The Meaning of Faith
by Harry Emerson Fosdick · English · Gutenberg #40482 · 729,979 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Meaning of Faith
Author: Harry Emerson Fosdick
Release date: August 11, 2012 [eBook #40482]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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Transcriber's Note:
Italics are indicated by _underscores_. Daily quotations from
published prayers, which are italicised here and in the original, have
been indented.
Bolding is indicated by =equal signs=. Daily quotations from
Scripture, which are bolded here and in the original, have also been
indented.
Small capitals have been rendered in upper case.
Inconsistencies in spelling (e.g. "Savior" and "Saviour") and in
hyphenation have been retained.
In the two chemical formulae in Chapter 4 "^" is followed by a
superscript and "_" by a subscript.
Minor changes have been made to the format of biblical references; and
corrections made to apparent punctuation errors elsewhere in the text.
The Meaning of Faith
HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK
AUTHOR OF "THE MANHOOD OF THE MASTER," "THE MEANING OF PRAYER,"
"THE CHALLENGE OF THE PRESENT CRISIS," ETC.
ASSOCIATION PRESS
NEW YORK: 347 MADISON AVENUE
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF
YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS
Printed in the United States of America
The Bible Text used in this volume is taken from the American Standard
Edition of the Revised Bible, copyright 1901, by Thomas Nelson & Sons,
and is used by permission.
TO
MY MOTHER
IN MEMORIAM
"_'Tis human fortune's happiest height to be
A spirit melodious, lucid, poised, and whole;
Second in order of felicity
To walk with such a soul._"
PREFACE
A book on faith has been for years my hope and intention. And now it
comes to final form during the most terrific war men ever waged, when
faith is sorely tried and deeply needed. Direct discussion of the war
has been purposely avoided; the issues here presented are not confined
to those which the war suggests; but many streams of thought within
the book flow in channels that the war has worn. Since the conflict
had to come, I am glad for this book's sake that it was not written
until it had Europe's holocaust for a background.
Against one misunderstanding the reader should be guarded. If anyone
approaches these studies, expecting to find detailed and special views
of Christian doctrine, he will be disappointed. The perplexities of
mind and life and the affirmations of religious faith, with which
these studies deal, lie far beneath sectarian doctrinal controversy. I
have tried to make clear a foundation on which faith might build its
thoughts of Christian truth. And while I have spoken freely of God and
Christ and the Spirit, of the Cross and life eternal, I have not
intended or endeavored a complete theology. I have had in mind that
elemental matter of which Carlyle was thinking when he wrote: "The
thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain
concerning his vital relations to the mysterious Universe, and his
duty and destiny there, _that_ is in all cases the primary thing
for him, and creatively determines all the rest. _That_ is his
religion."
As in "The Meaning of Prayer," the Scripture has been used for the
basis and interpretation of the daily thought. The Bible is our
supreme record of man's experience with faith; it recounts in terms of
life faith's sources and results, its successes and failures, its
servants and its foes. And because faith is not a _tour de force_
of intellect alone, but is an act of life, prayers have been used for
the expression of aroused desire and resolution.
My indebtedness to many helpers is very great. But to my friend and
colleague, Professor George Albert Coe, my gratitude is so definitely
due for his careful reading of the manuscript, that the book should
not go out lacking an acknowledgment.
H. E. F.
December 15, 1917.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special acknowledgment is gladly made to the following: to E. P.
Dutton & Company for permission to use prayers from "A Chain of Prayer
Across the Ages" and from "The Temple," by W. E. Orchard, D.D.; to the
Rev. Samuel McComb and the publishers for permission to quote from "A
Book of Prayers," Copyright, 1912, Dodd, Mead & Company; to the
American Unitarian Association for permission to draw upon "Prayers,"
by Theodore Parker; to the Pilgrim Press and the author for permission
to use selections from "Prayers of the Social Awakening," by Dr.
Rauschenbusch; to the Missionary Education Movement for permission to
make quotations from "Thy Kingdom Come," by Ralph E. Diffendorfer; to
Fleming H. Revell Co., for permission to make use of "A Book of Public
Prayer," by Henry Ward Beecher; and to the publishers of James
Martineau's "Prayers in the Congregation and in College," Longmans,
Green & Co.
None of the above material should be reprinted without securing
permission.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE vii
I. FAITH AND LIFE'S ADVENTURE 1
II. FAITH A ROAD TO TRUTH 26
III. FAITH IN THE PERSONAL GOD 51
IV. BELIEF AND TRUST 77
V. FAITH'S INTELLECTUAL DIFFICULTIES 103
VI. FAITH'S GREATEST OBSTACLE 129
VII. FAITH AND SCIENCE 158
VIII. FAITH AND MOODS 184
IX. FAITH IN THE EARNEST GOD 210
X. FAITH IN CHRIST THE SAVIOR: FORGIVENESS 237
XI. FAITH IN CHRIST THE SAVIOR: POWER 263
XII. THE FELLOWSHIP OF FAITH 289
SCRIPTURE PASSAGES USED IN THE DAILY READINGS 316
SOURCES OF PRAYERS USED IN THE DAILY READINGS 317
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
The complex subject of Faith has required an extended treatment, which
has made the present volume much longer than the author's previous
works. Every item of expense connected with publishing has greatly
increased even within the past few months, and, to the regret, alike
of publisher and author, it has been found necessary to charge more
for this volume than for "The Meaning of Prayer" and "The Manhood of
the Master."
CHAPTER I
Faith and Life's Adventure
DAILY READINGS
Discussion about faith generally starts with faith's _reasonableness_;
let us begin with faith's _inevitableness_. If it were possible
somehow to live without faith, the whole subject might be treated
merely as an affair of curious interest. But if faith is an
unescapable necessity in every human life, then we must come to terms
with it, understand it, and use it as intelligently as we can. _There
are certain basic elements in man which make it impossible to live
without faith._ Let us consider these, as they are suggested in the
Epistle to the Hebrews, which, better than any other book in the
Bible, presents faith as an unavoidable human attitude.
First Week, First Day
=Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things
not seen.--Heb. 11:1.=
As Moffatt translates: "Now faith means we are confident of what we
hope for, convinced of what we do not see." When faith is described in
such general terms, its necessity in human life is evident. Man cannot
live without faith, because he deals not only with a past which he may
know and with a present which he can see, but with a _future in whose
possibilities he must believe_. A man can no more avoid looking ahead
when he lives his life than he can when he sails his boat, and in one
case as in the other, his direction is determined by his thought about
what lies before him, his "assurance of things hoped for." Now, this
future into which continually we press our way can never be a matter
of demonstrable knowledge. We know only when we arrive, but meanwhile
we believe; and our knowledge of what is and has been is not more
necessary to our quest than our faith concerning what is yet to come.
As Tennyson sings of faith in "The Ancient Sage":
"She sees the Best that glimmers thro' the Worst,
She feels the sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro' the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wail'd 'Mirage'!"
However much a man may plan, therefore, to live without faith, he
cannot do it. When one strips himself of all convictions about the
future he stops living altogether, and active, eager, vigorous manhood
is always proportionate to the scope and power of reasonable faith.
The great spirits of the race have had the aspiring, progressive
quality which the Scripture celebrates:
=These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but
having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having confessed
that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say
such things make it manifest that they are seeking after a country of
their own. And if indeed they had been mindful of that country from
which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. But
now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly: wherefore God
is not ashamed of them, to be called their God; for he hath prepared
for them a city.--Heb. 11:13-16.=
_Almighty God, let Thy Spirit breathe upon us to quicken in us all
humility, all holy desire, all living faith in Thee. When we meditate
on the Eternal, we dare not think any manner of similitude; yet Thou
art most real to us in the worship of the heart. When in the strife
against sin we receive grace to help us in our time of need, then art
Thou the Eternal Rock of our salvation. When amid our perplexities
and searchings, the way of duty is made clear, then art Thou our
Everlasting Light. When amid the storms of life we find peace and
rest through submission, then art Thou the assured Refuge of our
souls. So do Thou manifest Thyself unto us, O God!_
_Our Heavenly Father, we give Thee humble and hearty thanks for all
the sacred traditions which have come down to us from the past--for
the glorious memories of ancient days, concerning that Divine light
in which men have been conscious of Thy presence and assured of Thy
grace. But we would not content ourselves with memories. O Thou who
art not the God of the dead, but the God of the living, manifest
Thyself unto us in a present communion. Reveal Thyself unto us in the
tokens of this passing time. Give us for ourselves to feel the
authority of Thy law: give us for ourselves to realize the exceeding
sinfulness of sin: give us for ourselves to understand the way of
salvation through sacrifice. Teach us, by the Spirit of Christ, the
sacredness of common duties, the holiness of the ties that bind us to
our kind, the divinity of the still small voice within that doth ever
urge us in the way of righteousness. So shall our hearts be renewed
by faith; so shall we ever live in God. Amen._--John Hunter.
First Week, Second Day
=By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place
which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not
knowing whither he went. By faith he became a sojourner in the land
of promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac
and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for
the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is
God.--Heb. 11:8-10.=
=By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son
of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing rather to share ill treatment with
the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season;
accounting the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures
of Egypt: for he looked unto the recompense of reward. By faith he
forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as
seeing him who is invisible.--Heb. 11:24-27.=
Man cannot live without faith because his relationship with the future
is an affair not alone of thought but also of action; _life is a
continuous adventure into the unknown_. Abraham and Moses pushing out
into experiences whose issue they could not foresee are typical of all
great lives that have adventured for God. "By faith" is the first word
necessary in every life like Luther's and Wesley's and Carey's. By
faith John Bright, when his reforms were hard bestead, said: "If we
can't win as fast as we wish, we know that our opponents can't in the
long run win at all." By faith Gladstone, when the Liberal cause was
defeated, rose undaunted in Parliament, and said, "I appeal to time!"
and by faith every one of us must undertake each plain day's work, if
we are to do it well. Robert Louis Stevenson said that life is "an
affair of cavalry," "a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully
hazarded." But so to deal with life demands faith. The more one sees
what venturesome risks he takes every day, what labor and sacrifice he
invests in hope of a worthy outcome, with what great causes he falls
in love until at his best he is willing for their sakes to hazard
fortune and happiness and life itself, the more he sees that the soul
of robust and serviceable character is faith.
_O God, who hast encompassed us with so much that is dark and
perplexing, and yet hast set within us light enough to walk by;
enable us to trust what Thou hast given as sufficient for us, and
steadfastly refuse to follow aught else; lest the light that is in us
become as darkness and we wander from the way. May we be loyal to all
the truth we know, and seek to discharge those duties which lay their
commission on our conscience; so that we may come at length to
perfect light in Thee, and find our wills in harmony with Thine._
_Since Thou hast planted our feet in a world so full of chance and
change that we know not what a day may bring forth, and hast
curtained every day with night and rounded our little lives with
sleep; grant that we may use with diligence our appointed span of
time, working while it is called today, since the night cometh when
no man can work; having our loins girt and our lamps alight, lest the
cry at midnight find us sleeping and the door fast shut._
_Since we are so feeble, faint, and foolish, leave us not to our own
devices, not even when we pray Thee to; nor suffer us for any care to
Thee or for any pain to us to walk our own unheeding way. Plant
thorns about our feet, touch our hearts with fear, give us no rest
apart from Thee, lest we lose our way and miss the happy gate.
Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
First Week, Third Day
Man cannot live without faith because the prime requisite in life's
adventure is _courage_, and the sustenance of courage is faith.
=And what shall I more say? for the time will fail me if I tell of
Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah; of David and Samuel and the
prophets: who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness,
obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of
fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong,
waxed mighty in war, turned to flight armies of aliens. Women
received their dead by a resurrection: and others were tortured, not
accepting their deliverance; that they might obtain a better
resurrection: and others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yea,
moreover of bonds and imprisonment: they were stoned, they were sawn
asunder, they were tempted, they were slain with the sword: they went
about in sheep-skins, in goat-skins; being destitute, afflicted,
ill-treated (of whom the world was not worthy), wandering in deserts
and mountains and caves, and the holes of the earth. And these all,
having had witness borne to them through their faith, received not
the promise, God having provided some better thing concerning us,
that apart from us they should not be made perfect.--Heb. 11:32-40.=
When in comparison with men and women of such admirable spirit, one
thinks of weak personalities, that ravel out at the first strain, he
sees that the difference lies in courage. _When a man loses heart he
loses everything._ Now to keep one's heart in the midst of life's
stress and to maintain an undiscourageable front in the face of its
difficulties is not an achievement which springs from anything that a
laboratory can demonstrate or that logic can confirm. It is an
achievement of faith,
"The virtue to exist by faith
As soldiers live by courage."
Consider this account of Havelock, the great English general: "As he
sat at dinner with his son on the evening of the 17th, his mind
appeared for the first and last time to be affected with gloomy
forebodings, as it dwelt on the probable annihilation of his brave men
in a fruitless attempt to accomplish what was beyond their strength.
After musing long in deep thought, his strong sense of duty and his
confidence in the justice of his cause restored the buoyancy of his
spirit; and he exclaimed, 'If the worst comes to the worst, we can but
die with our swords in our hands!'" No man altogether escapes the
need for such a spirit, and, as with Havelock and the Hebrew heroes,
confidence in someone, faith in something, is that spirit's source.
_O God, who hast sent us to school in this strange life of ours, and
hast set us tasks which test all our courage, trust, and fidelity;
may we not spend our days complaining at circumstance or fretting at
discipline, but give ourselves to learn of life and to profit by
every experience. Make us strong to endure._
_We pray that when trials come upon us we may not shirk the issue or
lose our faith in Thy goodness, but committing our souls unto Thee
who knowest the way that we take, come forth as gold tried in the
fire._
_Grant by Thy grace that we may not be found wanting in the hour of
crisis. When the battle is set, may we know on which side we ought to
be, and when the day goes hard, cowards steal from the field, and
heroes fall around the standard, may our place be found where the
fight is fiercest. If we faint, may we not be faithless; if we fall,
may it be while facing the foe. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
First Week, Fourth Day
Man cannot live without faith, because the adventure of life demands
not only courage to achieve but _patience to endure and wait_,
and all untroubled patience is founded on faith. When the writer to
the Hebrews speaks of those who "through faith and patience inherit
the promises" (Heb. 6:12), he joins two things that in experience no
man successfully can separate. By as much as we need patience, we need
faith.
=But call to remembrance the former days, in which, after ye were
enlightened, ye endured a great conflict of sufferings; partly, being
made a gazingstock both by reproaches and afflictions; and partly,
becoming partakers with them that were so used. For ye both had
compassion on them that were in bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling
of your possessions, knowing that ye have for yourselves a better
possession and an abiding one. Cast not away therefore your boldness,
which hath great recompense of reward. For ye have need of patience,
that, having done the will of God, ye may receive the promise.--Heb.
10:32-36.=
The most difficult business in the world is _waiting_. There are
times in every life when action, however laborious and sacrificial,
would be an unspeakable relief; but to sit still because necessity
constrains us, endeavoring to live out the admonition of the psalmist,
"Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him," is prodigiously
difficult. _No one can do it without some kind of faith._ "In
your patience," said Jesus, "ye shall win your souls" (Luke 21:19),
but such an achievement is no affair of logic or scientific
demonstration; it is a venture of triumphant faith. The great
believers have been the unwearied waiters; faith meant to them not
controversial opinion, but sustaining power. As another has phrased
it, "Our faculties of belief were not primarily given to us to make
orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to _live_ by."
_We beseech of Thee, O Lord our God, that Thou wilt grant to every
one of us in Thy presence, this morning, the special mercies which he
needs--strength where weakness prevails, and patience where courage
has failed. Grant, we pray Thee, that those who need long-suffering
may find themselves strangely upborne and sustained. Grant that those
who wander in doubt and darkness may feel distilling upon their soul
the sweet influence of faith. Grant that those who are heart-weary,
and sick from hope deferred, may find the God of all salvation.
Confirm goodness in those that are seeking it. Restore, we pray Thee,
those who have wandered from the path of rectitude. Give every one
honesty. May all transgressors of Thy law return to the Shepherd and
Bishop of their souls with confession of sin, and earnest and sincere
repentance. Amen._--Henry Ward Beecher.
First Week, Fifth Day
Man cannot live without faith because he exists in a universe, the
complete explanation of which is forever beyond his grasp, so that
_whatever he thinks about the total meaning of creation is
fundamentally faith_.
=By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word
of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which
appear.--Heb. 11:3.=
Not only is this true, but if we think that there is _no_ God,
that also is faith; and if we hold that the basic reality is physical
atoms, that is faith; and whatever anybody believes about the origin
and destiny of life is faith. When Haeckel says that the creator is
"Cosmic Ether," and when John says that "God is love," they both are
making a leap of faith. This does not mean that faith can dispense
with reason. In these studies we shall set ourselves to marshal the
ample arguments that support man's faith in God. But when the utmost
that argument can do has been achieved, the finite mind, dealing with
the infinite reality, is forced to a sally of faith, a venture of
confidence in Goodness at the heart of the world, not opposed to
reason but surpassing reason. _Faith always sees more with her eye
than logic can reach with her hand._ And especially when men come
to the highest thought of life's meaning and believe in the Christian
God, they face the fact which the writer to the Hebrews presents:
=And without faith it is impossible to be well-pleasing unto him; for
he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a
rewarder of them that seek after him.--Heb. 11:6.=
Indeed, in all stout conviction about the meaning of life there is a
certain defiant note, refusing to surrender to small objections. Cried
Stevenson, "I believe in an ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I
woke in hell, should still believe it!"
_O Thou Infinite Spirit, who needest no words for man to hold his
converse with Thee, we would enter into Thy presence, we would
reverence Thy power, we would worship Thy wisdom, we would adore Thy
justice, we would be gladdened by Thy love, and blessed by our
communion with Thee. We know that Thou needest no sacrifice at our
hands, nor any offering at our lips; yet we live in Thy world, we
taste Thy bounty, we breathe Thine air, and Thy power sustains us,
Thy justice guides, Thy goodness preserves, and Thy love blesses us
forever and ever. O Lord, we cannot fail to praise Thee, though we
cannot praise Thee as we would. We bow our faces down before Thee
with humble hearts, and in Thy presence would warm our spirits for a
while, that the better we may be prepared for the duties of life, to
endure its trials, to bear its crosses, and to triumph in its lasting
joys...._
_In times of darkness, when men fail before Thee, in days when men of
high degree are a lie, and those of low degree are a vanity, teach
us, O Lord, to be true before Thee, not a vanity, but soberness and
manliness; and may we keep still our faith shining in the midst of
darkness, the beacon-light to guide us over stormy seas to a home and
haven at last. Father, give us strength for our daily duty, patience
for our constant or unaccustomed cross, and in every time of trial
give us the hope that sustains, the faith that wins the victory and
obtains satisfaction and fulness of joy. Amen._--Theodore Parker.
First Week, Sixth Day
Man cannot live, lacking faith, because _without it life's richest
experiences go unappropriated_. Opportunities for friendship lie
all about us, but only by trustful self-giving can they be enjoyed;
chances to serve good causes continually beckon us, but one must have
faith to try; superior minds offer us their treasures, but to avail
oneself of instruction from another involves teachable humility. A man
without capacity to let himself go out to other men in friendly trust
or to welcome new illumination on his thought with grateful faith
would be shut out from the priceless treasures of humanity. A certain
trustful openheartedness, a willingness to venture in personal
relationship and in attempts at service is essential to a rich and
fruitful life. And what is true of man's relationship with man is true
of man's relationship with God. So Prof. William James, of Harvard,
states the case: "Just as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no
advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one's
word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from
all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn--so
here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to
make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at
all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making
the gods' acquaintance." _Wherever in life great spiritual values
await man's appropriation, only faith can appropriate them._
=Let us fear therefore, lest haply, a promise being left of entering
into his rest, any one of you should seem to have come short of it.
For indeed we have had good tidings preached unto us, even as also
they: but the word of hearing did not profit them, because it was not
united by faith with them that heard!--Heb. 4:1, 2.=
_O Infinite Source of life and health and joy! the very thought of
Thee is so wonderful that in this thought we would rest and be still.
Thou art Beauty and Grace and Truth and Power. Thou art the light of
every heart that sees Thee, the life of every soul that loves Thee,
the strength of every mind that seeks Thee. From our narrow and
bounded world we would pass into Thy greater world. From our petty
and miserable selves we would escape to Thee, to find in Thee the
power and the freedom of a larger life.... We recognize Thee in all
the deeper experiences of the soul. When the conscience utters its
warning voice, when the heart is tender and we forgive those who have
wronged us in word or deed, when we feel ourselves upborne above time
and place, and know ourselves citizens of Thy everlasting Kingdom, we
realize, O Lord, that these things, while they are in us, are not of
us. They are Thine, the work of Thy Spirit brooding upon our souls._
_Spirit of Holiness and Peace! Search all our motives; try the secret
places of our souls; set in the light any evil that may lurk within,
and lead us in the way everlasting. Amen._--Samuel McComb.
First Week, Seventh Day
Man cannot live without faith, because in life's adventure the central
problem is _building character_. Now, character is not a product of
logic, but of faith in ideals and of sacrificial devotion to them.
What is becomes only the starting point of a campaign for what _ought
to be_, and in the prosecution of that campaign what ought to be must
be believed in with passionate intensity. Faith of some sort,
therefore, is necessarily the dynamic of character; only limp and
ragged living is possible without faith; and the greatest characters
are girded by the most ample faith in God and goodness. The writer to
the Hebrews saw this intimate relationship between quality of faith
and quality of life, and challenged his readers to judge the
Christian faith by its consequence in character.
=Remember them that had the rule over you, men that spake unto you
the word of God; and considering the issue of their life, imitate
their faith.--Heb. 13:7.=
Such are the basic elements in human experience that make faith
necessary: we deal with a future, about which we must think, with
reference to which we must act, and adventuring into which we need
courage and patience; this venture of life takes place in a world the
meaning of which can be grasped only by a leap of faith; and in this
venture the best treasures of the spirit are obtainable only through
openheartedness, and character is possible only to men of resolute
conviction. Plainly the subject to whose study we are setting
ourselves is no affair of theoretical interest alone; it affects the
deepest issues of life. No words could better summarize this vital
idea of faith which the Epistle to the Hebrews presents than Hartley
Coleridge's:
"Think not the faith by which the just shall live
Is a dead creed, a map correct of heaven,
Far less a feeling, fond and fugitive,
A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given.
It is an affirmation and an act
That bids eternal truth be present fact."
_How great are the mercies, O Lord our God, which Thou hast prepared
for all that put their trust in Thee!... Thou hast comfort for those
that are in affliction; Thou hast strength for those that are weak;
... Thou hast all blessings that are needed, and standest ready to be
all things to all, and in all. And yet, with bread enough and to
spare, with raiment abundant, and with all medicine, how many are
there that go hungry, and naked, and sick, and destitute of all
things! We desire, O Lord, that Thou wilt, to all Thine other
mercies, add that gift by which we shall trust in Thee--faith that
works by love; faith that abides with us; faith that transforms
material things, and gives them to us in their spiritual meanings;
faith that illumines the world by a light that never sets, that
shines brighter than the day, and that clears the night quite out of
our experience. This is the portion that Thou hast provided for thy
people. We beseech of Thee, grant us this faith, that shall give us
victory over the world and over ourselves; that shall make us valiant
in all temptation and bring us off conquerors and more than
conquerors through Him that loved us. Amen._--Henry Ward Beecher.
COMMENT FOR THE WEEK
I
When Donald Hankey, who died in the trenches in the Great War, said
that "True religion is betting one's life that there is a God," he not
only gave expression to his own virile Christianity, but he gave a
good description of all effective faith whatsoever. Faith is holding
reasonable convictions, in realms beyond the reach of final
demonstration, and, as well, it is thrusting out one's life upon those
convictions as though they were surely true. _Faith is vision plus
valor._
Our study may well begin by recognizing that, as it is exercised in
the religious life, such faith is the supreme use of an attitude which
we are employing in every other realm. No man can live without vision
to see as true what as yet he cannot prove, or without valor to act on
the basis of his insight. Our vocabulary in ordinary relationships,
quite as much as in religion, is full of words involving faith. I
believe, I feel sure, I am confident, I venture--such phrases express
our common attitudes in work and thought. Each day we act on
reasonable probabilities, hold convictions not yet verified, take
risks whose outcome we cannot know, and trust people whom we have
barely met. We may pride ourselves that our twentieth century's life
is being built on scientifically demonstrable knowledge, but a swift
review of any day's experience shows how indispensable is another
attitude, without which our verifiable knowledge would be an unused
instrument. In order to _live_ we must have insight and daring.
It is not alone the just who live by faith; lacking it, there is no
real life anywhere.
To be sure, we may not leap from this general necessity of faith to
the conclusion that therefore our religious beliefs are justified.
Many men use faith in business and in social life who cannot find
their way to convictions about God. But our desire to understand
faith's meaning is quickened when we see how indispensable a place it
holds, how tremendous an influence it wields, whether it be
religiously applied or not. All sorts of human enterprise bear witness
to its unescapable necessity. Haeckel, the biologist, describing
science's method, says: "Scientific faith fills the gaps in our
knowledge of natural laws with temporary hypotheses." Lincoln, the
statesman, entreating the people, cries: "Let us have faith that right
makes might and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty."
Stevenson, the invalid, trying with fortitude to bear his trial,
writes: "Whether on the first of January or the thirty-first of
December, faith is a good word to end on." And the Master states the
substance of religion in a single phrase: "Have faith in God" (Mark
11:22). Scientific procedure, social welfare, personal quality,
religion--the applications of our subject are as wide as life. Vision
and valor are the dynamic forces in all achievement, intellectual as
well as moral, and as for man's spiritual values and satisfactions,
"It is faith in something," as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, "which
makes life worth living."
II
One major reason for this necessary place of faith in our experience
is clear. _Life is an adventure and adventure always demands insight
and daring._ That "Chinese" Gordon, on his hazardous expedition into
the Soudan, should be thrown back on undiscourageable faith in
himself, in the justice of his cause, in the bravery of his men, and
in God; that he should even speak of praying his boats up the Nile,
seems to us natural; for some kind of faith is obviously necessary to
any great adventure. But men often forget that all ordinary living is
essentially adventurous and that by this fact the need of faith is
woven into the texture of every human life. It is an amazing adventure
to be born upon this wandering island in the sky and it is an
adventure to leave it when death calls. To go to school, to make
friends, to marry, to rear children, to face through life the swift
changes of circumstance that no man can certainly predict an hour
ahead, these are all adventures. Each new day is an hitherto unvisited
country, which we enter, like Abraham leaving Ur for a strange land,
"not knowing whither he went" (Heb. 11:8), and every New Year we begin
a tour of exploration into a twelvemonth where no man's foot has ever
walked before. If we all love tales of pioneers, it is because from
the time we are weaned to the time we die, life is pioneering. Of
course we cannot live by verifiable knowledge only. Imagine men,
equipped with nothing but powers of logical demonstration, starting on
such an enterprise as the title of Sebastian Cabot's joint stock
company suggests: "Merchants Adventurers of England for the discovery
of lands, territories, isles and seignories, unknown."
Indeed no knowledge of the sort that our scientific inductions can
achieve ever will take from life this adventurous element. Scientific
knowledge in these latter decades has grown incalculably; yet for all
that, every child's life is a hazardous experiment, every boy choosing
a calling takes his chances, every friendship is a risky exploration
in the province of personality, and all devotion to moral causes is
just as much a venturesome staking of life on insight and hope as it
was when Garrison attacked slavery or Livingstone landed in Africa. To
one who had acquired not only all extant but all possible knowledge,
as truly as to any man who ever lived, life would be full of hazard
still. He could not certainly know in advance the outcome of a single
important decision of his life. He could not at any moment tell in
what new, strange, challenging, or terrific situation the next hour
might find him. With all his science, he must face each day, as Paul
faced his journey to Rome, "not knowing the things that shall befall
me there" (Acts 20:22).
The reason for this is obvious. Our systematized knowledge is the
arrangement under laws of the experiences which we have already had.
It furnishes invaluable aid in guiding the experiments and
explorations which life continuously forces on us. In every
enterprise, however, we must use not only legs to stand on, but
tentacles as well with which to feel our way forward--intuitions,
insights, hopes, unverified convictions, faith. We project our life
forward as we build a cantilever bridge. Part of the structure is
solidly bolted and thoroughly articulated in a system; but ever beyond
this established portion we audaciously thrust out new beginnings in
eager expectation that from the other side something will come to meet
them. Without this no progress ever would be possible.
Every province of life illustrates this necessity of adventure. In
_science_, the established body of facts and laws is only the
civilized community of knowledge from whose frontiers new guesses and
intuitions start. Says Sir Oliver Lodge about the great Newton: "He
had an extraordinary faculty for guessing correctly, sometimes with no
apparent data--as for instance, his intuition that the mean density of
the earth was probably between five and six times that of water, while
we now know it is really about five and one half." In _personal
character_, our habits are basic, but our ideals in which, despite
ourselves, we must believe, are pioneers that push out into new
territory and call our habits after them to conquer the promised land.
In _social advance_, some Edmund Burke, statesman of the first
magnitude, basing his judgment on the established experience of the
race, can call slavery an incurable evil and say that there is not the
slightest hope that trade in slaves can be stopped; and yet within
eighty-two years the race can feel its way forward to Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation. As for _daily business_, adventurous daring
is there the very nerve of enterprise. Says a modern newspaper man:
"There are plenty of people to do the possible; you can hire them at
forty dollars a month. The prizes are for those who perform the
impossible. If a thing can be done, experience and skill can do it; if
a thing cannot be done, only faith can do it." Great in human life is
this adventurous element, and, therefore, great in human life is the
necessity of faith. To chasten and discipline, to make reasonable and
stable the faiths by which we live is a problem unsurpassed in
importance for every man.
III
One result of special interest follows from this truth. It is commonly
suspected that as mankind advances, the function of faith proportionately
shrinks. It is even supposed that the place of faith in human life has
sensibly diminished with our growing knowledge, and that Matthew
Arnold told the truth:
"The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world."
Accordingly by custom we call the mediæval centuries the "Age of
Faith." But even a cursory comparison between the mediæval people and
ourselves reveals that among the many differences that distinguish us
from them, none is more marked than the diversity and range of our
faiths. One considers in surprise the things which they did not
believe. That the world would ever grow much better, that social
abuses like political tyranny and slavery could be radically changed,
that man could ever master nature by his inventions until her mighty
forces were his servants, that the whole race could be reached for
Christ, that war could be abolished and human brotherhood in some fair
degree established, that common men could be trusted with responsibility
for their own government or with freedom to worship God according to
the dictates of their own consciences--none of these things did the
mediæval folk believe. One of the most distinguishing characteristics
of the so-called "Age of Faith" was its lack of faith. It lived in a
static world; it was poor in possibilities except in heaven; it
pitiably lacked those most certain signs of vital faith, the open mind
eager for new truth and the ardent, vigorous life seeking new
conquests. In comparison with such an age our generation's faiths are
rich and manifold. To call our time an "Age of Doubt" because of its
free spirit of critical inquiry, is seriously to misunderstand its
major drift. Bunyan's Pilgrim found Doubting Castle kept by Giant
Despair and his wife Diffidence and in any Doubting Castle these two
always dwell. But who, considering our generation's life as a whole,
would call it diffident or desperate? It is rather robust and
confident; its social faiths, at least, are unprecedented in their
sweep and certainty. Even the Great War is the occasion of such
organized faith in a federated and fraternal world as mankind has
never entertained before.
The truth is that with the progress of the race the adventure of life
is elevated and enlarged, and in consequence faith grows not less but
more necessary. _The faiths of a savage are meager compared with a
modern man's._ The Australian bushman never dreams of laboring for
social ideals even a few years ahead. What can he know of those superb
faiths in economic justice and international brotherhood, which even
in the face of overwhelming difficulty, master the best of modern men?
The primitive mind was not curious enough to wonder whether the sun
that rises in the morning was the same that set the night before. What
could such a mind understand of modern science's faith in the
universal regularity of law? Put a Moro head hunter beside Mr. Edison,
and see how incalculable the difference between them, not simply in
their knowledge, but in their faith as to what it is possible for
humanity to do with nature! Or put a fetish worshipper from Africa
beside Phillips Brooks and compare the faith of the one in his idol
with the faith of the other in God. Faith does not dwindle as wisdom
grows; vision and valor are not less important. _The difference
between the twentieth century man and the savage is quite as much in
the scope and quality of their faith as in the range and certainty of
their knowledge._
Faith, therefore is not a transient element in human life, to be
evicted by growing science. For whatever life may _know_, life
_is_ adventure; and as the adventure widens its horizons, the
demand for faith is correspondingly increased. If one tries to imagine
the world with all faith gone--knowledge supposedly having usurped its
place--he must conceive a world where no conscious life and effort
remain at all. Take trust in testimony away from courts of law, and
unsure experiments from the physician's practice; refuse the teacher
his confidence in growing minds and the business man his right to
ventures that involve uncertainty; abstract from civic reforms all
faith in a better future, from science all unproved postulates, from
society all mutual trust and from religion all belief in the Unseen,
and life would become an "inane sand heap." A man who tries to live
without faith will die of inertia. A society that makes the attempt
will be paralyzed within an hour. The question is not whether or no we
shall live by faith. The question is rather--By what faiths shall we
live? What range and depth and quality shall they have? How reasonable
and how assured shall they be?
IV
Among all the faiths which mankind has cherished and by which it has
been helped in life's adventure, none have been more universally and
more passionately held than those associated with religion. In the
daring experiment of living, men naturally have sought by faith
interpretation not only of life's details but of life itself--its
origin, its meaning, and its destiny. Australian bushmen, unable to
count above four on their fingers, have been heard discussing in their
huts at night whence they came, whither they go, and who the gods are
anyway. And when one turns to modern manhood in its finest exhibitions
of intelligence and character, he sees that Professor Ladd, of Yale,
speaks truly: "The call of the world of men today, which is most
insistent and most intense, if not most loud and clamorous, is the
call for a rehabilitation of religious faith."
For it does make a prodigious difference to the spirit of our
adventure in this world, whether we think that God is good or on the
other hand see the universe as Carlyle's terrific figure pictures
it--"one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its
dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb." It does make a
difference of quite incalculable magnitude whether we think that our
minds and characters are an evanescent product of finely wrought
matter which alone is real and permanent, or on the contrary with John
believe that "Now are we children of God and it is not yet made
manifest what we shall be" (I John 3:2).
How great a difference in life's adventure religious faith does make
is better set forth by concrete example than by abstract argument. On
the one side, how radiant the spirit of the venture as the New
Testament depicts it! The stern, appealing love of God behind life,
his good purpose through it, his victory ahead of it, and man a fellow
worker, called into an unfinished world to bear a hand with God in its
completion--here is a game that indeed is worth the candle. On the
other side is Bertrand Russell's candid disclosure of the consequences
of his own scepticism: "Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and
all his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good
and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its
relentless way; for Man condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow
himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to
cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his
little day--proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate
for a moment his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a
weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have
fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power."
Man's life, interpreted and motived by religious faith, is glorious,
but shorn of faith's interpretations life loses its highest meaning
and its noblest hopes. Let us make this statement's truth convincing
in detail.
_When faith in God goes, man the thinker loses his greatest
thought._ Man's mind has ranged the universe, has woven atoms and
stars into a texture of law; his conquering thoughts ride out into
every unknown province of which they hear. But among all the ideas on
which the mind of man has taken hold, incomparably the greatest is the
idea of God. In sheer weight and range no other thought of man
compares with that. Amid the crash of stars, the reign of law, the
vicissitudes of human history, and the griefs that drive their
ploughshares into human hearts, to gather up all existence into
spiritual unity and to believe in God, is the sublimest venture of the
human mind.
_When faith in God goes, man the worker loses his greatest
motive._ Man masters nature until the forces that used to scare him
now obey; in society he labors tirelessly that his children may have a
better world. Wars come, destroying the achievements of ages; yet when
war is over, man rebuilds his cities, recreates his commerce, dreams
again his human brotherhoods, and toils on. Many motives, deep and
shallow, fine and coarse, have sustained him in this tireless work,
but when one seeks the fountain of profoundest hope in mankind's toil
he finds it in religious faith. To believe that we do not stand alone,
hopelessly pitted against the dead apathy of cosmic forces which in
the end will crush us in some solar wreck and bring our work to
naught; to believe that we are fellow-laborers with God, our human
purposes comprehended in a Purpose, God behind us, within us, ahead of
us--this incomparably has been the master-faith in man's greatest work.
_When faith in God goes, man the sinner loses his strongest help._ For
man is a sinner. He tears his spiritual heritage to shreds in
licentiousness and drink. He wallows in vice, wins by cruelty,
violates love, is treacherous to trust. His sins clothe the world in
lamentation. Yet in him is a protest that he cannot stifle. He is the
only creature whom we know whose nature is divided against itself. He
hates his sin even while he commits it. He repents, tries again,
falls, rises, stumbles on--and in all his best hours cries out for
saviorhood. No message short of religion has ever met man's need in
this estate. That God himself is pledged to the victory of
righteousness in men and in the world, that he cares, forgives, enters
into man's struggle with transforming power, and crowns the long
endeavor with triumphant character--such faith alone has been great
enough to meet the needs of man the sinner.
_When faith in God goes, man the sufferer loses his securest
refuge._ One who has walked with families through long illnesses
where desperate prayers rise like a fountain day and night, who has
seen strong men break down in health or lose the fortune of a
lifetime, who has stood at children's graves and heard mothers cry,
"How empty are my arms!" does not need long explication of life's
tragic suffering. The staggering blows shatter the hopes of good and
bad alike. Whether one's house be built on rock or sand, on both, as
Jesus said, the rains descend and the floods come and the winds blow.
In this experience of crushing trouble nothing but religious faith has
been able to save men from despair or from stoical endurance of their
fate. To face the loom of life and hopefully to lay oneself upon it,
as though the dark threads were as necessary in the pattern as the
light ones are, we must believe that there is a purpose running
through the stern, forbidding process. What men have needed most of
all in suffering, is not to know the explanation, but _to know that
there is an explanation_. And religious faith alone gives confidence
that human tragedy is not the meaningless sport of physical forces,
making our life what Voltaire called it, "a bad joke," but is rather a
school of discipline, the explanation of whose mysteries is in the
heart of God. No one who has lived deeply can ever call such faith a
"matter of words and names." To multitudes it is a matter of life and
death.
_When faith in God goes, man the lover loses his fairest vision._ When
we say our worst about mankind, this redeeming truth remains, that
each of us has some one for whose sake he willingly would die. The
very love lyrics of the race are proof of this human quality, from
homely folk songs like "John Anderson, My Jo, John" to great poetry
like Mrs. Browning's sonnets. We call them secular, but they are
ineffably sacred. And when one seeks the faith that has made these
loves of men radiant with an illumination which man alone cannot
create, he finds it in religion. Love is not a transient fragrance
from matter finely organized--so men have dared believe; love is of
kin with the Eternal, has there its source and ground and destiny;
love is the very substance of reality. "God is love, and he that
abideth in love, abideth in God, and God abideth in him" (I John
4:16). Man the lover is bereft of his finest insight and love's inner
glory has departed, when that faith has gone.
_When faith in God goes, man the mortal loses his only hope._
Man's nature, like a lighthouse, combines two elements. At the
foundation of the beacon all is stone; as one lifts his eyes, all is
stone still; but at the top is something new and wonderful. It is the
thing for which the rock was piled. Its laws are not the laws of stone
nor are its ways the same. For while the stolid rock stands fast, this
miracle of light with speed incredible hurls itself out across the
sea. Two worlds are here, the one cold and stationary, the other full
of the marvel and mystery of fire. So man has in him a miracle which
he cannot explain; he "feels that he is greater than he knows"; and he
never has been able to believe that the mystery of spirit was given
him in vain, had no reality from which it came, and no future beyond
death. The finest thing ever said of Columbus is a remark of his own
countryman, "The instinct of an unknown continent burned in him." That
is the secret of Columbus' greatness. All the arguments by which he
attempted to convince the doubters were but afterthoughts of this; all
the labors by which he endeavored to make good his hopes were but its
consequence. And if we ask of man why so universally he has believed
in life to come, the answer leaps not superficially from the mind, but
out of the basic intuitions of man's life. We know that something is
now ours which ought not to die; the instinct of an unknown continent
burns in us. But all the hopes, the motives, the horizons that
immortality has given man must go, if faith in God departs. In a
godless world man dies forever.
One, therefore, who is facing loss of faith may not regard it as a
light affair. To be sure, some denials of religion, even a Christian
must respect. Huxley, for example, at the death of his little boy,
wanting to believe in immortality as only a father can whose son lies
dead, yet, for all that, disbelieving, wrote to Charles Kingsley, "I
have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and
name and fame were all to be lost to me one after another as the
penalty, still I will not lie." One respects _that_. When George John
Romanes turned his back for a while on the Christian faith, he wrote
out of his agnosticism, "When at times I think, as think at times I
must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that
creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now
I find it--at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the
sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible." One respects _that_.
But some discard religion from their life's adventure with no such
serious understanding of the import of their denial. They are pert
disbelievers. They toss faith facilely aside in a light mood. Such
frivolous sceptics indict their own intelligence. Whoever discards
religious faith should appoint a day of mourning for his soul, and put
on sackcloth and ashes. He must take from his life the greatest
thought that man the thinker ever had, the finest faith that man the
worker ever leaned upon, the surest help that man the sinner ever
found, the strongest reliance that man the sufferer ever trusted in,
the loftiest vision that man the lover ever saw, and the only hope
that man the mortal ever had. So he must deny his faith in God. Before
one thus leaves himself bereft of the faith that makes life's
adventure most worth while he well may do what Carlyle, under the
figure of Teufelsdröckh, says that he did in his time of doubt: "In
the silent night-watches, still darker in his heart than over sky and
earth, he has cast himself before the All-seeing, and with audible
prayers cried vehemently for Light."
V
If minimizing the importance of religious faith is unintelligent, so
is avoiding some sort of decision about religious faith impossible.
Most of those into whose hands these studies fall will grant readily
faith's incalculable importance. Some, however, will be not helped but
plunged into deeper trouble by their consent. For they feel themselves
unable to decide about a matter which they acknowledge to be the most
important in the world. Asked whether they believe in God, they would
reply with one of Victor Hugo's characters, "Yes--No--Sometimes." They
grant that to be steadily assured of God would be an invaluable boon,
but for themselves, how can they balance the opposing arguments and
find their way to confidence? All our studies are intended for the
help of such, but at the beginning one urgent truth may well be
plainly put. However undecided they may appear, men cannot altogether
avoid decision on the main matters of religion. Life will not let
them. For while the mind may hold itself suspended between
alternatives, the adventure of life goes on, and men inevitably tend
to live either as though the Christian God were real or as though he
were not.
Some questions allow a complete postponement of decision. As to which
of several theories about the Northern Lights may be true, a man can
hold his judgment in entire suspense. Life does not require from him
any action that depends on what he thinks of the Aurora Borealis; and
whether a man think one thing or another, no conceivable change would
be the consequence in anything he said or did. But there is another
kind of question, where, however much the mind may waver between
opinions and may resolve on indecision, life itself compels decision.
A man cannot really be agnostic and neutral on a question like the
moral law of sexual purity, for, by an irrevocable necessity, he has
to act one way or another. He may stop thinking, but he cannot stop
living. With tremendous urgency the adventure of life insistently goes
on, and it never pauses for any man to make up his mind on any
question. Therefore while a man may theoretically suspend his judgment
as to the requirements of the moral law, his life will be a loud,
convincing advertisement to all who know him that he has vitally
decided. _A man can avoid making up his mind, but he cannot avoid
making up his life._
Quite as truly, though, it may be, not quite as obviously, religious
questions belong to this second class. Not all questions that are
called religious belong there. With fatal pettiness religious men have
reduced the great faiths to technicalities and some beliefs called
religious a man may hold or not, with utter indifference to anything
he is or does. But on the basic attitudes of religion such as we have
just rehearsed, a man cannot be completely neutral, no matter how he
tries. Bernard Shaw's remark, "What a man believes may be ascertained
not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually
acts," should be taken to heart by any one trying to remain
religiously neutral. For one cannot by any possibility avoid
"assumptions on which he habitually acts." He tends to undertake
social service either as confident cooperation with God's purpose or
as an endeavor to make one corner of an unpurposed world as decent as
possible. He tends to follow his ideals, either as the voice of God
calling him upward, or as the work of natural selection, adjusting him
to a temporary environment. He tends to face suffering either
hopefully as a school of moral discipline, in a world presided over by
a Father, or grimly as a hardship in which there is no meaning. He
tends to face death either as the supreme adventure, full of boundless
hope, or as a final exit that leads nowhere. He may never consciously
formulate his ideas on any of these matters, he may maintain an
intellectual agnosticism, genuine and complete, but his living subtly
involves the confession of some faith. "A man's action," said Emerson,
"is only the picture-book of his creed." And the more thoughtful he
is, the more he will be aware of that unescapable tendency to confess
in his living an inward faith about life.
One practical result of this urgent truth is too frequently seen to be
doubtful. _Those who in religion do not decide, thereby decide
against religion._ Religious faith is a positive achievement, and
he who does not deliberately choose it, loses it. A man who, rowing
down Niagara River, debates within himself whether or not he will stop
at Buffalo, and who cannot decide, thereby has decided. His
irresolution has not for a moment interfered with the steady flow of
the river, and if he but debate long enough concerning his stop at
Buffalo, he will awake to discover that he has finally decided not to
stop there. As much beyond the control of man's volition is the steady
flow of life. It pauses for no man's indecision, and if one is
irresolute about any positive, aspiring faith in any realm, his
indecisiveness is decision of a most final sort.
This, then, is the summary of the matter. Life is a great adventure in
which faith is indispensable; in this adventure faith in God presents
the issues of transcendent import; and on these issues life itself
continuously compels decision. Our obligation is obvious--since
willy-nilly the decision must be made--to make it consciously, to
reach it by reason, not by chance, by thinking, not by drifting. If a
man is to be irreligious, let him at least know why, and not slip into
this estate, as most irreligious men do, by careless living and
frivolous thought. If a man is to be religious, let him have reason
for his choice; let his faith be founded not on credulity and chance,
but on real experience and reasonable thought. So his faith shall be
good not only for domestic consumption, but for export too--clear in
his own mind and convincing to his friends. The forms of thought shift
with the centuries and old situations cannot be repeated in detail,
but one crisis in its essential meaning is perennial: "Elijah came
near unto all the people, and said, How long go ye limping between the
two sides? if Jehovah be God follow him; but if Baal then follow him"
(I Kings 18:21).
CHAPTER II
Faith a Road to Truth
DAILY READINGS
Many minds are prevented from even a fair consideration of religious
faith by prejudices which spring, not from reasoned argument, but from
practical experience. They are biased before argument has begun; they
_feel_ that faith means credulity, and that religious faith in
particular is a surrender of reason. Before we positively present
faith as an indispensable means of dealing with reality in any realm,
let us, in the daily readings, consider some of the practical
experiences and attitudes that thus prejudice men against religion.
Second Week, First Day
Many men are biased in advance by the _unwise treatment to which in
their childhood they were subjected_. Paul pictures the home life of
Timothy as ideal:
=I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers in a pure conscience,
how unceasing is my remembrance of thee in my supplications, night
and day longing to see thee, remembering thy tears, that I may be
filled with joy; having been reminded of the unfeigned faith that is
in thee; which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother
Eunice; and, I am persuaded, in thee also.--II Tim. 1:3-5.=
"Unfeigned faith" is often thus a family heritage, handed down by
vital contagion. But in many homes religion is not thus beautifully
presented to the children; it is a hard and rigorous affair of dogma
and restraint. "Oh, why," said a young professional man, whom
Professor Coe quotes, "why did my parents try to equip me with a
doctrinal system in childhood? I supposed that the whole system must
be believed on pain of losing my religion altogether. And so, when I
began to doubt some points, I felt obliged to throw all overboard. I
have found my way back to positive religion, but by what a long and
bitter struggle!" If, however, one has been so unfortunate as to be
hardened in youth by unwise training, is it reasonable on that account
forever to shut himself out from the most glorious experience of man?
This complaint about mistreatment in youth is often an excuse, not a
reason for irreligion. Says Phillips Brooks: "I have grown familiar to
weariness with the self-excuse of men who say, 'Oh, if I had not had
the terrors of the law so preached to me when I was a boy, if I had
not been so confronted with the woes of hell and the awfulness of the
judgment day, I should have been religious long ago.' My friends, I
think I never hear a meaner or a falser speech than that. Men may
believe it when they say it--I suppose they do--but it is not true. It
is unmanly, I think. It is throwing on their teaching and their
teachers, or their fathers and their mothers, the fault which belongs
to their own neglect, because they have never taken up the earnest
fight with sin and sought through every obstacle for truth and God. It
has the essential vice of dogmatism about it, for it claims that a
different _view_ of God would have done for them that which no view of
God can do, that which must be done, _under any system, any teaching_,
by humility and penitence and struggle and self-sacrifice. Without
these no teaching saves the soul. With these, under any teaching, the
soul must find its Father."
_O Thou, who didst lay the foundations of the earth amid the singing
of the morning stars and the joyful shouts of the sons of God, lift
up our little life into Thy gladness. Out of Thee, as out of an
overflowing fountain of Love, wells forth eternally a stream of
blessing upon every creature Thou hast made. If we have thought that
Thou didst call into being this universe in order to win praise and
honor for Thyself, rebuke the vain fancies of our foolish minds and
show us that Thy glory is the joy of giving. We can give Thee nothing
of our own. All that we have is Thine. Oh, then, help us to glorify
Thee by striving to be like Thee. Make us just and pure and good as
Thou art. May we be partakers of the Divine Nature, so that all that
is truly human in us may be deepened, purified, and strengthened.
And so may we be witnesses for Thee, lights of the world, reflecting
Thy light._
_Help us to make religion a thing so beautiful that all men may be
won to surrender to its power. Let us manifest in our lives its
sweetness and excellency, its free and ennobling spirit. Forbid that
we should go up and down the world with melancholy looks and dejected
visage, lest we should repel men from entering Thy Kingdom. Rather,
may we walk in the freedom and joy of faith, and with Thy new song in
our mouths, so that men looking on us may learn to trust and to love
Thee. Amen._--Samuel McComb.
Second Week, Second Day
Many men are prejudiced against religion during their youthful
_period of revolt against authority_. Listen to an ancient father
talking with his sons:
=Hear, my sons, the instruction of a father,
And attend to know understanding:
For I give you good doctrine;
Forsake ye not my law.
For I was a son unto my father,
Tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother.
And he taught me, and said unto me:
Let thy heart retain my words;
Keep my commandments, and live;
Get wisdom, get understanding;
Forget not, neither decline from the words of my mouth;
Forsake her not, and she will preserve thee;
Love her, and she will keep thee.
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom;
Yea, with all thy getting get understanding.
Exalt her, and she will promote thee;
She will bring thee to honor, when thou dost embrace her.
She will give to thy head a chaplet of grace;
A crown of beauty will she deliver to thee.=
=--Prov. 4:1-9.=
No father can read this urgent, anxious plea without understanding the
reason for its solicitude. Every boy comes to the time when he breaks
away from parental authority and begins to take his life into his own
hands. It is one of youth's great crises, and the spirit of it is
sometimes harsh and rebellious. So Carlyle describes his own
experience: "Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle
when he moults is sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly
dash-off the old one upon rocks." For religious faith this period of
life is always critical. Stevenson in his revolt, when he called
respectability "the deadliest gag and wet-blanket that can be laid on
man," also became, as he said, "a youthful atheist." How many have
traveled that road and stopped in the negation! Stevenson did not
stop, and years afterward wrote of his progress: "Because I have
reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through Newhaven and
Dieppe." Surely if anyone has been "a youthful atheist," it was an
experience to be "passed through."
_O God, we turn to Thee in the faith that Thou dost understand and
art very merciful. Some of us are not sure concerning Thee; not sure
what Thou art; not sure that Thou art at all. Yet there is something
at work behind our minds, in times of stillness we hear it, like a
distant song; there is something in the sky at evening-time;
something in the face of man. We feel that round our incompleteness
flows Thy greatness, round our restlessness Thy rest. Yet this is not
enough._
_We want a heart to speak to, a heart that understands; a friend to
whom we can turn, a breast on which we may lean. O that we could find
Thee! Yet could we ever think these things unless Thou hadst inspired
us, could we ever want these things unless Thou Thyself wert very
near?_
_Some of us know full well; but we are sore afraid. We dare not yield
ourselves to Thee, for we fear what that might mean. Our foolish
freedom, our feeble pleasures, our fatal self-indulgence suffice to
hold us back from Thee, though Thou art our very life, and we so sick
and needing Thee. Our freedom has proved false, our pleasures have
long since lost their zest, our sins, oh how we hate them!_
_Come and deliver us, for we have lost all hope in ourselves.
Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Second Week, Third Day
Some men--often the precocious, clever ones--are biased against
religion because _in youth they accepted an immature philosophy of
life and have never changed it_. The crust forms too soon on some
minds, and if it forms during the period of youthful revolt, they are
definitely prejudiced against religious truth. The difference between
such folk and the great believers is not that the believers had no
doubts, but that they did not fix their final thought of life until
more mature experience had come. They fulfilled the admonition of a
wise father to keep up a tireless search for truth:
=My son, if thou wilt receive my words,
And lay up my commandments with thee;
So as to incline thine ear unto wisdom,
And apply thy heart to understanding;
Yea, if thou cry after discernment,
And lift up thy voice for understanding;
If thou seek her as silver,
And search for her as for hid treasures:
Then shalt thou understand the fear of Jehovah,
And find the knowledge of God.=
=--Prov. 2:1-5.=
Mrs. Charles Kingsley, for example, says of her husband that at twenty
"He was full of religious doubts; and his face, with its unsatisfied,
hungering, and at times defiant look, bore witness to the state of his
mind." At twenty-one Kingsley himself wrote: "You believe that you
have a sustaining Hand to guide you along that path, an Invisible
Protection and an unerring Guide. I, alas! have no stay for my weary
steps, but that same abused and stupefied reason which has stumbled
and wandered, and betrayed me a thousand times ere now, and is every
moment ready to faint and to give up the unequal struggle." If
Kingsley had framed his final philosophy then, what a loss to the
world of an inspiring life transfigured by Christian faith! He cried
after discernment, lifted up his voice for understanding, and he found
the knowledge of God. Many a man ought to revise in the light of
mature experience and thought a hasty irreligious guess at life's
meaning which he made in youth.
_O Father, we turn to Thee because we are sore vexed with our own
thoughts. Our minds plague us with questionings we cannot answer; we
are driven to voyage on strange seas of thought alone. Dost Thou
disturb our minds with endless questioning, yet keep the answers
hidden in Thy heart, so that away from Thee we should always be
perplexed, and by thoughts derived from Thee be ever drawn to Thee?
Surely, our God, it must be so._
_But still more bitter and humbling, O Father, is our experience of
failure, so frequent, tragic, and unpardonable. We have struggled on
in vain, resolves are broken ere they pass our lips; we can see no
hope of better things, we can never forgive ourselves; and after all
our prayers our need remains and our sense of coming short but
deepens. Yet, at least we know that we have failed, and how, if
something higher than ourselves were not at work within?_
_Our desperate desires have driven us at last to Thee, conscious now,
after all vain effort, that it is Thyself alone can satisfy, and now
at peace to know that Thou it is who art desired, because Thou it is
who dost desire within us. Beyond our need reveal Thyself, its cause
and cure; in all desire teach us to discern Thy drawing near.
Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Second Week, Fourth Day
Men are often prejudiced against religion because _the churches
which they happened to attend in youth urged on them an irrational
faith_. Some men never recover from the idea that all religion
everywhere must always be the same kind of religion against which in
youth their good sense rose in revolt; they are in perpetual rebellion
against religion as it was when they broke with it a generation ago.
But if one thing more than another grows, expands, becomes in the
intelligent and pure increasingly pure and intelligent, it is religion.
Consider an early Hebrew idea of God:
=And it came to pass on the way at the lodging-place, that Jehovah
met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a flint, and cut
off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet; and she said,
Surely a bridegroom of blood art thou to me. So he let him alone.
Then she said, A bridegroom of blood art thou, because of the
circumcision.--Exodus 4:24-26.=
Over against so abhorrent a picture of a deity who would have
committed murder, had not a mother swiftly circumcised her son,
consider a later thought of God:
=How think ye? if any man have a hundred sheep, and one of them be
gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and go unto the
mountains, and seek that which goeth astray? And if so be that he
find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth over it more than over
the ninety and nine which have not gone astray. Even so it is not the
will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of these little ones
should perish.--Matt. 18:12-14.=
So religion grows with man's capacity to receive higher, finer
revelations of the divine. And in no age of the world has so great a
change passed over the intellectual framework of faith as in the
generation just gone. To live in protest against forms of belief a
generation old is fighting men of straw; the vanguard of religious
thought and life has pushed ahead many a mile beyond the point of such
attack. Men who threw away the living water of the Gospel because they
disliked the water-buckets in which their boyhood churches presented
it, are living spiritually thirsty lives when there is no reasonable
need of their doing so. There is many an unbeliever with a "God-shaped
blank" in his heart, who could be a confident and joyful believer if
he only knew what religion means to men of faith today.
_O God, who hast formed all hearts to love Thee, made all ways to
lead to Thy face, created all desire to be unsatisfied save in Thee;
with great compassion look upon us gathered here. Our presence is our
prayer, our need the only plea we dare to claim, Thy purposes the one
assurance we possess._
_Some of us are very confused; we do not know why we were ever born,
for what end we should live, which way we should take. But we are
willing to be guided. Take our trembling hands in Thine, and lead us
on._
_Some of us are sore within. We long for love and friendship, but we
care for no one and we feel that no one cares for us. We are
misunderstood, we are lonely, we have been disappointed, we have lost
our faith in man and our faith in life. Wilt Thou not let us love
Thee who first loved us?_
_Some of us are vexed with passions that affright us; to yield to
them would mean disaster, to restrain them is beyond our power, and
nothing earth contains exhausts their vehemence or satisfies their
fierce desire._
_And so because there is no answer, no end or satisfaction in
ourselves; and because we are what we are, and yet long to be so
different; we believe Thou art, and that Thou dost understand us. By
faith we feel after Thee, through love we find the way, in hope we
bring ourselves to Thee. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Second Week, Fifth Day
Many minds are prejudiced against religion because, having gone so far
as to feel the credulity of religious belief, they have never gone
further and _seen the credulity of religious unbelief_. Irreligion
implies a creed just as surely as religion does; and many a man's
return to faith has begun when his faculties of doubt, which hitherto
had been used only against belief in God, became active against belief
in no-God. Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, with his characteristic vividness
and exaggeration, narrates such an experience: "I never read a line of
Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. It was
Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to
orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of
doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine
and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine
horribly. The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any
use whatever; and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far
as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at
all. As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures
the dreadful thought broke across my mind, 'Almost thou persuadest me
to be a Christian.' I was in a desperate way." Lest Mr. Chesterton's
whimsicality may hide the seriousness of such an experience, we may
add that Robert Louis Stevenson's first break with his "youthful
atheism" came when, under the influence of Professor Fleeming Jenkin,
he too began to have his "first wild doubts of doubt." He began
thinking, as he says, that "certainly the church was not right, but
certainly not the anti-church either." Many a man has played unfairly
with his doubts; he has used them against religion, but not against
irreligion. When he is thorough with his doubts he may join the many
who understand what the apostle meant when he wrote to Timothy:
=O Timothy, guard that which is committed unto thee, turning away
from the profane babblings and oppositions of the knowledge which is
falsely so called; which some professing have erred concerning the
faith.=
=Grace be with you.--1 Tim. 6:20, 21.=
_O God, too near to be found, too simple to be conceived, too good to
be believed; help us to trust, not in our knowledge of Thee, but in
Thy knowledge of us; to be certain of Thee, not because we feel our
thoughts of Thee are true, but because we know how far Thou dost
transcend them. May we not be anxious to discern Thy will, but
content only with desire to do it; may we not strain our minds to
understand Thy nature, but yield ourselves and live our lives only to
express Thee._
_Shew us how foolish it is to doubt Thee, since Thou Thyself dost set
the questions which disturb us; reveal our unbelief to be faith
fretting at its outworn form. Be gracious when we are tempted to
cease from moral strife: reveal what it is that struggles in us.
Before we tire of mental search enable us to see that it was not
ourselves but Thy call which stirred our souls._
_Turn us back from our voyages of thought to that which sent us
forth. Teach us to trust not to cleverness or learning, but to that
inward faith which can never be denied. Lead us out of confusion to
simplicity. Call us back from wandering without to find Thee at home
within. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Second Week, Sixth Day
Many men are biased in favor of their habitual doubt because they do
not see that _positive faith is the only normal estate of man_.
We live not by the things of which we are uncertain, but by the things
which we verily believe. Columbus doubted many of the old views in
geography, but these negations did not make him great; his greatness
sprang from the positive beliefs which he confidently held and on
which he launched his splendid adventure. Goethe is right when he
makes Mephistopheles, his devil, say, "I am the spirit of negation,"
for negation, save as it paves the way for positive conviction, always
bedevils life. The psalmist reveals the ideal experience for every
doubter.
First, _uncertainty_:
=But as for me, my feet were almost gone;
My steps had well nigh slipped.
For I was envious at the arrogant,
When I saw the prosperity of the wicked.=
=--Psalm 73:2, 3.=
Then _vision_:
=When I thought how I might know this,
It was too painful for me;
Until I went into the sanctuary of God,
And considered their latter end.=
=--Psalm 73:16, 17.=
Then, _positive assurance_:
=Thou wilt guide me with thy counsel,
And afterward receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but thee?
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee.
My flesh and my heart faileth;
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.=
=--Psalm 73:24-26.=
Doubt, therefore, does have real value in life; it clears away rubbish
and stimulates search for truth; but it has no value unless it is
finally swallowed up in positive assurance. So Tennyson pictures the
experience of his friend, Arthur Hallam:
"One indeed I knew
In many a subtle question versed,
Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first,
But ever strove to make it true:
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own."
_O Most Merciful, whose love to us is mighty, long-suffering, and
infinitely tender; lead us beyond all idols and imaginations of our
minds to contact with Thee the real and abiding; past all barriers of
fear and beyond all paralysis of failure to that furnace of flaming
purity where falsehood, sin, and cowardice are all consumed away. It
may be that we know not what we ask; yet we dare not ask for less._
_Our aspirations are hindered because we do not know ourselves. We
have tried to slake our burning thirst at broken cisterns, to comfort
the crying of our spirits with baubles and trinkets, to assuage the
pain of our deep unrest by drugging an accusing conscience, believing
a lie, and veiling the naked flame that burns within. But now we know
Thou makest us never to be content with aught save Thyself, in earth,
or heaven, or hell._
_Sometimes we have sought Thee in agony and tears, scanned the clouds
and watched the ways of men, considered the stars and studied the
moral law; and returned from all our search no surer and no nearer.
Yet now we know that the impulse to seek Thee came from Thyself
alone, and what we sought for was the image Thou hadst first planted
in our hearts._
_We may not yet hold Thee fast or feel Thee near, but we know Thou
holdest us. All is well. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Second Week, Seventh Day
Men are often prejudiced against religion or any serious consideration
of it, because they _never have felt any vital need of God_. To study
wireless telegraphy in the safe seclusion of a college laboratory is
one thing; to hear the wireless apparatus on a floundering ship send
out its call for help across a stormy sea is quite a different matter.
Many folk have never thought of faith in God save with a mild,
intellectual curiosity; they do not know those deep experiences of
serious souls with sin and sorrow and anxiety, with burden for
great causes and desire for triumphant righteousness in men and
nations--experiences that throw men back on God as their only
sufficient refuge and hope. _Men never really find God until they need
him_; and some men never feel the need of him until life plunges them
into a shattering experience. Even in scientific research new
discoveries are made because men _want_ them, and Mayer, lighting on a
theory that proved to be of great value, says, "Engaged during a sea
voyage almost exclusively with the study of physiology, I discovered
the new theory, for the sufficient reason that I _vividly felt the
need of it_." How much more must the vital discovery of God depend on
life's conscious demand for him! And how certainly a shallow,
frivolous nature, unstirred by the deep concerns of life, is biased
against any serious interest in religious faith! Great believers have
first of all _thirsted_ for God.
=Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that
hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price. Wherefore do ye spend money for that
which is not bread? and your labor for that which satisfieth not?
hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let
your soul delight itself in fatness. Incline your ear, and come unto
me; hear, and your soul shall live: and I will make an everlasting
covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David.... Seek ye Jehovah
while he may be found; call ye upon him while he is near: let the
wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let
him return unto Jehovah, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our
God, for he will abundantly pardon.--Isa. 55:1-3, 6, 7.=
_Grant unto us, we pray Thee, the lost hunger and thirst after
righteousness--the longing for God. Grant unto us that drawing power
by which everything that is in us shall call out for Thee. Become
necessary unto us. With the morning and evening light, at noon and at
midnight, may we feel the need of Thy companionship.... Though Thou
dost not speak as man speaks, yet Thou canst call out to us; and the
soul shall know Thy presence, and shall understand by its own self
what Thou meanest. Grant unto us this witness of the Spirit, this
communion of the soul with Thee--and not only once or twice: may we
abide in the light._
_Thou hast come unto Thine own; and even as of old, Thine own know
Thee not, and believe Thee not. How many are there that have learned
Thy name upon their mother's knee, but have forgotten it! How many
are there that grew up into the happiness of a childhood in which
piety presided, but have gone away, and have not come back again to
their first love and to their early faith! How many are there
marching on now in the Sahara of indifference and in the wilderness
of unbelief!... Lord, look upon them; have merciful thoughts toward
them, and issue those gracious influences of power by which what is
best in them shall lift itself up and bear witness against that which
is worst. Amen._--Henry Ward Beecher.
COMMENT FOR THE WEEK
I
We are to deal in this chapter with one of the most common experiences
of doubt and are to attempt the statement of a truth useful in meeting
it. Many minds are undone at the first symptoms of religious
uncertainty, because they suppose that their doubt is philosophical,
and they feel a paralyzing inability to deal with philosophy at all.
As men have been known to take to their beds at hearing the scientific
names of illnesses which hitherto they had patiently endured, so minds
are sometimes overwhelmed by an unsettlement of faith that takes the
name of philosophic doubt. It is well, then, early in our study, to
note the homely, familiar experience, which in most cases underlies
and helps to explain the problem of theological unrest.
We all began, as children, with an unlimited ability to believe what
we were told. We were credulous long before we became critical. God
and Santa Claus, fairy stories and life after death--in what
beautiful, unquestioning confusion we received them all! Our thinking
was altogether imitative, as our talking was. From the existence of
Kamchatka to the opinion that it was wrong to lie, we had no
independent knowledge of our own. Reliance on authority was our only
road to truth. One prescription was adequate for every need of
information: ask our parents and be told.
This situation was the occasion of our first unsettlement of faith: we
discovered the fallibility of our parents. They failed to tell us what
we asked, or we found to be untrue what they had said, or they
themselves confessed how much they did not know. To some this was a
shock, the memory of which has never been forgotten. Edmund Gosse, the
literary critic, tells us that up to his sixth year he thought that
his father knew everything. Then came the fateful crisis when his
father wrongly reported an incident which Edmund himself had
witnessed. "Nothing could possibly have been more trifling to my
parents," he writes, "but to me it meant an epoch. Here was the
appalling discovery never suspected before that my father was not as
God and did not know everything. The shock was not caused by any
suspicion that he was not telling the truth, as it appeared to him,
but by the awful proof that he was not, as I had supposed,
omniscient." By most of us, however, the transfer of our faith from
our parents' authority to some other basis of belief was easily
accomplished. We found ourselves resting back on the priest or the
church or the creed or the Bible. Still our convictions were not
independently our own; we had never fought for them or thought them
through; they were founded on the say-so of authority. What we wished
to know we asked another, and what was told us we implicitly believed.
The time inevitably comes, however, to a normally developing mind,
when such an attitude of unquestioning credulity becomes impossible.
The curious "Why?" of the growing child, that began in early years to
besiege all statements of fact, now ranges out to call in question the
propositions of religious faith. For long-accepted truths, from the
rotundity of the earth to the existence of God, the enlarging
intellect wants reasons rather than dogmas. So normal is this period
of interrogation that it is regularly slated on the timetables of
psychological development. Starbuck fixes the average age of the doubt
period at about eighteen years for boys and about fifteen for girls.
At whatever time and in whatever special form this period of doubt
arises, the characteristic quality of its outcome is easily described.
In the end the fully awakened mind is ill content to accept any
authoritative statements that he dare not question or deny. He resents
having a quotation from any source waved like a revolver in his face
with the demand that he throw up his intellectual hands. No more in
religion than in politics does he incline to stand before infallibility,
like the French peasants before Louis XI, saying, "Sire, what are our
opinions?" He claims his right to question everything, to make every
truth advance and give the countersign of reasonableness, to weigh all
propositions in the scales of his own thinking, and if he is to love
the Lord his God at all, to do it, not with all his credulity, but, as
Jesus said, with all his mind.
Biography reveals how many of the great believers have passed through
this youthful period of rebellion against accepted tradition and have
suffered serious religious unsettlement in the process. Robert
Browning tells us that as a boy he was "passionately religious." When
his period of questioning and revolt arrived, however, it carried him
so far that he was publicly rebuked in church for intentional
misbehavior, and in his sixteenth year, under the influence of
Shelley's "Queen Mab," he declared himself an atheist. But in his
"Pauline," written when he was twenty-one, the direction in which his
quest was leading him was plain:
"I have always had one lode-star; now
As I look back, I see that I have halted
Or hastened as I looked towards that star--
A need, a trust, a yearning after God."
And when he grew to his maturity, had left his early credulousness
with the revolt that followed it far behind and had used his
independent thinking to productive purpose, from what a height of
splendid faith did he look back upon that youthful period of storm and
stress which he called "the passionate, impatient struggles of a boy
toward truth and love"!
Henry Ward Beecher's intellectual revolution was postponed until he
had entered the theological seminary. "I was then twenty years old,"
he writes, "and there came a great revulsion in me from all this
inchoate, unregulated, undirected experience. My mind took one
tremendous spring over into scepticism, and I said: 'I have been a
fool long enough--I will not stir one step further than I can see my
way, and I will not stand a moment where I cannot see the truth. I
will have something that is sure and steadfast.' Having taken that
ground, I was in that state of mind for the larger part of two years."
A wholesome restraint upon the wild perversions, the anarchic denials,
the abysmal despairs of this period of life is the clear recognition
that in some form it is one of the commonest experiences of man.
II
The treatment accorded to a youth who is passing through this
difficult adjustment often determines, in a fine or lamentable way,
his subsequent attitude towards religion. _Negative repression of real
questions is of all methods the most fatal, whether it be practiced on
the youth by others or by the youth upon himself._ "I have not been in
church for twenty years," said a college graduate. "Why?" was the
inquiry. "Because in college I learned from geology through how many
ages this earth was slowly being built. Troubled by the conflict
between this new knowledge and my early training, I went to my
minister. He said that the Bible told us the earth was made in six
days and that I must accept that on faith. That's why." Thousands of
men are religious wrecks today because, when the issue was raised in
their thinking between their desire for a reason and their traditional
beliefs, they were told that to ask a reason is sin. George Eliot's
experience unhappily is not unique. Just when in girlhood her mind was
waking to independent thought, a book now long unread, Hennell's
"Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity," convinced her
immature judgment that her early credulity had been blind. No one was
at hand to state the faith in a reasonable way or to meet, not by
denying but by using her right to think, the attacks of Hennell, which
now are forgotten in their futility. She never came through her
youthful unsettlement. Years after, F. W. H. Myers wrote: "I remember
how at Cambridge I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of
Trinity, on an evening of rainy May, and she, stirred somewhat beyond
her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used
so often as the inspiring trumpet calls of men--the words God,
Immortality, Duty--pronounced with terrible earnestness, how
inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and how
peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents
affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I
listened and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward
me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my
grasp one by one the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third
scroll only, awful with inevitable fate."
In this period of readjustment, whether one is the youth in the midst
of the struggle or the solicitous friend endeavoring to help, one most
needs a clear perception of the ideal outcome of such intellectual
unrest. Let us attempt a picture of that ideal. The youth who long has
taken on his parents' say-so the most important convictions that the
soul can hold, or who, with no care to think or question for himself,
has looked to Book or Church for all that he believed about God, now
feels within him that intellectual awakening that cannot be quieted by
mere authority. He long has taken his truth preserved by others'
hands; now he desires to pick it for himself, fresh from the living
tree of knowledge. His declaration of independence from subjection to
his parents or his Church is not at first irreverent desire to
disbelieve; it is rather desire to enter into the Samaritans'
experience when they said to the woman who first had told them about
Jesus: "Now we believe, not because of _thy_ speaking; for we have
_heard for ourselves_, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the
world" (John 4:41). The youth turns from second-hand rehearsal of the
truth to seek a first-hand, original acquaintance with it. As he began
in utter financial dependence on his father, then made a bit of
spending money of his own, and at last moved out to make his living,
ashamed to be a pensioner and parasite when he should be carrying
himself, so from his old, intellectual dependence the youth passes to
a fine responsibility for his own thinking and belief. He knows that
such transitions, whether financial or intellectual, generally mean
stress and perplexity, but if he is to be a man the youth must
venture.
In this transition beliefs will certainly be modified. Not only do
forms of religious thinking shift and change with the passing
generations, but individuals differ in their powers to see and
understand. Religious faith, like water, takes shape from the
receptacles into whose unique nooks and crannies it is poured. If the
truth which the youth possesses is to be indeed his own, it will
surely differ from the truth which once he learned, by as much as his
mind and his experience differ from his father's. Even in the New
Testament one can easily distinguish James' thought from Paul's and
John's from Peter's. But change of form need not mean loss of value.
To pass by fine gradations from unquestioning credulity to thoughtful
faith is not impossible. Thus a boy learns to swim with his father's
hands beneath him and passes so gradually from reliance upon another
to independent power to swim alone that he cannot tell when first the
old support was quietly withdrawn.
Thus ideally pictured, this transition is nothing to be feared; it is
one of life's steps to spiritual power. This period of questioning and
venture we have called the passage from credulity to independence, but
its significance is deeper than those words imply. _It is the passage
from hearsay to reality._ Of all inward intimate experiences, religion
reaches deepest and is least transferable. It is as incommunicable as
friendship. A father may commend a comrade to his son and lay bare his
own deep friendship with the man, but if the son himself does not see
the value there nor for himself in loyalty and love make self
surrender, the father can do nothing more. Friendship cannot be
carried on by proxy. One can as easily breathe for another as in
another's place be loyal to a friend or trust in God.
When, therefore, the youth moves out from mere dependence on his
father, his Bible, or his Church to see and know God in his own right,
he is fulfilling the end of all religion. _For this his father
taught him, for this the Book was written and the Church was
founded._ As George Macdonald put it, "Each generation must do its
own seeking and finding. The father's having found is only the warrant
for the children's search." Said Goethe: "What you have inherited from
your fathers you must earn for yourself before you can call it yours."
This individual experience makes religion real, and the "awkward age"
of the spirit when the old security of credulous belief has gone and
the new assurance of personal conviction has not yet fully come, is a
small price to pay for the sense of reality that enters into religion
when a man for himself knows God. Such is the ideal transition from
credulity to independence, from hearsay to reality.
III
One fallacy which disastrously affects many endeavors after this ideal
transition is the prejudice that, since faith has hitherto in the
youth's experience meant credulous acceptance of another's say-so,
faith always must mean that. Faith and credulity appear to him
identical. In "Alice through the Looking Glass" the Queen asserts that
she is a hundred and one years, five months, and one day old. "I can't
believe that," said Alice. "Can't you?" said the Queen. "Try again,
draw a long breath and shut your eyes." So blind, irrational, and
wilful does faith seem to many! So far from being an essential part
of all real knowledge, therefore, faith seems to stand in direct
contrast with knowledge, and this impression is deepened by our common
phraseology. Tennyson, for example, sings:
"We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see."
Before there can be any profitable discussion of religious belief,
therefore, we need to see that faith is one of the chief ways in which
continually we deal with reality; it is a road to truth, without which
some truth never can be reached at all. The reason for its
inevitableness in life is not our lack of knowledge, but rather that
faith is as indispensable as logical demonstration in any real knowing
of the world. Behind all other words to be said about our subject lies
this fundamental matter: _faith is not a substitute for truth, but a
pathway to truth; there are realities which without it never can be
known_.
For one thing, no one can know _persons_ without faith. The world
of people, without whom if a man could live, he would be, as Aristotle
said, either a brute or a god, is closed in its inner meaning to a
faithless mind. Entrance into another life with insight and
understanding is always a venture of trust. We cry vainly like Cassim
before the magic cave, "Open, Barley," if we try to penetrate the
secrets of a human personality without sympathy, loyalty, faith. These
alone cry "Open, Sesame."
Surely this knowledge of persons, impossible without faith, is as
important as any which we possess. While the physical universe
furnishes the general background of our existence, the immediate world
in which we really live is personal, made up of people whom we fear or
love, by whom we are cheered, admonished, hurt, and comforted. "The
world is so waste and empty," cried Goethe, "when we figure but towns
and hills and rivers in it, but to know that someone is living on it
with us, even in silence--this makes our earthly ball a peopled
garden." A solitary Robinson Crusoe would give up any other knowledge,
if in return he could know even a benighted savage like Friday. But
even a savage cannot be known by logical demonstration. Crusoe could
so have learned some things, but when he wanted to know Friday, he
came by way of adventures in confidence, personal trust and
self-commitment, growing reliance and appreciative insight, assured
loyalty and faith. He _knew_ whom he had _believed_.
Moreover, such knowledge of persons is as solid as it is important.
That two plus two make four cannot be gainsaid, and doubtless no other
kinds of information can be quite so absolute as mathematical
theorems. But when one thinks of a comrade, long loved and trusted
until he is known through and through, for practical purposes one can
think of nothing more stable than his knowledge of his friend. The
plain fact is that we _do_ know people, know them well, and that
this knowledge never has been or can be a matter of logical
demonstration. By taking Arthur Hallam to pieces and analyzing him,
the inductive mind might work out all the laws that are involved in
Arthur Hallam's constitution; but that mind with all its knowledge
would not know Arthur Hallam. Tennyson's "In Memoriam," however, makes
clear that knowledge of a friend is not interdicted because scientific
demonstration cannot supply it. Tennyson knew Hallam well, and this
knowledge, far more solid and significant than most other information
he possessed, was not achieved by grinding laws out of facts; it came,
as all such knowledge comes, by faith.
As one considers what this understanding of the personal world, seen
with the open eyes of trust and loyalty, means to us, how assured it
is, how it enriches and deepens life, he perceives that here at least
faith is something far more than a stop-gap for ignorance, a dream, a
fantasy. It is positively a pathway to truth.
There is another realm where faith is our only way of dealing with
reality; by it alone can we know _the possibilities of individuals and
of society_. We are well assured now in the United States that the
nation can be economically prosperous without slavery. But sixty years
ago plenty of people were assured of the contrary, were convinced that
if the abolitionists succeeded we could not economically endure. How
did we come by this significant knowledge that the immoral system was
dispensable? Not by logical demonstration. The economists of most of
our universities logically demonstrated that slavery was essential.
_Faith was the pathway to the truth._ Faith that a new order minus
slavery was possible gained adherents, grew in certainty with access
of new believers, fed its followers on hopes unrealized but
passionately believed in, until _faith became experiment, and
experiment became experience, and experience brought forth
knowledge_. The nation trusted and tried. This is the only way to
truth in the realm of moral possibilities. If the world were finished,
its _i's_ all dotted and its _t's_ all crossed, we might exist on that
sort of descriptive science that finds the facts and plots their laws.
But the world is in the making; what is _actual_ is not quite so
important to us as what is _possible_; we live, as Wordsworth sings,
in
"Hope that can never die,
Effort and expectation and desire,
And something evermore about to be."
To endeavor to satisfy man, therefore, with descriptions of the actual
is preposterous. The innermost meaning of personal and social life
lies in the contrast between what we are and what we may become.
Beyond the achieved present and the demonstrable future, stands the
ideal, whose possibility we can never know as a truth without faith
enough to try.
When, therefore, one hears disparagement of faith as a poor makeshift
for knowledge, he may be pardoned a sharp rejoinder. When has man ever
found solid knowledge in this most important realm of human
possibilities, without faith as the pioneer? We do not know first and
then supply by belief what knowledge lacks. _We believe first, as
Columbus did, and then find new continents because what faith first
suggested a great venture has confirmed._ When Stephenson proposed to
run a steam car forty miles an hour, a host of wise-acres proved the
feat impossible on the ground that no one could move through the air
so rapidly and still survive. If now we know that one easily survives
a speed of over a hundred miles an hour in an aeroplane, it is because
a faith that _saw_ and _dared_ introduced us to the information. We
know now that democracy is not a futile dream, nor the conquest of the
air by wireless and of the land by electricity a madman's frenzy; we
know truths of highest import and certainty from the usefulness of
radium to the wisdom of religious liberty, and all this knowledge
existed as belief in possibility before it became truth in fact. Faith
was "assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen"
(Hebrews 11:1). Faith is no makeshift. Its power is nowhere felt more
effectively than in the achievement of knowledge.
IV
So far is faith, then, from being blind credulity, that it alone
deserves to be called the Great Discoverer. Everywhere faith goes
before as a pioneer and the more prosaic faculties of the mind come
after to civilize the newly opened territory. In the evolution of the
senses touch developed first. All the knowledge that any creature had,
concerned the tangible. But in time other senses came. Dimly and
uncertainly creatures discerned by hearing and seeing the existence of
distant objects. They became aware of presences which as yet they
could not touch; they were furnished with clues, in following which
they found as real what at first had been intangible. Such a relation
faith bears to knowledge. Faith, said Clement of Alexandria, is the
"ear of the soul." Said Ruskin, faith is "veracity of insight." By it
we hear what as yet we cannot touch and see what the arms of our logic
are not long enough to reach.
All the elemental, primary facts of life are faith's discoveries; we
have no other means of finding them. By faith we discover our
_selves_. We do not hold back from living until we can prove that
we exist. We never can strictly prove that we exist. The very self
that we are trying to demonstrate would have to be used in the
demonstration. We have no other way of getting at ourselves except to
take ourselves for granted--accepting
"This main miracle that you are you,
With power on your own act and on the world."
As Mr. Chesterton remarked, "You cannot call up any wilder vision than
a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves." By faith
all men go out to live as though their selves were real.
By faith we accept the existence of the _outer world_. We do not
restrain ourselves from acting as though the physical world were
really there, until we can prove it. We never can strictly prove it;
perhaps it is not there at all. When through a microscope an Indian
was shown germs in the Ganges' water, to convince him of the peril of
its use, he broke the instrument with his cane, as though when the
microscope was gone, the facts had vanished too. In his philosophy all
that we see is illusion. Perhaps this is true--the world a phantasm
and our minds fooling us. But none of us believes it. And we do not
believe it because we live by faith--the elemental faith on which all
common sense and science rest and without which man's thought and work
would halt--that our senses and our minds tell us the truth. "It is
idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. _Reason
itself is a matter of faith._ It is an act of faith to assert that
one's thoughts have any relation to reality at all."
By faith we even discover the _universe_. We cannot think of the
world as a multiverse; we always think of it as having unity, and we
do so whether as scientists we talk about the uniformity of nature, or
as Christians we speak of one Creator. Not only, however, can no one
demonstrate that this is a universe; _it positively does not look as
though it were_. Opposing powers snarl at each other and clash in a
disorder that gives to the casual observer not the slightest
intimation that any unity is there. Thunder storms and little babies,
volcanoes and Easter lilies, immeasurable nebulæ in the heavens and
people getting married on the earth--what indescribable contrasts and
confusions! Still we insist on thinking unity into this seeming
anomaly, and out of it we wrest scientific doctrines about the
uniformity of law. As Professor James, of Harvard, put it, "The
principle of uniformity in nature has to be _sought_ under and in
spite of the most rebellious appearances; and our conviction of its
truth is far more like religious faith than like assent to a
demonstration."
One might suppose that beliefs so assumed and so incapable of adequate
demonstration would make the knowledge based upon them insecure. _But
the fact is that all our surest knowledge is thus based on assumptions
that we cannot prove._ "As for the strong conviction," Huxley says,
"that the cosmic order is rational, and the faith that throughout all
duration, unbroken order has reigned in the universe, I not only
accept it, but I am disposed to think it the most important of all
truths." Faith then, in Huxley's thought, is not a makeshift when
knowledge fails. Rather by faith we continually are getting at the
most important realities with which we deal. As Prof. Ladd, of Yale,
impatiently exclaims: "The rankest agnostic is shot through and
through with all the same fundamental intellectual beliefs, all the
same unescapable rational faiths, about the reality of the self and
about the validity of its knowledge. You cannot save science and
destroy all faith. You cannot sit on the limb of the tree while you
tear it up by the roots."
V
If faith is thus the pioneer that leads us to knowledge of persons and
of moral possibilities; if by faith we discover our selves, the outer
world's existence and its unity, why should we be surprised that faith
is our road to God? Superficial deniers of religion not infrequently
seek the discredit of a Christian's trust by saying that God is only a
matter of faith. To which the Christian confidently may answer: Of
course God is a matter of faith. Faith is always the Great Discoverer.
A man finds God as he finds an earthly friend. He does not go apart in
academic solitude to consider the logical rationality of friendship,
until, intellectually convinced, he coolly arms himself with a Q. E.
D. and goes out to hunt a comrade. Friendship is never an adventure of
logic; it is an adventure of life. It is arrived at by what Emerson
called the "untaught sallies of the spirit." We fall in love, it may
be with precipitant emotion; our instincts and our wills are first
engaged; the whole personality rises up in hunger to claim the
affection that it needs and without which life seems unsupportable;
faith, hope, and love engage in a glorious venture, where logic plays
a minor part. But to make friendship rational, to give it poise, to
trace its origins and laws, to clarify, chasten, and direct--this is
the necessary work of thought. Faith discovers and reveals; reason
furnishes criticism, confirmation, and discipline.
So men find God. They are hungry for him not in intellect alone, but
with all their powers. They feel with Tolstoi: "I remembered that I
only _lived_ at those times when I believed in God." They need him to
put sense and worth and hope into life. As with the reality of
persons, the validity of knowledge, the unity of the world, so in
religion the whole man rises up to claim the truth without which life
is barren, meaningless. His best convictions at the first are all of
them insights of the spirit, affirmations of the _man_. But behind,
around and through them all play clarifying thoughts, and reasons come
to discipline and to confirm. But the reasons by themselves could not
have found God. Faith is the Great Discoverer.
"Oh! world, thou choosest not the better part,
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes;
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world and had no chart
Save one that Faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across the void of mystery and dread.
Bid then the tender light of Faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Into the thinking of the thought Divine."[1]
[1] Professor Santayana, of Harvard.
CHAPTER III
Faith in the Personal God
DAILY READINGS
We are to consider this week the Christian faith that God is personal.
Before, however, we deal with the arguments which may confirm our
confidence in such a faith, or even with the explanations that may
clarify our conception of its meaning, let us, in the daily readings,
consider _some of the familiar attitudes in every normal human life,
that require God's personality for their fulfilment_. Men have
believed in a personal God because their own nature demanded it.
Third Week, First Day
Men have believed in a personal God because of a _deep desire to think
of creation as friendly_. F. W. Myers, when asked what question he
would put to the Sphinx, if he were given only one chance, replied
that he would ask, "Is the universe friendly?" Some have tried to
think of creation as an enemy which we must fight, as though in
Greenland we strove to make verdure grow, although the soil and
climate were antagonistic. Some have tried to think creation neutral,
an impersonal system of laws and forces, which we must impose our will
upon as best we can, although in the end the system is sure to outlast
all our efforts and to bring our gains to naught. But at the heart of
man is an irresistible desire to think creation a friend, with whose
good purposes our wills can be aligned, and whose power can carry our
efforts to victorious ends. Says Gilbert Murray, of Oxford University,
"As I see philosophy after philosophy falling into this unproven
belief in the Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I myself cannot,
except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from making the same
assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here too we are under the
spell of a very old ineradicable instinct." _But friends are always
persons, and if creation is friendly then God is in some sense
personal._ This faith is the radiant center of the Gospel.
=But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and
having shut thy door, pray to thy Father who is in secret, and thy
Father who seeth in secret shall recompense thee. And in praying use
not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do: for they think that they
shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not therefore like unto
them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye
ask him. After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father who art in
heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as
in heaven, so on earth. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive
us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And bring us not
into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For if ye forgive
men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive
you.--Matt. 6:6-14.=
_O Lord, we would rest in Thee, for in Thee alone is true rest to be
found. We would forget our disappointed hopes, our fruitless efforts,
our trivial aims, and lean on Thee, our Comfort and our Strength.
When the order of this world bears cruelly upon us; when Nature seems
to us an awful machine, grinding out life and death, without a reason
or a purpose; when our hopes perish in the grave where we lay to rest
our loved dead: O what can we do but turn to Thee, whose law
underlieth all, and whose love, we trust, is the end of all? Thou
fillest all things with Thy presence, and dost press close to our
souls. Still every passion, rebuke every doubt, strengthen every
element of good within us, that nothing may hinder the outflow of Thy
life and power. In Thee, let the weak be full of might, and let the
strong renew their strength. In Thee, let the tempted find succor,
the sorrowing consolation, and the lonely and the neglected their
Supreme Friend, their faithful Companion._
_O Lord, we are weary of our old, barren selves. Separate us from our
spiritual past, and quicken within us the seeds of a new future.
Transform us by the breath of Thy regenerating power, that life may
seem supremely beautiful and duty our highest privilege, and the only
real evil a guilty conscience. Let us be no longer sad, or downcast,
or miserable, or despairing, vexed by remorse, or depressed by our
failures. Take from us the old self. Give us a new self, beautiful,
vigorous, and joyous. Let old things pass away and let all things
become new. Kindle within us a flame of heavenly devotion, so that to
us work for Thee shall become a happiness, and rest in Thee shall
become an energy, unchecked by fears within and foes without. Give us
love, and then we shall have more than all we need, for Thou art
Love, Thyself the Giver and the Gift. Amen._--Samuel McComb.
Third Week, Second Day
=Bless Jehovah, O my soul;
And all that is within me, bless his holy name.
Bless Jehovah, O my soul,
And forget not all his benefits:
Who forgiveth all thine iniquities;
Who healeth all thy diseases;
Who redeemeth thy life from destruction;
Who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies;
Who satisfieth thy desire with good things,
So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle.=
=--Psalm 103:1-5.=
Such an attitude of thankfulness as this psalm represents is native to
man's heart. When he is glad he feels grateful: he has an irrepressible
impulse to thank somebody. As between a boastful Nebuchadnezzar--"This
great Babylon which I have built ... by the might of my power and for
the glory of my majesty" (Dan. 4:30)--and the Master, grateful for the
dawning success of his cause--"I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven
and earth" (Matt. 11:25)--we can have no doubt which is the nobler
attitude. Man at his best always looks upon his blessings as gifts,
his powers as entrustments, his service as a debt which he owes, and
his success as an occasion of gratitude rather than pride. _But we
cannot be really thankful to impersonal power._ Little children blame
chairs for their falls and thank apple trees for their apples, but
maturity outgrows the folly of accusing or blessing impersonal things.
Thankfulness, in any worthy interpretation of the term, can never be
felt except toward friendly persons who _intended the blessing_ for
which we are glad. A thoughtful man, therefore, cannot be grateful to
a godless world-machine, even though it has treated him well, for the
world-machine never purposed to treat him well and his happiness is a
lucky accident, with no good will to thank for it. Haeckel says that
there is no God--only "mobile, cosmic ether." Imagine a congregation
of people, under Haeckel's leadership, rising to pray, "O Mobile
Cosmic Ether, blessed be thy name!" It is absurd. _Unless God is
personal, the deepest meanings of gratitude in human hearts for life
and its benedictions have no proper place in the universe._
_O God above all, yet in all; holy beyond all imagination, yet friend
of sinners; who inhabitest the realms of unfading light, yet leadest
us through the shadows of mortal life; how solemn and uplifting it is
even to think upon Thee! Like sight of sea to wearied eyes, like a
walled-in garden to the troubled mind, like home to wanderer, like a
strong tower to a soul pursued; so to us is the sound of Thy name._
_But greater still to feel Thee in our heart; like a river glorious,
cleansing, healing, bringing life; like a song victorious, comforting
our sadness, banishing our care; like a voice calling us to battle,
urging us beyond ourselves._
_But greater far to know Thee as our Father, as dear as Thou art
near; and ourselves begotten of Thy love, made in Thy image, cared
for through all our days, never beyond Thy sight, never out of Thy
thought._
_To think of Thee is rest; to know Thee is eternal life; to see Thee
is the end of all desire; to serve Thee is perfect freedom and
everlasting joy. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Third Week, Third Day
=Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness:
According to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my
transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity,
And cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions;
And my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,
And done that which is evil in thy sight.=
=--Psalm 51:1-4.=
Penitence is one of the profoundest impulses in man's heart. And man
at his deepest always feels about his sin as the Psalmist did: he has
wronged not only this individual or that, but he has sinned against
the whole structure of life, against whatever Power and Purpose may be
behind life, and his penitence is not complete until he cries to the
Highest, "Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned." While men,
therefore, have always asked each other for forgiveness, they have as
well asked God for it. _But such an attitude is utterly irrational if
God is not personal._ Persons alone care what we do, have purposes
that our sins thwart, have love that our evil grieves, have compassion
to forgive the penitent; and to confess sin to a world-machine--careless,
purposeless, loveless, and without compassion--is folly. Yesterday we
saw how impossible it was really to feel grateful to a materialist's
god; today imagine congregations of people addressing to the Cosmic
Ether any such penitent confessions as Christians by multitudes
continually address to their Father: "We have erred and strayed from
Thy ways like lost sheep." _Plainly in a world where creative power is
impersonal the deepest meanings of penitence have no place._ Read over
the prayer that follows, considering the futility of addressing such a
penitent aspiration to anything impersonal; and then really pray it to
the God whom Christ revealed:
_We beseech Thee, Lord, to behold us with favor, folk of many
families and nations gathered together in the peace of this roof,
weak men and women subsisting under the covert of thy patience. Be
patient still; suffer us yet awhile longer--with our broken purposes
of good, with our idle endeavors against evil, suffer us awhile
longer to endure and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us
our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken,
brace us to play the man under affliction. Be with our friends, be
with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to
them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to
us, our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with
morning hearts--eager to labor--eager to be happy, if happiness shall
be our portion--and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure
it._
_We thank Thee and praise Thee; and in the words of him to whom this
day is sacred, close our oblation. Amen._--Robert Louis Stevenson.[2]
Third Week, Fourth Day
=Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
that ye may abound in hope, in the power of the Holy Spirit.--Rom.
15:13.=
=For in hope were we saved: but hope that is seen is not hope: for
who hopeth for that which he seeth? But if we hope for that which we
see not, then do we with patience wait for it.--Rom. 8:24, 25.=
Hope is no fringe on the garment of human life; it is part of the
solid texture of our experience; without it men may exist, but they
cannot live. Now some minds live by hope about tomorrow, or at the
most, the day after tomorrow, and do not take long looks ahead. But as
men grow mature in thoughtfulness, such small horizons no longer can
content their minds; they seek a basis for hope about the far issue of
man's struggle and aspiration. They cannot bear to think that creation
lacks a "far-off divine event"; they cannot tolerate a universe that
in the end turns out to be
"An eddy of purposeless dust,
Effort unmeaning and vain."
_But it is obvious that if God is not in control of creation, with
personal purpose of good will, directing its course, there is no solid
basis for hope._ If the universe is in the hands of physical
forces, then a long look ahead reveals a world collapsing about a cold
sun, and humanity annihilated in the wreck. Some such finale is the
inevitable end of a godless world. As another pictures it, mankind,
like a polar bear on an ice floe that is drifting into warmer zones,
will watch in growling impotence the steady dwindling of his home,
until he sinks in the abyss. All optimistic philosophies of life have
been founded on faith in a personal God, who purposes good to his
children, and without such faith no hope, with large horizons, is
reasonable. Paul is fair to the facts when he says, "Having no hope
and without God in the world" (Eph. 2:12). When one asks why men have
believed in a personal God, this clearly is part of the answer: only a
personal God can be "the God of hope."
_O God of heaven above and earth beneath! Thou art the constant hope
of every age--the reliance of them that seek Thee with
thoughtfulness and love. We own Thee as the guardian of our
pilgrimage; and when our steps are weary we turn to Thee, the mystic
companion of our way, whose mercy will uphold us lest we fall. Thou
layest on us the burden of labor throughout our days; but in this
sacred hour Thou dost lift off our load, and make us partakers of Thy
rest. Thou ever faithful God, our guide by cloud and fire! without
this blest repose our life were but a desert path; here we abide by
the refreshing spring, and pitch our tents with joy around Thy holy
hill. Yet when we seek to draw nigh to Thee, Thou art still above us,
like the heavens. O Thou that remainest in the height, and coverest
Thyself with the cloud thereof! behold, we stand around the mountain
where Thou art; and if Thou wilt commune with us, the thunder from
Thy voice of love shall not make us afraid. Call up a spirit from our
midst to serve Thy will; and take away the veil from all our hearts,
that with the eye of purity we may look on the bright and holy
countenance of life. And when we go hence to resume our way, may it
be with nobler spirits, with more faithful courage, and more generous
will. For life and death we trust ourselves to Thee as disciples of
Jesus Christ. Amen._--James Martineau.
Third Week, Fifth Day
=Jehovah is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup:
Thou maintainest my lot.
The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places;
Yea, I have a goodly heritage.
I will bless Jehovah, who hath given me counsel;
Yea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons.
I have set Jehovah always before me:
Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.
Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth:
My flesh also shall dwell in safety.
For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol;
Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption.
Thou wilt show me the path of life:
In thy presence is fulness of joy;
In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.=
=--Psalm 16:5-11.=
Many things in human life bring joy. From the sense of a healthy body
and the exhilaration of a sunshiny day to the deep satisfactions of
home and friends--there are numberless sources of happiness. But man
has always been athirst to find joy in thinking about the total
meaning of life. Lacking that, the details of life lose radiance, for,
in spite of himself, man
"Hath among least things
An undersense of greatest; sees the parts
As parts, but with a feeling of the whole."
If when he thinks about God, he can, like this psalmist, rejoice in
the love behind life, the good purpose through it, the glorious future
ahead of it, then all his other blessings are illumined. Not only are
there happy things _in life_, but _life itself_ is fundamentally
blessed. But if when he raises his thought to the Eternal, he has no
joyful thoughts about it, sees no love or purpose there, then a pall
falls on even his ordinary happiness. Alas for that man who does not
like to think about life's origin and destiny and meaning, because he
has no joyful faith about God! Some men have what Epictetus called
"paralysis of the soul" every time they think of creation, for to them
it is a huge physical machine crashing on without reason or good will.
But some men have such a joyful faith in the divine that their
gladness about the whole of life redeems their sorrow about its
details. So Samuel Rutherford in prison said, "Jesus Christ came into
my room last night and every stone flashed like a ruby." For the
thought of God in terms of friendly personality is the most joyful
idea of him that man has ever had. Man's thirst for joy is one of the
sources of his faith in a personal God. He has wanted what Paul called
"joy and peace in believing" (Rom. 15:13).
_We rejoice, O Lord our God, not in ourselves nor in the firm earth
on which we tread, nor in the household, nor in the church, nor in
all the procession of things where mankind moves with power and
glory. We rejoice in the Lord. We rejoice in Thy strength. A strange
joy it is. Day by day we find ourselves breaking out into gladness
through the ministration of the senses, and by the play of inward
thought; but Thou art never beheld by us.... Thou never speakest to
us, nor do we feel Thy hand, nor do we discern Thy face of love and
glory and power. We break away from all other experiences, and look
up into the emptiness, as it seems to us, which yet is full of life;
into that which seems cold and void, but wherein moves eternal power;
into the voiceless and inscrutable realm where Thou dwellest, God
over all, blessed forever.... O Lord our God, how near Thou art to
us! and we do not know it. How near is the other life! and we do not
feel it. It clothes us as with a garment. It feeds us. It shines down
upon us. It rejoices over us.... Thither, out of narrow and
anguishful ways, out of sorrows, out of regrets, out of bereavements,
we look; and already we are rested before we reach it._
_Grant unto us, today, we beseech Thee, this beatific vision.
Amen._--Henry Ward Beecher.
Third Week, Sixth Day
=For when one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are
ye not men? What then is Apollos? and what is Paul? Ministers through
whom ye believed; and each as the Lord gave to him. I planted,
Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he
that planteth anything, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth
the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: but
each shall receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we
are God's fellow-workers: ye are God's husbandry, God's building.--I
Cor. 3:4-9.=
One of the profoundest motives that can grip man's heart is the
conviction that he is a fellow-worker with the Divine. To feel that
there is a great Cause, on behalf of which God himself is concerned,
and in the furtherance of which we can be God's instruments and
confederates, is the most exhilarating outlook on life conceivable.
Even people who deny God try to get this motive for themselves. One
such man hopes for the success of his favorite causes in "the tendency
of the universe"; another talks about "the nature of things taking
sides." _But nothing save personality has moral tendencies, and only
persons take sides in moral issues._ If the guidance of the world is
personal, then, and then only, can we rejoice with confidence in a
great Ally, who has moral purposes and who has committed to us part of
his work. This was the Master's motive when he said, "My Father
worketh even until now, and I work" (John 5:17). But one clearly sees
that such an inspiring consciousness of cooperation with the Eternal
depended on the certainty with which the Master called the Eternal by
a personal name--Father. When men like Livingstone have gone out in
sacrificial adventure for the saving of men they have not banked on
the "tendency of the universe," nor trusted in any abstract "nature of
things taking sides"; they have been servants of a personal God, under
orders from him, and they have counted on personal guidance in the
service of a cause whose issue was safe in God's hands.
_O God, we pray Thee for those who come after us, for our children,
and the children of our friends, and for all the young lives that are
marching up from the gates of birth, pure and eager, with the morning
sunshine on their faces. We remember with a pang that these will live
in the world we are making for them. We are wasting the resources of
the earth in our headlong greed, and they will suffer want. We are
building sunless houses and joyless cities for our profit, and they
must dwell therein. We are making the burden heavy and the pace of
work pitiless, and they will fall wan and sobbing by the wayside. We
are poisoning the air of our land by our lies and our uncleanness,
and they will breathe it._
_O God, Thou knowest how we have cried out in agony when the sins of
our fathers have been visited upon us, and how we have struggled
vainly against the inexorable fate that coursed in our blood or bound
us in a prison-house of life. Save us from maiming the innocent ones
who come after us by the added cruelty of our sins. Help us to break
the ancient force of evil by a holy and steadfast will and to endow
our children with purer blood and nobler thoughts. Grant us grace to
leave the earth fairer than we found it; to build upon it cities of
God in which the cry of needless pain shall cease; and to put the
yoke of Christ upon our business life that it may serve and not
destroy. Lift the veil of the future and show us the generation to
come as it will be if blighted by our guilt, that our lust may be
cooled and we may walk in the fear of the Eternal. Grant us a vision
of the far-off years as they may be if redeemed by the sons of God,
that we may take heart and do battle for Thy children and ours.
Amen._--Walter Rauschenbusch.
Third Week, Seventh Day
=I will extol thee, my God, O King;
And I will bless thy name for ever and ever.
Every day will I bless thee;
And I will praise thy name for ever and ever.
Great is Jehovah, and greatly to be praised;
And his greatness is unsearchable.
One generation shall laud thy works to another,
And shall declare thy mighty acts.
Of the glorious majesty of thine honor,
And of thy wondrous works, will I meditate.
And men shall speak of the might of thy terrible acts;
And I will declare thy greatness.
They shall utter the memory of thy great goodness,
And shall sing of thy righteousness.
Jehovah is gracious, and merciful;
Slow to anger, and of great lovingkindness.
Jehovah is good to all;
And his tender mercies are over all his works.
All thy works shall give thanks unto thee, O Jehovah;
And thy saints shall bless thee.=
=--Psalm 145:1-10.=
Adoration springs from the deeps of man's spirit. We never can be
content with looking down on things beneath us, nor with looking out
on things that find our level. We always must look up to things above
us. As a mediæval saint said, "_The soul can never rest in things
that are beneath itself._" Worship, therefore, is an undeniable
impulse in man's heart. Poets worship Beauty; scientists worship
Truth; every man of honor worships Right. That is, the good, true, and
beautiful stand above us calling out our adoration, and all the best
in us springs from our worshipful response to their appeal. But this
impulse to adore is never fulfilled until we gather up all life into
spiritual unity and bow down in awe and joy before God. That is
adoration glorified, worship crowned and consummated. And the only God
whom man can adore with awe and joy is personal. No impersonal thing
is worshipful; however great a _thing_ may be it still lies beneath
our soul. No abstract Idea is worshipful; we still are greater than
any _idea_ that we can hold. Only God, thought of in personal terms
but known to be greater than any terms which human life can use, is
adorable. _Men have believed in Him because worship is man's holiest
impulse._
Such are the experiences of man, with which faith in a personal God is
inseparably interwoven. Our demand for a friendly creation, our
deepest impulses to thanksgiving, penitence, hope, joy, cooperation
with the Eternal, and adoration of the highest--all require
personality in God. As Professor William James said, "The universe is
no longer a mere _It_ to us, but a _Thou_ if we are religious."
_O Lord our God, Thy greatness is unsearchable, and the glory of Thy
presence has overwhelmed us. Thou art hidden in excess of light; and
if we were to behold Thee in the great sphere in which Thou art
living, none of us would dare to draw near to Thee. Our
imperfections, our transgressions, our secret thoughts, our wild
impulses, that at times come surging in upon us, are such that we
should be ashamed to stand before the All-searching Eye. Our lives
are before Thee, open as a book, and Thou readest every word and
every letter thereof. Blessed be Thy name, Thou hast taught us to
come to Thee through the Lord Jesus Christ as through a friend, and
thou hast taught us to draw near to Thee in person through the
familiar way of Fatherhood; from our childhood we have said, Our
Father, and in this way we are not afraid; in this way we come
familiarly and boldly: not irreverently, but with the familiarity
which love gives. Thou hast poured the light of Thy love upon the
path which we tread, and Thou hast taught us to come rejoicing before
Thee.... Open Thy hand and Thy heart, and say to every one of us,
Peace be unto you! Amen._--Henry Ward Beecher.
COMMENT FOR THE WEEK
I
We have been using freely the most momentous word in human speech as
though we clearly understood its meaning. We have been speaking of God
as though the import of the term were plain. But most of us, asked to
state precisely what we mean by "God," would welcome such a refuge
from our confusion as Joubert sought. "It is not hard to know God,"
said he, "provided one will not force oneself to define him." Many
people who stoutly claim to believe in God live in perpetual
vacillation as to what they mean by him. Writes one: "God to my mind
is an impersonal being, but whether for convenience or through sheer
impotence I pray to him as a personal being.... I know I talk on both
sides of the fence, but that is just where I am."
At times, indeed, some question whether there is any need to think or
say what "God" may signify. They call him by vague names--the All, the
Infinite. In moods of exalted feeling, impatient of definition, they
wish to be left alone with their experience of the Eternal; they
resent the intrusion of theology, as a poet, lost in wonder at a
landscape, might resent the coming of surveyors with their clanking
chains. So Walt Whitman wanted to see the stars rather than hear the
astronomer, and after listening to the learned lecture, with its
charts and diagrams, he says,
"I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars."
But, for all that, we well may be thankful for astronomers. At times
the "mystical, moist night air" is absent; we do not wish to "look up
in perfect silence at the stars"; and, even though we know in advance
that they are bound to be inadequate, we do want as clear and worthy
ideas as possible about the universe. Moreover, when such ideas are
ours, looking up in perfect silence at the stars is more impressive
than it ever was before. No more can men content themselves with a
vague consciousness of God. Spirits like Wordsworth have raptures of
which they sing,
"In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not--in enjoyment it expired."
In communion with nature, in love for family, in fellowship with God,
such hours may come, but nature, family, and God must also be the
objects of understanding thought. Days of vital need, if not of mental
doubt, inevitably come when it is impossible any longer to use a term
like "God" without knowing what we mean.
The special urgency of this is felt by most of us because as children
we were taught to picture the Divine in terms of personality. The God
of the Bible is personal. Little that persons do, save sinning, is
omitted from the catalogue of God's activities as he is pictured for
us in the Scripture. He knows, loves, purposes, warns, rebukes,
allures, rewards, and punishes, as only persons can. And all our
relationships with him are clearly personal. When we pray we say "Our
Father"; when we seek our duty we ask, "What wilt thou have me to do?"
God is _He_ and _Thou_, not _It_, and friendship is the ideal relation
of all souls with him.
Moreover, in our maturity we are not likely to be interested in a God
who is not personal. Whoever curiously asks why he believes in God,
will find not simply _reasons_ but _causes_ for his faith,
and will perceive that the causes of faith lie back of the reasons for
it. Vital need always precedes the arguments by which we justify its
satisfaction. A man eats one thing and shuns another on principles of
dietetics that can be defended before his intelligence; but behind all
such sophisticated reasons stands the vital cause of eating--hunger.
So back of intellectual arguments for belief in God lies the initial
cause of faith: _men are hungry_. Men believe in God because they
hunger for a world that is not chance and chaos, but that is guided by
a Purpose. They believe in God, because in their struggles after
righteousness they hunger for a Divine Ally in whom righteousness has
its origin, its ground and destiny. They believe in God because they
hunger for confidence that Someone cares about our race in its
conflicts and defeats and because in their individual experience they
want a friend. Without such faith man feels himself to be, in Goethe's
phrase, "a troubled wanderer upon a darkened earth." Plainly this
elemental human hunger for purpose, righteousness, and friendship
calls for something akin to personality in God. _Only persons have
purpose, character, and friendliness._ The vital motives which lead
men to seek God's comfort, forgiveness, guidance, and cooperation
plainly imply his personality. Things do not forgive us, love us, nor
purpose good concerning us, nor can any thing be imagined so subtle
and so powerful as to satisfy the needs on account of which men come
to God. If God is not personal, he can feel no concern for human life
and a God of no concern is of no consequence.
The philosophers of India, with a well-reasoned pantheistic system and
centuries to make their philosophy effective, have failed to quell
this deathless thirst for a God who counts. Every wayside shrine of
Hinduism incarnates the old faith in gods conceived as friends, not
things; and Buddha, who taught impersonal deity, is now himself adored
as the Personal Lord of Love and Blessedness. Wherever one finds vital
religion one finds that God is no dry impersonal abstraction, but
man's friend. Boscamen, speaking of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and
of the Chaldean Tablets, says: "Six thousand years ago in Egypt and
Chaldea--it is not dread, but the grateful love of a child to his
father, of friend to friend, that meets us in the oldest books of the
world." And when one turns from the oldest to the newest books this
inner demand of man's religious life has not ceased; it has been
refined and confirmed. "The All would not be the All unless it
contained a Personality," said Victor Hugo. "That Personality is God."
Biography is lavish in illustrations of this need in man's religious
life. The biographer of Theodore Parker, the freelance preacher of
Boston, remarks: "In his _theology_ God was neither personal nor
impersonal, but a reality transcending these distinctions. In his
_devotions_ God was as personal as his own father or mother, and he
prayed to him as such, daringly indifferent to the anthropomorphisms
of his unfettered speech." When one passes from speculation to
religion, he always comes into a realm where only a personal God will
do. On this point even confessed unbelievers furnish confirmation. One
who calls himself an agnostic writes: "At times in the silence of the
night and in rare lonely moments, I experience a sort of communion of
myself with Something Great that is not myself. Then the Universal
Scheme of things has on me the effect of a sympathetic Person, and my
communion therewith takes on a quality of fearless worship. These
moments happen, and they are to me the supreme fact in my religious
life." Always for the purposes of vital religion, God must have on us
the "effect of a sympathetic Person."
II
When one, however, subjects this need of his religious life to
searching thought, what difficulty he encounters! Multitudes, if they
were candid, would confess what a college senior wrote: "When I am
just thinking about God in a speculative or philosophical way, I
generally think of him as impersonal, but for practical purposes I
think of him as personal." Many folks feel thus distraught; at the
heart of their religious life is the paralyzing doubt, that in a
universe like this to think of God as personal is absurd. If a train
moving a mile a minute should leave the earth, it must travel
40,000,000 years before it would reach the nearest star. The Creator
of such a world is not readily reduced to the similitude of human
life. Once men lived on a flat earth, small in compass and cosily
tucked beneath the sky's coverlet, but now the world's vastness
beggars imagination. As an astronomer remarked, coming from a session
with his telescope, "This does away with a six-foot god; you cannot
shake hands with the Creator of _this_." Men used to suppose that
Arcturus was a single star, but now new telescopes reveal Arcturus as
a galaxy of stars, thousands in number, with interstellar spaces so
immense that thought breaks down in spanning them and imagination even
cannot make the leap. Is the God of such a universe to be conceived in
terms of a magnified man?
So to picture deity seems at first sight a survival of mere
childishness. Professor John Fiske, of Harvard, has told us that when
he was a boy God always conjured up in his imagination the figure of a
venerable bookkeeper, with white flowing beard, standing behind a high
desk and writing down the bad deeds of John Fiske. How many of us can
recall such early crude and childish thoughts of God! A mother asked
her young daughter what she was drawing. "A picture of God," was the
answer. "But no one knows what God looks like," the mother said. "They
will," came the rejoinder, "when I get through." We all began with
some such primitive idea of deity. Indeed, these early conceptions
long persist in many minds, as the following statements, written by
college students, indicate: "I think of God as real, actual skin and
blood and bones, something we shall see with our eyes some day, no
matter what lives we lead on earth." "It may be a remnant of youth,
but anyhow, every time I think of God there appears a vague image of a
man, with all members of the body, just enormously large." "I have
always pictured him according to a description in _Paradise Lost_ as
seated upon a throne, while around are angels playing on harps and
singing hymns." "I think of God as having bodily form and being much
larger than the average man. He has a radiant countenance beaming
with love and compassion. He is erect and upright, fearless and
brave."[3]
No one of us may be contemptuous of such crude ideas; we all possessed
them once. Indeed the loss of them, with their picture of deity, clear
in feature and distinct in outline, has been to some a shock from
which faith has not recovered. When increasing knowledge discredited
our immature theology, and our world immeasurably widened, the very
human God of our first imaginations was lost among the stars. We
learned that this is a universe where the light that falls upon our
eyes tonight left the far heavens when Abraham was shepherding on
Syrian hills. The Christian Gospel of the personal Father which once
was good news became a serious problem. We still may cling to the old
meanings of our religious faith; still we may pray in hours of need as
though our childhood's God were really there; but at times we suspect
that we are clinging to the beauty of an early memory while
reluctantly we lose conviction of its truth. Many modern men and women
can understand the plight of the famous Dr. Jowett of Oxford, who, so
runs the tradition, inserted "used to" in a muffled voice, when he
recited the creed: "I _used to_ believe in God the Father Almighty."
With such misgivings, whether as habitual disturbers of our faith or
as occasional moods of unbelief that come and go, most of us must be
familiar. What Charles Darwin is reported to have said about himself,
many if they spoke frankly would say too: "Sometimes I feel a warm
sense of a personal God, and then"--with a shake of his head--"it goes
away."
III
Whatever may be our theology, the fact is plain that the denial of a
personal God solves no problem. For if we may not think of God in
terms of personality, the query still remains, which was there
before--_in what terms shall we conceive of the Eternal_? In a
discussion on the nature of the sky, one boy, denying the idea of a
solid canopy, exclaimed, "There ain't any sky." Said the other, seeing
how little this negation solved the problem, "Well, what _is_ it that
ain't?" Some such inquiry one must put to his doubts about God's
personality. Though we may deny a personal God, nevertheless in the
place where he once stood, creator and sustainer of all existence, is
Something that we do think of somehow. We may have but little of
Carlyle's sublime imagination; may not easily transport ourselves to
stand with him on the far northern cliff, "behind him all Europe and
Africa fast asleep, except the watchmen, and before him the silent
Immensity and Palace of the Eternal, whereof our sun is but the
porch-lamp." Yet who of us, regarding the illimitable universe, on the
far outskirts of which our little earth is whirling, so minute that
through the strongest telescope from the nearest star its conflagration
would be quite invisible, has escaped the sense of a Universal Power?
And the human mind cannot so keep itself at home in little tasks and
pleasures as to evade the question: How shall we think of the Power
that made the universe? In what terms? By what analogies? Hours of
revelation come in every serious life when no desire compares in
urgency with the desire to know the character of the Eternal. It does
make a prodigious difference what hands hold the leash of the
universe.
This second fact is also clear, that if we are to think of the Eternal
at all, we must think in terms of something drawn from our experience.
When we sing of Paradise we speak of golden streets and gates of
pearl, and Thoreau remarks that, arriving in heaven, he expects to
find pine trees there. Such words we do not take literally, but such
words we cannot utterly avoid, for if we are to speak at all of the
unknown glory, we must use pictures from the known. So we think of God
in human symbols. We cannot catch him in an abstract definition as
though a boy with a butterfly net should capture the sun at noon. Our
minds are not fitted for such enterprise. Of necessity we take
something homely, familiar, close at hand, and lifting it up as far as
we can reach, say _God is most like that_. No one who thinks at
all of the Eternal escapes this necessity.
By this method the _materialist_ reaches his philosophy. Haeckel
laughs to scorn the opening clause of the "Apostles' Creed." "I
believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth"--for
such faith no words are contemptuous enough. This denial does not mean
however that Haeckel has no faith; he deliberately offers a creedal
substitute which runs in part: I believe in a "chemical substance of a
viscous character, having albuminous matter and water as its chief
constituents." In such terms does Haeckel think of the Eternal. A
professor of medicine has remarked that such a theory reduces all
reality to "phosphorus and glue." When some Psalmist cries, "Bless the
Lord, O my soul," nothing substantial is speaking or is being spoken
to save phosphorus and glue! When an Italian patriot cries, "The time
for dying comes to all, but the time for dishonoring oneself ought
never to come," nothing is real and causal save phosphorus and glue!
And every gracious and redeeming deed in history from the love of
mothers to the cross of Christ has been a complicated working out of
phosphorus and glue! In whatever labored phrases he may state his
case, the materialist's method there is obvious; he has taken physical
energy, of whose presence in his own body he is first assured, and
whose reality he has then read out into the world, and this homely and
familiar experience he has lifted up as far as he can reach to say,
the Eternal is most like that.
So far as method is concerned, the _theist_ of necessity travels
the same road; only he insists on a nobler symbol than physical energy
in terms of which to think of God. He takes _mind_. He says in
effect: There may be wide stretches of the universe where our
intellects meet no answer and find no meaning. But in much of the
universe we do see meaning; and how can intelligence find sense where
intelligence has not put sense? A few scratches on a cliff's face in
Assyria, after centuries of neglect, rendered up their meaning to the
mind of Rawlinson. They were themselves the work of intelligence, and
intelligence could read them. So, the theist continues, the universe
is in part at least intelligible. Our minds fit into it and are
answered by it. We can trace its laws and predict its movements. Man
first worked out the nature of the ellipse in theoretical geometry,
and then telescopes later showed the gigantic ellipses of planetary
orbits in the heavens. Can it be that this intelligible world,
readable by mind, is itself essentially mindless? As easily believe
that the notes of Wagner's operas were accidentally blown together by
a whirlwind and yet are playable by man! Therefore the theist believes
the universe to be rational; he takes mind as he has known it in
himself, and lifting it as high as he can reach, cries, God is most
like that.
So far as the general method of approach is concerned, the Christian
travels the same road to his idea of God. Only he cannot believe that
the best he knows is too good or too great to be a symbol in terms of
which to think of the Eternal. Therefore he will not take a byproduct
of experience such as physical energy, nor a section of personality
such as mind; he takes the full orb of personality, _self-conscious
being that knows and purposes and loves_, and he affirms that God is
most like this. Such in its simplest form is the Christian assertion
of God's personality.
In one of his noblest passages Martineau has put into classic form
this necessity, which we have been discussing, of thinking about God
in terms of human experience: "God, being infinite, can never be fully
comprehended by our minds; whatever thought of him be there, his real
nature must still transcend: there will yet be deep after deep beyond,
within that light ineffable; and what we see, compared with what we do
not see, will be as the raindrop to the firmament. Our conception of
him can never _correspond with the reality_, so as to be without
omission, disproportion, or aberration; but can only _represent the
reality_, and _stand for God_ within our souls, till nobler
thoughts arise and reveal themselves as his interpreters. And this is
precisely what we mean by a symbolical idea. The devotee who
prostrates himself before a black stone,--the Egyptian who in his
prayers was haunted by the ideal form of the graceful ibis or the
monstrous sphinx--the Theist who bends beneath the starry porch that
midnight opens to the temple of the universe--the Christian who sees
in heaven a spirit akin to that which divinely lived in Galilee, and
with glorious pity died on Calvary--all alike assume a representation
of him whose immeasurable nature they can neither compass nor escape.
And the only question is, whether the conception they portray upon the
wall of their ideal temple is an abominable idol, or a true and
sanctifying mediatorial thought."
IV
In their endeavor thus to think of God in terms of personality, some
are perplexed because in their imagination a person is inseparable
from flesh. "I think of God as a personal being," writes a college
student. "A personal being would have a form that you could see or
touch." But this would be true only if the grossest materialism were
accepted, and the spiritual life declared to be the product of brain
as digestive fluids are of salivary glands. On any other basis,
personality is not indissolubly bound to body nor by it necessarily
delimited. A man cannot hear without his ear, but he is not his ear;
he cannot hear without the auditory nerve, but he is not the auditory
nerve; he cannot hear without the temporal lobe of the brain, but he
is not the brain nor any portion of it. These may be the instruments
which he uses; he is free when they are well, hampered when they are
broken, and at last he is separable from them all. John Quincy Adams
at the age of eighty met a friend upon a Boston street. "Good
morning," said the friend, "and how is John Quincy Adams today?"
"Thank you," was the ex-president's reply, "John Quincy Adams himself
is well, quite well, I thank you. But the house in which he lives at
present is becoming dilapidated. It is tottering upon its foundation.
Time and the seasons have nearly destroyed it. Its roof is pretty well
worn out. Its walls are much shattered and it trembles with every
wind. The old tenement is becoming almost uninhabitable and I think
John Quincy Adams will have to move out of it soon. But he himself is
quite well, quite well." Such a conception of man as _being_ a
permanent personality and _having_ a temporary body is essential to
any worthy meaning when we use personal terms about God.
With such an elevated thought, however, of what personality does mean,
it soon is evident that no other reality with which we deal is so
worthy to be the symbol of an Eternal Spirit. Is one perplexed that
God, who is invisible, should be pictured in the similitude of human
persons? But _we_ are invisible. The outward husks and fleshly
garment of our friends we indeed have seen, but upon the friend
himself--consciousness, love, purpose, ideal, and character--no eye
has looked. No mirror ever has been strong enough to show us to
ourselves. In every homely conversation this ineffable miracle is
wrought: out of the unseen where I dwell, I signal by word and gesture
to you back in the unseen where you dwell. We are inhabitants now of
the intangible and unseen world; we are as invisible as God.
Indeed, personality is essentially the most unlimited reality with
which we deal; in comparison a solar system is a little thing.
Consider _memory_, by which we can retrace our youthful days, build
our shanties once again at brooksides, replay our games, and
recapitulate the struggles and the joys of the first days at school.
Nothing in all the universe can remember except persons. Were we not
so familiar with this element in human greatness, we would more often
pause to exclaim, as did Augustine, fifteen centuries ago, "Great is
the power of memory. Amazement overcomes me when I think of it. And
yet men go abroad to gaze upon the mountains, the broad rivers, the
wide ocean, the courses of the stars, and pass themselves, the
crowning wonder, by!" Consider _imagination_, by which, sitting still
in body we can project ourselves around the world, can walk down
Princes Street in Edinburgh, or stand in mingled awe and condemnation
before the tomb of Napoleon in Paris, or rise uncovered before the
majesty of the Matterhorn. Nothing in all the universe can do that
except persons. Were full power to act wherever we can _think_ added
to our gifts, we should come so near to incipient omnipresence as to
be in dread of our responsibility. Consider _love_, by which we live
not so much where our bodies are as where our friends and family may
be. Love expands the individual until his real life is independent of
geography. Says one lover to another:
"The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double."
Many a mother in America has _lived_ in the trenches of France;
many a man has found that what might happen to him where his body was
could not be compared with what might happen to him where his
friendships were; and as we grow in love and loyalty we find ourselves
scattered all over creation. How far such an expansion of life may go
our Lord revealed when he said, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of
these, my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me." (Matt.
25:40.) Nothing in heaven above or on the earth beneath can so extend
itself in love save persons.
Finally, consider _creative power_ by which human beings project
themselves into the future, and, with masterful ideals in mind, lay
hold on circumstance and bend it to their will. As if he shared
creative power with the Eternal, an engineer summons nature's forces
to his bidding and lays his will upon them, until where nothing was a
structure stands that mankind may use for centuries. Nothing in all
the universe can so create except persons. In that essentially
creative act where deathless ideas and harmonies are given being by
poets and musicians, so that something out of nothing is brought to
pass by personality, man faces a mystery as abysmal as God's making of
the world. "Paradise Lost" is wonderful; but not half as wonderful as
the creative personality itself who years before projected it. "An
inward prompting," Milton says, "which now grew daily upon me, that by
labor and intense study, joined with the strong propensity of nature,
I might perhaps leave something so written to after times as they
should not willingly let it die." Nothing can so create save
personality.
Personality is not so limited that we should be ashamed to think of
God in terms of it. Rather, of all realities with which we deal,
personality alone, invisible, reaching back in memory, reaching out in
imagination, expanding itself in love, and laying hold upon the future
with creative power, is a worthy symbol of the Eternal Spirit.
Even when the meaning of personality has been so enlarged and
elevated, we should not leave our statement of belief in God as though
our experience of personality were a mould into which our thought of
him is poured and so delimited. We are not presumptuous Lilliputians,
running out with verbal stakes and threads, to pin down the tall,
majestic Gulliver of the Eternal and dance in theological exultation
round our capture. We know better than that. We understand how
insufficient is every human name for God. We know that when we have
said our best--"How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past
tracing out!" (Rom. 11:33).
Nothing more has marred the Christian message and discredited the
Christian faith than the unwise presumption that has forced its
definitions into the secrets of the Infinite. "It is enough to say,"
exclaims Leslie Stephen, "that they defined the nature of God Almighty
with an accuracy from which modest naturalists would shrink in
describing the genesis of a black beetle." The antidote to such vain
pride of theology is found in the wholesome modesty of the Bible.
There man enquires, "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou
find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what
canst thou do? Deeper than Sheol; what canst thou know?" (Job 11:7).
There God replies: "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are
my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts"
(Isa. 55:9). Scripture bears abundant testimony to the symbolic nature
of our human terms for God. "Like as a father pitieth his children, so
Jehovah pitieth them that fear him" (Psalm 103:13). "As one whom his
mother comforteth, so will I comfort you" (Isa. 66:13). "I will
betroth thee unto me" (Hos. 2:20). "Return, ... saith Jehovah, for I
am a husband unto you" (Jer. 3:14). "The Lord spake unto Moses ... as
a man speaketh unto his friend" (Ex. 33:11). Father, Mother,
Bridegroom, Husband, Friend--these are symbols of God. Men,
endeavoring to frame some worthy thought of the Eternal, lift up their
best in phrases such as these, and in them enshrine their noblest
concepts of the divine. They have no better, truer thing to say of
God, no wiser way in which to say it. But when they think of the
Eternal as he must be, and of their human words, infinitesimal in
comparison, they know that all their best names for God are like small
measures of water dipped from an immeasurable sea. For all that, so
much of God as they can grasp and understand is the most important
truth that mankind knows. Let even a tea-cup of water be taken to a
laboratory and it will tell the truth about the sea; _that one tea-cup
will reveal the quality of the whole ocean_. Yet it will not reveal
all the truth about the ocean. When one considers the reach of the sea
over the rim of the world; thinks of the depths that no eye can
pierce, the distances that no mind can imagine; remembers the currents
that sweep through the sea, the tides that rise there, and the storms
that beat it to its nether wells, he dare not try to put _these_ into
a tea-cup. So God sweeps out beyond the reach of human symbols. At
once so true and so inadequate are all our words for him.
So we might speak to one who incredulously looks upon our faith, but
for one who whole-heartedly approaches God as Christianity suggests,
no negative and cautionary word is adequate. The Christian method of
conceiving God brings the most exhilarating thought of him that man
has ever had. It says in brief: Take your _best_ and think of God as
most truly symbolized in that. As to what our best is, not even the
agnostics doubt. The physical universe belittles us on one side only;
it makes a pigmy of the body. In our spirits we still tower above the
physical; we are greater than the world we know. Our supreme good, the
divinest reality with which we deal, is personality. Then lift that
up, says Christianity; it is your best, and you dare not think of God
in terms of less; you have Christ's example in arguing from the human
best to the divine: "If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts
unto your children, _how much more_ ... your Father." (Matt. 7:11.)
The Christian faith asserts that when a man thus thinks of God in
terms of the best he knows he is on the road toward truth. How many
billion spiritual miles he may have to travel to the end, no man can
tell. Only he will never need to stop, retrace his steps, and start
upon a lower path than personality, a road that lies beneath
righteousness and love. The road leads on and up beyond our
imagination, but it is the same road and not another. _God is
personality plus, or else he alone is completely personal and we are
but in embryo._
If God so is personal, then all the deep meanings of religious life
and faith that the saints, our spiritual sires, have known are open to
us modern men and women. Forms of thought indeed have changed, but if
God is thus our Father and our Friend, the essentials of Christian
experience are waiting for us all. Life then is not purposeless; all
creation is bound into spiritual unity by personal Will; and in
sacrificial labor we are serving one who is able to guard that which
we "have committed unto him against that day" (II Tim. 1:12). Old
hymns of confidence in time of trial, we too can sing:
"Still will we trust, though earth seem dark and dreary,
And the heart faint beneath His chastening rod;
Though steep and hard our pathway, worn and weary,
Still will we trust in God."
And we can pray, not indeed with clamorous beggary as though the grace
of God were a wayside stall where every greedy hand can pluck what
passing whim may wish, but we can commune with God as the real saints
have always prayed with humility and gratitude and confident desire
for good. Most of all, that priceless privilege is open to us which is
the center and sun of Christian thought and life. For if among all
realities in our experience, we have dared take the best, personality,
as a symbol in terms of which to think of God, how should we not,
among all personalities, take the best we know as the highroad of
approach to him. Therefore our real symbol of God shall be no man
among us, frail and sinful, but our Lord himself "fairest among ten
thousand"--"the one altogether beautiful." We shall think of God in
terms of him. We shall see "the light of the knowledge of the glory of
God in the face of Jesus Christ" (II Cor. 4:6.)
[2] Copyright, 1914, Charles Scribner's Sons. Used by permission.
[3] From a questionnaire, "Belief in God and Immortality," by Prof.
James H. Leuba.
CHAPTER IV
Belief and Trust
DAILY READINGS
We have tried to explain our faith in the personal God, and to see the
transfiguring influence of that faith on life. But is belief in God
always such a blessing as we have pictured? Rather faith, like every
other experience of man, has its caricatures and burlesques. Many men
are prevented from appreciation of faith in God, with its inestimable
blessings, because they have so continually seen faith's perversions.
The fact is that belief in God may be an utterly negligible matter in
a man's experience or may even become a positively pernicious
influence. Let us, in the daily readings, consider some of the
_familiar travesties on faith_.
Fourth Week, First Day
=Praise ye Jehovah.
Praise Jehovah, O my soul.
While I live will I praise Jehovah:
I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being,
Put not your trust in princes,
Nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth;
In that very day his thoughts perish.
Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help,
Whose hope is in Jehovah his God.=
=--Psalm 146:1-5.=
No one can mistake the note of reality in this psalmist's experience
of God. But every one of us knows people who, if asked whether they
believed in God, would readily assent, yet to whom faith makes no such
difference in life as this psalm expresses. Their faith is nothing but
an opinion about God, lightly held, a formal consent that what church
or family tradition says must be correct. They have what Luther used
to call "the charcoal burner's faith." A man of that occupation, when
asked what he believed, said, "What Holy Church believes"; but,
questioned further, he could not tell what it was that Holy Church did
believe. So formal, vitally unpossessed, and practically unreal is
much of our religious opinion that passes for faith. Dean Swift was a
churchman of high rank, and yet his biographer is compelled to say of
him: "He clung to the doctrines of his church, not because he could
give abstract reasons for his belief, but simply because the church
happened to be his." Vital religious faith is a very different thing
from such dry conventionality. A man may assent to the contents of a
college catalogue and yet never have experience of college life; he
may agree that a menu is dietetically correct and yet never grow
strong from the food; and he may believe in every creed in Christendom
and not know what faith in God really means. Opinions about God are a
roadway to God, but the end of the journey is a personal fellowship
that transfigures life; and to seize opinions as though they were the
object of faith is, to use Tagore's figure, "like a man who tries to
reach his destination by firmly clutching the dust of the road."
_O Thou great Father of us all, we rejoice that at last we know Thee.
All our soul within us is glad because we need no longer cringe
before Thee as slaves of holy fear, seeking to appease Thine anger by
sacrifice and self-inflicted pain, but may come like little children,
trustful and happy, to the God of love. Thou art the only true
Father, and all the tender beauty of our human loves is the reflected
radiance of Thy loving kindness, like the moonlight from the
sunlight, and testifies to the eternal passion that kindled it._
_Grant us growth of spiritual vision, that with the passing years we
may enter into the fulness of this our faith. Since Thou art our
Father, may we not hide our sins from Thee, but overcome them by the
stern comfort of Thy presence. By this knowledge uphold us in our
sorrows and make us patient even amid the unsolved mysteries of the
years. Reveal to us the larger goodness and love that speak through
the unbending laws of Thy world. Through this faith make us the
willing equals of all Thy other children._
_As Thou art ever pouring out Thy life in sacrificial father-love,
may we accept the eternal law of the cross and give ourselves to
Thee and to all men. We praise Thee for Jesus Christ, whose life has
revealed to us this faith and law, and we rejoice that he has become
the first-born among many brethren. Grant that in us, too, the faith
in Thy fatherhood may shine through all our life with such persuasive
beauty that some who still creep in the dusk of fear may stand erect
as free sons of God, and that others who now through unbelief are
living as orphans in an empty world may stretch out their hands to
the great Father of their spirits and find Thee near. Amen._--Walter
Rauschenbusch.
Fourth Week, Second Day
Faith is travestied in many lives not so much by the substitution of
opinion for experience, as by making religion consist in certain
devout practices, such as church-going. Ceremonialism, instead of
being an aid in making God real, takes the place of fellowship with
God. How scathing were the attacks of the prophets on this distortion
of religion!
=Hear the word of Jehovah, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law
of our God, ye people of Gomorrah. What unto me is the multitude of
your sacrifices? saith Jehovah: I have had enough of the
burnt-offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not
in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. When ye come
to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to trample
my courts? Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination
unto me; new moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies--I cannot
away with iniquity and the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your
appointed feasts my soul hateth; they are a trouble unto me; I am
weary of bearing them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will
hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not
hear: your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; put
away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;
learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the
fatherless, plead for the widow.--Isa. 1:10-17.=
Many young people, watching conventional observances in religious
worship and perceiving no real life active there, come to the
conclusion that religious faith is a decent and negligible formality.
So William Scott Palmer, tracing his progress from agnosticism to
Christianity, describes the religion of his boyhood: "Religion as a
personal matter, religion as a life, did not exist for me or for my
family. The border-land of my native village went to church at eleven
o'clock on fine Sundays, and I went in and with it. There were unlucky
Sundays when the Litany was said, and the service prolonged by its
unmeaning length; the lucky Sundays were wet ones that cleared up
later.... I did not know that there was any vital meaning in
religion." And even Sir Wilfred Grenfell, whose work in Labrador is
one of this generation's outstanding triumphs of Christian faith, says
of his young manhood: "The ordinary exponents of the Christian faith
had never succeeded in interesting me in any way, or even in making me
believe that they were more than professionally concerned themselves.
Religion appeared to be a profession, exceedingly conventional, and
most unattractive in my estimation--the very last I should have
thought of selecting." No travesty on faith is more deadly in its
effects than this substitution of conventional observance for life.
_O Jesus, we thy ministers bow before Thee to confess the common sins
of our calling. Thou knowest all things; Thou knowest that we love
Thee and that our hearts' desire is to serve Thee in faithfulness;
and yet, like Peter, we have so often failed Thee in the hour of Thy
need. If ever we have loved our own leadership and power when we
sought to lead our people to Thee, we pray Thee to forgive. If we
have been engrossed in narrow duties and little questions, when the
vast needs of humanity called aloud for prophetic vision and
apostolic sympathy, we pray Thee to forgive. If in our loyalty to the
Church of the past we have distrusted Thy living voice and have
suffered Thee to pass from our door unheard, we pray Thee to forgive.
If ever we have been more concerned for the strong and the rich than
for the shepherdless throngs of the people for whom Thy soul grieved,
we pray Thee to forgive._
_O Master, amidst our failures we cast ourselves upon Thee in
humility and contrition. We need new light and a new message. We need
the ancient spirit of prophecy and the leaping fire and joy of a new
conviction, and Thou alone canst give it. Inspire the ministry of Thy
Church with dauntless courage to face the vast needs of the future.
Free us from all entanglements that have hushed our voice and bound
our action. Grant us grace to look upon the veiled sins of the rich
and the coarse vices of the poor through Thine eyes. Give us Thine
inflexible sternness against sin, and Thine inexhaustible compassion
for the frailty and tragedy of those who do the sin. Make us faithful
shepherds of Thy flock, true seers of God, and true followers of
Jesus. Amen._--Walter Rauschenbusch.
Fourth Week, Third Day
=And he spake also this parable unto certain who trusted in
themselves that they were righteous, and set all others at nought:
Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the
other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself,
God, I thank thee, that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners,
unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the
week; I give tithes of all that I get. But the publican, standing
afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but
smote his breast, saying, God, be thou merciful to me a sinner. I say
unto you, This man went down to his house justified rather than the
other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled; but he
that humbleth himself shall be exalted.--Luke 18:9-14.=
The men against whom the Master directed this parable were bigots.
Self-opinionated, self-conceited, dogmatic, and contemptuous--they
wore all the attributes of bigotry. _And bigotry is a very familiar
perversion of faith._ Vital fellowship with God ought to make men
gracious, magnanimous, generous; it ought to make life with God seem
so incomparably important that when anyone has that, his opinions
about God will be tolerantly regarded, however mistaken they may
appear to be. Dr. Pritchett, when President of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, passed through a classroom where a young
instructor was conducting a chemical experiment. "The reaction
itself," says Dr. Pritchett, "was going on in a retort on the table,
while on a blackboard was written the conventional formula, which in
the science of chemistry is used to describe the reaction. It so
happened that the instructor had made a mistake in writing the
formula; instead of CO^2 he had written CO_3. But this made not the
slightest difference in the reaction which was going on in the flask."
So, a man may live his life with an admirably Christian spirit,
although he describes it with a mistaken formula. His error is
theoretical, not vital. But a bigot is so sure that he alone knows the
true formula, that a man without that formula is altogether wrong, and
that he must either set him right or condemn him utterly, that he
grows bitter, hard, unlovely. His opinions may be right, but his
spirit is wrong. The faith that should make his life radiant is
perverted to make it narrow, harsh, contemptuous. He renders hateful
the very faith he seeks to commend and ruins the reputation of the God
whom he is zealous to exalt. So the Pharisee of the parable missed all
the beauty of the Publican's life because he thought the Publican's
formula was wrong. No one can estimate the irreparable damage which
zealous bigots have done to true faith.
_O Thou who art of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, canst Thou
bear to look on us conscious of our great transgression? Yet hide not
Thy face from us, for in Thy light alone shall we see light._
_Forgive us for the sins which crowd into the mind as we realise Thy
presence; our ungovernable tempers, our shuffling insincerities, the
craven fear of our hearts, the pettiness of our spirits, the foul
lusts and fatal leanings of our souls. Not for pardon only, but for
cleansing, Lord, we pray._
_Forgive us, we beseech Thee, our unconscious sins; things which must
be awful to Thy sight, of which we yet know nothing. Forgive by
giving us in fuller measure the awakening of Thy presence, that we
may know ourselves, and lose all love of sin in the knowledge of what
Thou art._
_Forgive us for the things for which we can never forgive ourselves;
those sad turned pages of our life which some chance wind of memory
blows back again with shame; for the moment of cruel passion, the
hour beyond recall, the word that went forth to poison and defame,
the carelessness that lost our opportunity, the unheeded fading of
bright ideals._
_Forgive us for the things that others can never forgive; the idle
tale, the cruel wrong, the uncharitable condemnation, the unfair
judgment, the careless criticism, the irresponsible conduct._
_Forgive us for the sins of our holy things; that we have turned the
sacred page without a sigh, read the confessions of holy men and
women and never joined therein, lived in Thy light and never prayed
to be forgiven or rendered Thee thanksgiving; professed to believe in
Thee and love Thee, yet dared to injure and hate._
_Naught save being born again, nothing but a miracle of grace, can
ever be to us forgiveness. Cleanse our hearts, renew our minds, and
take not Thy Holy Spirit from us. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Fourth Week, Fourth Day
Of all perversions of faith none is more fatal than the substitution
of opinions about God for integrity of character and usefulness of
life. With what scathing vehemence does James, as Dr. Moffatt renders
him, attack this travesty on faith.
="My brothers, what is the use of anyone declaring he has faith, if
he has no deeds to show? Can his faith save him? Suppose some brother
or sister is ill-clad and short of daily food; if any of you says to
them, 'Depart in peace! Get warm, get food,' without supplying their
bodily needs, what use is that? So faith, unless it has deeds, is
dead in itself. Someone will object, 'And you claim to have faith!'
Yes, and I claim to have deeds as well; you show me your faith
without any deeds, and I will show you by my deeds what faith is! You
believe in one God? Well and good. So do the devils, and they
shudder. But will you understand, you senseless fellow, that faith
without deeds is dead? When our father Abraham offered his son Isaac
on the altar, was he not justified by what he did?"--James 2:14-21.=
An American business man not long dead, who hated any word from the
pulpit about social righteousness, used to complain: "Preachers are
talking so everlastingly about this earth. I've done my best to get
them to stick to the Gospel, and not allow 'worldliness' to get into
the teachings of the Church; but the good old preachers have gone to
glory." Yet this pious zealot helped wreck the finances of a great
railroad system, and with part of the proceeds built a theological
seminary. _There was no vital, intelligent connection between his
faith in God and his ideals of character and service._ One verse
should be made to flame in Christian pulpits: "If any provideth not
for his own, and specially his own household, he hath denied the faith
and is worse than an unbeliever" (I Tim. 5:8). Domestic fidelity is
here only typical of all basic moral obligations. What this verse says
in principle is clear: theoretical unbelief is not the worst sin in
God's sight; any man who fails in the fundamental duties of rectitude
and service has thereby denied the faith and is worse than an atheist.
_O thou holy One and just! if alone the pure in heart can see thee,
truly we must stand afar off, and not so much as lift up our eyes
unto heaven. Were it not that thou hast help and pity for the
contrite spirit, we could only cry, "Depart from us, we are sinful
men, O Lord!" For idle words, for proud thoughts and unloving deeds;
for wasted moments and reluctant duties, and too eager rest; for the
wandering desire, the vain fancy, the scornful doubt, the untrustful
care; for impatient murmurs, and unruly passions, and the hardness of
a worldly heart; thou, Lord, canst call us unto judgment, and we have
naught to answer thee. But, O thou Judge of men, thou art witness
that we do not love our guilty ways; make our conscience true and
tender that we may duly hate them, and refuse them any peace as
enemies to thee. Stir up within us a great and effectual repentance
that we may redeem the time which we have lost, and in the hours that
remain may do the work of many days. Thou knowest all our secret
snares; drive from us every root of bitterness: with thy severity
pluck out, O Lord, the thorns of sin from our entangled souls, and
bind them as a crown of contrition around our bleeding brows; and
having made our peace with thee may we henceforth watch and pray that
we enter not again into temptation, but bear our cross with patience
to the close. Amen._--James Martineau.
Fourth Week, Fifth Day
Some of the most lamentable perversions of religious faith arise from
inadequate ideas of God. Consider, for example, the way Manasseh
thought that the Divine ought to be worshiped.
=For he built again the high places which Hezekiah his father had
destroyed; and he reared up altars for Baal, and made an Asherah, as
did Ahab king of Israel, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and
served them. And he built altars in the house of Jehovah, whereof
Jehovah said, In Jerusalem will I put my name. And he built altars
for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of Jehovah.
And he made his son to pass through the fire, and practised augury,
and used enchantments, and dealt with them that had familiar spirits,
and with wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of Jehovah, to
provoke him to anger.--II Kings 21:3-6.=
Then compare the thought of the Master on the same subject.
=But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall
worship the Father in spirit and truth: for such doth the Father seek
to be his worshippers. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him
must worship in spirit and truth.--John 4:23, 24.=
There is no reason to suppose that Manasseh was insincere; he is one
of an innumerable company in whom the religious motive has been
harnessed to warped and ignorant ideas of God. Religious faith, like
any other tremendous power, is terrific in evil consequences when it
goes wrong. Men, under its subtle and prevailing influence, have waged
bloody wars, worshiped with licentious rituals, carried on pitiless
persecutions, and in bigotry, cruelty, and deceit have grown worse
than they would have been with no religion whatsoever. And men, in its
inspiring light, have launched missionary movements, founded great
philanthropies, built schools, hospitals, orphanages, and in
sacrifice, courageous service, and hope of human brotherhood have made
man's history glorious. Religion needs intelligence to save it from
becoming a ruinous curse; like all power of the first magnitude it is
a disaster if ignorantly used. Since religious faith will always be a
major human motive, under what obligations are we to save it from
perversion and to keep it clean and right!
_Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we are most unworthy to be called
Thy children; for when light and darkness have been set before us, we
have often chosen darkness rather than light. Conscious that within
us are the elements of a nobler and a meaner life, we have yet given
way to the meaner appetites, and have not obeyed the inspiration Thou
hast kindled within us. We entreat Thee now of Thy grace to call us
back from the ways of temptation and sin into that higher life which
Thou dost breathe upon us, and which is manifested in Jesus Christ
our Lord. Give us the self-knowledge, the humility, the repentance,
the aspiration which draw us to the Cross of Christ, that worshiping
there in lowliness, we may see the weakness of falsehood and the
strength of truth, the exceeding sinfulness of selfishness, and the
beauty of love and sacrifice._
_O Thou whose secret is with them that fear Thee, inspire us with
that loyalty of soul, that willingness to do Thy will to which all
things are clear. Darkness, we know, cometh upon the proud and
disobedient; confusion is ever attendant upon self-will; while to the
humble, the earnest, and the pure-minded, the way of duty and
spiritual health is made clear. O Spirit of the Eternal, subdue
within us all pride, all vainglory, all self-seeking, and bring every
thought and every desire into obedience to the law of Christ our
Lord._
_Almighty Father, to Thee would we consecrate these earthly days from
infancy to age. Thee would we remember in childhood and youth. Thee
would we serve in all the relations and activities of middle age.
Thee would we teach our children to love and serve. Be Thou our stay
and hope when health and strength shall fail. And when we are
summoned hence, do Thou, O Life of our life, illumine the mystery of
the invisible world with Thy presence and love. We ask these
blessings in the spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen._--John Hunter.
Fourth Week, Sixth Day
The perversions of religious faith, working pitiable instead of
benevolent consequences, are often seen on mission fields. Consider
Paul's address in Athens:
=And Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus, and said,=
=Ye men of Athens, in all things I perceive that ye are very
religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your
worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, TO AN UNKNOWN
GOD. What therefore ye worship in ignorance, this I set forth unto
you. The God that made the world and all things therein, he, being
Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;
neither is he served by men's hands, as though he needed anything,
seeing he himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and
he made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the
earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of
their habitation; that they should seek God, if haply they might feel
after him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us: for
in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain even of your
own poets have said,=
=For we are also his offspring.=
=--Acts 17:22-28.=
Paul did not need to plead for religion with the Athenians; they were
already "very religious." Only religion was not doing for them what it
ought; it was a power used "in ignorance"; and Paul, valuing all that
was good there, quoting their own poets with appreciation,
nevertheless longed to take their strong religious motives and so
clarify and direct them that faith might mean unqualified benediction.
Is not this always the right missionary method? The people of India
are intensely religious; no tribe in Africa lacks its gods; and
everywhere the faith-motive is immensely powerful. But often it makes
mothers drown their babies in sacred rivers, it consecrates caste
systems as holy things, it centers man's adoration around unworthy
objects, its powers, gone wrong, are a curse and not a blessing. If in
Jesus Christ religious faith has come to us, through no merit of our
own, as an unspeakable benediction, ought we not, humbly, without
dogmatism or intolerance, and yet with passionate earnestness, to
share our best with all the world? Religious faith may either depress
or lift a people's life; it is forever doing one or the other in every
nation under heaven; and _there is no hope for the world until this
master-motive is lifting everywhere_.
_Almighty God, our Father in heaven, who hast so greatly loved the
world that Thou hast given Thine only-begotten Son, the Redeemer,
communicate Thy love to the hearts of all believers, and revive Thy
Church to preach the Gospel to every creature._
_O Thou who rulest by Thy providence over land and sea, defend and
guide and bless the messengers of Christ; in danger be their shield,
in darkness be their hope; enrich their word and work with wisdom,
joy, and power, and let them gather souls for Thee in far fields
white unto the harvest._
_O Thou who by Thy Holy Spirit workest wonders in secret, open the
eyes that dimly look for light to see the day-star in Christ; open
the minds that seek the unknown God to know their Heavenly Father in
Christ; open the hearts that hunger for righteousness to find eternal
peace in Christ. Deliver the poor prisoners of ignorance and captives
of idolatry, break down the bars of error, and dispel the shadows of
the ancient night; lift up the gates, and let the King of glory and
the Prince of Peace come in._
_Thy kingdom, O Christ, is an everlasting kingdom! Strengthen Thy
servants to pray and labor and wait for its appearing; forgive our
little faith and the weakness of our endeavor; hasten the day when
all nations shall be at peace in Thee, and every land and every heart
throughout the world shall bless the name of the Lord Jesus, to the
glory of God the Father. Amen._--Henry van Dyke.
Fourth Week, Seventh Day
The sad perversions of religious faith are not a matter for foreign
missions only. At home, too, we find people who seem to be rather
worse than better because they are religious. Just as power in any
other form may be abused, so may religious faith. Some in the name of
religion become censorious and intolerant, some superstitious, some
slaves to morbid fears; and ignorance, self-conceit, pride, and
worldly ambition when driven and enforced by a religious motive are
infinitely worse than they would have been without it. Toward this
fact two attitudes are possible. One is to throw over religion on
account of its abuses; which is as reasonable as to deny all the
blessings of electricity because in ignorant hands it is a dangerous
power. The other is to take religious faith more seriously than ever,
to see how great a force for weal or woe it always is in human life,
and to strive in ourselves and in others for a high, intelligent, and
worthy understanding and use of it. For religion can mean what Amiel
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