under the notion that the virtues are gifts and
not trophies. Pere Gratry was right in pointing this out
as a grave defect in our teaching, and even more so in
our practice, of the religious life.

If this is true of Protestantism in general, I fear it is
still more true of that wing of it which calls itself, not
always truly, liberal. Here, at least, I may be permitted

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

to speak frankly and to the point, applying my words
more severely to myself than to any other. If I allow
myself to be called a liberal Christian, it is not because
I like defining my Christianity by an adjective for I
do not. But I somehow got the idea that this move-
ment meant that a man is free to be a Christian, not
that he holds his Christianity loosely, if not lightly. It
had come to me that a liberal is one who has the same
charity toward the past as toward the present, and is as
willing to listen to St. Bernard as to Bernard Shaw. At
any rate, it had been told me that the liberal pulpit re-
jected certain dogmas about Christ, and I thought that
was because it wanted Christ brought nearer to us
with the demand which I knew would plague me with
an unsatisfiable passion to be more like him. Some of
us thought it was discontented with doctrines of the
Atonement, because it wanted the reality that we are
called to be crucified with Christ, that he may rise in
us. We thought it held the gospel of salvation which
bids a man be willing to stand naked before the Awful
Holiness, seeking "purity rather than peace/' as New-
man made his motto. Were we mistaken? If so, then ',
liberalism shall know me no longer, for who teaches an
easy gospel teaches a gospel of perdition, whose end is
death.

This is true, whatever else be false that following
Christ is a great adventure, and it means that we must
take up a cross and bear it. Much as we may admire
modern life, with many of the ideals of this indulgent
age there can be no compromise, if we are to be fol-
lowers of the Master. What fills me with a deep dis-

166

THE CHALLENGE OF LENT

quiet about our Christianity today, both liberal and or-
thodox, is that it is so harmless. It is so tame, so timid,
so tepid a kind of glorified lollipop. Even if we apply
it to social questions, as we talk so much of doing, there
will be little result unless it has more power in it than
it has now. It behooves us to think of the reality and
ministry of our religion as we look toward the Passion
of Him who, being rich, became poor, and was a friend
of the lowly and forlorn. Lent evokes such thoughts,
and it is therefore that we should keep it and wisely
use it, doubly so in an age when "Whirl is King" and
noise is terrifying, lest as the Wages of Hurry we lose
our souls.

Alas, instead of being a period of inner discipline,
Lent has become a relief from the dizzy social whirl; a
time of moral manicuring! Penitence? For a few devout
souls, yes; but for the mass of church folk it is little
more than a form. No doubt we need to deal with the
little gray sins which eat away our peace; but is there
to be no prayer and fasting for the dark social sins
which make human life a hell? No broken and con-
trite heart for the sin of war, which desolates human-
ity and leaves trails of skeletons across the earth? No
repentance for racial rancor, and the bigotry which
blinds us to brotherhood? No sackcloth and ashes for
the sin of schism which divides the church and makes it
impotent; for pettiness of soul, for our Pickwickian talk
about unity? No bitter sorrow that the Gospel of Jesus
has become in our hands a religion of easy edification
rather than of daring moral adventure; jam, not dyna-
mite? Yet, if we look into our own hearts we shall find

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

the key to the chaos, and why the world is so awry,
since the social scene is our own lives writ large. O my
soul, remember!

For one thing, Lent brings up the whole question as
to the relation of the life of the body to the life of the
spirit. Such a question cannot be discussed here at
length, but it is a far-reaching one and may be hinted
at It is good common sense, as well as wise Platonic
philosophy, that he who devotes himself to his appe-
tites will have thoughts wingless and alien to the sky.
Think of die fasting how you will, "a stuffed body can-
not see clearly," as the old axiom assures us. Much less
can it see the invisible things which ask for close and
deep thinking. Asceticism, in its true sense, is simply
a disciplined effort to gain an end, nothing more. Every
man, if he has any ideal of any sort, is more or less an
ascetic whether he knows it or not. That is, he begins,
if he be wise, by cutting off what is incompatible with
attainment. Thus an athlete goes into training, and by
renunciation, by obeying rigid rules, makes his muscles
strong and his nerves firm the early Christians called
themselves "spiritual athletes/' Thus a man of affairs
foregoes many pleasures to win the prize he aims at.
Lent is a period of training for the soul, in behalf of a
deeper insight, a fearless self-examination, and a better
ordered inner life.

As such it is not beyond the reach of the most flac-
cid of us, since neither our bodies nor our wills are as
finely tempered instruments as they ought to be. Wil-
liam James, my honored and dear teacher, urged men
to keep alive in them the "faculty of effort," by doing

168

THE CHALLENGE OF LENT

each day something for no other reason than that they
would rather not do it. By such renunciations, he said,
we attain a twofold end: we strengthen a habit of self-
control, and we prepare ourselves to stand when the
hour of dire need draws near, lest it find us unnerved
and untrained to stand the test. In one of his letters to
his children, Gladstone urged them to "put habit on the
side of the spiritual life," and his wisdom was born of
his own experience, as we know from the story of his
life. Certain it is that a man inured to habits of con-
centrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial
will be unshaken, while his softer fellows fall. "A goocf
will is the substance of all perfection," said the author
of The Cloud of Unknowing^ and he added:

"Silence is not God, nor speaking; fasting
is not God, nor eating; loneliness, nor com-
pany; nor yet any of all the other two such
contraries. He is hidden between them, and
may be found only by love of thine heart.
He may not be known by reason, nor con-
cluded by understanding; but He may be
loved and chosen by the true loving will.
Such a blind shot with the sharp dart of long-
ing love may never miss the mark, the which
is God. Look that nothing live in thy working
mind but a naked intent stretching into the
divine."

For another thing, Lent suggests most eloquently
the need and value of some definite method for the
culture of the inner life. Here is the great defect of our

169

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

age. No wonder so few of us ever get beyond the native
and instinctive religion which is an endowment, and
cannot be shaken off. In other things we have method,
system, discipline, technique. No lawyer tries to prac-
tice at haphazard, with no regard for the decisions of
courts or the masters of the law. Yet that is what we
do in our life of faith. Not many of us know even the
names of the great religious masterpieces those pas-
tures of the soul, so rich in beauty and wisdom. What
a treasure of insight and experience, what noble com-
panionship, what high leadership and yet it is left
unused. Volumes could not tell the folly of this neglect
of the arts and offices of the soul whereby spiritual
reality is made real. The wonder is not that wet have
misgivings, but that we have any faith at all, so little
care do we take to keep it alive in our hearts.

Here again let me speak frankly, not to hurt, but, if
it may be, to help. Some of us, women for the most
part, take up with the cult of the esoteric or of some
other sort, and spend some time each day reading its
books. This is a start in the right direction but such
books, mere rubbish and hodgepodge, bereft of beauty,
devoid of insight, with never a glint of genius! Sup-
pose one should study art in that manner. Suppose opte
should leave out of account Angelo, Rembrandt and
Raphael, and take up with some poor dauber. That
would not be more pathetic than what some restless,
troubled minds are doing. They have never employed
methods in studying the great Christian religion, but
must follow some wandering marsh-light. What a spec-
tacle! If anyone wishes an inspiring optimism, radiant

170

THE CHALLENGE OF LENT

and serene, let him go to Emerson who had authentic
genius and power. Better still, let him devote the hours
wasted on poor scribblers to the book that shows uSj
as in a mirror, what we are, and what we ought to be.

Then, too, Lent asks us to look into our own hearts
and face what we find there, though it may make us
shudder. One of our comfortable essayists said the other
day that people in our day are not troubling about
their sins. That is only too true; and it might be very
well but for the fact that their sins will never cease to
trouble them. With what terrible intensity of insight
Ibsen has made us see that sin, no matter how it is ex-
cused or hidden, troubles not only ourselves but those
yet unborn ghastly Ghosts that will not down. If a
great outside teacher, who can hardly be said to have
had any faith in God, drives this fact home to men,
surely the pulpit is remiss when it does not emphasize
it. There were with us only a few years ago two such
teachers of the very first order, Ibsen and Tolstoi. Now
they are both gone, and there is no other who comes
within sight of them.

Whatever else may be said of Ibsen, he was one of
the greatest rulers and interpreters of the human spirit.
So long as men dare to see life as it is, he will be read.
He tore away ruthlessly the masks and veils with which
men hide the fact of sin in the heart, and made us view
with uncovered eyes the uncovered horror. He showed
the insecurity and ultimate impossibility of any life
that is founded upon a lie. It cannot stand. It is a house
built upon the sand. Further, this stern teacher goes
down into the dim depths of the soul and finds that sin

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

exists there, and that while men spend much time in
cloaking it, it never can finally be hidden. What a tonic
he is, after reading the rosewater theology of our day,
which either ignores sin or seeks to disinfect it with an
easy-going optimism.

Not so Ibsen. He preaches sin as a terrific reality,
and he knows the agony of its inner wound but, alas!
he has no hope that it can be cleansed away. Confes-
sion he knows, but not the music of the gospel fact
of forgiveness and healing. He preaches as few have
ever preached the truth

Could my zeal no respite know,
Could my tears forever flow,
All for sin could not atone

and there he stops, as so much of the preaching of our
time does. He sees no hope save in death, and that is
why in six of his ten plays men and women invoke
death by their own hands. Like all really profound
thinkers, he saw the great fact of sacrifice, and espe-
cially the free sacrifice of the innocent for the guilty.
Yet, sadly enough, he did not see the meaning of die
Great Sacrifice, and so go on to finish the lines
Thou must save, and Thou alone.

Has the gospel of our age lost the rhythm of that line?
If so, however liberal it may be, however brilliant, it is
no Gospel at all.

When the thoughts of men are turned toward the
cross, let us look into our hearts in the light of the life
and sacrifice of Jesus. God of mercy! what vile and
slimy things a man finds in his heart when he sees it as

172

THE CHALLENGE OF LENT

it is, in that soft, sure, penetrating light! He sees all that
Ibsen saw, and more too. How his respectability van-
ishes! How his towering vanity comes tumbling down
into the dust! Yet it is a kindly light, not only pure
but purifying, with health and healing in its rays. It
shows a great horror, but it gives us a great hope. Once
a year, at the least, a man should examine the house
of his heart and see what kind of spirit lives there
and that is the meaning of Lent. It demands that we
fling away the spectacles of pretense, and face our souls
in the light.

Such a meeting with his own soul is good for a man,
whether he be in the pulpit or the pew. It helps him
to see things as they really are himself included, if so
he may bestir himself to be other and better than he Is.
More than all, it induces a true humility of spirit, which
is the beginning of wisdom and of righteousness. With
me, the question is how to live before death so as to
be worthy to live after it. Often it is a matter of grave
doubt with me whether it is worth while to continue the
experiment of such a life as mine. Until it is nobler and
more Christlike than it is, that doubt must remain at
once a perplexity and a provocation to effort.

It is good to be last, not first,

Pending the present distress;
It is good to hunger and thirst,

So it be for righteousness.

It is good to spend and be spent,
It is good to watch and to pray;

Life and Death make a goodly Lent,
So it lead to Easter Day.

The Immortal Life

From a volume entitled "If I Had Only One
Sermon to Preach on Immortalitf; edited by W. L.
Stidger; used by permission of Harper and
Brothers.

THE IMMORTAL LIFE

Jesus said unto her, I am the Resur-
rection, and the Life: he that believ-
eth in me, though he were dead, yet
shall he live: and whosoever liveth
and believeth m me shall never die.
Believest thou this?

John 11:25, 26.

GAIN THE TIDE OF ETERNITY, BY
MEN CALLED TIME, HAS BROUGHT
US TO THE DAY OF ALL DAYS THE
BEST, THE CREST AND CROWN OF
the Christian Year: the Day of Eternal Life. The sweet
order of Easter Day is blended with a beautiful con-
fusion, in which the mysteries of religion are mixed
with the mysteries of nature; and that is as it should
be, because it is the day of the Cosmic Christ the
mighty Lord of Life and Death and all that lies between
and beyond.

Out of a red sunset an Oriental poet once saw a
friend riding over the desert toward his tent, wrapped
in glory like a heavenly halo, and the poet exclaimed,
"Glory to the Almighty, the sun has risen in the West!"
Out of the crimson sunset on Good Friday, its horror
and its heroism, the Risen Christ comes riding in
majesty today, the best Friend of the human heart, and

177

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

we cry out, "Glory to the Almighty, the sun has risen
in the West!"

Out of death comes Life; out of agony comes joy;
out of defeat, victory; out of sunset, dawn. Where we
had least hope of sunrise, "the Son of Righteousness
arises with healing in His wings/' in fulfillment of his
own tremendous words:

tf l am the Resurrection, and the Life: he
that betieveth in me, though he were dead,
yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
believeth in me shall never die. Believest
thou this?'

How often, alas, we have heard those words as a
part of the Office of the Burial of the Dead; and it was
so I first heard them as a tiny lad when my father was
buried. Clinging to the hand of my little mother, on
that snowy day I looked for the first time into an open
grave, and it seemed that everything was lost as if
the bottom had dropped out of life. Then the kindly old
country preacher began the service: "I am the Resurrec-
tion, and the Life," never shall I forget the thrill of
those words! It was as if a great, gentle Hand, stronger
than the hand of man and more tender than the hand
of woman, had been put forth from the unseen to help
and heal from that day to this I have loved Jesus to
distraction! Forty-six years later I stood on the same
spot, when the little mother whose hand I held in days
that come not back was laid away; and again the words,
"I am the Resurrection, and the Life," spoke to me out
178

THE IMMORTAL LIFE

of the depths of death nay, out of the heart of God!
and there was sunrise in the west!

Of all expositions of those words the noblest is the
picture, by Browning, of the death of St. John the Evan-
gelist of Love, the last of the glorious company of the
Apostles, and the only one to die a natural death. The
little knot of disciples stood around watching the great
head sink lower and yet lower, until at last the flame
of life flickered, and, as it seemed, went out. Loneli-
ness, like a cold, crawling sea mist, filled their hearts,
for there was no one left who had seen the face of
Jesus; no one who could say, "I heard his voice,"
and how much had been left untold! Desperately the
little group tried to coax back a tiny spark of life, but
in vain, till a lad ran for a copy of the Gospel, found
the page, and read, "I am the Resurrection, and the
Life." Hearing the Voice of his Lord, the seemingly
dead man sat up and poured out his soul in one last
luminous talk

What stupendous words, "I am the Resurrection, and
the Life/' and how utterly empty and unreal, if not
wildly insane, upon the lips of the gentle, winsome
humanitarian Christ who, however heroic and fasci-
nating, is only one of ourselves purer, braver, more
unearthly yet guessing at the riddle of life as we have
to do, knowing nothing certainly of his own destiny or
ours, himself a victim of muddy, all-devouring Death,
which seems to divide divinity with God. No! No! Here
speaks the Master of Life and Death, the Lord of
worlds other than this orb of dust, the Revealer of the
meaning of life, a Voice out of the heart of things a

179

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

Voice not simply of comfort, but of command. Here
shines a Light that never was on sea or land, fairer than
the prophet-vision, brighter than the poet-dream.
Nevertheless, this Being who towers so far above us is
still so close to our humanity, his whole life so entwined
with our piteous, passionate, and pathetic life on earth,
that we somehow feel that what is true of him is in
some degree true, potentially, of ourselves. How these
two truths can be united may be hard to know save in
a paradox profounder than thought but they are
equally vivid, equally valid, and equally blessed in our
historic Christian faith; and to lose either truth is to
lose the other. Here, to say it once more, is the highest
reach of holiness in man answered by a Voice older
than the earth and deeper than death:

Before Abraham was, I am life endless at both
ends, moving with a higher rhythm, stretching away
into unfathomable depths and distances; one vast Life
that Jives and cannot die, gathering all our broken
lights into its eternal radiance.

I am the Light of the World the sun is up; shadows
of death and dark fatality flee away; blind thoughts we
know not nor can name are forgotten like fear in the
night. It is daybreak; life everywhere is radiant earth
is a valley with a lark-song over it.

I am the Way the path marked out for the soul;
the way without which there is no going, to lose which
is to wander in a wilderness, or end in a blind alley;
the Way which, if we follow it faithfully, shineth more
and more unto the perfect day.

/ am the Truth the truth about life and death, which

180

THE IMMORTAL LIFE

"breaks through language and escapes; the truth that
makes all other truth true; nay, more, the Truth that
can never be uttered, but must be acted, incarnated; the
truth that sets life to music.

I am the Life the Life that interprets life; no mere
story of life, but Life itself intense, creative, palpitat-
ing, prophetic; life in a new dimension, with a new
radiance, overflowing, sweeping dim death away as in
a flood of light and power and joy.

/ am the Good Shepherd the Shepherd of ages and
journeying generations, whose heart aches with com-
passion for the multitudes who wander far, seeking
without finding; the mighty Shepherd in whose bosom
the lambs find a haven and a home.

/ am the Door the Door out of night into dawn;
the Door into Another Room in the House not made
with hands, "our dwelling place in all generations";
the sheltering home of all souls, however far-wander-
ing, where we shall see "that one Face" and be satis-
fied. "Behold, I have set before you an open door, and
no man can shut it."

/ am the Resurrection, and the Lije death is abol-
ished, as the radio abolishes distance; it no longer
exists, save as a cloud-shadow wandering across the
human valley. "Let not your heart be troubled, neither
let it be afraid," death is other than we think or fear.

Behold, I am alive for evermore the word of One
who has death behind him, never to face it again a
thing left below, defeated and outsped having passed
through its shadow, making a path of light "which
shineth more and more unto the perfect day."

181

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

Now, consider. No one else has ever spoken such
words to humanity; no one can do it. Never once does
Jesus say, "I believe/' as we must needs do, praying help
for our unbelief. No. "I am the Resurrection, and the
Life" it is not merely an anthem pf affirmation; it is a
revelation of another order, rhythm and cadence of life.
He does not argue; he unveils the truth. He does not
promise immortality in some dim, far time beyond; he
illumines it, bringing both "life and immortality to
light/* It is not only a prophecy but a possession such
a reversal of faith, such a transvaluation of values as
baffles thought and bewilders imagination. "I am the
Resurrection": God is here, Eternity is now, Death is
nothing to the soul it is a staggering truth, so vast
that our minds seem unable to grasp and hold it. Once
we do grasp it, once we do lay it to heart and knolv its
power, then we know the meaning of the words, "Be-
hold, I make all things new." Life everyway is infinite;
the sky begins at the top of the ground. O my soul, re-
member, consider, and rejoice in God thy Saviour!

Here is the song of the immortal life, breaking in
upon our broken days and years, gathering our fugitive
and fragmentary lives into its sovereign harmony, if we
have ears to hear and hearts to heed and understand.
Slowly, upon our dim eyes, blinded by dusty death,
there dawns the vision of a Spiritual Order in which
all the holy things of life its higher values, its haunt-
ing prophecies have their source, sanction, security,
and satisfaction. To the reality of that realm all the
noblest creative life of humanity bears witness dimly
or clearly and from it the purest souls of the race

182

THE IMMORTAL LIFE

have drawn inward sustaining. Of that Order "the Lord
of all Good Life" was and is a citizen; its laws were
revealed in his life; its meaning spoke in his words
pitched not in the past nor in the future, but in "the
mystic tense"; its light became incandescent in his
personality. By its sovereign power he was Master of
disease, discord, and dark fatality nay, more, of Life
and Time and Death; in its fellowship he still lives and
serves humanity, a thousand times more alive than in
the days of his flesh. By the Power of Spirit his swift
and gentle years moved with the lilt of a lyric, and even
the tragedy of his death in which he faced the worst
and found the best became the epic of the life ever-
lasting.

As Dante said, Jesus taught us "how to make our
lives eternal," and if we learn his secret we shall know
neither fret nor fear. In prayer, in glad obedience, in
high adventure giving all, daring all he drew the
fullness of God into his life, fulfilling what others had
dreamed. By the wonder of his personality he released
a new power in human life "the power of an endless
life" power over sin, over sorrow, over brute matter
and black despair. Here lies the secret of social sta-
bility and nobility, no less than of triumphant charac-
ter. Half a life ago Dostoievski foretold the orgy of
modern Russia anarchy running mad and running red
when, in The Possessed, one of his characters cries
out, prophetically:

"Listen, I've reckoned them all up; a
teacher who laughs with children at their

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THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

God is on our side. The juries who acquit
every criminal are ours. Among officials and
literary men we have lots, lots, and they
don't know it themselves. Do you know how
many we shall catch with little, ready-made
ideas? The Russian God has already been
vanquished with cheap vodka. The peasants
are drunk, the churches are empty. Oh, this
generation has only to grow up. Ah, what a
pity there is no proletariat. But there will be,
there will be; we are going that way/'

What happened in Russia will happen among us,
when we let the altar fires of our fathers go out and
our faith fail. All the dear interests and institutions of
humanity have their basis in the eternal life, else they
cannot abide. Our human world is kept in place and
urged along its orbit by unseen forces. Thence come
those impulses to progress, those insights and aspira-
tions, which impel man to vaster issues they are the
pressure upon him of the endless life. Liberty, justice,
love, truth are things of the eternal life, without
which customs are cobwebs and laws are ropes of sand.
Toward the end of his life Dostoievski divided the race
into two classes, those who know the eternal life and
those who do not, and the fate of civilization, he said,
will rest with those who are citizens of eternity. The
power of an endless life is thus the creative and con-
structive force of humanity, and when it is lost society
becomes a pig-sty.

Here, no less, is the secret of spiritual character and
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THE IMMORTAL LIFE

personality, the two loveliest flowers grown in these
short days of sun and frost. Only recently a great physi-
' dan said that subconscious health cannot be obtained
in one who has lost faith in immortality. Without it
the noblest powers of the soul are inhibited, its finest
instincts are frustrated, having no happy release and
no promise of fulfillment. When we know the Eternal
Life, all doors are open and the great aspirations of the
heart take wings. The impingement of Eternity upon
u$' gives to the moral sense an august authority, and
makes religion not a dogma, but an Eternal Commu-
nion. Life everywhere grows in dignity, meaning, worth
and grace when it is lived in the fellowship of eternal
things. The Power of an Endless Life it is the life of
faith, of love, of fellowship, of joy. It makes a man
stand up like a tower, four-square to all the winds of
the world, a defense to the weak or the weary. It is
one with all dear friendships, with every tender tie
which unites us with those nearest to us, with every
bond of sympathy binding us to humanity aye, with
those whom we have loved and lost awhile.

What life really is, what it prophesies, what it may
actually become even here on earth transfiguring all
"our fleshly dress with bright shoots of everlasting-
ness" is shown us in the life of Jesus; by the truth he
taught, and still more by his personality. He was so
aglow with the power and joy of life, so in tune with its
vivid, creative urge and insight, that his words seem
to have a life of their own, and grow. He was a spirit-
ual biologist who thought of religion in terms of life
not of life in terms of religion and he hardly used die

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

word death at all; since death is not an event but a
tendency, and true life is the death of death. By his
death Jesus gave life to his religion, and by his resur-
rection he made religion a life, even the Eternal Life
in time, free, radiant, abundant, creative, victorious a
quest, a conquest, a consecration.

In literature there is an exalted zone of song wherein
if a man step his footfall echoes forever, defying time
and change and death; and thus the echo of an hour
of prayer among the Judean hills, or a lyric sung at a
Greek festival, becomes a part of the eternal speech of
mankind. Just so, there is in the life of the spirit a level
of loyalty, of luminous lucidity, of immaculate percep-
tion, of all-giving love, which joins the mortal to the
immortal, and death is seen to be only the shadow of
life as it spreads its wings for flight; only a dark room
in which life changes its robe and marches on. Others
enter that realm, briefly, in rare hours of insight and
understanding, when the mood is pure and the vision
is clear; but Jesus lived in it, obeyed its laws, unveiled
its reality and revealed its emancipating truth. Hence
the strange, searching, haunting, healing quality of his
words, which seem like birds let loose from a region
above our reach of which we are dimly aware, and
toward which both wisdom and faith point. Hence,
too, the refrain that echoes through his teaching: "He
that hath ears to hear, let him hear."

From that radiant realm, in the rhythm of its pro-
found and transcendent experience of God, Jesus spoke
the words, / am the Resurrection, and the Life, Such
186

THE IMMORTAL LIFE

words are notes in an eternal world-song, a Divine
Symphony which began when the morning stars sang
together over a new-born earth, and which runs through
all things. It is the Song of Life itself, underflowing all
the tumult and tragedy of time, upbearing the life and
death of humanity its sins and woes, its griefs and
heartaches and lifting all at last into the rhythm and
cadence of an Eternal Life; an august undertone pro-
phetic of a final harmony of all things with God. All
religions, all philosophies are but broken echoes of one
everlasting music, prose versions of a Divine Poetry
singing even "in the mud and scum of things/ 1 an
all-sustaining, undefeatable melody:

It singeth low in every heart,
We hear it each and all.

At last, rising above all discord and seeming defeat,
it will break in triumphant anthems of adoration upon
the throne of God, proclaiming that "life is ever lord of
death and love can never lose its own/' Believest thou
this?

By the same token, if we would know the power of
an endless life, defeating death and dull dismay, it
must be by contact and fellowship with the Lord of
Life. Ever the path lies at our feet, if we follow on
to realize the life that is triumphant, and the road
mounts steadily: "And this is life eternal, that they
might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ,
whom thou hast sent." For Thou, O God, art Life, Thou
art Reality, and Thou art our Father.

THINGS I KNOW IN RELIGION

Safe in the care of heavenly powers,
The good we dreamed but might not do,
Lost beauty magically new,

Shall spring as surely as the flowers
When, 'micl the sobbing of the rain,
The heart of April beats again.

Celestial spirit that doth roll
The heart's sepulchral stone away,
Be this our resurrection day,

The singing Easter of the Soul:
O gentle Master of the Wise,
Teach me to say, "I will arise!"

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