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diff --git a/old/61004-0.txt b/old/61004-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 99c8f6f..0000000 --- a/old/61004-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,4386 +0,0 @@ -Project Gutenberg's Spiritual Energies In Daily Life, by Rufus M. Jones - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - -Title: Spiritual Energies In Daily Life - -Author: Rufus M. Jones - -Release Date: December 22, 2019 [EBook #61004] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE *** - - - - -Produced by WebRover, QuakerHeron, Monicas wicked stepmother -and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive) - - - - - - - - - - -SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE - - - - - [Illustration] - - THE MACMILLAN COMPANY - NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS - ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO - - MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED - LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA - MELBOURNE - - THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. - TORONTO - - - - - SPIRITUAL ENERGIES - IN DAILY LIFE - - BY - RUFUS M. JONES, LITT.D., D.D. - Professor of Philosophy in Haverford College - - Author of _Studies in Mystical Religion_; _The Inner Life_; - _The World Within_, etc. - - New York - THE MACMILLAN COMPANY - 1922 - - _All rights reserved_ - - COPYRIGHT, 1922, - BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY - - Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1922 - - PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - - - - -PREFACE - - -I wish to thank the editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_ for his permission -to print in this volume the chapter entitled “The Mystic’s Experience of -God,” also the editors of _The Journal of Religion_ for their permission -to use the article on “Psychology and the Spiritual Life.” Some of -the shorter essays have been printed in _The_ (London) _Friend_ and -in _The Homiletic Review_. Kind permission has been granted for their -reproduction. - - - - -INTRODUCTION - -RELIGION AS ENERGY - - -Religion is an experience which no definition exhausts. One writer with -expert knowledge of anthropology tells us what it is, and we know as -we read his account that, however true it may be as far as it goes, it -yet leaves untouched much undiscovered territory. We turn next to the -trained psychologist, who leads us “down the labyrinthine ways of our -own mind” and tells us why the human race has always been seeking God -and worshiping Him. We are thankful for his Ariadne thread which guides -us within the maze, but we feel convinced that there are doors which -he has not opened—“doors to which he had no key.” The theologian, with -great assurance and without “ifs and buts,” offers us the answer to all -mysteries and the solution of all problems, but when we have gone “up -the hill all the way to the very top” with him, we find it a “homesick -peak”—_Heimwehfluh_—and we still wonder over the real meaning of religion. - -We are evidently dealing here with something like that drinking horn -which the Norse God Thor tried to drain. He failed to do it because -the horn which he assayed to empty debouched into the endless ocean, -and therefore to drain the horn meant drinking the ocean dry. To probe -religion down to the bottom means knowing “what God and man is.” Each -one of us, in his own tongue and in terms of his own field of knowledge, -gives his partial word, his tiny glimpse of insight. But the returns are -never all in. There is always more to say. “Man is incurably religious,” -that fine scholar, Auguste Sabatier, said. Yes, he is. It is often wild -and erratic religion which we find, no doubt, but the hunger and thirst -of the human soul are an indubitable fact. In different forms of speech -we can all say with St. Augustine of Hippo: “Thou hast touched me and I -am on fire for thy peace.” - -In saying that religion is energy I am only seizing one aspect of this -great experience of the human heart. It is, however, I believe, an -essential aspect. A religion that makes no difference to a person’s life, -a religion that _does_ nothing, a religion that is utterly devoid of -power, may for all practical purposes be treated as though it did not -exist. The great experts—those who know from the inside what religion -is—always make much of its dynamic power, its energizing and propulsive -power. _Power_ is a word often on the lips of Jesus; never used, it -should be said, in the sense of extrinsic authority or the right to -command and govern, but always in reference to an intrinsic and interior -moral and spiritual energy of life. The kingdom of God comes with power, -not because the Messiah is supplied with ten legions of angels and can -sweep the Roman eagles back to the frontiers of the Holy Land, but it -“comes with power” because it is a divine and life-transforming energy, -working in the moral and spiritual nature of man, as the expanding -yeast works in the flour or as the forces of life push the seed into -germination and on into the successive stages toward the maturity of the -full-grown plant and grain. - -The little fellowship of followers and witnesses who formed the nucleus -of the new-born Church felt themselves “endued with power” on the day of -Pentecost. Something new and dynamic entered the consciousness of the -feeble band and left them no longer feeble. There was an in-rushing, -up-welling sense of invasion. They passed over from a visible Leader -and Master to an invisible and inward Presence revealed to them as an -unwonted energy. Ecstatic utterance, which seems to have followed, -is not the all-important thing. The important thing is heightened -moral quality, intensified fellowship, a fused and undying loyalty, -an irresistible boldness in the face of danger and opposition, a -fortification of spirit which nothing could break. This energy which came -with their experience is what marks the event as an epoch. - -St. Paul writes as though he were an expert in dynamics. “Dynamos,” -the Greek word for power, is one of his favorite words. He seems to -have found out how to draw upon energies in the universe which nobody -else had suspected were even there. It is a fundamental feature of his -“Aegean gospel” that God is not self-contained but self-giving, that He -circulates, as does the sun, as does the sea, and comes into us as an -energy. This incoming energy he calls by many names: “The Spirit,” “holy -Spirit,” “Christ,” “the Spirit of Christ,” “Christ in you,” “God that -worketh in us.” Whatever his word or term is, he is always declaring, -and he bases his testimony on experience, that God, as Christ reveals -Him, is an active energy working with us and in us for the complete -transformation of our fundamental nature and for _a new creation_ in us. - -All this perhaps sounds too grand and lofty, too remote and far away, -to touch us with reality. We assume that it is for saints or apostles, -but not for common everyday people like ourselves. Well, that is where -we are wrong. The accounts which St. Paul gives of the energies of -religion are not for his own sake, or for persons who are _bien né_ and -naturally saintly. They are for the rank and file of humans. In fact his -Corinthian fellowship was raised by these energies out of the lowest -stratum of society. The words which he uses to describe them are probably -not over strong: “Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, -nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, -nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners -shall inherit the kingdom of God. _And such were some of you_: but ye are -washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name [i.e. the -power] of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”[1] - -It is to be noticed, further, that St. Paul does not confine his list -of energies to those mighty spiritual forces which come down from above -and work upon us from the outside. Much more often our attention is -directed to energies which are potential within ourselves—even in the -most ordinary of us—energies which work as silently as molecular forces -or as “the capillary oozing of water,” but which nevertheless are as -reconstructive as the forces of springtime, following the winter’s havoc. -If the grace of God—the unlimited sacrificing love of God revealed in -Christ—is for St. Paul the supreme spiritual energy of the universe, -hardly less important is the simple human energy which meets that -centrifugal energy and makes it operate within the sphere of the moral -will. That dynamic energy, by which the man responds to God’s upward pull -and which makes all the difference, St. Paul calls faith. - -We are so accustomed to the use of the word in a spurious sense that -we are slow to apprehend the immense significance of this human energy -which lies potentially within us. Unfortunately trained young folks and -scientifically minded people are apt to shy away from the word and put -themselves on the defensive, as though they were about to be asked to -believe the impossible or the dubious or the unprovable. Faith in the -sense in which St. Paul uses it does not mean _believing_ something. -It is a moral attitude and response of will to the character of God -as He has been revealed in Christ. It is like the act which closes -the electric circuit, which act at once releases power. The dynamic -effect which follows the act is the best possible verification of the -rationality of the act. So, too, faith as a moral response is no blind -leap, no wild venture; it is an act which can be tested and verified by -moral and spiritual effects, which are as real as the heat, light, and -horse power of the dynamo. - -Faith has come to be recognized as an energy in many spheres of life. We -know what a stabilizer it is in the sphere of finance. Stocks and bonds -and banks shift their values as faith in them rises or falls. _Morale_ -is only another name for faith. Our human relationships, our social -structures, our enjoyment of one another, our satisfaction in books and -in lectures rest upon faith and when that energy fails, collapses of the -most serious sort follow. We might as well try to build a world without -cohesion as to maintain society without the energy of faith. - -We have many illustrations of the important part which faith plays in -the sphere of physical health. The corpuscles of the blood and the -molecules of the body are altered by it. The tension of the arteries and -the efficiency of the digestive tract are affected by it. Nerves are -in close sympathetic _rapport_ with faith. It is never safe to tell a -strong man that he is pale and that he looks ill. If two or three persons -in succession give him a pessimistic account of his appearance, he will -soon begin to have the condition which has been imagined. Dr. William -McDougall gives the case of a boy who was being chased by a furious -animal and under the impulse of the emergency he leaped a fence which he -could never afterwards jump, even after long athletic training. The list -of similar instances is a very long one. Every reader knows a case as -impressive as the one I have given. The varieties of “shell-shock” have -furnished volumes of illustrations of the energy of faith, its dynamic -influence upon health and life and efficiency. - -Faith in the sphere of religion works the greatest miracles of life -that are ever worked. It makes the saint out of Magdalene, the heroic -missionary and martyr out of Paul, the spiritual statesman of the ages -out of Carthaginian Augustine, the illuminated leader of men out of -Francis of Assisi, the maker of a new world epoch out of the nervously -unstable monk Luther, the creator of a new type of spiritual society out -of the untaught Leicestershire weaver, George Fox. Why do we not all -experience the miracle and find _the rest of ourselves_ through faith? -The main trouble is that we live victims of limiting inhibitions. We -hold intellectual theories which keep back or check the outflow of -the energy of faith. We have a nice system of thought which accounts -for everything and explains everything and which leaves no place for -faith. We know too much. We say to ourselves that only the ignorant and -uncultured are led by faith. And this same wise man, who is too proud to -have faith, holds all his inhibitory theories on a basis of faith! Every -one of them starts out on faith, gathers standing ground by faith, and -becomes a controlling force through faith! - -There are many other spiritual energies, some of which will be dealt with -specifically or implicitly in the later chapters of this book. Not often -in the history of the modern world certainly have spiritual energies -seemed more urgently needed than to-day. Our troubles consist largely -now of failure to lay hold of moral and spiritual forces that lie near -at hand and to utilize powers that are within our easy reach. Our stock -of faith and hope and love has run low and we realize only feebly what -mighty energies they can be. - -I hope that these short essays may help in some slight way to indicate -that the ancient realities by which men live still abide, and that -the invisible energies of the spirit are real, as they have always -been real. We have had an impressive demonstration that a civilization -built on external force and measured in terms of economic achievements -cannot stand its ground and is unable to speak to the condition of -persons endowed and equipped as we are. We are bound to build a higher -civilization, to create a greater culture, and to form a truer kingdom -of life or we must write “_Mene_” on all human undertakings. That is -our task now, and it is a serious one for which we shall need all the -energies that the universe puts at our disposal. I am told that when -the great Hellgate bridge was being built over the East River in New -York the engineers came upon an old derelict ship, lying embedded in -the river mud, just where one of the central piers of the bridge was to -go down through to its bedrock foundation. No tug boat could be found -that was able to start the derelict from its ancient bed in the ooze. -It would not move, no matter what force was applied. Finally, with a -sudden inspiration one of the workers hit upon this scheme. He took a -large flat-boat, which had been used to bring stone down the river, and -he chained it to the old sunken ship when the tide was low. Then he -waited for the great tidal energies to do their work. Slowly the rising -tide, with all the forces of the ocean behind it and the moon above it, -came up under the flat-boat, raising it inch by inch. And as it came up, -lifted by irresistible power, the derelict came up with it, until it -was entirely out of the mud that had held it. Then the boat, with its -subterranean load, was towed out to sea where the old waterlogged ship -was unchained and allowed to drop forever out of sight and reach. - -There are greater forces than those tidal energies waiting for us to use -for our tasks. They have always been there. They are there now. But they -do not _work_, they do not _operate_, until we lay hold of them and use -them for our present purposes. We must be _co-workers with God_. - - Haverford, Pennsylvania. - - Mid Winter, 1922. - - - - -CONTENTS - - - PAGE - - INTRODUCTION: RELIGION AS ENERGY vii - - CHAPTER I - - THE CENTRAL PEACE - - I. PEACE THAT PASSES UNDERSTANDING 1 - - II. THE SEARCH FOR A REFUGE 5 - - III. WHAT WE WANT MOST 10 - - CHAPTER II - - THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK - - I. TRYING THE BETTER WAY 15 - - II. HE CAME TO HIMSELF 23 - - III. SOME NEW REASONS FOR “LOVING ENEMIES” 29 - - CHAPTER III - - THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US - - I. WHERE THE BEYOND BREAKS THROUGH 35 - - II. CONQUERING BY AN INNER FORCE 41 - - III. LIVING IN THE PRESENCE OF THE ETERNAL 46 - - CHAPTER IV - - THE WAY OF VISION - - I. DAYS OF GREATER VISIBILITY 50 - - II. THE PROPHET AND HIS TRAGEDIES 54 - - III. A LONG DISTANCE CALL 60 - - CHAPTER V - - THE WAY OF PERSONALITY - - I. ANOTHER KIND OF HERO 65 - - II. THE BETTER POSSESSION 69 - - III. THE GREATEST RIVALRIES OF LIFE 74 - - CHAPTER VI - - AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION - - I. THE CHURCH OF THE LIVING GOD 79 - - II. THE NURSERY OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 83 - - III. THE DEMOCRACY WE AIM AT 86 - - IV. THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY 91 - - CHAPTER VII - - THE NEAR AND THE FAR - - I. THINGS PRESENT AND THINGS TO COME 98 - - II. TWO TYPES OF MINISTRY 102 - - III. WE HAVE SEEN HIS STAR 106 - - CHAPTER VIII - - THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY - - I. THE RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE OF DEATH 111 - - II. THE NEW BORN OUT OF THE OLD 127 - - CHAPTER IX - - THE MYSTIC’S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 133 - - CHAPTER X - - PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 160 - - - - -SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE - - - - -CHAPTER I - -THE CENTRAL PEACE - - -I - -PEACE THAT PASSES UNDERSTANDING - -We are all familiar with the coming of a peace into our life at the -terminus of some great strain or after we have weathered a staggering -crisis. When a long-continued pain which has racked our nerves passes -away and leaves us free, we suddenly come into a zone of peace. When we -have been watching by a bedside where a life, unspeakably precious to us, -has lain in the grip of some terrible disease and at length successfully -passes the crisis, we walk out into the fields under the altered sky -and feel a peace settle down upon us, which makes the whole world look -different. Or, again, we have been facing some threatening catastrophe -which seemed likely to break in on our life and perhaps end forever -the calm and even tenor of it, and just when the hour of danger seemed -darkest and our fear was at its height, some sudden turn of things has -brought a happy shift of events, the danger has passed, and a great peace -has come over us instead of the threatened trouble. In all these cases -the peace which succeeds pain and strain and anxiety is a thoroughly -natural, reasonable peace, a peace which comes in normal sequence and -is quite accessible to the understanding. We should be surprised and -should need an explanation if we heard of an instance of a passing pain -or a yielding strain that was not followed by a corresponding sense of -peace. One who has seen a child that was lost in a crowded city suddenly -find his mother and find safety in her dear arms has seen a good case of -this sequential peace, this peace which the understanding can grasp and -comprehend. We behold it and say, “How otherwise!” - -There is, St. Paul reminds us, another kind of peace of quite a different -order. It baffles the understanding and transcends its categories. It is -a peace which comes, not after the pain is relieved, not after the crisis -has passed, not after the danger has disappeared; but in the midst of the -pain, while the crisis is still on, and even in the imminent presence -of the danger. It is a peace that is not banished or destroyed by the -frustrations which beset our lives; rather it is in and through the -frustrations that we first come upon it and enter into it, as, to use St. -Paul’s phrase, into a garrison which guards our hearts and minds. - -Each tested soul has to meet its own peculiar frustrations. All of us who -work for “causes” or who take up any great piece of moral or spiritual -service in the world know more about defeats and disappointments than -we do about success and triumphs. We have to learn to be patient and -long-suffering. We must become accustomed to postponements and delays, -and sometimes we see the work of almost a lifetime suddenly fail of its -end. Some turn of events upsets all our noble plans and frustrates the -result, just when it appeared ready to arrive. Death falls like lightning -on a home that had always before seemed sheltered and protected, and -instantly life is profoundly altered for those who are left behind. -Nothing can make up for the loss. There is no substitute for what -is gone. The accounts will not balance; frustration in another form -confronts us. Or it may be a breakdown of physical or mental powers, -or peradventure both together, just when the emergencies of the world -called for added energy and increased range of power from us. The need -is plain, the harvest is ripe, but the worker’s hand fails and he must -contract when he would most expand. Frustration looks him straight in the -face. Well, to achieve a peace under those circumstances is to have a -peace which does not follow a normal sequence. It is not what the world -expects. It does not accord with the ways of thought and reasoning. It -passes all understanding. It brings another kind of world into operation -and reveals a play of invisible forces upon which the understanding -had not reckoned. In fact, this strange intellect-transcending peace, -in the very midst of storm and strain and trial, is one of the surest -evidences there is of God. One may in his own humble nerve-power succeed -in acquiring a stoic resignation so that he can say, - - “In the fell clutch of circumstance - I have not winced nor cried aloud. - Under the bludgeonings of chance - My head is bloody, but unbowed.” - -He may, by sheer force of will, keep down the lid upon his emotions -and go on so nearly unmoved that his fellows can hear no groan and -will wonder at the way he stands the universe. But peace in the soul -is another matter. To have the whole heart and mind garrisoned with -peace even in Nero’s dungeon, when the imperial death sentence brings -frustration to all plans and a terminus to all spiritual work, calls for -some world-transcending assistance to the human spirit. Such peace is -explained only when we discover that it is “the peace of God,” and that -it came because the soul broke through the ebbings and flowings of time -and space and allied itself with the Eternal. - - -II - -THE SEARCH FOR A REFUGE - -Few things are more impressive than the persistent search which men have -made in all ages for a refuge against the dangers and the ills that -beset life. The cave-men, the cliff-dwellers, the primitive builders of -shelters in inaccessible tree tops, are early examples of the search for -human defenses against fear. Civilization slowly perfected methods of -refuge and defense of elaborate types, which, in turn, had to compete -with ever-increasing ingenuity of attack and assault. But I am not -concerned here with these material strongholds of refuge and defense. I -am thinking rather of the human search for shelter against other weapons -than those which kill the body. We are all trying, in one way or another, -to discover how to escape from “the heavy and weary weight of all this -unintelligible world,” how to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous -fortune. We are sensitively constructed, with nerves exposed to easy -attack. We are all shelterless at some point to the storms of the world. -Even the most perfectly equipped and impervious heroes prove to be -vulnerable at some one uncovered spot. Sooner or later our protections -fail, and the pitiless enemies of our happiness get through the defenses -and reach the quick and sensitive soul within us. How to rebuild our -refuge, how to find real shelter, is our problem. What fortress is there -in which the soul is safe from fear and trouble? - -The most common expedient is one which will drug the sensitive nerves -and produce an easy relief from strain and worry. There is a magic in -alcohol and kindred distillations, which, like Aladdin’s genie, builds a -palace of joy and, for the moment, banishes the enemy of all peace. The -refuge seems complete. All fear is gone, worry is a thing of the past. -The jargon of life is over, the pitiless problem of good and evil drops -out of consciousness. The shelterless soul seems covered and housed. -Intoxication is only one of the many quick expedients. It is always -possible to retreat from the edge of strenuous battle into some one of -the many natural instincts as a way of refuge. The great instinctive -emotions are absorbing, and tend to obliterate everything else. They -occupy the entire stage of the inner drama, and push all other actors -away from the footlights of consciousness, so that here, too, the enemies -of peace and joy seem vanquished, and the refuge appears to be found. - -That multitudes accept these easy ways of defense against the ills of -life is only too obvious. The medieval barons who could build themselves -castles of safety were few in number. Visible refuges in any case are -rare and scarce, but the escape from the burdens and defeats of the -world in drink and drug and thrilling instinctive emotion is, without -much difficulty, open to every man and within easy reach for rich and -poor alike, and many there be that seize upon this method. The trouble -with it is that it is a very temporary refuge. It works, if at all, only -for a brief span. It plays havoc in the future with those who resort -to it. It rolls up new liabilities to the ills one would escape. It -involves far too great a price for the tiny respite gained. And, most -of all, it discounts or fails to reckon with the inherent greatness of -the human soul. We are fashioned for stupendous issues. Our very sense -of failure and defeat comes from a touch of the infinite in our being. -We look before and after, and sigh for that which is not, just because -we can not be contented with finite fragments of time and space. We are -meant for greater things than these trivial ones which so often get our -attention and absorb us; but the moment the soul comes to itself, its -reach goes beyond the grasp, and it feels an indescribable discontent -and longing for that for which it was made. To seek refuge, therefore, -in some narcotic joy, to still the onward yearning of the soul by -drowning consciousness, to banish the pain of pursuit by a barbaric surge -of emotions, is to strike against the noblest trait of our spiritual -structure; it means committing suicide of the soul. It cannot be a real -man’s way of relief. - -In fact, nothing short of finding the goal and object for which the soul, -the spiritual nature in us, is fitted will ever do for beings like us. -St. Augustine, in words of immortal beauty, has said that God has made -us for himself, and our hearts are restless until we rest in him. It -is not a theory of poet or theologian. It is a simple fact of life, as -veritable as the human necessity for food. There is no other shelter for -the soul, no other refuge or fortress will ever do for us but God. “We -tremble and we burn. We tremble, knowing that we are unlike him. We burn, -feeling that we are like him.” - -In hours of loss and sorrow, when the spurious props fail us, we are -more apt to find our way back to the real refuge. We are suddenly made -aware of our shelterless condition, alone, and in our own strength. Our -stoic armor and our brave defenses of pride become utterly inadequate. -We are thrown back on reality. We have then our moments of sincerity and -insight. We feel that we cannot live without resources from beyond our -own domain. We must have God. It is then, when one knows that nothing -else whatever will do, that the great discovery is made. Again and again -the psalms announce this. When the world has caved in; when the last -extremity has been reached; when the billows and water-spouts of fortune -have done their worst, you hear the calm, heroic voice of the lonely man -saying: “God is our refuge and fortress, therefore will not we fear -though the earth be removed, though the mountains be carried into the -midst of the sea.” That is great experience, but it is not reserved for -psalmists and rare patriarchs like Job. It is a privilege for common -mortals like us who struggle and agonize and feel the thorn in the flesh, -and the bitter tragedy of life unhealed. Whether we make the discovery -or not, God is there with us in the furnace. Only it makes all the -difference if we do find him as the one high tower where refuge is not -for the passing moment only, but is an eternal attainment. - - -III - -WHAT WE WANT MOST - -There are many things which we want—things for which we struggle hard and -toil painfully. Like the little child with his printed list for Santa -Claus, we have our list, longer or shorter, of precious things which -we hope to see brought within our reach before we are gathered to our -fathers. The difference is that the child is satisfied if he gets one -thing which is on his list. We want everything on ours. The world is -full of hurry and rush, push and scramble, each man bent on winning some -one of his many goals. But, in spite of this excessive effort to secure -the tangible goods of the earth, it is nevertheless true that deep down -in the heart most men want the peace of God. If you have an opportunity -to work your way into that secret place where a man really lives, you -will find that he knows perfectly well that he is missing something. -This feeling of unrest and disquiet gets smothered for long periods in -the mass of other aims, and some men hardly know that they have such a -thing as an immortal soul hidden away within. But, even so, it will not -remain quiet. It cries out like the lost child who misses his home. When -the hard games of life prove losing ones, when the stupidity of striving -so fiercely for such bubbles comes over him, when a hand from the dark -catches away the best earthly comfort he had, when the genuine realities -of life assert themselves over sense, he wakes up to find himself hungry -and thirsty for something which no one of his earthly pursuits has -supplied or can supply. He wants God. He wants peace. He wants to feel -his life founded on an absolute reality. He wants to have the same sort -of peace and quiet steal over him which used to come when as a child he -ran to his mother and had all the ills of life banished from thought in -the warm love of her embrace. - -But it is not only the driving, pushing man, ambitious for wealth and -position, who misses the best thing there is to get—the peace of God. -Many persons who are directly seeking it miss it. Here is a man who hopes -to find it by solving all his difficult intellectual problems. When -he can answer the hard questions which life puts to him, and read the -riddles which the ages have left unread, he thinks his soul will feel the -peace of God. Not so, because each problem opens into a dozen more. It is -a noble undertaking to help read the riddles of the universe, but let no -one expect to enter into the peace of God by such a path. Here is another -person who devotes herself to nothing but to seeking the peace of God. -Will she not find it? Not that way. It is not found when it is sought for -its own sake. He or she who is living to get the joy of divine peace, -who would “have no joy but calm,” will probably never have the peace -which passeth understanding. Like all the great blessings, it comes as a -by-product when one is seeking something else. Christ’s peace came to him -not because he sought it, but because he accepted the divine will which -led to Gethsemane and Calvary. Paul’s peace did not flow over him while -he was in Arabia seeking it, but while he was in Nero’s prison, whither -the path of his labors for helping men had led him. He who forgets -himself in loving devotion, he who turns aside from his self-seeking aims -to carry joy into any life, he who sets about doing any task for the love -of God, has found the only possible road to the permanent peace of God. - -There are no doubt a great many persons working for the good of others -and for the betterment of the world who yet do not succeed in securing -the peace of God. They are in a frequent state of nerves; they are busy -here and there, rushing about perplexed and weary, fussy and irritable. -With all their efforts to promote good causes, they do not quite attain -the poise and calm of interior peace. They are like the tumultuous -surface of the ocean with its combers and its spray, and they seldom know -the deep quiet like that of the underlying, submerged waters far below -the surface. The trouble with them is that they are carrying themselves -all the time. They do not forget themselves in their aims of service. -They are like the ill person who is so eager to get well that he keeps -watching his tongue, feeling his pulse, and getting his weight. Peace -does not come to one who is watching continually for the results of his -work, or who is wondering what people are saying about it, or who is -envious and jealous of other persons working in the same field, or who is -touchy about “honor” or recognition. Those are just the attitudes which -frustrate peace and make it stay away from one’s inner self. - -There is a higher level of work and service and ministry, which, thank -God, men like us can reach. It is attained when one swings out into a -way of life which is motived and controlled by genuine sincere love -and devotion, when consecration obliterates self-seeking, when in some -measure, like Christ, the worker can say without reservations, “Not my -will but thine be done.” - - - - -CHAPTER II - -THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK - - -I - -TRYING THE BETTER WAY - -A very fresh and unusual type of book has recently appeared under -the title, “_By An Unknown Disciple_.” It tells in a simple, direct, -impressive way, after the manner of the Gospels, the story of Christ’s -life and works and message. It professes to be written by one who was an -intimate disciple, and who was therefore an eye-witness of everything -told in the book. It is a vivid narrative and leaves the reader deeply -moved, because it brings him closer than most interpretations do into -actual presence of and companionship with the great Galilean. The first -chapter is a re-interpretation of the scene on the eastern shore of -Gennesaret, where Jesus casts the demons out of the maniac of Geresa. A -man on the shore of the lake told Jesus, when he landed there with his -disciples in the early morning, that it was not safe for any one to go -up the rugged hillside, because there were madmen hidden there among the -tombs: “people possessed by demons, who tear their flesh, and who can be -heard screaming day and night.” - -“How do you know they are possessed by demons?” asked Jesus. - -“What else could it be?” said the man. “There are none that can master -them. They are too fierce to be tamed.” - -“Has any man tried to tame them?” asked Jesus. - -“Yes, Rabbi, they have been bound with chains and fetters. There was one -that I saw. He plucked the fetters from him as a child might break a -chain of field flowers. Then he ran foaming into the wilderness, and no -man dare pass by that way now....” - -“Have men tried only this way to tame him?” Jesus asked. - -“What other way is there, Rabbi?” asked the man. - -“There is God’s way,” said Jesus. “Come, let us try it.” - -As Jesus spoke, “His gaze went from man to man,” the writer continues, -“and then his eyes fell upon me. It was as if a power passed from him to -me, and immediately something inside me answered, ‘Lead, and I follow.’” -The narrative proceeds to describe the encounter with the demoniac man -whose name was “Legion.” “He ran toward us, shrieking and bounding in the -air. He had two sharp stones in his hand, and as he leaped he cut his -flesh with them and the blood ran down his naked limbs. The men behind us -scattered and fled down the hillside; but Jesus stood still and waited.” -The effect of the calm, undisturbed, unfrightened presence of Jesus was -astonishing. It was as though a new force suddenly came into operation. -The jagged stones were thrown from his hands, for he recognized at once -in Jesus a friendly presence and a helper with an understanding heart. -His fear and terror left the demoniac man and he became quiet, composed -and like a normal person. Meantime some of the men who ran away in fear, -when the madman appeared, frightened a herd of swine feeding near by, and -in their uncontrolled terror they rushed wildly toward the headland of -the lake and pitched over the top into the water where they were drowned. -“Fear is a foul spirit,” said Jesus, and it seemed plain and obvious -that the ungoverned fear which played such havoc with the man had taken -possession also of the misguided swine. It was the same “demon,” fear. A -little later in the day when the companions of Jesus found him they saw -the man who had called himself “Legion” sitting at Jesus’ feet, clothed -and in his right mind—a quieted and restored person. - -We now know that this disease, called “possession,” which appears so -often in the New Testament accounts, is a very common present-day -trouble. The name and description given to it in the Bible make it often -seem remote and unfamiliar to us, but it is, in fact, as prevalent in the -world to-day as it was in the first century. It is an extreme form of -hysteria, a disorganization of normal functions, often causing delusions, -loss of memory, the performance of automatic actions, and sometimes -resulting in double, or multiple, personality, a condition in which a -foreign self seems to usurp the control of the body and make it do many -strange and unwilled things. This disease is known in very many cases to -be produced by frights, fear, or terror, sometimes fears long hidden away -and more or less suppressed. - -The famous cases of Doris Fischer and Miss Beauchamp were both of this -type. They were only extreme instances of a fairly common form of -mental trouble, generally due to fears, and capable of being cured by -wise, skillful understanding and loving care, applied by one who shows -confidence and human interest and who knows how to use the powerful -influence of _suggestion_. Dr. Morton Prince, who has reported these -two cases, has achieved cures and restorations that read like miracles, -and his narratives tell of minds, “jangling, harsh, and out of tune,” -broken into dissociated selves, which have been unified, organized, -harmonized and restored to normal life. Few restorations are more -wonderful than that effected upon a Philadelphia girl under the direction -of Dr. Lightner Witmer. The girl was hopelessly incorrigible, stubborn, -sullen, suspicious, and stupid. She screamed, kicked, and bit when she -was opposed, and she utterly refused to obey anybody. So unnatural and -dehumanized was she that she was generally called “Diabolical Mary.” She -was examined by Dr. Witmer, underwent some simple surgical operations to -remove her obvious physical handicaps, and then was put under the loving, -tender care of a wise, attractive, and understanding woman. The girl -responded to the treatment at once and soon became profoundly changed, -and the process went on until the girl became a wholly transformed and -re-made person. - -The so-called shell-shock cases which have bulked so large in the story -of the wastage of men in all armies during the World War, turn out to be -cases of mental disorganization, occasioned for the most part by immense -emotional upheaval, especially through suppressed fear. The man affected -with the trouble has seemed to master his emotion. He has not winced or -shown the slightest fear in the face of danger; but the pent-up emotion, -the suppressed fear and terror, insidiously throw the entire nervous -mechanism out of gear. The successful treatment of such cases is, again, -like that for hysteria, one that brings confidence, calm, liberation -of all strain and anxiety. The poor victim needs a patient, wise, -skillful, psychologically trained physician, who has an understanding -mind, a friendly, interested, intimate way, a spirit of love, and who -can arouse expectation of recovery and can suggest thoughts of health -and the right emotional reactions. This method of cure has often been -tried with striking effect upon the so-called criminal classes. Prisoners -almost always respond constructively to the personal manifestation of -confidence, sympathy, and love. Elizabeth Fry proved this principle in an -astonishing way with the almost brutalized prisoners in Newgate. Thomas -Shillitoe’s visit to the German prisoners at Spandau, who were believed -to be beyond all human appeals, though not so well known and famous, is -no less impressive and no less convincing. - -There was perhaps never a time in the history of the world when an -application of this principle and method—God’s way—was so needed in -the social sphere of life. Whole countries have the symptoms which -appear in these nervous diseases. It is not merely an individual case -here and there; it takes on a corporate, a mass, form. The nerves are -overstrained, the emotional stress has been more than could be borne, -suppressed fears have produced disorganization. There are signs of -social “dissociation.” The remedy in such cases is not an application of -compelling force, not a resort to chains and fetters, not a screwing on -of the “lid,” not a method of starving out the victims. It is rather an -application of the principle which has always worked in individual cases -of “dissociation” or “possession” or “suppressed fear”—the principle -of sympathy, love and suggestion—what Jesus, in the book mentioned -above, calls “God’s way.” The “dissociation” of labor and employers in -the social group, with its hysterical signs of strikes and lockouts, -upheaval and threats, needs just now a very wise physician. Force, -restraint, compulsion, fastening down the “lid,” imprisonment of leaders, -drastic laws against propaganda, will not cure the disease, any more -than chains cured the poor sufferer on the shores of Gennesaret. The -situation must first of all be _understood_. The inner attitude behind -the acts and deeds must be taken into account. The social mental state -must be diagnosed. The remedy, to be a remedy, must remove the causes -which produce the dissociation. It can be accomplished only by one who -has an understanding heart, a good will, an unselfish purpose, and a -comprehending, i.e., a unifying, _suggestion_ of coöperation. - -This _way_ is no less urgent for the solution of the most acute -international situations. It has been assumed too long and too often that -these situations can be best handled by unlimited methods of restraint, -coercion, and reduction to helplessness. Some of the countries of Europe -have been plainly suffering from neurasthenia, dissociation, and the -kindred forms of emotional, fear-caused diseases. Starvation always makes -for types of hysteria. It will not do now to apply, with cold, precise -logic, the old vindictive principle that when the sinner has been made -to suffer enough to “cover” the enormity of his sin he can then be -restored to respectable society. It is not vindication of justice which -most concerns the world now; it is a return of health, a restoration of -normal functions, a reconstruction of the social body. That task calls -for the application of the deeper, truer principles of life. It calls for -a knowing heart, an understanding method, a healing plan, a sympathetic -guide who can obliterate the fear-attitude and _suggest_ confidence and -unity and trustful human relationships. Those great words, used in the -Epistle of London Yearly Meeting of Friends in 1917, need to be revived -and put to an experimental venture: “_Love knows no frontiers._” There is -no limit to its healing force, there are no conditions it does not meet, -there is no terminus to its constructive operations. - - -II - -HE CAME TO HIMSELF - -Was there ever such a short-story character sketch as this one of the -prodigal son! No realism of details, no elaboration of his sins, and -yet the immortal picture is burned forever into our imagination. The -_débâcle_ of his life is as clear and vivid as words can portray the -ruin. Yet the phrase which arrests us most as we read the compact -narrative of his undoing is not the one which tells about “riotous -living,” or the reckless squandering of his patrimony, or his hunger for -swine husks, or his unshod feet and the loss of his tunic; it is rather -the one which says that when he was at the bottom of his fortune “he came -to himself.” - -He had not been himself then, before. He was not finding himself in the -life of riotous indulgence. That did not turn out after all to be the -life for which he was meant. He missed himself more than he missed his -lost shoes and tunic. That raises a nice question which is worth an -answer: When is a person his real self? When can he properly say, “At -last I have found myself; I am what I want to be?” Robert Louis Stevenson -has given us in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a fine parable of the actual -double self in us all, a higher and a lower self under our one hat. But -I ask, which is the real me? Is it Jekyll or is it Hyde? Is it the best -that we can be or is it this worse thing which we just now are? - -Most answers to the question would be, I think, that the real self is -that ideal self of which in moments of rare visibility we sometimes -catch glimpses. - - “All I could never be, - All, men ignored in me, - This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.” - -“Dig deep enough into any man,” St. Augustine said, “and you will find -something divine.” We supposed he believed in total depravity, and -he does in theory believe in it; but when it is a matter of actual -experience, he announces this deep fact which fits perfectly with his -other great utterance: “Thou, O God, hast made us for thyself, and we are -restless (dissatisfied) until we find ourselves in thee.” - -Too long we have assumed that Adam, the failure, is the type of our -lives, that he is the normal man, that to err is human, and that one -touch, that is, blight, of nature makes all men kin. What Christ has -revealed to us is the fact that we always have higher and diviner -possibilities in us. He, the overcomer, and not Adam, is the true type, -the normal person, giving us at last the pattern of life which is life -indeed. - -Which is the real self, then? Surely this higher possible self, this one -which we discover in our best moments. The Greeks always held that sin -was “missing the mark”—that is what the Greek word for sin means—failure -to arrive at, to reach, the real end toward which life aims. Sin is -defeat. It is loss of the trail. It is undoing. The sinner has not found -himself, he has not come to himself. He has missed the real me. He cannot -say, “I am.” - -If that is a fact, and if the life of spiritual health and attainment is -the normal life, we surely ought to do more than is done to help young -people to realize it and to assist them to find themselves. We are much -more concerned to manufacture things than we are to make persons. We do -one very well and we do the other very badly. Kipling’s “The Ship that -Found Itself” is a fine account of the care bestowed upon every rivet and -screw, every valve and piston. He pictures the ship in the stress and -strain of a great storm and each part of the ship from keel to funnel -describes what it has to bear and to do in the emergency and how it has -been prepared in advance for just this crisis. Nansen was asked how he -felt when he found that the _Fram_ was caught in the awful jam of the -Arctic ice-floe. “I felt perfectly calm,” he said. “I knew she could -stand it. I had watched every stick of timber and every piece of steel -that went into her hull. The result was that I could go to sleep and -let the ice do its worst.” With even more care we build the airplane. -There must be no chance for capricious action. The propeller blades must -be made of perfect wood. There must be no defect in any piece of the -structure. The gasoline must be tested by all the methods of refinement. -The oil must be absolutely pure, free of every suspicion of grit. - -But when we turn from ships and airplanes to the provisions for training -young persons we are in a different world. The element of chance now -bulks very large. We let the youth have pretty free opportunity to begin -his malformation before we begin seriously to construct him on right -lines. We fail to note what an enormous fact “disposition” is, and we -take little pains to form it early and to form it in the best way. We -are far too apt to assume that all the fundamentals come by the road -of heredity. We overwork this theory as much as earlier theologians -overworked their dogma of original sin from poor old Adam. - -The fact is that temperament and disposition and the traits of character -which most definitely settle destiny are at least as much formed in those -early critical years of infancy as they are acquired by the strains of -heredity. Education, which is more essential to the greatness of any -country than even its manufactures, is one of the most neglected branches -of life. We take it as we find it—and lay its failures to Providence -as we do deaths from typhoid. It must not always be so. We must be as -greatly concerned to form virile character in our boys and girls and -to develop in them the capacity for moral and spiritual leadership in -this crisis as we are concerned over our coal supply or our industries. -There are ways of assisting the higher self to control and dominate the -life, ways by which the ideal person can become the real person. Why not -consider seriously how to do that? - -He that overcomes, the prophet of Patmos says, receives a white stone -with a new name written on it, which no man knoweth save he that hath -it. It is a symbolism which may mean many things. It seems at least to -mean that he who subdues his lower self, holds out in the strain of life, -and lives by the highest that he knows, will as a consequence receive a -distinct individuality, a clearly defined self, instead of being blurred -in with the great level mass—a self with a name of its own. And that self -will not be the old familiar self that everybody knows by traits of past -achievement and by the old tendencies of habit. It will be the self -which only God and the person himself in his deepest and most intimate -moments knew was possible—and here at last it is found to be the real -self. The man can say, “I am.” He has come to himself. - -We ask, at the end, whether it may not be that the world will soon come -to itself and discover the way back to some of its missed ideals. Here on -a large scale we have the story of a desperate hunger, squandered wealth, -lost shoes, lost tunics, and even more precious things gone—a world that -has missed its way and is floundering about without sufficient vision -or adequate leadership. If it could only come to itself, discover what -its true mission is and where its real sources of power and its line of -progress lie, it would still find that God and man together can rebuild -what man by his blunders has destroyed. - - -III - -SOME NEW REASONS FOR “LOVING ENEMIES” - -Nobody ever amounts to anything who lives without conflict with -obstacles. It seems to be a law of the universe that nothing really good -can be got or held by soft, easy means. - -The Persians were so impressed with this stern condition of life that -they interpreted the universe as the scene of endless warfare between -hostile powers of the invisible world. Ormuzd, the god of light, and -Ahriman, the god of darkness, were believed to be engaged in a continual -Armageddon. There could be no truce in the strife until one or the other -should win the victory by the annihilation of his opponent. This Persian -dualism has touched all systems of thought and has left its influence -upon all the religions of the world. The reasons why it has appealed so -powerfully to men of all generations are, of course, that there is so -much conflict involved in life and that no achievement of goodness is -ever made without a hard battle for it against opposing forces. But if -all this opposition and struggle is due to an “enemy,” we certainly ought -to love this “enemy,” because it turns out to be the greatest possible -blessing to us that we are forced to struggle with difficulties and to -wrestle for what we get. - -“Count it all joy,” said the Apostle James in substance, writing to his -friends of the Dispersion, “when you fall into manifold testings, or -trials, knowing that the proving of your faith worketh steadfastness, -and let steadfastness have its perfect work, that ye may be perfect and -entire, lacking in nothing.” St. Paul thought once that his “thorn in the -flesh” was conferred upon him by Satan and was the malicious messenger -of an enemy; but in the slow process of experience he came to see that -the painful “thorn” exercised a real ministry in his life, that through -his suffering and hardship he got a higher meaning of God’s grace; and he -discovered that divine power was thus made perfect through his weakness, -so that he learned to love the “enemy” that buffeted him. - -The Psalmist who wrote our best loved psalm, the twenty-third, thought at -first that God was his Shepherd because he led him in green pastures and -beside still waters where there was no struggle and no enemy to fear. But -he learned at length that in the dark valleys of the shadow and on the -rough jagged hillsides God was no less a good Shepherd than on the level -plains and in the lush grass; and he found at last that even “in the -presence of enemies” he could be fed with good things and have his table -spread. The overflowing cup and the anointed head were not discovered -on the lower levels of ease and comfort; they came out of the harder -experiences when “enemies” of his peace were busy supplying obstacles -and perplexities for him to overcome. - -It is no accident that the book of Revelation puts so much stress upon -“overcoming.” The world seemed to the prophet on the volcanic island -of Patmos essentially a place of strife and conflict—an Armageddon of -opposing forces. There are no beatitudes in this book promised to any -except “overcomers.” - - “Not to one church alone, but seven - The voice prophetic spake from heaven; - And unto each the promise came, - Diversified, but still the same; - For him that overcometh are - The new name written on the stone, - The raiment white, the crown, the throne, - And I will give him the Morning Star!” - -But the conflict that ends in such results can not be called misfortune, -any more than Hercules’ labors through which the legendary hero won his -immortality can be pronounced a misfortune for him. Once more, then, the -saint who has overcome discovers, at least in retrospect, that there is -good ground for loving his “enemies”! - -The farmer, in his unceasing struggle with weeds, with parasites, with -pests visible and invisible, with blight and rot and uncongenial -weather, sometimes feels tempted to blaspheme against the hard conditions -under which he labors and to assume that an “enemy” has cursed the ground -which he tills and loaded the dice of nature against him. The best cure -for his “mood” is to visit the land of the bread-fruit tree, where nature -does everything and man does nothing but eat what is gratuitously given -him, and to see there the kind of men you get under those kindly skies. -The virile fiber of muscle, the strong manly frame, the keen active mind -that meets each new “pest” with a successful invention, the spirit of -conquest and courage that are revealed in the farmer at his best are no -accident. They are the by-product of his battle with conditions, which if -they seem to come from an “enemy,” must come from one that ought to be -loved for what he accomplishes. - -These critics of ours who harshly review the books we write, the -addresses we give, the schemes of reform for which we work so -strenuously—do they do nothing for us? On the contrary, they force -us to go deeper, to write with more care, to reconsider our hasty -generalizations, to recast our pet schemes, to revise our crude -endeavors. They may speak as “enemies,” and they may show a stern and -hostile face; but we do well to love them, for they enable us to find -our better self and our deeper powers. The hand may be the horny hand of -Esau, but the voice is the kindly voice of Jacob. - -All sorts of things “work” for us, then, as St. Paul declared. Not only -does love “work,” and faith and grace; but tribulation “works,” and -affliction, and the seemingly hostile forces which block and buffet and -hamper us. Everything that drives us deeper, that draws us closer to the -great resources of life, that puts vigor into our frame and character -into our souls, is in the last resort a blessing to us, even though it -seems on superficial examination to be the work of an “enemy,” and we -shall be wise if we learn to love the “enemies” that give us the chance -to overcome and to attain our true destiny. Perhaps the dualism of the -universe is not quite as sharp as the old Persians thought. Perhaps, too, -the love of God reaches further under than we sometimes suppose. Perhaps -in fact all things “work together for good,” and even the enemy forces -are helping to achieve the ultimate good that shall be revealed “when God -hath made the pile complete.” - - - - -CHAPTER III - -THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US - - -I - -WHERE THE BEYOND BREAKS THROUGH - -If we sprinkle iron filings over a sheet of paper and move a magnet -beneath the paper, the filings become active and combine and recombine -in a great variety of groupings and regroupings. A beholder who knows -nothing of the magnet underneath gazes upon the whole affair with a sense -of awe and mystery, though he feels all the time that there must be some -explanation of the action and that some hidden power behind is operating -as the cause of the groupings and regroupings of the iron particles. -Something certainly that we do not see is revealing its presence and its -power. - -Our everyday experience is full of another series of activities even -more mysterious than these movements of the iron. Whenever we open our -eyes we see objects and colors confronting us and located in spaces far -and near. What brings the object to us? What operates to produce the -contact? How does the far-away thing hit our organ of vision? This was to -the ancient philosopher a most difficult problem, a real mystery. He made -many guesses at a solution, but no guess which he could make satisfied -his judgment. Our answer is that an invisible and intangible substance -which we call ether—luminiferous ether—fills all space, even the space -occupied by visible objects, and that this ether which is capable of -amazing vibrations, billions of them a second, is set vibrating at -different velocities by different objects. These vibrations bombard the -minute rods and cones of the retina at the back of the eye and, presto, -we see now one color and now another, now one object and now another. -This ether would forever have remained unknown to us had not this -marvelous structure of the retina given it a chance to break through and -reveal itself. In many other ways, too, this ether breaks through into -revelation. It is responsible apparently for all the immensely varied -phenomena of electricity, probably, too, of cohesion and gravitation. -Here, again, the revelations remained inadequate and without clear -interpretation until we succeeded in constructing proper instruments and -devices for it to break through into active operation. The dynamo and -the other electrical mechanisms which we have invented do not make or -create electricity. They merely let it come through, showing itself now -as light, now as heat, now again as motive power. But always it was there -before, unnoted, merely potential, and yet a vast surrounding ocean of -energy there behind, ready to break into active operation when the medium -was at hand for it. - -Life is another one of those strange mysteries that cannot be explained -until we realize that something more than we see is breaking through -matter and revealing itself. The living thing is letting through some -greater power than itself, something beyond and behind, which is needed -to account for what we see moving and acting with invention and purpose. -Matter of itself is no explanation of life. The same elemental stuff is -very different until it becomes the instrument of something not itself -which organizes it, pushes it upward and onward, and reveals itself -through it. Something has at length come into view which is more than -force and mechanism. Here is intelligent purpose and forward-looking -activity and something capable of variation, novelty, and surprise. -And when living substance has reached a certain stage of organization, -something higher still begins to break through—consciousness appears, -and on its higher levels consciousness begins to reveal truth and moral -goodness. It is useless to try to explain consciousness—especially -truth-bearing consciousness—as a function of the brain, for it cannot be -done. That way of explanation no more explains mind than the Ptolemaic -theory explains the movements of the heavenly bodies. Once more, -something breaks through and reveals itself, as surely as light breaks -through a prism and reveals itself in the band of spectral colors. This -consciousness of ours, as I have said, is not merely awareness, not only -intelligent response; it lays hold of and apprehends, i.e., reveals, -truth and goodness. What I think, when I really think, is not just -my private “opinion,” or “guess,” or “seeming”; it turns out to have -something universal and absolute about it. My multiplication-table is -everybody’s multiplication-table. It is true for me and for beyond me. -And what is true of my mathematics is also true of other features of my -thinking. When I properly organize my experience through rightly formed -concepts, I express aspects that are real and true for everybody—I attain -to something which can be called truth. The same way in the field of -conduct: I can discover not only what is subjectively right, but I can -go farther and embody principles which are right not only for me but for -every good man. Something more than a petty, tiny, private consciousness -is expressing itself through my personality. I am the organ of something -more than myself. - -Perhaps more wonderful still is the way in which beauty breaks through. -It breaks through not only at a few highly organized points, it breaks -through almost everywhere. Even the minutest things reveal it as well -as do the sublimest things, like the stars. Whatever one sees through -the microscope, a bit of mould for example, is charged with beauty. -Everything from a dewdrop to Mount Shasta is the bearer of beauty. And -yet beauty has no function, no utility. Its value is intrinsic, not -extrinsic. It is its own excuse for being. It greases no wheels, it bakes -no puddings. It is a gift of sheer grace, a gratuitous largess. It must -imply behind things a Spirit that enjoys beauty for its own sake and -that floods the world everywhere with it. Wherever it can break through -it does break through, and our joy in it shows that we are in some sense -kindred to the giver and revealer of it. - -Something higher and greater still breaks through and reveals a -deeper Reality than any that we see and touch. Love comes through—not -everywhere like beauty, but only where rare organization has prepared an -organ for it. Some aspects of love appear very widely, are, at least, -as universal as truth and moral goodness. But love in its full glory, -love in its height of unselfishness and with its passion of self-giving -is a rare manifestation. One person—the Galilean—has been a perfect -revealing organ of it. In his life it broke through with the same perfect -naturalness as the beam of light breaks through the prism of waterdrops -and reveals the rainbow. Love that understands, sympathizes, endures, -inspires, recreates, and transforms, broke through and revealed itself so -impressively that those who see it and feel it are convinced that here at -last the real nature of God has come through to us and stands revealed. -And St. Paul, who was absolutely convinced of this, went still further. -He held, with a faith buttressed in experience, that this same Christ, -who had made this demonstration of love, became after his resurrection -an invisible presence, a life-giving Spirit who could work and act as a -resident power within receptive, responsive, human spirits, and could -transform them into a likeness to himself and continue his revelation -of love wherever he should find such organs of revelation. If that, or -something like it, is true it is a very great truth. It was this that -good old William Dell meant when he said: “The believer is the only book -in which God himself writes his New Testament.” - - -II - -CONQUERING BY AN INNER FORCE - -There are few texts that have been more dynamic in the history of -spiritual religion than the one which forms the keynote of the message of -the little book of Habakkuk: “The righteous man lives by faith” (2:4). It -became the central feature of St. Paul’s message. It was the epoch-making -discovery in Luther’s experience, and it has always been the guiding -principle of Protestant Christianity. - -The profound significance of the words is often missed because the text -is so easily turned into a phrase that is supposed just of itself to work -a kind of magic spell, and secondly because the meaning of “faith” is so -frequently misinterpreted. When we go back to the original experience out -of which the famous text was born we can get fresh light upon the heart -of its meaning. The little book begins with a searching analysis of the -conditions of the time. With an almost unparalleled boldness the prophet -challenges God to explain why the times are so badly out of joint, why -the social order is so topsy-turvy, and why injustice is allowed to run a -long course unchecked. God seems unconcerned with affairs—the moral pilot -appears not to be steering things. - -Then comes a moment of mental relief. The prophet hits upon the -conclusion, arrived at by other prophets also, that God is about to use -the Chaldeans as a divine instrument to chastise the wicked element in -the nation, to right the wrongs of the disordered world, and to execute -judgment. But as he begins to reflect he becomes more perplexed than -ever. How can God, who is good, use such a terrible instrument for moral -purposes? This people, which is assumed to be an instrument of moral -judgment in a disordered world, is itself unspeakably perverse. It is -fierce and wolfish. Its only god is might. It cares only for success. It -catches men, like fish, in its great dragnet, and “then he sacrificeth -unto his net and burneth incense unto his drag.” How can such a pitiless -and insolent people, dominated by pride and love of conquest, be used to -work out the ends of righteousness and to act for God who is too pure -even to look upon that which is evil and wrong? Here the prophet finds -himself suddenly up against the ancient problem of the moral government -of the universe and the deep mystery of evil in it. He cannot untangle -the snarled threads of his skein. No solution of the mystery lies at -hand. He decides to climb up into his “watch-tower” and wait for an -answer from God. If it does not come at once, he proposes to stay until -it does come—“if it tarry, wait for it; it will surely come.” At length -the vision comes, so clear that a man running can read it. It is just -this famous discovery of the great text that a man cannot hope to get the -world-difficulties all straightened out to suit him, he cannot in some -easy superficial way justify the ways of God in the course of history; -but, at least, he can live unswervingly and victoriously by his own -soul’s insight, the insight of faith that God can be trusted to do the -right thing for the universe which he is steering. It is beautifully -expressed in a well-known stanza of Whittier’s: - - “I know not where His islands lift - Their fronded palms in air; - I only know I cannot drift - Beyond His love and care.” - -Many things remain unexplained. The mysteries are not all dissipated. -But I see enough light to enable me to hold a steady course onward, and -I have an inner confidence in God which nothing in the outward world can -shatter. This is the message from Habakkuk’s watch-tower: There is a -faith which goes so far into the heart of things that a man can live by -it and stand all the water-spouts which break upon him. - -Josiah Royce once defined faith as an insight of the soul by which one -can stand everything that can happen to him, and that is what this text -means. You arrive at such a personal assurance of God’s character that -you can face any event and not be swept off your feet. If this is so, -it means that the most important achievement in a man’s career is the -attainment of just this inner vision, the acquisition of an interior -spiritual confidence which itself is the victory. - -William James used often to close his lecture courses at Harvard with -what he called a “Faith-ladder.” Round after round it went up from a mere -possibility of hope to an inner conviction strong enough to dominate -action. He would begin with some human faith which outstrips evidence and -he would say of it: It is at least not absurd, not self-contradictory, -and, therefore, it might be true under certain conditions, in some kind -of a world which we can conceive. It may be true even in this world and -under existing conditions. It is fit to be true; it ought to be true. The -soul in its moment of clearest insight feels that it must be true. It -shall be true, then, at least for me, for I propose to act upon it, to -live by it, to stake my existence on it. - -This watch-tower of Habakkuk is a similar faith-ladder. He sees no way -to explain why the good suffer, or to account for the catastrophes of -history, but at least he has found a faith in God which holds him like -adamant: “Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit -be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall -yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold and there shall -be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy -in the God of my salvation.... He will make me to walk upon mine high -places.” Faith like that is always contagious. The unshaken soul kindles -another soul who believes in his belief, and the torch goes from this man -on his watch-tower to St. Paul, and from him on to the great reformer, -and then to an unnamed multitude, who through their soul’s insight can -stand everything that may happen! - - -III - -LIVING IN THE PRESENCE OF THE ETERNAL - -Some time ago I received a letter from a young minister who was about to -settle for religious work in a large manufacturing town. He and I were -strangers to each other in the flesh but friends through correspondence, -and because we were kindred spirits he wrote to me to say: “I have before -me the great work of living in the eternal God and in a humanity toiling -in factories and shops. Oh, if I could only make the presence of the -Eternal real to myself and to my people!” Another minister, laboring in -a large suburb of New York City, also a stranger to me except through -correspondence, wrote to say that he was glad for every voice which -holds up before men the reality of the invisible Church and the idea of -the universal priesthood of believers. These letters coming within a -week—and they are samples of many similar ones—are signs of the times, -and show clearly that thoughtful men all about us are done with the husk -of religion and are devoting themselves to the heart of the matter. There -is a deep movement under way which touches all denominations and is -steadily preparing in our busy, hurrying, materialistic America a true -seed of the vital, spiritual religion that will later bear rich blossoms -and ripe harvest. - -I want for the moment to return to the central desire of the young -minister, in the hope that it may inspire some of us, especially some of -our young ministers who are facing their new spiritual tasks: “I have -before me the great work of living in the eternal God and in a humanity -toiling in factories and shops. Oh, if I could only make the presence of -the Eternal real to myself and to them!” - -It is perhaps a new idea to some that living in the eternal God is -“work.” We are so accustomed to the idea that all that is required of us -is a passive mind and a waiting spirit that we have never quite realized -this truth: No person can live in the eternal God unless he is ready for -the most intense activity and for the most strenuous life. Gladstone, -in his old age, surprised his readers with his impressive phrase, “the -work of worship.” The fact is, no man ever yet found his way into the -permanent enjoyment of God along paths of least resistance or by any lazy -methods. How many of us have been humiliated to discover, in the silence -or in the service, that nothing spiritual was happening within us. Our -mind, unbent and passive enough, was like a stagnant pool, or, if not -stagnant, was darting its feelers out and following in lazy fashion any -line of suggestion which pulled it. Instead of finding ourselves “living -in the eternal God” and in the high enjoyment of him, we catch ourselves -wondering what the next strike will be, or thinking about the mean and -shabby way some one spoke to us an hour ago! There is no use blaming a -mind because it wanders—everybody’s mind wanders—but the real achievement -is to make it wander in a region which ministers to our spiritual life; -and that can be done only by getting supremely interested in the things -of the Spirit. That is where the “work” lies; that is where the effort -comes in. Attention is always determined by the fundamental interest. -What we love supremely we attend to. It gets us, it holds us. One of the -colloquial phrases for being in love with a person is “paying attention -to” the person. It is a true phrase and goes straight to reality. -If we are to discover and enjoy the eternal Presence we must become -passionately earnest in spirit and glowing with love for the Highest. - -My friend brings two important things together: He proposes to undertake -the work of living in the eternal God and in toiling humanity. The two -things go together and cannot be safely separated. It is in the actual -sharing of life through love and sympathy and sacrifice, in going out of -self to feel the problems and difficulties and sufferings of others, that -we find and form a life rich in higher interests and centered on matters -of eternal value. A man who has traveled through the deeps of life with -a fellow man comes to his hour of worship with a mind focused on the -Eternal and with a spirit girded for the inward wrestling, without which -blessings of the greater sort do not come. And every time such a man -finds himself truly at home in the eternal God and fed from within, he -can go out, with the strength of ten, to the tasks of toiling humanity. -This is one of those spiritual circles which work both ways: He that -dwells in God loves, and he that loves finds God, St. John tells us. - -It is fine to see a strong man, trained in all his faculties, going to -his work with the quiet prayer: “Oh, that I may make the presence of the -Eternal real to myself and to my people.” It is a good prayer for all of -us. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - -THE WAY OF VISION - - -I - -DAYS OF GREATER VISIBILITY - -From the porch of my little summer cottage in Maine I can see, across the -beautiful stretch of lake in the foreground, the far-distant Kennebago -Mountains in their veil of purple. But we see them only when all the -conditions of sky and air are absolutely right. Most of the time they -are wrapped in clouds or are lost in a dim haze. Our visitors admire -the lake, are charmed with the islands, the picturesque shore and the -surrounding hills, but they do not suspect the existence of this added -glory beyond the hills. We often tell them of the mountains “just over -there,” which come out into full view when the sky clears all the way -to the horizon and the wind blows fine from the northwest. They make a -casual remark about the sufficiency of what is already in sight, and go -their way in satisfied ignorance of the “beyond.” - -Next day, perhaps—Oh wonder! The morning dawns with all the conditions -favorable for our distant view. The air is altogether right for far -visibility. The clouds are swept clean from the western rim, the blue is -utterly transparent—and there are the mountains! We wish our skeptical -visitors could be with us now. We guess that they would not easily -talk of the sufficiency of the near beauty, if they could once see the -overtopping glory of these mountains now fully unveiled and revealed. -Something like that, I feel sure, is true of God and of other great -spiritual realities which are linked with his being. Most of the time -we get on with the things that are near at hand; the things we see and -handle and are sure of. The world is full of utility and we do well to -appreciate what is there waiting to be used. There is always something -satisfying about beauty, and nature is very rich and lavish with it. -Friendship and love are heavenly gifts, and when these are added to the -other good things which the world gives us, it would seem, and it does -seem, to many that we ought to be satisfied and not be homesick for the -glory which lies beyond the horizon-line of the senses. I cannot help -it; my soul will not stay satisfied with this near-at-hand supply. A -discontent sweeps over me, an uncontrollable _Heimweh_—homesickness of -soul—surges up within me and I should be compelled to call the whole -scheme miserable failure, if the near, visible skyline were the real -boundary of all that is. - -Sometimes—Oh joy! When the inward weather is just right; when selfish -impulse has been hushed; when the clouds and shadows, which sin makes, -are swept away and genuine love makes the whole inner atmosphere pure and -free from haze, then I know that I find a beyond which before was nowhere -in sight and might easily not have been suspected. I cannot decide -whether this extended range of sight is due to alterations in myself, -or whether it is due to some sudden increase of spiritual visibility in -the great reality itself. I only know the fact. Before, I was occupied -with things; now, I commune with God and am as sure of him as I am of the -mountains beyond my lake, which my skeptical visitor has not yet seen. - -There can be no adequate world here for us without at least a faith in -the reality beyond the line of what we see with our common eyes. We have -times when we cannot live by bread alone, or by our increase of stocks; -when we lose our interest in cosmic forces and need something more -than the slow justice which history weighs out on its great judgment -days. We want to feel a real heart beating somewhere through things; we -want to discover through the maze a loving will working out a purpose; -we want to know that our costly loyalties, our high endeavors, and our -sacrifices which make the quivering flesh palpitate with pain, really -matter to Someone and fill up what is behind of his great suffering for -love’s sake. We can not get on here with substitutes; we must have the -reality itself. Religion is an awful farce if it is only a play-scheme, a -cinematograph-show, which makes one believe he is seeing reality when he -is, in fact, being fooled with a picture. We must at all costs insist on -the real things. It is God we want and not another, the real Face and not -a picture. - - “We needs must love the highest when we see it; - Not Lancelot nor another.” - -He is surely there to be seen, like my mountain. Days may pass when we -only hope and long and guess. Then the weather comes right, the veil -thins away and we see! It is, however, not a rare privilege reserved for -a tiny few. It is not a grudged miracle, granted only to saints who have -killed out all self. It belongs to the very nature of the soul to see -God. It is what makes life really life. It is as normal a function as -breathing or digestion. Only one must, of all things, intend to do it! - - -II - -THE PROPHET AND HIS TRAGEDIES - -There will always be in the world a vast number of persons who take the -most comfortable form of religion which their generation affords. They -are not path-breakers; they have nothing in their nature which pushes -them into the fields of discovery—they are satisfied with the religion -which has come down to them from the past. They accept what others have -won and tested, and are thankful that they are saved the struggle and the -fire which are involved in first-hand experience and in fresh discovery. - -The prophet, on the contrary, in whatever age he comes, can never take -this easy course. He cannot rest contented with the forms of religion -which are accepted by others. He cannot enjoy the comforts of the calm -and settled faith which those around him inherit and adopt. His soul -forever hears the divine call to leave the old mountain and go forward, -to conquer new fields, to fight new battles, to restate his faith in -words that are fresh and vital, in terms of the deepest life of his time. -We used to think—many people still think—that a prophet is a foreteller -of future events, a kind of magical and miraculous person who speaks -as an oracle and who announces, without knowing how or why, far-off, -coming occurrences that are communicated to him. To think thus is to miss -the deeper truth of the prophet’s mission. He is primarily a religious -patriot, a statesman with a moral and spiritual policy for the nation. -He is a person who sees what is involved in the eternal nature of things -and therefore what the outcome of a course of life is bound to be. He -possesses an unerring eye for curves of righteousness or unrighteousness, -as the great artist has for lines of beauty and harmony, or as the great -mathematician has for the completing lines of a curve, involved in any -given arc of it. He is different from others, not in the fact that he -has ecstasies and lives in the realm of miracles, but rather that he has -a clearer conviction of God than most men have. He has found him as the -center of all reality. He reads and interprets all history in the light -of the indubitable fact of God, and he estimates life and deeds in -terms of moral and spiritual laws, which are as inflexible as the laws -of chemical atoms or of electrical forces. He looks for no capricious -results. He sees that this is a universe of moral and spiritual order. - -If he is an Amos, he will refuse to fall in line with the easy worshipers -of his age, who are satisfied with the old-time religion of “burnt -offerings” and “meat offerings” and “peace offerings of fat beasts.” His -soul will cry out for a religion which makes a new moral and spiritual -man, “makes righteousness run down as a mighty stream,” and sets the -worshiper into new social relations with his fellows. If he is an Isaiah, -he will refuse “to tramp the temple” with the mass of easy worshipers; -he will have his own vision of “the Lord high and lifted up,” with his -glory filling not only the temple but the whole earth, and he will -dedicate himself to the task of preparing a holy people and a holy city -for this God who has been revealed to him as a thrice-holy God. If he is -a Jeremiah, he will not accept the view that the traditional religion of -Jerusalem is adequate for the crisis of the times. He will insist that -true religion must be inwardly experienced; that the law of God must be -written in the heart, and that the life of a man must be the living -fruit of his faith. He will cry out against the idea that the moral -wounds and spiritual sores of the daughter of Jerusalem can be healed -with easy salves and cheap panaceas. - -The supreme example of this refusal to go along the easy line of -contemporary religion is that of One who was more than a prophet. His -people prided themselves on being the chosen people of the Lord. The -scribal leaders had succeeded in drawing up a complete and perfect -catalogue of religious performances. They supplied minute directions for -one’s religious duty in every detail, real or imaginary, of daily life, -and the world has never seen a more elaborate form of religion than this -of the Pharisees. But Christ refused to follow the path of custom; he -could not and he would not do the things which the scribes prescribed. He -broke a new path for the soul, and called men away from legalism and the -dead routine of “performances” to a life of individual faith and service, -which involves suffering and self-sacrifice, but which brings the soul -into personal relation with the living God. - -St. Paul, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a rabbinical scholar of the first -rank, a man rising stage by stage to fame along the path marked out by -the traditions of his people, came back from his eventful journey to -Damascus to take up the work of a path-breaker and to set himself like -a flint against the old-time religion in which he was born and reared. -Luther, a devout monk, an ambassador to the papal court, a professor of -scholastic theology, discovered that he could not find peace to his soul -along the path of the prevailing traditional religion, and he swung, -with all the fervor of his powerful nature, into a fresh track which -has blessed all ages since. These are some of the supreme leaders, but -every age has had its quota of minor prophets, who have heard the call to -leave the old mountain and go forward and who have fearlessly entered the -perilous and untried path of fresh vision. As we look back and see them -in the perspective of their successful mission to the race, we thank God -for their bravery and their valiant service, but we are apt to forget the -tragedies of their lives. - -Nobody can enter a fresh path, or bring a new vision of the meaning of -life, or reinterpret old truths—in short, nobody can be a prophet—without -arousing the suspicion and, sooner or later, the bitter hatred of those -who are the keepers and guardians of the existing forms and traditions, -and the path-breaker must expect to see his old friends misunderstand -him, turn against him, and reproach him. He must endure the hard -experience of being called a destroyer of the very things he is giving -his life to build. Christ is, for example, hurried to the cross as a -blasphemer, and each prophet, in his degree, has had to hear himself -charged with being the very opposite of what he really is in heart and -life. To be a prophet at all he must be a sensitive soul, and yet he must -live and work in a pitiless rain of misunderstanding and attack. Still -more tragic, perhaps, is the necessity which the prophet is under of -doing his hard tasks without living to see the triumphant results. He is, -naturally, ahead of his time—a path-breaker—and his contemporaries are -always slow to discover and to realize what he is doing. Even those who -love him and appreciate him only half see his true purpose, and thus he -feels alone and solitary, though he may be in the thick of the throng. -It is only when he is long dead and the mists have cleared away that he -is called a prophet and comes to his true place. While he lived he was -sure of only one Friend who completely understood him and approved of his -course, and that was his invisible and heavenly Friend. But in spite of -the tragedy and the pain and the hard road, the prophet, “seeing him who -is invisible,” prefers to all other paths, however easy and popular, the -path of his vision and call. - - -III - -A LONG DISTANCE CALL - -Just when life seems peculiarly crowded with items of complexity and -importance, the telephone rings a determined, significant kind of ring. -This is evidently no ordinary passing-the-time-of-day affair. I interrupt -my weighty concerns and take up the receiver with expectation. I say -“Hello!” but there is no answer, no human recognition. The wire hums and -buzzes, instruments click far away, plugs are pulled out and pushed in. -Little tiny scraps of remote, inane, unintelligible conversation between -unknown mortals furnish the only evidence I get that there is any human -purpose going forward in this strange world inside the telephone system -where I can see nothing happening. - -Suddenly a voice which is evidently hunting for me breaks in: “Is this -Mr. ——?” “Yes.” “Hold the wire, please.” I am led on with increasing -interest and confidence. Somebody somewhere miles away in this invisible -world of electrical connections is seeking for me. I forget the -multitudinous problems that were besieging me when the telephone first -rang, and I listen with suppressed breath and strained muscles. All I -get, however, is an immense confusion. There is no coherence or order to -anything that reaches me. Faint and far away in some still remoter center -than at first I hear clicks and buzzes, vague unmeaning noises, and the -dull thud of shifting plugs that connect the lines. Once more a kindly -voice breaks in on the confusion, a voice seeking after me from some -distant city: “Is this Mr. ——?” “Yes.” “Wait a minute.” - -I do wait a minute as patiently as I can. I dimly feel that we are -plunging out into yet remoter space, and that I am being connected up -with the person who all the time has been seeking me. A low hum of -the far-away wire is all I get to repay me for the long wait. I grow -impatient. I shout “Hello!” “Is anybody there?” “Do you want me?” Not a -word comes back, only endless, empty murmurs of people who have found one -another and are talking so far off that the sense is lost in the mere -broth of sounds. This dull world inside the telephone seems to be a mad -world of noise and confusion but no substance, no real correspondence. I -am on the verge of giving the whole business up and of returning to my -interrupted tasks, which at least were rational. - -Suddenly a voice breaks in, this time a voice I know and recognize. The -person who had been seeking me all the time, across these spaces and -over this network of interlaced wires, calls me by name, speaks words of -insight and intelligence, and gives me a message which moves me deeply -and raises the whole tone of my spirit. When finally I “hang up” and -return to the things in hand, I have renewed my strength and can work -with clearer head and faster pace. The pause has been like a pause in -a piece of music. It has been full of significance, and it has helped -toward a higher level. - -Something like this telephone experience happens in another and very -different sphere—a sphere where there are no wires. In the hush and -silence, when the conditions are right for it, it often seems as -though some one were trying to communicate with us, seeking for actual -correspondence with us. We turn from the din and turmoil of busy efforts -and listen for the voice. We listen intently and we hear—our own heart -beating. We feel the strain of our muscles across the chest. We push back -a little deeper and try again. We feel the tension of the skin over the -forehead and we note that we are pulling the eyeballs up and inward for -more concentrated meditation. All the muscles of the scalp are drawn -and we notice them perhaps for the first time. Strange little bits of -thought flit across the threshold of the mind. We catch glimpses of dim -ideas knocking at the windows for admission to the inner domain where -we live. Then, all of a sudden, we succeed in pushing further back. We -forget our strained muscles and are unconscious of the corporeal bulk of -ourselves. We get in past the flitting thoughts and the procession of -ideas contending for entrance. The track seems open for the Someone who -is seeking us no less certainly than we are seeking him. If we do not -hear our name called, and do not hear distinctly a message in well-known -words, we do at least feel that we have found a real Presence and have -received fresh vital energy from the creative center of life itself, so -that we come back to action, after our pause, restored, refreshed, and -“charged” with new force to live by. - -Some time ago a long distance call came to my telephone and I went -through all the stages of waiting and of confusion and finally heard the -clear voice calling me, but I could not get any answer back. I heard -perfectly across the five hundred intervening miles, but my correspondent -never got a single clear word from me. We found that something was wrong -with our transmitter. The connection was good, the line was pervious, the -seeking voice was at the other end, but I did not succeed in transmitting -what ought to have been said. Here is where most of us fail in this other -sphere—this inner wireless sphere—we are poor transmitters. We make the -connection, we receive the gift of grace, we are flooded with the incomes -of life and power and we freely take, but we do not give. We absorb and -accumulate what we can, but we transmit little of all that comes to us. -Our radius of out-giving influence is far too small. We need, on the one -hand, to listen deeper, to get further in beyond the tensions and the -noises, but on the other hand we need to be more radio-active, better -transmitters of the grace of God. - - - - -CHAPTER V - -THE WAY OF PERSONALITY - - -I - -ANOTHER KIND OF HERO - -A generation ago almost everybody read, at least once, Carlyle’s great -book on heroes. He gave us the hero as prophet, as priest, as poet, -as king, and he made us realize that these heroes have been the real -makers of human society. I should like to add a chapter on another kind -of hero, who has, perhaps, not done much to build cities and states and -church systems, but who has, almost more than anybody else, shown us the -spiritual value of endurance—I mean the hero as invalid. - -It is the hardest kind of heroism there is to achieve. Most of us know -some man—too often it is oneself—who is a very fair Christian when he is -in normal health and absorbed in interesting work, who carries a smooth -forehead and easily drops into a good-natured smile, but who becomes -“blue” and irritable and a storm center in the family weather as soon -as the bodily apparatus is thrown out of gear. Most of us have had a -taste of humiliation as we have witnessed our own defeat in the presence -of some thorn in the flesh, which stubbornly pricked us, even though we -prayed to have it removed and urged the doctor to hurry up and remove it. - -What a hero, then, must he be, who, with a weak and broken body, a -prey to pain and doomed to die daily, learns how to live in calm faith -that God is good and makes his life a center of cheer and sunshine! -The heroism of the battlefield and the man-of-war looks cheap and thin -compared with this. We could all rally to meet some glorious moment -when a trusted leader shouted to us, “Your country expects you to do -your duty!” But to drag on through days and nights, through weeks and -months, through recurring birthdays, with vital energy low, with sluggish -appetite, with none of that ground-swell of superfluous vigor which makes -healthy life so good, and still to prove that life is good and to radiate -joy and triumph—that is the very flower and perfume of heroism. If we -are making up a bead-roll of heroes, let us put at the top the names of -those quiet friends of ours who have played the man or revealed the woman -through hard periods of invalidism and have exhibited to us the fine -glory of a courageous spirit. - -One of the hardest and most difficult features to bear is the inability -to work at one’s former pace and with the old-time constructive power. -The prayer of the Psalmist that his work, the contribution of his life, -might be preserved is very touching: “Establish thou the work of our -hands upon us, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.” What can be -more tragic than the cry of Othello: “My occupation is gone!” So long as -the hand keeps its cunning and the mind remains clear and creative, one -can stand physical handicap and pain, but when the working power of mind -or body is threatened, then the test of faith and heroism indeed arrives. - -A man whose life meant much to me and whose intimacy was very precious -to me made me see many years ago how wonderfully this test could be -met. He was a great teacher, the head of a distinguished boys’ school. -He was experiencing the full measure of success, and his influence over -his boys was extraordinary. He realized, as his work went on, that his -hearing was becoming dull and was steadily failing. He went to New York -and consulted a famous specialist. After making a careful examination the -specialist said, with perfect frankness: “Your case is hopeless. Nothing -can be done to check the disaster. You are hard of hearing already, but -in a very short time you will have no hearing at all.” Without a quaver -the teacher said: “Don’t you think, doctor, that I shall hear Gabriel’s -trumpet when it blows!” He went back to his school, learned to read lips, -reorganized his life, accepted without a murmur his loss of a major -sense, and finished his splendid career of work in an undefeated spirit -and with a grace and joy which were envied by many persons in possession -of all their powers. - -All my readers will think of some “star player” in this hard game of -patience and endurance, and will have watched with awe and reverence the -glorious fight of some of those unrecorded heroes who won but got no -valor medal. The only person who ranks higher in the scale of heroism -than the hero as invalid is possibly the person who patiently, lovingly -nurses and cares for some invalid through years of decline and suffering. -Generally, though not always, it is a woman. Not seldom she is called -upon to consecrate her life to the task, and often she gives what is much -more precious than life itself. We build no monuments to daughters who -unmurmuringly forego the joy of married life, who refuse the suit of -love in order to be free to ease the closing years of father or mother, -grown helpless; but where is there higher consecration or finer heroism? -Men sometimes complain that the days of chivalry and heroism are past. On -the contrary, they are more truly dawning. As Christianity ripens love -grows richer and deeper, and where love appears heroism is always close -at hand. Our best heroes are mothers and wives and daughters, fathers and -husbands and sons. - - -II - -THE BETTER POSSESSION - -During one of the intense persecutions by which an early Roman emperor -harried the Christians of the first century, some unknown writer (Harnack -thinks It was a woman) wrote an extraordinary little book to hearten -those who were undergoing the trial of their faith. I mean, of course, -the Epistle to the Hebrews. It is marked by rare genius and by undoubted -inspiration. It is full of vital messages and it contains passages of -great power. Just before the most loved section of the little book—the -account of the faith-heroes—the author, in a passage open to a variety -of translations, refers to the fact that those to whom he is writing -have suffered, and have suffered joyfully, the spoiling of their -possessions, “knowing,” he says, “that you have your own selves for a -better possession”—you yourselves are a better possession than any of -those goods which you have lost for your faith. - -I wonder if the readers fully realized the truth, or if we should to-day -realize it had we suffered a similar stripping. We are very slow to take -account of that type of stock. We are very keen about our own assets, -but we often fail to prize this supreme ownership, the possession of -ourselves. There is a story, both sad and amusing, of an insane man who -was seen wildly rushing about the house, from room to room, looking in -cupboards and clothes-presses, crawling under beds, obviously searching -for something. When questioned as to what he was so frantically looking -for, he replied, “I am trying to find my self!” It is not as mad as it -seems. I am not sure but that we who are not trying to find ourselves are -after all more crazy still. - -Old Burton, who wrote _The Anatomy of Melancholy_, well said: - - “Men look to their tools; a painter will wash his pencils; a - smith will look to his hammer, anvil, and forge; a husbandman - will mend his plow-irons and grind his hatchet, if it be dull; - a musician will string and unstring his lute; only scholars - neglect that instrument, their brains and spirits I mean, which - they daily use.” - -Not scholars only, but all classes and conditions of men are guilty -of this strange insanity. If the Duke of Westminster should offer to -transfer to us his estates, we would rush with all conceivable speed to -acquire our new potential possessions. We would go as with wings of an -aeroplane to get the transaction accomplished before anything could occur -to keep us from entering into our fortune. But here we are already within -reach of a vastly better possession, of which we are strangely negligent. -If it came to a choice between himself and his outward possessions, this -duke who owns so much would not hesitate a minute which to prefer. If in -a crisis of illness he could save himself by surrender of his goods, they -would instantly go. “Give me health and a day,” Emerson said, “and I will -make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.” - -What we would do in a crisis we often fail to do when no crisis confronts -us, and it is a fact that too often we miss and even squander that -better possession, ourselves. The best way to win it and enjoy it is -to cultivate those inner experiences and endowments which make us -independent of external fortune. All Christ’s beatitudes attach to some -inherent quality of life itself. The meek, the merciful, the pure, are -“happy,” not because the external world conforms to their wishes, but -because they have resources of life within themselves and have entered -upon a way of life which continually opens out into more life and richer -life. They have found a kind of Canaan that “comes” in continuous -instalments. - -One of the simplest ways to heighten the total value of life is to form -a habit of appreciating the world we have here and now. It presents -occasional inconveniences, no doubt, but think of the amazing donations -which come to us: the tilting of the earth’s axis twenty-three and a -half degrees to the ecliptic by which contrivance we have our seasons; -the fact that the proportion of earth and water is just right to give -us a fine balance of rain and sunshine; the extraordinary way in which -the entire universe submits to our mathematics so that every movement of -matter and every vibration of ether conforms to laws which we formulate; -the accumulation and storage of fuel and motor power, with the prospect -of even greater resources of energy to be had from the unoccupied space -surrounding the earth. Then, again, it cannot be a matter of unconcern -that there is such a wealth of beauty lavished upon us everywhere, -waiting for us to enjoy it. There is here a strange fit between the outer -and the inner. The more one draws upon the beauty of the world and enjoys -it, so much the more does he increase his capacity to discover and enjoy -beauty. Coal and oil may become exhausted, but beauty is inexhaustible. -The only trouble is that we are so limited in our range of appreciation -of it. We turn to cheaper values and miss so much of this free gift of -loveliness. - -Greater still should be our resources of love and friendship. Nothing -could be stranger or more wonderful than that in a world where struggle -for existence is the law this other trait should have emerged. It is -easy to explain selfishness; love is the mystery. Love forgets itself; -it scorns double-entry bookkeeping; it gives, it bestows, it shares, it -sacrifices without asking whether anything is coming back. And it turns -out to be a fact that nothing else so enhances and increases the value of -this “better possession which is ourselves.” - -Even more wonderful, if that is possible, is the way we are formed -and contrived to have intercourse with the Eternal. With all our -material furnishings we strangely open out into the infinite and -partake of a spiritual nature. God has set eternity in our hearts. We -cannot win this better possession nor hold it permanently unless we -exercise these spiritual capacities, which expand our being and add the -richest qualities of life. “Thou hast made us for thyself,” Augustine -acknowledged in his great prayer at the opening of the _Confessions_ and -“we are restless until we find thee as our true rest.” It is as true now -as in the fourth century. Barns and houses, lands and stocks, mortgages -and bonds, do not constitute life unless one learns how to win and -possess his soul and to keep that best of all possessions—himself. - - -III - -THE GREATEST RIVALRIES OF LIFE - -“After experience had taught me that all things which are encountered in -human life are vain and futile.... I at length determined to inquire if -there was anything which was a true good.” Those are the words of a great -philosopher who says that he found himself “led by the hand up to the -highest blessedness.” - -Not everybody finds the choice of ends so easy as Spinoza did; not all of -us are carried along into sustained and unmistakable blessedness. Life -is full of rivalries which tend to divide our interest and to dissipate -our attention. We wake up, perhaps, with surprise to discover that we -are being carried, by the hand or by the hair, straight away from “the -highest blessedness.” Not seldom the sternest tragedies of human life are -occasioned by success. Failure overtaking one in his aim will often shake -him awake and make him see that he was pursuing an end in sharp rivalry -with his highest good. But success often dulls the vision for other -issues and gives one the specious confidence that he is on the right -track and “all’s well.” - -Christ has a vivid parable which touches upon the rivalries of life. It -is the story of a great feast to which many guests are invited. When -the critical moment for the dinner comes the other rivalries begin to -operate. One man, attracted by his possessions, “begs off,” to use the -graphic phrase of the original. Another, occupied with the complex -interests of business and busy with the affairs of trade, prays to be -excused. A third is immersed in the joys and responsibilities of married -life and he abruptly dispatches his “regrets.” It was not that they were -unconcerned about the sumptuous feast, but that they were carried along -by rival interests. - -The feast in this parable plainly stands for the “true good,” the -“highest blessedness” of life. It symbolizes the goal and crown of life, -the full realization of our best human possibilities, the attainment of -that for which we were made aspiring beings. The invitation is a mark -of amazing grace and the recipient of it has the clearest evidence that -the feast would satisfy him. But there are the other things with their -rival attractions! Possessions and business and domestic life pull us in -a contrary direction. We send our cards of regret and beg off from the -great feast. - -The real mistake lies in treating these things as rivals. If we only -knew it, an affirmative response to the great invitation of life would -prepare us for all the other things and would heighten the value of all -we own, of all we do, and of all we love. Salvation is not some remote -and ghostly thing that has to do with another world. It is the infusion -of new life and power into all the concerns and affairs of this present -world where we are. It means, as Christ said, receiving “a hundredfold -now in this time, houses and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and -children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal -life.” - -Nothing could be a more mistaken way than to regard human love as a -rival to the highest of all relations, the love of the soul for God. -One of the medieval saints said: “God brooks no rival”; but that phrase -shows that the saint was caught napping, and in any case did not quite -understand what love is. The way up to the highest love is not to be -found by turning away from those experiences which give us training -and preparation for the highest; but rather it is found in and through -the experience of loving some person who, however imperfectly, is a -revelation of the beauty and divineness of love. Not by some sheer leap -from the earth does the soul arrive at its height of blessedness, but by -steps and stages, by processes which bring illumination and richness of -life. The man who has married a wife will do well to say when he answers -the great invitation: “I have just married a wife and therefore I am -peculiarly glad to come to thy feast, since fellowship with thee will -make my love more real and true as that in turn will enable me to rise to -a more genuine appreciation of thy love.” - -The same is true of houses and lands, of business and trade. There is no -necessary rivalry here. Religion does not rob us of earthly interests, -it does not strip us of the good things of this world. It only corrects -our perspective and enables us to see the true scale of values. The -trivial and fragmentary things of the world no longer absorb us. We -refuse now to allow them to own us and drive us, or drag us. We see -things steadily and we see them whole. We discover through our higher -contacts and inspirations how to flood light back upon our occupations -and upon the things we own, and how to make these subordinate things -minister to the higher functions and attitudes of life. We get not some -other world, but this world here and now transmuted and raised a little -nearer to the ideal and perfect world of our hopes and dreams. We get it -back item for item increased a hundredfold, raised to a higher spiritual -level. The wise owner of property and the intelligent man of affairs will -not beg off when the great invitation comes to him. He will say: “I have -just come into possession of a piece of land, I have bought five yoke -of oxen, and therefore I want to come to thy divine feast so that I may -learn how to turn all I possess into the channels of real service and to -make these things which thou hast given me help me find the way to the -highest joy and blessedness of life.” - - - - -CHAPTER VI - -AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION - - -I - -THE CHURCH OF THE LIVING GOD - -We have all been asking, “What is the matter with the Church? Why is it -so weak and ineffective? Why does it exercise such a feeble influence -in the world to-day? Why do men care so little for its message and its -mission?” There are no doubt many answers to these questions, but one -answer concerns us here. It is this: We who compose the Church do not -sufficiently realize that God is a living God and that the Church is -intended to be the living body through which he works in the world and -through which he reveals himself. We think of him as far away in space -and remote in time, a God who created once and who worked wonders in -ancient times long past, but we do not, as we should, vividly think of -him as a living reality, as near to us as the air is to the flying bird -or the water to the swimming fish. We suppose that the Church is made -up of just people, and is a human convenience for getting things done in -the world. We do not see as we should that it is meant to be both divine -and human and that it never is properly a Church unless God lives in it, -reveals himself by means of it and works his spiritual work in the world -through it. - -This truth of the real Presence breaks through many of Christ’s great -sayings and was one of the most evident features of the experience of the -early Church. “Wherever in all the world two or three shall gather in my -name there am I in the midst of them.” “Lo, I am with you always, even -unto the end of the world.” “Wherever there is one alone,” according to -the newly found “saying” of Jesus, “I am with him. Raise the stone and -there thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and there am I.” - -Not once alone was the early Church invaded by a life and power from -beyond itself as at Pentecost. The consciousness which characterized this -“upper room” experience was repeated in some degree wherever a Church -of the living God came into existence, as “a tiny island in a sea of -surrounding paganism.” To belong to the Church meant to St. Paul to be -“joined to the Lord in one spirit,” while the Church itself in his great -phrase is the body of Christ and each individual a member in particular -of that body. - -What a difference it would make if we could rise to the height of St. -Paul’s expectation and be actually “builded together for an habitation -of God through the Spirit!” We try plenty of other expedients. We -popularize our message; we take up fads; we adjust as far as we can to -the tendencies of the time; but only one thing really works after all and -that is having the Church become the organ of the living God, and having -it “charged” with what Paul so often calls the power of God—“the power -that worketh in us.” - -I saw a car wheel recently that had been running many miles with the -brake clamped tight against it. It was white hot and it glowed with -heat and light until it seemed almost transparent in its extraordinary -luminosity. Those Christians in the upper room at Pentecost were baptized -with fire so that the whole personality of each of them was glowing with -heat and light, for the fire had gone all through them. They suddenly -became conscious that their divine Leader who was no longer visible -with them had become an invisible presence and a living power working -through them. It is no wonder that all Jerusalem and its multitudinous -sojourners were at once awakened to the fact that something novel had -happened. - -Our controversies which have divided us have been controversies about -things out at the periphery, not about realities at the heart and center. -We disagree about baptism, and we are at variance over problems of -organization, ministry, and ordination, but the thing that really matters -is the depth of conviction, consciousness of God, certainty of communion -and fellowship with the Spirit. These experiences unite and never divide. - -There is after all, in spite of all our gaps and chasms, only one Church. -It is the Church of the living God. We are named with many names. We bear -the sign of a particular denomination, but if we belong truly to the -Church, then we belong to the great Church of the living God. It is built -upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself -being the chief cornerstone, in whom the building, fitly framed together, -grows into an holy temple in the Lord. This is “the blessed community,” -the living, expanding fellowship of vital faith, and it has the promise -of the future, whether conferences on “faith and order” succeed or not, -because it is the Church of the living God. - - -II - -THE NURSERY OF SPIRITUAL LIFE - -We are coming more and more to realize that religion attaches to the -simple, elemental aspects of our human life. We shall not look for it in -a few rare, exalted, and so-called “sacred” aspects of life, separated -off from the rest of life and raised to a place apart. Religion to be -real and vital must be rooted in life itself and it must express itself -through the whole life. It should begin, where all effective education -must begin, in the home, which should be the nursery of spiritual life. - -The Christian home is the highest product of civilization; in fact there -is nothing that can be called civilization where the home is absent. The -savage is on his way out of savagery as soon as he can create a home and -make family life at all sacred. The real horror of the “slums” in our -great cities is that there are no homes there, but human beings crowded -indiscriminately into one room. It is the real trouble with the “poor -whites” whether in the South or in the North that they have failed to -preserve the home as a sacred center of life. - -One of the first services of the foreign missionary is to help to -establish homes among the people whom he hopes to Christianize. In short, -the home is the true unit of society. It determines what the individual -shall be; it shapes the social life; it makes the Church possible; it is -the basis of the state and nation. A society of mere individual units is -inconceivable. Men and women, each for self, and with no holy center for -family life, could never compose either a Church or a State. - -Christianity has created the home as we know it, and that is its highest -service to the world, for the kingdom of heaven would be realized if -the Christian home were universal. The mother’s knee is still the -holiest place in the world; and the home life determines more than all -influences combined what the destiny of the boy or girl shall be. The -formation of disposition and early habits of thought and manner as well -as the fundamental emotions and sentiments do more to shape and fix the -permanent character than do any other forces in the world. - -We may well rejoice in the power of the Sunday school, the Christian -ministry, the secular school, the college, the university; but all -together they do not measure up to the power of the homes which are -silently, gradually determining the future lives of those who will -compose the Sunday school, the Church, the school, and the college. - -The woman who is successful in making a true home, where peace and love -dwell, in which the children whom God gives her feel the sacredness and -holy meaning of life, where her husband renews his strength for the -struggles and activities of his life, and in which all unite to promote -the happiness and highest welfare of each other—that woman has won the -best crown there is in this life, and she has served the world in a -very high degree. The union of man and woman for the creation of a home -breathing an atmosphere of love is Christ’s best parable of the highest -possible spiritual union where the soul is the bride and he is the -Eternal Bridegroom, and they are one. - -It seems strange that these vital matters are so little emphasized or -regarded. Few things in fact are more ominous than the signs of the -disintegration of the home as a nursery of spiritual life. We can, -perhaps, weather catastrophes which may break down many of our ancient -customs and even obliterate some of the institutions which now seem -essential to civilization; but the home is a fundamental necessity for -true spiritual nurture and culture, and if it does not perform its -function the world will drift on toward unspeakable moral disasters. - - -III - -THE DEMOCRACY WE AIM AT - -Democracy was in an earlier period only a political aim; it has now -become a deep religious issue. It must be discussed not only in caucuses -and conventions, but in churches as well. For a century and a quarter -“democracy” has been a great human battle word, and battle words never -have very exact definitions. It has all the time been charged with -explosive forces, and it has produced a kind of magic spell on men’s -minds during this long transitional period. But the word democracy has, -throughout this time, remained fluid and ill-defined—sometimes expressing -the loftiest aspirations and sometimes serving the coarse demagogue in -his pursuit of selfish ends. - -The goal or aim of the early struggle after democracy was the overthrow -of human inequalities. Men were thought of in terms of individual -units, and the units were declared to be intrinsically equal. The -contention was made that they all had, or ought to have, the same rights -and privileges. This equality-note has, too, dominated the social and -economic struggles of the last seventy-five years. The focus has been -centered upon rights and privileges. Men have been thought of, all along, -as individual units, and the goal has been conceived in political and -economic terms. Democracy is still supposed, in many quarters, to be an -organization of society in which the units have equal political rights. -Much of the talk concerning democracy is still in terms of privileges. -It is a striving to secure opportunities and chances. The aim is the -attainment of a social order in which guarantee is given to every -individual that he shall have his full economic and political rights. - -I would not, in the least, belittle the importance of these claims, -or underestimate the human gains which have been made thus far in the -direction of greater equality and larger freedom. But these achievements, -however valuable, are not enough. They can only form the base from which -to start the drive for a more genuine and adequate type of democracy. At -its best this scheme of “equality” is abstract and superficial. Nobody -will ever be satisfied with an achievement of flat equality. Persons can -never be reduced to homogeneous units. There are individual differences -woven into the very fiber of human life, and no type of democracy can -ever satisfy men like us until it gets beyond this artificial scheme and -learns to deal with the problem in more adequate fashion. - -A genuinely Christian democracy such as the religious soul is after can -not be conceived in economic terms, nor can it be content with social -units of equality or sameness. We want a democracy that is vitally and -spiritually conceived, which recognizes and safeguards the irreducible -uniqueness of every member of the social whole. This means that we can -not deal with personal life in terms of external behavior. We can not -think of society as an aggregation of units possessing individual rights -and privileges. We shall no longer be satisfied to regard persons as -beings possessing utilitarian value or made for economic uses. We shall -forever transcend the instrumental idea. We shall begin rather with -the inalienable fact of spiritual worth as the central feature of the -personal life. This would mean that every person, however humble or -limited in scope or range, has divine possibilities to be realized; is -not a “thing” to be used and exploited, but a spiritual creation to be -expanded until its true nature is revealed. The democracy I want will -treat every human person as a unique, sacred, and indispensable member -of a spiritual whole, a whole which remains imperfect if even one of -its “little ones” is missing; and its fundamental axiom will be the -liberation and realization of the inner life which is potential in every -member of the human race. - -On the economic and equality level we never reach the true conception -of personal life. Men are thought of as units having desires, needs, -and wants to be satisfied. We are, on this basis, aiming to achieve a -condition in which the desires, wants, and needs are well met, in which -each individual contributes his share of supplies to the common stock of -economic values, and receives in turn his equitable amount. I am dealing, -on the other hand, with a way of life which begins and ends, not with a -material value-concept at all, but rather with a central faith in the -intrinsic worth and infinite spiritual possibilities of every person in -the social organism—a democracy of spiritual agents. - -It is true, no doubt, as Shylock said, that we all have “eyes, hands, -organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions,” are “subject to -diseases,” and “warmed and cooled by summer and winter.” “If you prick -us we bleed, if you tickle us we laugh, if you poison us we die,” and so -on. We do surely have wants and needs. We must consider values. We must -have food and clothes and houses. We must have some fair share of the -earth and its privileges. But that is only the basement and foundation -of real living, and we want a democracy that is supremely concerned with -the development of personality and with the spiritual organization of -society. We shall not make our estimates of persons on a basis of their -uses, or on the ground of their behavior as animal beings; we shall -live and work, if we are Christ’s disciples, in the faith that man is -essentially a spiritual being, in a world which is essentially spiritual, -and that we are committed to the task of awakening a like faith in others -and of helping realize an organic solidarity of persons who practice -this faith. Our rule of life would be something like the following: to -act everywhere and always as though we knew that we are members of a -spiritual community, each one possessed of infinite worth, of irreducible -uniqueness, and indispensable to the spiritual unity of the whole—a -community that is being continually enlarged by the faith and action of -those who now compose it, and so in some measure being formed by our -human effort to achieve a divine ideal. - -The most important service we can render our fellow men is to awaken -in them a real faith in their own spiritual nature and in their own -potential energies, and to set them to the task of building the ideal -democracy in which personality is treated as sacred and held safe from -violation, infringement, or exploitation, and, more than that, in which -we altogether respect the worth and the divine hopes inherent in our -being as men. - - -IV - -THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY - -There are few questions more difficult to answer than the question, What -is Christianity? Every attempt to answer it reveals the peculiar focus of -interest in the mind of the writer, but it leaves the main question still -asking for a new answer. - -“Always it asketh, asketh,” and each answer, to say the least, is -inadequate. Harnack, Loisy, and Tolstoy have given three characteristic -answers to the great question. Their books are touched with genius and -will long continue to be read, but, like the other books, they, too, -reveal the writers rather than solve the central problem. - -One of the greatest difficulties about the whole matter is the difficulty -of deciding where to look for the essential traits of Christianity. -Are they to be found in the teaching of Jesus? Are they revealed in -the message of St. Paul? Are they embodied in the Messianic hope? Are -they exhibited in the primitive apostolic Church? Are they set forth -in the great creeds of orthodoxy? Are they expressed in the imperial -authoritative Church? Are they to be discovered in the Protestantism -of the modern world? This catalogue of preliminary questions shows how -complicated the subject really is. To start in on any one of these lines -would be of necessity to arrive at a partial and one-sided answer. - -Nowhere can we find pure and unalloyed Christianity; always we have -it mixed and combined with something else, more or less foreign to -it. The creeds contain a larger element of Greek philosophy than of -the pure original gospel. The Messianic hope is far more Jewish than -it is “Christian.” The imperial authoritative Church is Christianity -interpreted through the Roman genius for organization and merged -and fused with the age-long faiths and customs of pagan peoples. -Protestantism is an amazingly complex blend of ideas and ideals and -everywhere interwoven with the long processes of history. Even this did -not drop from the sky ready-made! Nor did St. Paul’s message flash in -upon him with the Damascus vision, as a pure heaven-presented truth. It -proves to be a very difficult task to find one’s way back to the pure, -unalloyed teaching of Jesus, and, strangely enough, the moment one -endeavors to constitute this by itself “Christianity,” and undertakes to -turn it into a set of commands and to make it a “new law,” he ends with a -dry legalism and not a vital, universal Christianity. - -What, then, is Christianity? In answering this question we can not -confine ourselves to the teaching and the work of Jesus. Important as it -is to go “back to Jesus” that is not enough. We can not fully comprehend -the meaning of Christianity until we take into account the fact that -the invisible, resurrected Christ is the continuation through the ages -of the same revelation begun in the life and teaching of Jesus. Galilee -and Judea mark only one stage of the gospel, which is, in its fullness, -an eternal gospel. The Christian revelation which came to light first -in one Life—its master interpretation and incarnation—has since been -going forward in a continuous and unbroken manifestation of Christ -through many lives and through many groups and through the spiritual -achievements of all those who have lived by him. Christianity is, thus, -the revelation of God through personal life—God humanly revealed. St. -Paul and the writer of the Fourth Gospel were the first to reach this -profound insight into its fuller meaning, though it is plainly suggested -in some of the sayings of Jesus and in the pentecostal experiences of the -first Christians. It is the very heart of the Pauline and the Johannine -Christianity. Important as is the backward look to Jesus in both these -writers, the central emphasis is unmistakably upon the inward experience -of the invisible, spiritual Christ. This is the expectation in the Fourth -Gospel: Greater things than these shall ye do when the Spirit comes upon -you. This is the mystery, the secret of the gospel, St. Paul says, Christ -in you. - -If this is the right clew, Christianity is not a new law, nor an -institution, nor a creed, nor a body of doctrine, nor a millennial -hope. It is a type of life, it is a way of living. The most essential -thing about it is the fact of the incursion of God into human life, -the revelation of the eternal in the midst of time, the new discovery -which it brought of God’s nature and character. We nowhere else come so -close to the essential truth of Christianity as we do in the life and -experience of Jesus. The life at every point floods over and transcends -the teaching. He is the most complete and adequate exhibition of what I -have called the incursion of God into human life, but even so he is the -beginning, not the end, of the revelation of God through humanity—the -Christ-revelation of God—and this Christ-revelation of God _is_ God, so -far as he is at all adequately known. - -Some persons talk as though God were a kind of composite Being, got by -adding up the God of the natural order, the God of the Old Testament, -and the God as Father about whom Jesus taught. He is, according to this -scheme, in some way a compound aggregate of infinite power, irresistible -justice, and eternal love. Sometimes one “attribute” is predominant, -and sometimes another, while in some mysterious way all the dissonant -attributes get “reconciled.” This is surely boggy ground to build upon. - -Christianity is essentially, I should say, a unique revelation of God. -Here for the first time the race discovers that God identifies himself -with humanity, is in the stream of it, is suffering with us, is in -moral conflict with sin and evil, is conquering through the travail -and tragedy of finite persons, and is eternally, in mind and heart and -will, a God of triumphing Love. No texts adequately “prove” this mighty -truth. We cannot tie it down to “sayings,” though there are “sayings” -which declare it. The life of Jesus, the supreme decisions through which -he expresses his purpose, the spirit which dominates him and guides his -decisive actions, make the truth plain that God meant _that_ to him and -that his way of life revealed that kind of God. - -Through all the fusions and confusions of history and through all the -vagaries of man’s tortuous course since the Church began to be built, -Christ as eternal Spirit has gone on revealing this truth about God and -demonstrating the victorious power of this way of life. The making of -a kingdom of God in the world, the spread of the brother-spirit, the -expansion of the love-method, the increase of coöperation, sympathy, -and service, the continued incursion of the divine into the life of the -human, these are the things now and always which indicate the vitality -and progress of Christianity, and the uninterrupted revelation of God. - -Always, in every period of history, the essential truth of Christianity -must be revealed and expressed in and through a medium not altogether -adapted to it. It is always living and working in a world more or less -alien to it. It has at any stage only partially realized its ideal, and -only achieved in a fragmentary way the goal toward which it is moving. -It means endless conquest and ever fresh winning of unwon victories. It -must be for us all a vision and a venture, it must be a thing of faith -and forecast. At the same time it is, in a very real sense, experience -and achievement. God _has_ entered into humanity. Love has revealed its -redeeming power. Grace is as much a reality as mountains are. The kingdom -of God though not all in sight yet is, I believe, as sure as gravitation. -The invisible, eternal Christ, living in the soul of man, revealing -his will in moral and spiritual victories in personal lives, is, I am -convinced, as genuine a fact as electricity is. But we shall see _all_ -that Christianity means only when the living totality of the revelation -of God through humanity is complete. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - -THE NEAR AND THE FAR - - -I - -THINGS PRESENT AND THINGS TO COME - -Anaxagoras said twenty-five hundred years ago that men are always -cutting the world in two with a hatchet. William James, in one of his -living phrases, says with the same import that everybody dichotomizes -the cosmos. It is so. We all incline to bisect life into alternative -possibilities. We split realities into opposing halves. We show a kind -of fascination for an “either-or” selection. We are prone to use the -principle of parsimony, and to be content with one side of a dilemma. -History presents a multitude of dualistic pairs from which one was -supposed to make his individual selection. There was the choice between -this world and the next world; the here and the yonder; the flesh and the -spirit; faith and reason; the sacred and the secular; the outward and -the inward, and many more similar alternatives. This “either-or” method -always leaves its trail of leanness behind. It makes life thin and narrow -where it might be rich and broad, for in almost every case it is just as -possible to have a whole as to have a half, to take both as to select an -alternative. St. Paul found his Corinthians bisecting their spiritual -lives and narrowing their interests to one or two possibilities. One of -them would choose Paul as his representative of the truth and then see no -value in the interpretation which Apollos had to give. Another attached -himself to Apollos and missed all the rich contributions of Paul. Some of -the “saints” of the Church selected Cephas as the only oracle, and they -lost all the breadth which would have come to them had they been able -to make a synthesis of the opposing aspects. St. Paul called them from -their divided half to a completed whole. He told them that instead of -“either-or” they could have both. “All things are yours; whether Paul or -Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present or -things to come, all are yours; and ye are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.” -This is the method of synthesis. This is the substitution of wholes for -halves, the proffer of both for an “either-or” alternative. - -That last pair of alternatives is an interesting one, and many persons -make their bisecting choice of life there. One well-known type of person -focuses on the near, the here and now, the things present. Those who -belong to this class propose to make hay while the sun shines. They glory -in being practical. They have what doctors call myopia. They see only the -near. Their lenses will not adjust for the remote. They believe in quick -returns and bank upon practical results. Those of the other type have -presbyopia, or far-sightedness. They are dedicated to the far-away, the -remote, the yonder. They are pursuing rainbows and distant ideals. They -are so eager for the millennium that they forget the problem of their -street and of the present day. Browning has given us a picture of both -these types: - - “That low man seeks a little thing to do, - Sees it and does it: - This high man, with a great thing to pursue, - Dies ere he knows it. - - That low man goes on adding one to one, - His hundred’s soon hit: - This high man, aiming at a million, - Misses an unit.” - -Browning’s sympathies are plainly with the “high man” who misses the -unit, but it is one more case of unnecessary dichotomy. What we want is -the discovery of a way to unite into one synthesis things present and -things to come. We need to learn how to seize this narrow isthmus of a -present and to enrich it with the momentous significance of past and -future. Henry Bergson has been telling us that all rich moments of life -are rich just because they roll up and accumulate the meaning of the past -and because they are crowded with anticipations of the future. They are -fused with memory and expectation, and one of these two factors is as -important as the other. If either dies away the present becomes a useless -half, like the divided parts of the child which Solomon proposed to -bisect for the two contending mothers. - -We are at one of those momentous ridges of time at the present moment. -Some are so busy with the near and immediately practical that they cannot -see the far vision of the world that is to be built. Others are so -impressed with past issues that have become paramount, with the glorious -memories of the blessed Monroe Doctrine, for instance, that they have no -expectant eyes for the creation of an interrelated and unified world. -Another group is so concerned with the social millennium that they -discount the lessons of the past, the message of history, the wisdom of -experience, and fly to the useless task of constructing abstract human -paradises and dreams of a world-kingdom which could exist only in a realm -where men had ceased to be men. - -What we want is a synthesis of things present and things to come, a union -of the practical, tested experience of life and the inspired vision of -the prophet who sees unfolding the possibilities of human life raised to -its fuller glory in Christ, the incarnation of the way of love, which -always has worked, is working now, and always will work. - - -II - -TWO TYPES OF MINISTRY - -Most people like to be told what they already think. They enjoy hearing -their own opinions and ideas promulgated, and no amens are so hearty as -the ones which greet the reannouncement of views we have already held. - -The natural result is that speakers are apt to give their hearers what -they want. They take the line of least resistance and say what will -arouse the enthusiasm of the people before them, and they get their quick -reward. They are popular at once. There is a high tide of emotion as they -proceed to tell what everybody present already thinks, and they soon find -themselves in great demand. - -The main trouble with such an easy ministry is that it isn’t worth doing. -It accomplishes next to nothing. It merely arouses a pleasurable emotion -and leaves lives where they were before. And yet not quite where they -were either, for the constant repetition of things we already believe -dulls the mind and deadens the will and weakens rather than strengthens -the power of life. It is an easy ministry both for speakers and hearers, -but it is ominous for them both. - -The prophet has a very different task. He cannot give people what they -want. He is under an unescapable compulsion to give them what his soul -believes to be true. He cannot take lines of least resistance; he must -work straight up against the current. He cannot work for quick effects; -he must slowly educate his people and compel them to see what they have -not seen before. The amens are very slow to come to his words, and he -cannot look for emotional thrills. He must risk all that is dear to -himself, except the truth, as he sets himself to his task, and he is -bound to tread lonely wine-presses before he can see of the travail of -his soul and be satisfied. - -Every age has these two types of ministry. They are both ancient and -familiar. There are always persons who are satisfied to give what is -wanted, who are glad to cater to popular taste, who like the quick -returns. But there are, too, always a few souls to be found who volunteer -for the harder task. They forego the amens and patiently teach men to see -farther than they have seen before. Their first question is not, What do -people want me to say? but, What is God’s truth which to-day ought to be -heard through me? and knowing that, they speak. They do not move their -hearers as the other type does; they do not reach so many, and they miss -the popular rewards—but they are compassed about by a great cloud of -witnesses as they fight their battles for the truth, and they have their -joy. - -But this is not quite all there is to say. It is not possible to teach -the new effectively without linking it up with the old. The wholly new is -generally not true. New, fresh truth emerges out of ancient experience; -it does not drop like a shooting star from the distant skies. The great -prophets in all ages have lived close to the people. They have not had -their “ear to the ground,” to use a political phrase, but they have -understood the human heart. They have lived in the great currents of -life. They have heard the going in the mulberry trees, and have felt the -breaking forth of the dawning light just because of their double union -with men and God. - -All sound pedagogy recognizes this principle. The good teacher knits -the new material which he wishes learned on to the old and familiar. He -takes his student forward by gradual stages, not by leaps and bounds, and -he binds the known and unknown together by rational synthesis, not by -some strange, foreign, magical glue. The more we wish to belong to the -prophet-class and to raise our hearers to new and greater levels of truth -and insight, the more we shall strive to understand the truth that has -already been revealed, to saturate ourselves with it, to fuse and kindle -our lives with those immense realities by which men in past ages have -lived and conquered. So, and only so, can we go forward and take others -forward with us to new experiences and to new discoveries of the light -that never was on sea or land. - - -III - -“WE HAVE SEEN HIS STAR” - -Every time the Christmas anniversary returns, the heart renews its -youthful joy in the thrilling stories of the nativity. We cannot be too -thankful for the inspiration and poetry and imagination which touch and -glorify every aspect of our religious faith. Some dull and leaden-minded -pedants appear to think that the “real” Christ is the person we get when -we take, for the construction of our figure, only those facts about him -which can be rationalistically, historically, and critically verified. We -are thus reduced to a few religious ideas, a little group of “sayings,” -a tiny body of events, which explain none of the immense results that -followed. The real Christ, on the contrary, is this rich, wonderful, -mysterious, baffling person whose life was vastly greater even than his -deeds or his words, who aroused the wonder and imagination of all who -came in contact with him, who touched everything with emotion, and fused -religion forever with poetry and feeling. He, in a very true sense, - - “ ... touches all things common, - Till they rise to touch the spheres.” - -Not only over the manger, but over the entire story of his life, hovers -the glory of the star. It is a life that will not stay down on the dull -earth of mere fact; it always rises into the region of idealism and -beauty. It always transcends the things of sight and touch. We have a -religion which cannot be confined in a system of doctrine or a code of -ethics; it partakes too intimately of life for that. It is, like its -Founder, a full rounded reality, rich in inspiration and emotion and -wonder, as well as in intellectual ideas and truth. When the star wanes -and imagination falls away, and we hold in our thin hands only the husks -of a dead system, the power of religion is over. - -The same thing is true of the cross. Its power lies in the fullness and -richness of the reality. We do not want to reduce it, but to raise it -to its full meaning and glory as a way of complete life. The direction -of present-day Christianity is certainly not away from Calvary, but -quite the opposite. The men who are in these days trying to deliver our -religion from formalism and tradition find not less meaning in the cross -than a former generation did, but vastly more. The atonement remains at -the center, as it has always done, in vital Christianity. All attempts to -reduce Christianity to a dry and bloodless system of philosophy, with -the appeal of the heart left out, fail now as they have always failed. -It is a Savior that men, tangled in their sins and their sorrows, still -want—not merely a great thinker or a great teacher. - -The Church has, no doubt, far too much neglected the idea of the kingdom -of God as Christ expounded it in sermon and parable, and hosts of -prominent Christians do not at all understand what this great, central -teaching of the Master meant then and means now. His transforming -revelation of the nature of God has, too, been missed by multitudes, who -still hold Jewish rather than Christian conceptions of God. But patient -study of the gospel is slowly forcing these ideas into the thought of -men everywhere, and books abound now which make his teaching clear and -luminous. - -What is needed above everything else now is that we shall not lose any -of our vision of Christ as Savior, and that we shall live our lives -in his presence. It is through the cross that we touch closest to the -Savior-heart, and it is here that we feel our lives most powerfully moved -by the certainty of his divine nature. Arguments may fail, but one who -looks steadily at this voluntary Sufferer, giving himself for us, will -cry out, with one of old, “My Lord and my God.” - -Nothing short of that will do, I believe, if Christianity is to remain -a saving religion. Good men have died in all ages; great teachers have -again and again gone to their deaths in behalf of their truth or out -of love for their disciples. It touches us as we read of their bravery -and their loyalty, but we do not and we cannot build a world-saving -religion upon them. Christ is different! We feel that in him the veil is -lifted and we are face to face with God. When we hear with our hearts -the words, “In the world ye shall have tribulation; but fear not, for I -have overcome the world,” we feel that we are hearing the triumph of God -in the midst of suffering—we are hearing of an eternal triumph. Christ -can not be for us less than God manifested here in a world of time and -space and finiteness, doing in time what God does in eternity—suffering -over sin, entering vicariously into the tragedy of evil, and triumphing -while he treads the winepress. No one has fathomed the awfulness of sin, -until, in some sense, he feels that his sin makes God suffer, that it -crucifies him afresh. If Christ is God revealed in time—made visible and -vocal to men—then, through the cross, we shall discover that we are not -to think of God henceforth as Sovereign—not a Being yonder, enjoying his -royal splendor. We must think of him all the time in terms of Christ. He -is an eternal Lover of our hearts. We pierce him with our sins; we wound -him with our wickedness. He suffers, as mothers who love suffer, and he -enters vicariously into all the tragic deeps of our lives, striving to -bring us home to him. Jan Ruysbroeck says: - - “You must love the Love which loves you everlastingly, and if - you hold fast by his love, he remakes you by his Spirit, and - then joy is yours. The Spirit of God breathes into you, and you - breathe it out in rest and joy and love. This is eternal life, - just as in our mortal life we breathe out the air that is in us - and breathe in fresh air.” - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - -THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY - - -I - -THE RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE OF DEATH - -The Greeks had their story of Tithonus, a deeply significant myth of a -man who could not die, but who grew ever older and more decrepit until -the tragedy became unendurable and he envied those “happy men that have -the power to die.” Methuselah’s biography is brief and compact, but it -is full of pathos: “He lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years and he -died.” There was nothing more to add. Somebody has invented a radium -motor which strikes a little bell every second and is warranted to go -on doing that for thirty thousand years. The Methuselah monotony and -tedium seem much like that thin _seriatim_ row of items. It just goes on -with no novelty and no cumulation, and finally the one relieving novelty -is introduced—“he died.” What a happy fact it was! The wandering Jew -stands out in imaginative fiction as one of the saddest of all men—a -being who endlessly goes on. The angel of death seems a gentle, gracious -messenger when one thinks of the prospect of unending life, going on -in a one-dimensional series, with no new values and no fresh powers of -expansion. To many persons the idea of heaven is simply an expanded -Methuselah biography. - -Biologists have completely reversed the theory that death is an enemy. -It has long ago taken its place in the system of teleology, among “the -things that are for us.” Death has, beyond question, and has had, “a -natural utility.” It has played an important _rôle_ in raising life from -the low unicellular type to the rich complex forms of higher organisms, -from “the amœba that never dies of old age” to the new dynasty of beings -that have greater range and scope, but which nevertheless do die. Edwin -Arnold in his striking essay on _Death_ says: “The lowest living thing, -the Protamœba, has obviously never died! It is a formless film of -protoplasm, which multiplies by simple division; and the specimen under -any microscope derives, and must derive, in unbroken existence from the -amœba which moved and fed forty æons ago. The slime of our nearest puddle -lived before the Alps were made!” Methuselah was a mere child in a -perambulator compared to an amœba. - -In cases where the continued process of cell-division produced a lowered -and weakened type of amœba a rudimentary form of union of cells took -place, which resulted in raising the entire level of life and eventually -carried the biological order up to wholly new possibilities. So that -the threatened approach of death was met with an increase of life. “It -is more probable that death is a consequence of life,” says the famous -biologist, Edward Cope, “rather than that the living is a product of the -non-living.”[2] - -But in any case the testimony of biology can give us little help. Even if -death has had a function in the process of evolution, as seems likely, -that in no way eases the situation when the staggering blow falls into -our precious circle and removes from it an intimate personal life that -was indispensable to us. It is poor, cold comfort to be told that death -has assisted through the long æons in the slow process of heightening -the entire scale of life, if there is nothing more to say regarding the -future of this dear one whose frail bark has now gone to wreck. We must -somehow rise above the level of brute facts and discover some spiritual -significance which death has revealed, before we can arrive at any source -of comfort. We are all agreed with Shakespeare’s Claudio that “’tis too -horrible” to think of death as a sheer terminus: - - “ ... to die and go we know not where; - To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; - This sensible warm motion to become - A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit - To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside - In thrilling regions of rock-ribbed ice; - To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, - And blown with restless violence round about - The pendent world.” - -Death has undoubtedly brought to consciousness, as has perhaps no other -experience, the deeper meaning and significance of personal life. This -and not its biological function is what concerns us now. It has been -said that “freedom,” so far as it is achieved, “is the main achievement -of man in the past.”[3] I should be inclined rather to hold that man’s -main achievement on the planet so far has been to discover that personal -life reveals within itself an absolute value and possesses unmistakable -capacity to transcend the finite and temporal, an experience which -makes freedom possible. I believe death has ministered more than any -other single fact that confronts us in bringing those truths to clear -consciousness. We cannot, of course, dissociate death and separate it -from pain, suffering, struggle and danger, which are essentially bound up -with it. If the world were to be freed completely from death it would at -once _ipso facto_ be freed from the danger of it and by the same altered -condition struggle would to a large degree be eliminated, and likewise -those other great tests of life—pain and suffering, which culminate in -death. These things are all “perilous incidents” of finiteness, but of -a finiteness which transcends itself and is allied to something beyond -itself. To eliminate these things would be to miss the discovery of this -strange finite-infinite nature of ours which makes life such a venture -and so full of mystery and wonder. If we had been only naturalistic -beings, curious bits of the earth’s crust merely capable of recording the -empirical facts as they occurred, death would have taken an unimportant -place as one more event in a successive series of phenomena. Built as we -are, however, with a beyond within ourselves, the fact of mutability and -mortality has occasioned a transformation of our entire estimate of life -and has led us by the hand to a Pisgah view which we should never have -got if there had been no invasion of death into our world. - -“It is a venerable commonplace,” as Professor Schiller of Oxford has -said, “that among the melancholy prerogatives which distinguish man -from the other animals and bestow a deeper significance on human life -is the fact that man alone is aware of the doom that terminates his -earthly existence, and on this account lives a more spiritual life, in -the ineffable consciousness of the ‘sword of Damocles’ which overshadows -him and weights his lightest action with gigantic import. Nay, more; -stimulated by the ineluctable necessity of facing death, and of living so -as to face it with fortitude, man has not abandoned himself to nerveless -inaction, to pusillanimous despair; he has conceived the thought, he -has cherished the hope, he has embraced the belief, of a life beyond -the grave, and opened his soul to the religions which baulk the king of -terrors of his victims and defraud him of his victory. Thus, the fear -of death has been redeemed, and ennobled by the consoling belief in -immortality, a belief from which none are base enough to withhold their -moral homage, even though the debility of mortal knowledge may debar a -few from a full acceptance of its promise.”[4] - -The early animistic views of survival, which were the first forecasts of -a life beyond, were due not so much to the consciousness of the moral -grandeur of life as to _actual experiences_ which gave to primitive -man a confident assurance of some form of life after the death of the -body. Dreams had an important part in leading man to this naïve and yet -momentous discovery. In a world which had no established criterion of -“reality,” the experiences of vivid dreams were taken to be as real as -any other experiences, and in these dreams the dreamer often found his -dead ancestors and friends and tribesmen once more present with him, -active in the chase or the fight and as real as ever they were in life. -Trance, hallucination, telepathy, mediumship, possession, are not new -phenomena; they are very primitive and ancient. These things are as old -as smiling and weeping. These psychic experiences had their part to -play also in giving the early races their belief that the dead person -still existed though in an altered and attenuated form as an _animus_ or -“spirit” or “shade.” This empirical view of survival, built on actual -experiences, was more or less incapable of advance. No further knowledge -could be acquired and the constructions fashioned by imagination, in -reference to “the scenery and circumstance” of the departed soul, could -satisfy only an uncritical mind. These constructions were, too, often -crude and bizarre, and tended, in the hands of priests, to hamper man’s -moral development rather than to further it. But in any case man had made -the momentous guess that death did not utterly end him or his career. -Poor and thin as this dimly conceived future world of primitive man’s -hope may have been, the psychological effect of the hope was by no means -negligible. Professor Shaler of Harvard was probably speaking truly when -he wrote: - -“If we should seek some one mark, which in the intellectual advance from -the brutes to man, might denote the passage to the human side, we might -well find it in the moment when it dawned upon the nascent man that death -was a mystery which he had in his turn to meet. From the time when man -began to face death to the present stage of his development there has -been a continuous struggle between the motives of personal fear on the -one hand, and valor on the other. That of fear has been constantly aided -by the work of the imagination. For one fact of danger there have been -scores of fancied risks to come from the unseen world. Against this great -host of imaginary ills, which tended utterly to bear men down, they had -but one helper—their spirit of valiant self-sacrifice for the good of -their family, their clan, their state, their race, or, in the climax, for -the Infinite above.”[5] - -It marked a still greater intellectual advance when primitive man came to -the immense conclusion not only that death was a mystery which he in turn -must meet, but that he was a being that would survive death. - -It is, however, in another field that we must look for the most important -spiritual results from the contemplation of death, that is in what we -may call the field of spiritual values. I have already contended that -man’s greatest discovery was his discovery of the absolute value of moral -personality. Of course, it came fairly late in the development of the -race and by no means has everybody made it yet! But at any rate there -came a time somewhere in the process of history when man did discover a -beyond within himself, a greater inclusive self present within his own -fragmentary, finite spirit, revealed as a passion for perfection not yet -attained or experienced, a prophesying consciousness of eternity within -his often baffled and defeated temporal life. No one has expressed the -fact of this inner beyond within us better than old Sir Thomas Browne -did in the seventeenth century: “We are men and we know not how; there -is something in us that can be without us and will be after us, though -it is strange that it hath no history of what it was before us, nor can -tell how it entered in us.... There is surely a piece of Divinity in us, -something that was before the elements and owes not homage unto the Sun.” - -The sublimity and grandeur revealed in nature, the majesty of mountains, -the might of seas, the mystery of the ocean, the glory of the sun and -stars, the awe inspired by the thunderstorm, awakened man’s own spirit -and made him dimly conscious of a kindred grandeur in his own answering -soul. The greatest step of all was taken when man awoke to the meaning -and value of love. In some dim sense love preceded the emergence of man. -The evolution of a mother and of a father, as Drummond showed, began far -back in forms of life below man. But the type of love which transcends -instinct, which is raised above sex-assertion, and is transmuted into an -unselfish appreciation of the beauty and worth of personal character—that -type of love is one of the most wonderful flowers that has yet blossomed -on our Igdrasil tree of life and it was late and slow to come, like -flowers on the century-plant. - -When death broke in and separated those who loved in this great fashion -the whole problem of death at once became an urgent one. In fact death -received _attention_ in proportion as the higher values of life began to -be realized. Walt Whitman’s fiery outburst reveals clearly his estimate -of the worth of personality. “If rats and maggots end us, then alarum! -for we are betrayed”—he might have said “if microbes end us.” Emerson’s -poignant outcry of soul is found in his greatest poem—“Threnody”: - - “There’s not a sparrow or a wren, - There’s not a blade of autumn grain, - Which the four seasons do not tend - And tides of life and increase lend; - And every chick of every bird, - And weed and rock-moss is preferred. - O ostrich-like forgetfulness! - O loss of larger in the less! - Was there no star that could be sent, - No watcher in the firmament, - No angel from the countless host - That loiters round the crystal coast, - Could stoop to heal that only child, - Nature’s sweet marvel undefiled, - And keep the blossom of the earth, - Which all her harvests were not worth?” - -No such high revolt of spirit was occasioned so long as death was a mere -biological event, terminating one life to give room for another. This -cry of soul means the discovery of the infinite preciousness of personal -life. The mind now turns in on itself and takes a new account of its -stock, and as a result man began to solve the problem of death in an -enlarged way. He was no longer satisfied with a form of survival based -upon his experiences in dreams, trance and hallucination; he came to feel -that he must have a destiny which fitted his spiritual worth as a man. He -finds within himself intimation of powers and possibilities beyond those -required for the struggle of life here. He feels by that same insight -which carries him out beyond the seen to a rational faith in the unseen -that is necessary to complete it, that this little arc of earthly life -with its revelations of spiritual value and its transcendent prophecies -of more must find fulfillment somewhere in a form of life that rounds it -out full circle. - -The argument does not build on a passion of desire, as some doubters have -said. We do not assume immortality just because we want it. It rests upon -the moral consistency of the universe, upon the trustworthy character -of the eternal nature of things. The moral values which are revealed in -fully developed personality are certainly as _real_, as much a fact of -the universe, as are the tides or the orbits of planets. If we can count -upon the continuity of these occurrences and upon our predictions of -them, just as surely can we count on the consistency of the universe in -reference to spiritual values. If there is conservation of matter there -is at least as good ground for affirming conservation of moral values. -If biological life can pass over the slender bridge of a microscopic -germ-plasm and can carry with itself over that feeble bridge the traces -of habit and feature, the curve of nose and the emotional tone of some -far-off dead ancestor, and all the heredity gains of the past, may we not -count upon the permanence of that in us which allies us to that infinite -Spirit who is even now the invisible environment of all we see and touch? - -It is not a matter of reward or of “wages” that concerns us. It is not -“happy isles” or care-free “Edens” that we seek, not “golden streets” -and endless comfort to make up for the stress and toil of the lean years -here below. We want to find the whole of ourselves, we ask the privilege -of seeing this fragmentary being of ours unfold into the full expression -of its gifts and powers. The new period may be even more strenuous and -hazardous than this one has been—still we want the venture. We ask for -the culminating acts that will complete the drama, so far only fairly -begun. It must be not a mere serial, or straight line, existence; it -must be the opening out and expansion of the possibilities which we feel -within ourselves—new dimensions, please God. - -I am not wrong, I am sure, in claiming that this postulate, this rational -faith in the conservation of values, is an asset which death has revealed -to the race. The shock of death has always made love appear a greater -thing than we knew before the baffling crisis came upon us. It has, too, -by the same shock of contrast, awakened man to the full comprehension -of the moral sublimity of the good life. Kant maintained that the sense -of the sublime is due to the fact that when we are confronted with the -supreme powers of nature we then become aware of something unfathomable -in ourselves, and feel that we are superior to the might of the storm, -or the mountain or the cataract. Nowhere is this truer than when man—man -in his full, rich powers—is confronted by death. Instead of cringing in -fear, he rises to an unaccustomed height of greatness and is utterly -superior to death and aware of some quality of being in himself which -death cannot touch. It is just then in that moment of seeming disaster -and dissolution that a brave, good man is most triumphant and ready to -burn all bridges behind him in his great adventure. Mrs. Browning, all -her life an invalid, says about this so-called gigantic enemy: “I cannot -look on the earthside of death. When I look deathwards I look over death -and upwards.” Her husband, who was “ever a fighter,” has this way of -announcing the triumph: - - “And then as, ’mid the dark, a gleam - Of yet another morning breaks, - And like the hand which ends a dream, - Death, with the might of his sunbeam, - Touches the flesh and the soul awakes.”[6] - -Here is the testimony of a French soldier who writes at a moment when -death is close beside him: “I had often known the joy of seeing a spring -come like this, but never before had I been given the power of living in -every instant. So it is that one wins, without the help of any science, a -vague but indisputable intuition of the Absolute.... These are hours of -such beauty that he who embraces them knows not what death means.” - -Having come upon the higher values of personal life which death has -forced upon us we can never again, as men, be satisfied with such -facts of survival as may come to light through dreams, hallucinations, -telepathy and mediums, or in fact through any empirical experiences. Even -if the evidence were vastly greater than it is for some form of animistic -survival, it would fall far short of our moral and spiritual demands. We -already have some intimations in us of “the power of an endless life,” -and we seek for a chance to bring it full into play, for the “heavenly -period” to “perfect the earthen,” for an ampler life that will reveal -what we have all the time _meant_ life to be. - -Winifred Kirkland in _The New Death_ well says: “The New Death, _i.e._, -the new view of death, is the perception of our mortal end as the mere -portal of an eternal progression and the immediate result is the -consecration of all living.... It is a new illumination, a New Death, -when dying can be the greatest inspiration of our everyday energy, the -strongest impulse toward daily joy.” - - -II - -THE NEW BORN OUT OF THE OLD - -Walking across the fields in the spring I found the empty shell of a -bird’s egg. The tiny bird that once was in it was lying still and happy -under its mother’s wings, or was chirping its new-born song from the limb -of a nearby tree, or was trying its new-found wings on the buoyant air. -The empty shell was utterly worthless, a mere plaything for the wind. -The miracle of life that had stirred within it and had used it for its -shelter had gone on and left it deserted. There is a fine proverb which -says, “God empties the nest by hatching out the eggs,” and the world -is full of this gentle, silent, divine method of abolishing the old by -setting free to higher ends all that was true and living in it. - - “To-day I saw the dragon-fly - Come from the wells where he did lie. - An inner impulse rent the veil - Of his old husk: from head to tail - Came out clear plates of sapphire mail. - He dried his wings: like gauze they grew; - Through crofts and pastures wet with dew - A living flash of light he flew.” - -In the water below, the “old husk” lay empty and useless, while the -bright-colored living thing found its freedom in the invisible air. I -never go to a funeral without thinking of this miracle of transformation -which brings the bird out of the egg, the flower out of the seed, the -dragon-fly out of its water-larva. In his own mysterious way God has -emptied the nest by the hatching method, and all that was excellent, -lovable, and permanent in the one we loved has found itself in the realm -for which it was fitted. The body is only the empty shell, the shattered -seed, the old husk, which the silent forces of nature will slowly turn -back again into its original elements, to use over again for its myriad -processes of building: - - “And from his ashes may be made - The violet of his native land.” - -Those who treasure up the outworn dust and ashes, who make their thoughts -center about the empty shell, are failing to read aright the deeper -fact, which life everywhere is trying to utter, that that which belongs -in the higher sphere cannot be pent up in the lower. - -This divine hatching method may be seen, too, in the progress of truth, -as it unfolds from stage to stage. Nothing is more common than to see a -person holding on to a shell in which truth has dwelt, without realizing -that the precious thing he wants has gone on and reëmbodied itself in -new and living ways which he fails to follow and comprehend. While he is -saying in melancholy tones, “They have taken away my Lord and I know not -where they have laid him,” the living Lord is saying, “Have I been so -long time with thee and yet dost thou not know me?” - -Truth can no more keep a fixed and permanent form than life can. It lives -only by hatching out into higher and ever more adequate expressions of -itself, and the old forms in which it lived, the old words through which -it uttered itself, become empty and hollow because the warm breath of God -has raised the inner life, the spiritual reality, to a higher form of -expression. - -The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was very much impressed with -this crumbling of old forms and expressions to give place to the new. -God spoke, he says, to our fathers in sundered portions and in a variety -of manners, but he is speaking to us now by his Son. The things that can -be shaken, he writes, are being removed that the things which cannot be -shaken may remain. Luther must have felt this shaking process in his day; -and when he saw the old forms of religion crumbling, he wrote that great -hymn of the Reformation, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” He had found -something that could not be shaken. He could stand his ground and face -the seen and unseen world in faith, because he knew that the hatching was -going on, and the new was being born in higher, truer, and more adequate -forms as the old was vanishing. - -Let us hope that this ancient divine method may still operate in this -momentous hour of human history. Never, perhaps, since the fall of Rome, -has there been such a world-shaking process affecting every country and -all peoples. Immense changes are under way. Nothing will ever be quite -the same again. The old is vanishing before our eyes and the new is -being born. So much was wrong and outworn, and unjust and inhuman, that -the changes must go very far, and they will necessarily involve some -breakage. But even now, in this most dynamic period of modern history, -that which is to mark permanent progress will come forth, not by a -smashing process, but by the hatching of the eggs, by the emergence of -the underlying forces of life and the realization of those human hopes -and aspirations that have long been held in and suppressed. - -There is always the gravest danger from blind rage and sullen wrath. The -passionate resentment for the suffering of immemorial wrongs, when once -it breaks through the dams of restraint, is an almost irresistible force; -but sooner or later the sound, serious sense of the intelligent human -race comes into play and brings the world back to order and system. The -real gains in these crises are made not by the smashings and the blind -iconoclastic blows, but by the wise, clear-sighted fulfillment of the -slowly formed ideals which have been the inspiration of many lives before -the crisis came. May it be so now! It must not be, it cannot be, that -these millions of men shall have unavailingly faced death and mutilation. -It was not wreckage and chaos they sought in their brave adventure with -death. They went out to build a new world and to destroy, only that a new -re-creation might begin. This is the time of incubation and birth, for -ripening into reality those mighty hopes that make us men. - -It means at once that we must deepen down our lives into the life of God, -that we must suppress our petty individual passions and feel the sweep of -God’s purposes for the new age. In a multitude of ways the world moves -on, and as it moves the Spirit of God ends old forms and methods and -brings fresh and living ways to light. May we have eyes to see what is of -his divine hatching and what is empty shell! - - - - -CHAPTER IX - -THE MYSTIC’S EXPERIENCE OF GOD - - -I - -The revival of mysticism which has been one of the noteworthy features -in the Christianity of our time has presented us with a number of -interesting and important questions. We want to know, first of all, what -mysticism really is. Secondly, we want to know whether it is a normal or -abnormal experience. And omitting many other questions which must wait -their turn, we want to know whether mystical experiences actually enlarge -our sphere of knowledge, i.e., whether they are trustworthy sources of -authentic information and authoritative truth concerning realities which -lie beyond the range of human senses. - -The answer to the first question appears to be as difficult to accomplish -as the return of Ulysses was. The secret is kept in book after book. -One can marshall a formidable array of definitions, but they oppose and -challenge one another, like the men sprung from the dragon’s teeth. -For the purposes of the present consideration we can eliminate what is -usually included under psychical phenomena, that is, the phenomena of -dreams, visions and trances, hysteria and dissociation and esoteric -and occult phenomena. Thirty years ago Professor Royce said: “In the -Father’s house are many mansions, and their furniture is extremely -manifold. Astral bodies and palmistry, trances and mental healing, -communications from the dead and ‘phantasms of the living’—such things -are for some people to-day the sole quite unmistakable evidences of the -supremacy of the spiritual world.” These phenomena are worthy of careful -painstaking study and attention, for they will eventually throw much -light upon the deep and complex nature of human personality, are in fact -already throwing much light upon it. But they furnish us slender data -for understanding what is properly meant by mystical experience and its -religious and spiritual bearing. - -We can, too, leave on one side the metaphysical doctrines which fill a -large amount of space in the books of the great mystics. These doctrines -had a long historical development and they would have taken essentially -the same form if the exponents of them had not been mystics. Mystical -experience is confined to no one form of philosophy, though some ways of -thinking no doubt favor and other ways retard the experience, as they -also often do in the case of religious _faith_ in general. Mystical -experience, furthermore, must not be confused with what technical expert -writers call “the mystic way.” There are as many mystical “ways” as there -are gates to the New Jerusalem: “On the east three gates, on the north -three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.” One -might as well try to describe _the way_ of making love, or _the way_ of -appreciating the grand canyon as to describe _the way_ to the discovery -of God, as though there were only one way. - -I am not interested in mysticism as an _ism_. It turns out in most -accounts to be a dry and abstract thing, hardly more like the warm and -intimate experience than the color of a map is like the country for which -it stands. “Canada is very pink,” seems quite an inadequate description -of the noble country north of our border. It is mystical experience and -not mysticism that is worthy of our study. We are concerned with the -experience itself, not with second-hand formulations of it. “The mystic,” -says Professor Royce, “is a thorough-going empiricist;” “God ceases to -be an object and becomes an experience,” says Professor Pringle-Pattison. -If it is an experience we want to find out what happens to the mystic -himself inside where he lives. According to those who have been there -the experience which we call mystical is charged with the conviction of -real, direct contact and commerce with God. It is the almost universal -testimony of those who are mystics that they find God through their -experience. John Tauler says that in his best moments of “devout prayer -and the uplifting of the mind to God,” he experiences “the pure presence -of God in his own soul,” but he adds that all he can tell others about -the experience is “as poor and unlike it as the point of a needle is -to the heavens above us.” “I have met with my God; I have met with -my Savior. I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His -wings,” says Isaac Penington in the joy of his first mystical experience. -Without needlessly multiplying such testimonies for data, we can say -with considerable assurance that mystical experience is consciousness of -direct and immediate relationship with some transcendent reality which in -the moment of experience is believed to be God. “This is He, this is He,” -exclaims Isaac Penington, “there is no other: This is He whom I have -waited for and sought after from my childhood.” Angela of Foligno says -that she experienced God, and saw that the whole world was full of God. - - -II - -There are many different degrees of intensity, concentration and -conviction in the experiences of different individual mystics, and also -in the various experiences of the same individual from time to time. -There has been a tendency in most studies of mysticism to regard the -state of ecstasy as _par excellence_ mystical experience. That is, -however, a grave mistake. The calmer, more meditative, less emotional, -less ecstatic experiences of God are not less convincing and possess -greater constructive value for life and character than do ecstatic -experiences which presuppose a peculiar psychical frame and disposition. -The seasoned Quaker in the corporate hush and stillness of a silent -meeting is far removed from ecstasy, but he is not the less convinced -that he is meeting with God. For the _essentia_ of mysticism we do not -need to insist upon a certain “sacred” mystic way nor upon ecstasy, -nor upon any peculiar type of rare psychic upheavals. We do need to -insist, however, upon a consciousness of commerce with God amounting to -conviction of his presence. - - “Where one heard noise - And one saw flame, - I only knew He named my name.” - -Jacob Boehme calls the experience which came to him, “breaking through -the gate,” into “a new birth or resurrection from the dead,” so that, he -says, “I knew God.” “I am certain,” says Eckhart, “as certain as that I -live, that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I -am to myself.” One of these experiences—the first one—was an ecstasy, -and the other, so far as we can tell, was not. It was the flooding in of -a moment of God-consciousness in the act of preaching a sermon to the -common people of Cologne. The experience of Penington, again, was not -an ecstasy; it was the vital surge of fresh life on the first occasion -of hearing George Fox preach after a long period of waiting silence. A -simple normal case of a mild type is given in a little book of recent -date, reprinted from the _Atlantic Monthly_: “After a long time of -jangling conflict and inner misery, I one day, _quite quietly and with -no conscious effort_, stopped doing the dis-ingenuous thing [I had been -doing]. Then the marvel happened. It was as if a great rubber band which -had been stretched almost to the breaking point were suddenly released -and snapped back to its normal condition. Heaven and earth were changed -for me. Everything was glorious because of its relation to some great -central life—nothing seemed to matter but that life.” Brother Lawrence, -a barefooted lay-brother of the seventeenth century, according to the -testimony of the brotherhood, attained “an unbroken and undisturbed sense -of the Presence of God.” He was not an ecstatic; he was a quiet, faithful -man who did his ordinary daily tasks with what seemed to his friends -“an unclouded vision, an illuminated love and an uninterrupted joy.” -Simple and humble though he was, he nevertheless acquired, through his -experience of God, “an extraordinary spaciousness of mind.” - -The more normal, expansive mystical experiences come apparently when the -personal self is at its best. Its powers and capacities are raised to an -unusual unity and fused together. The whole being, with its accumulated -submerged life, _finds itself_. The process of preparing for any high -achievement is a severe and laborious one, but nothing seems easier in -the moment of success than is the accomplishment for which the life -has been prepared. There comes to be formed within the person what -Aristotle called “a dexterity of soul,” so that the person does with ease -what he has become skilled to do. Clement of Alexandria called a fully -organized and spiritualized person “a harmonized man,” that is, adjusted, -organized and ready to be a transmissive organ for the revelation of -God. Brother Lawrence, who was thus “harmonized,” finely says, “The most -excellent method which I found of going to God was that of _doing my -common business_, purely for the love of God.” An earlier mystic of the -fourteenth century stated the same principle in these words: “It is my -aim to be to the Eternal God what a man’s hand is to a man.” - -There are many human experiences which carry a man up to levels where -he has not usually been before and where he finds himself possessed of -insight and energies he had hardly suspected were his until that moment. -One leaps to his full height when the right inner spring is reached. We -are quite familiar with the way in which instinctive tendencies in us -and emotions both egoistic and social, become organized under a group -of ideas and ideals into a single system which we call a sentiment, -such as love, or patriotism, or devotion to truth. It forms slowly and -one hardly realizes that it has formed until some occasion unexpectedly -brings it into full operation, and we find ourselves able with perfect -ease to overcome the most powerful inhibitory and opposing instincts -and habits, which, until then, had usually controlled us. We are -familiar, too, with the way in which a well-trained and disciplined mind, -confronted by a concrete situation, will sometimes—alas not always—in a -sudden flash of imaginative insight, discover a universal law revealed -there and then in the single phenomenon, as Sir Isaac Newton did and -as, in a no less striking way, Sir William Rowan Hamilton did in his -discovery of Quaternions. Literary and artistic geniuses supply us with -many instances in which, in a sudden flash, the crude material at hand is -shot through with vision, and the complicated plot of a drama, the full -significance of a character, or the complete glory of a statue stands -revealed, as though, to use R. L. Stevenson’s illustration, a genie -had brought it on a golden tray as a gift from another world. Abraham -Lincoln, striking off in a few intense minutes his Gettysburg address, as -beautiful in style and perfect in form as anything in human literature, -is as good an illustration as we need of the way in which a highly -organized person, by a kindling flash, has at his hand all the moral and -spiritual gains of a life time. - -There is a famous account of the flash of inspiration given by Philo, -which can hardly be improved. It is as follows: “I am not ashamed to -recount my own experience. At times, when I have proposed to enter upon -my wonted task of writing on philosophical doctrines, with an exact -knowledge of the materials which were to be put together, I have had -to leave off without any work accomplished, finding my mind barren and -fruitless, and upbraiding it for its self-complacency, while startled at -the might of the Existent One, in whose power it lies to open and close -the wombs of the soul. But at other times, when I had come empty, all of -a sudden I have been filled with thoughts, showered down and sown upon -me unseen from above, so that by Divine possession I have fallen into -a rapture and become ignorant of everything, the place, those present, -myself, what was spoken or written. For I have received a stream of -interpretation, a fruition of light, the most clear-cut sharpness of -vision, the most vividly distinct view of the matter before me, such as -might be received through the eyes from the most luminous presentation.” - -The most important mystical experiences are something like that. They -occur usually not at the beginning of the religious life but rather in -the ripe and developed stage of it. They are the fruit of long-maturing -processes. Clement’s “the harmonized man” is always a person who has -brought his soul into parallelism with divine currents, has habitually -practiced his religious insights and has finally formed a unified -central self, subtly sensitive, acutely responsive to the Beyond within -him. In such experiences which may come suddenly or may come as a more -gradual process, the whole self operates and masses all the cumulations -of a lifetime. They are no more emotional than they are rational and -volitional. We have a total personality, awake, active, and “aware of his -life’s flow.” Instead of seeing in a flash a law of gravitation, or the -plot and character of Hamlet, or the uncarven form of Moses the Law-giver -in a block of marble, one sees at such times the moral demonstrations -of a lifetime and vividly feels the implications that are essentially -involved in a spiritual life. In the high moment God is seen to be as -sure as the soul is. - - “I stood at Naples once, a night so dark - I could have scarce conjectured there was earth - Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: - But the night’s black was burst through by a blaze— - Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, - Through her whole length of mountain visible: - There lay the city thick and plain with spires, - And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. - So may the truth be flashed out by one blow.” - -To some the truth of God never comes closer than a logical conclusion. He -is held to be as a living item in a creed. To the mystic he becomes real -in the same sense that experienced beauty is real, or the feel of spring -is real, or that summer sunlight is real—he has been found, he has been -met, he is present. - -Before discussing the crucial question whether these experiences are -evidential and are worthy of consideration as an addition to the world’s -stock of truth and knowledge I must say a few words about the normality -or abnormality of them. Nothing of any value can be said on this point -of mystical experience in the _abstract_. One must first catch his -concrete case. Some instances are normal and some are undoubtedly -abnormal. Trance, ecstasy and rapture are unusual experiences and in -that sense not normal occurrences. They usually indicate, furthermore, a -pathological condition of personality and are thus abnormal in the more -technical sense. There is, however, something more to be said on this -point. It seems pretty well established that some persons—and they have -often been creative leaders and religious geniuses—have succeeded in -organizing their lives, in finding their trail, in charging their whole -personality with power, in attaining a moral dynamic and in tapping vast -reservoirs of energy by means of states which, if occurring in other -persons, would no doubt be called pathological. The real test here is -a pragmatic one. It seems hardly sound to call a state abnormal if it -has raised the experiencer, as a mystic experience often does, into a -hundred horse-power man and through his influence has turned multitudes -of other men and women into more joyous, hopeful and efficient persons. -This question of abnormality and reality is thus not one to be settled -off-hand by a superficial diagnosis. - -An experience which brings spaciousness of mind, new interior dimensions, -ability to stand the universe—and the people in it—and capacity to -work at human tasks with patience, endurance and wisdom may quite -intelligently be called normal, though to an external beholder it -may look like what he usually calls a trance of hysteria, a state of -dissociation, or hypnosis by auto-suggestion. It should be added, -however, as I have already said, that mystical experience is not -confined to these extremer types. They may or may not be pathological. -The calmer and more restrained stages of mysticism are more important and -significant and are no more marked with the stigma of hysteria than is -love-making, enjoyment of music, devotion to altruistic causes, risking -one’s life for country, or any lofty experience of _value_. - - -III - -We come at length to the central question of our consideration: Do -mystical experiences settle anything? Are they purely subjective and -one-sided, or do they prove to have objective reference and so to be -two-sided? Do they take the experiencer across the chasm that separates -“self” from “Other”? Mystical experience undoubtedly feels as though it -had objective reference. It comes to the individual with indubitable -authority. He is certain that he has found some thing other than himself. -He has an unescapable conviction that he is in contact and commerce with -reality beyond the margins of his personal self. “A tremendous muchness -is suddenly revealed,” as William James once put it. - -We do not get very far when we undertake to reduce knowledge to an -affair of sense-experience. “They reckon ill who leave me out,” can be -said by the organized, personal, creative mind as truly as by Brahma. -There are many forms of human experience in which the data of the -senses are so vastly transcended that they fail to furnish any real -explanation of what occurs in consciousness. This is true of all our -experiences of _value_, which apparently spring out of synthetic or -synoptic activities of the mind, i.e., activities in which the mind is -unified and creative. The vibrations of ether which bombard the rods and -cones of the retina may be the occasion for the appreciation of beauty -in sky or sea or flower, but they are surely not the _cause_ of it. The -concrete event which confronts me is very likely the occasion for the -august pronouncement of moral issues which my conscience makes, but it -can not be said that the concrete event in any proper sense _causes_ this -consciousness of moral obligation. The famous answer of Leibnitz to the -crude sense-philosophy of his time is still cogent. To the phrase: “There -is nothing in the mind that has not come through the senses,” Leibnitz -added, “except the mind itself.” That means that the creative activity -of the mind is always an important factor in experience and one that can -not be ignored in any of the processes of knowledge. Unfortunately we -have done very little yet in the direction of comprehending the interior -depth of the personal mind or of estimating adequately the part which -mind itself in its creative capacity plays in all knowledge functions. It -will only be when we have succeeded in getting beyond what Plato called -the bird-cage theory of knowledge to a sound theory of knowledge and -to a solid basis for spiritual values that we shall be able to discuss -intelligently the “findings” of the mystic. - -The world at the present moment is pitiably “short” in its stock of -sound theories of knowledge. The prevailing psychologies do not explain -knowledge at all. The behaviorists do not try to explain it any more -than the astronomer or the physicist does. The psychologist who reduces -mind to an aggregation of describable “mind-states” has started out on -a course which makes an explanation forever impossible, since knowledge -can be explained only through unity and integral wholeness, never through -an aggregation of parts, as though it were a mental “shower of shot.” If -we expect to talk about _knowledge_ and seriously propose to use that -great word _truth_, we must at least begin with the assumption of an -intelligent, creative, organizing center of self-consciousness which can -transcend itself and can _know_ what is beyond and other than itself. In -short, the talk about a “chasm” between subject and object—knower and -thing known—is as absurd as it would be to talk of a chasm between the -convex and the concave sides of a curve. Knowledge is always knowledge -of an object and mystical experience has all the essential marks of -objective reference, as certainly as other forms of experience have. - -Professor J. M. Baldwin very well says that there is a form of -contemplation in which, as in æsthetic experience, the strands of -the mind’s diverging dualisms are “_merged and fused_.” He adds: “In -this experience of a fusion which is not a mixture but which issues -in a meaning of its own sort and kind, an experience whose essential -character is just this unity of comprehension, consciousness attains its -completest, its most direct, and its final apprehension of what Reality -is and means.” It really comes round to the question whether the mind of -a self-conscious person has any way of approach, except by way of the -senses, to any kind of reality. There is no _a priori_ answer to that -question. It can only be settled by experience. It is, therefore, pure -dogmatism to say, as Professor Dunlap in his recent attack on mysticism -does, that all conscious processes are based on sense-stimulation and -all thought as well as perception depends on reaction to sense-stimulus. -It is no doubt true that behavior psychology must resort to some such -formula, but that only means that such psychology is always dealing -with greatly transformed and reduced beings, when it attempts to deal -with persons like us who, in the richness of our concrete lives, are -never reduced to “behavior-beings.” We have interior dimensions and that -is the end on’t! Some persons—and they are by no means feeble-minded -individuals—are as certain that they have commerce with a world within -as they are that they have experiences of a world outside in space. -Thomas Aquinas, who neither in method nor in doctrine leaned toward -mysticism, though he was most certainly “a harmonized man,” and who in -theory postponed the vision of God to a realm beyond death, nevertheless -had an experience two years before he died which made him put his pen -and inkhorn on the shelf and never write another word of his _Summa -Theologiae_. When he was reminded of the incomplete state of his great -work and was urged to go on with it, he only replied, “I have seen that -which makes all that I have written look small to me.” - -It may be just possible that there is a universe of spiritual reality -upon which our finite spirits open inward as inlets open into the sea. - - “Like the tides on the crescent sea-beach - When the moon is new and thin - Into our hearts high yearnings - Come welling and surging in; - Come from that mystic ocean - Whose rim no foot has trod. - Some call it longing - But others call it God.” - -Such a view is perfectly sane and tenable; it conflicts with no proved -and demonstrated facts either in the nature of the universe or of -mind. It seems anyway to the mystic that there is such a world, that -he has found it as surely as Columbus found San Salvador, and that his -experience is a truth-telling experience. - - -IV - -But granting that it is truth-telling and has objective reference, is the -mystic justified in claiming that he has found and knows God? One does -not need to be a very wide and extensive student of mystical experience -to discover what a meager stock of knowledge the genuine mystic reports. -William James’ remarkable experience in the Adirondack woods very well -illustrates the type. It had, he says, “an intense significance of some -sort, if one could only _tell_ the significance.... In point of fact, I -can’t find a single word for all that significance and don’t know what it -was significant of, so that it remains a mere boulder of impression.”[7] -At a later date James refers to that “extraordinary vivacity of man’s -psychological commerce with something Ideal that _feels as if_ it were -also actual.”[8] The greatest of all the fourteenth century mystics, -Meister Eckhart, could not put his _impression_ into words or ideas. What -he found was a “wilderness of the Godhead where no one is at home,” i.e., -an Object with no particular differentiated, concrete characteristics. -It was not an accident that so many of the mystics hit upon the _via -negativa_, the way of negation, or that they called their discovery “the -divine Dark.” - - “Whatever your mind comes at - I tell you flat - God is not that.” - -Mystical experience does not supply concrete information. It does not -bring new finite facts, new items that can be used in a description of -“the scenery and circumstance” of the realm beyond our sense horizons. -It is the awareness of a Presence, the consciousness of a Beyond, the -discovery, as James puts it, that “we are continuous with a More of the -same quality, which is operative in us and in touch with us.” - -The most striking effect of such experience is not new fact-knowledge, -not new items of empirical information, but new moral energy, heightened -conviction, increased caloric quality, enlarged spiritual vision, an -unusual radiant power of life. In short, the whole personality, in the -case of the constructive mystics, appears to be raised to a new level of -life and to have gained from somewhere many calories of life-feeding, -spiritual substance. We are quite familiar with the way in which -adrenalin suddenly flushes into the physical system and adds a new and -incalculable power to brain and muscle. Under its stimulus a man can -carry out a piano when the house is on fire. May not, perhaps, some -energy from some Source with which our spirits are allied flush our inner -being with forces and powers by which we can be fortified to stand the -universe and more than stand it! “We are more than conquerors through -Him that loved us,” is the way one of the world’s greatest mystics felt. - -Mystical experience—and we must remember as Santayana has said, that -“experience is like a shrapnel shell and bursts into a thousand -meanings”—does at least one thing. It makes God sure to the person who -has had the experience. It raises faith and conviction to the nth power. -“The God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shined into my -heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God,” is St. -Paul’s testimony. “I knew God by revelation,” declares George Fox. “I was -as one who hath the key and doth open.” “The man who has attained this -felicity,” Plotinus says, “meets some turn of fortune that he would not -have chosen, but there is not the slightest lessening of his happiness -for that” (En. I: iv. 7). But this experience, with its overwhelming -conviction and its dynamic effect, can not be put into the common coin of -speech. Frederic Myers has well expressed the difficulty: - - “Oh could I tell ye surely would believe it! - Oh could I only say what I have seen! - How should I tell or how can ye receive it, - How, till He bringeth you where I have been?” - -There is no concrete “information” which can be shared with others. - -When Columbus found San Salvador he was able to describe it to those who -did not sail with him in the Santa Maria, but when the mystic finds God -he can not give us any “knowledge” in plain words of everyday speech. He -can only refer to his boulder, or his Gibraltar, of _impression_ That -situation is what we should expect. We can not, either, describe any of -our great emotions. We can not impart what flushes into our consciousness -in moments of lofty intuition. We have a submerged life within us which -is certainly no less real than our hand or foot. It influences all that -we do or say, but we do not find it easy to utter it. In the presence of -the sublime we have nothing to say—or if we do say anything it is a great -mistake! Language is forged to deal with experiences which are common -to many persons, i.e., to experiences which refer to objects in space. -We have no vocabulary for the subtle, elusive flashes of vision which -are unique, individual and unsharable, as for instance is our personal -sense of “the tender grace of a day that is dead.” We are forced in all -these matters to resort to symbolic suggestion and to artistic devices. -Coventry Patmore said with much insight: - - “In divinity and love - What’s best worth saying can’t be said.” - -I believe that mystical experiences do in the long run expand our -knowledge of God and do succeed in verifying themselves. Mysticism is a -sort of spiritual protoplasm that underlies, as a basic substance, much -that is best in religion, in ethics and in life itself. It has generally -been the mystic, the prophet, the seer that has spotted out new ways -forward in the jungle of our world, or lifted our race to new spiritual -levels. Their experiences have in some way equipped them for unusual -tasks, have given supplies of energy to them which their neighbors did -not have, and have apparently brought them into vital correspondence with -dimensions and regions of reality that others miss. The proof that they -have found God, or at least a domain of spiritual reality, does not lie -in some new stock of knowledge, not in some gnostic secret, which they -bring back; it is to be seen rather in the moral and spiritual fruits -which test out and verify the experience. - -Consciousness of beauty or of truth or of goodness baffles analysis -as much as consciousness of God does. These values have no objective -standing ground in current psychology. They are not things in the world -of space. They submit to no adequate casual explanation. They have their -ground of being in some other kind of world than that of the mechanical -order, a world composed of quantitative masses of matter in motion. These -experiences of value, which are as real for consciousness as stone walls -are, make very clear the fact that there are depths and capacities in -the nature of the normal human mind which we do not usually recognize -and of which we have scant and imperfect accounts in our text-books. -Our minds taken in their full range, in other words, have some sort of -contact and relationship with an eternal nature of things far deeper than -atoms and molecules. Only very slowly and gradually has the race learned -through finite symbols and temporal forms to interpret beauty and truth -and goodness which in their essence are as ineffable and indescribable -as the mystic’s experience of God is. Plato often speaks as though he -had high moments of experience when he rose to the naked vision of -beauty—beauty “alone, separate and eternal,” as he says, and his myths -are very likely told, as J. A. Stewart believes, to assist others to -experience this same vision—a beauty which “does not grow nor perish, -is without increase or diminution and endures for everlasting.” But as -a matter of fact, however exalted heavenly and enduring beauty may be -in its essence we know _what it is_ only as it appears in fair forms of -objects, of body, of soul, of actions; in harmonious blending of sounds -or colors; in well-ordered or happily-combined groupings of many aspects -in one unity which is as it ought to be. Truth and moral goodness always -transcend our attainments and we sometimes feel that the very end and -goal of life is the pursuit of that truth or that goodness which eye -hath not seen nor ear heard. But whatever truth we do attain or whatever -goodness we do achieve is always concrete. Truth is just this one more -added fact that resists all attempts to doubt it. Goodness is just this -simple everyday deed that reveals a heroic spirit and a brave venture of -faith in the midst of difficulties. So, too, the mystic knowledge of God -is not some esoteric communication, supplied through trance or ecstasy; -it is an intuitive personal touch with God, felt to be the essentially -real, the bursting forth of an intense love for him which heightens all -the capacities and activities of life, followed by the slow laboratory -results which verify it. “All I could never be” now is. It seems possible -to stand the universe—even to do something toward the transformation -of it. The bans are read for that most difficult of all marriages, the -marriage of the possible with the actual, the ideal with the real. And -if the experience does not prove that the soul has found God, it at -least does this: it makes the soul feel that proofs of God are wholly -unnecessary. - - - - -CHAPTER X - -PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE - - -I - -Twenty years ago in _A Dynamic Faith_, after reviewing the new questions -which the great sciences had raised for religion, I said: “There are -still harder problems than any of these. Psychology has opened a series -of questions which make the boldest tremble for his faith in an endless -life or in any spiritual reality.” The twenty years that have intervened -have made my point much more clear. It is now pretty generally recognized -that the deepest issues of the faith are to be settled in this field. -The problem of the real nature of the human soul is at the present -moment probably the most important religious question before us, for -upon the answer to it all our vital spiritual interests depend. If man -has no unique interior domain, if he is only a tiny bit of that vast -system of naturalism in which every curve of process and development is -rigidly determined by antecedent causes, then “spiritual” is only a -high-sounding word with a metaphorical significance, but with no basis -of reality in the nature of things. There is certainly no “place” in the -external world of space where we can expect to find spiritual realities. -They are not to be found by going “somewhere.” Olympus has been climbed, -and it was as naturalistic as any other mountain peak. Eden is only a -defined area of Mesopotamia, and that blessed word can work no miracles -for us now. The dome of the sky is only an optical illusion. It is no -supersensuous realm on which we can build our hopes. The beyond as a -spiritual reality is within, or it is nowhere. Psychology, however, has -not been very encouraging in promises of hope. It has gone the way of the -other sciences and has taken an ever increasing slant toward naturalism. -The result is that most so-called “psychologies of religion” reduce -religion either to a naturalistic or to a subjective basis, which means -in either case that religion as a way to some objective spiritual reality -has eluded us and has disappeared as a constructive power. Many a modern -psychologist can say with Browning’s Cleon: - - “And I have written three books on the soul, - Proving absurd all written hitherto, - And putting us to ignorance again.” - -Two of the main tendencies in what is usually called scientific -psychology are (1) the “behaviorist” tendency and (2) the tendency to -reduce the inner life to a series of “mind states.” Let us consider -behaviorism first. This turns psychology into “a purely objective -experimental branch of natural science.”[9] It aims at “the prediction -and control of behavior.” “Introspection forms no essential part of -its method.” One is not concerned with “interpretation in terms of -consciousness,” one is interested only in reactions, responses—in short, -in _behavior_ in the presence of stimuli which produce movements. The -body is a complicated organ and “mind” is merely a convenient term to -express its “activities.”[10] The behaviorist “recognizes no dividing -line between man and brute.” Psychology becomes “the science of -behavior,”[11] the study of “the activity of man or animal as it can be -observed from the outside, either with or without attempting to determine -the mental states by inference from these acts.” Emotions become reduced -forthwith to “the bodily resonance” set up in the muscular and visceral -systems by instinctive movements in the presence of objects, these -curious movements being due entirely to the inheritance of physiological -structure adapted at least in the early stages to aid survival. There is -no way by which behaviorist psychology can give any standing to religion -or to any type of spiritual values. “Æsthetics is the study of the -useless,” as William James baldly states the case. Conscience disappears -or becomes another name for the inheritance or acquisition of certain -types of social behavior. Everything which we call ethics or morality -changes into well-defined and rigidly determined behavior. There is -nothing more “spiritual” about it than there is in the fall of a raindrop -or in the luminous trail of a meteor, or in any form of what has happily -been called “cosmic weather.” - -This reduction of personality to a center of activity is a reaction from -the dualistic sundering of mind and body inherited from Descartes. The -theory of psycho-physical parallelism is utterly bankrupt. Idealism, -which is an attempt to get round the _impasse_ of dualism by treating -mind as the only reality, is abhorrent to scientists and unpopular -with young philosophers, especially in America. Some other solution -is therefore urgent. The easiest one at hand, though it is obviously -temporary and superficial, is to cut across the mind loop, ignore its -unique, originative, creative capacity and its interior depth, to deal -only with body plus body’s activities, and to call that “psychology.” - -The “mind-state” psychology takes us little farther on. It also is a -form of naturalism. “Mind-state” psychology makes more of introspection -than behaviorist psychology does, and it works more than the latter -does in terms of consciousness, which for the behaviorist can be almost -ignored or questioned as an existing reality. According to this view, -mind or consciousness is composed of a vast number of “elemental units,” -and the business of psychology is to analyze and describe these units -or states and to discover the laws of their arrangement or succession. -Mind, on this theory, is an aggregate or sum total of “states.” Professor -James, who gives great place to “mind states,” will, however, not admit -that they are permanent and repeatable “units,” passing and returning -unaltered. In his usual vivid way he says that “a permanently existing -‘idea’ [i.e., mental unit] which makes its appearance before the -footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals is as mythological -an entity as the Jack of Spades.”[12] And yet he continues to deal with -mind as a vast series of more or less describable states. Some states are -“substantive,” such as our “perceptions,” our “memories,” or our definite -“images,” when the mind perches and rests upon some clear and describable -thought, and on the other hand there are “transitive states” which are -vague, hard to catch or hold or express, and which reveal the mind in -flight, in passage, on the way from one substantive state to another. - -When we ask the “mind-state” psychologist to tell us about the soul or to -supply us with a working substitute for it, he relegates it to the scrap -heap where lie the collected rubbish and the antiquated mental furniture -of the medieval centuries. We have no need of it. It is only a _word_ -anyhow. It has always been an expensive luxury and a continual bother. We -are better off with it gone. When we look about for a “self as knower,” -or for a guardian of our identity, we find all that we need in these same -“passing states of consciousness.” They not only know things and facts, -but they also know themselves, and successively inherit and adapt all the -preceding “states” have gained and acquired. The state of the present -moment owns the thoughts and experiences which preceded it, for “what -possesses the possessor possesses the possessed.” “In our waking hours,” -Professor James says, “though each pulse of consciousness dies away and -is replaced by another, yet that other, among the things it knows, knows -its own predecessor and finding it ‘warm,’ greets it saying, ‘Thou art -_mine_ and part of the same self with me.’” It seems, then, this famous -writer concludes, that “states of consciousness are all that psychology -needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the soul to -exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle -of unity is superfluous.”[13] We are certainly hard up if we must depend -on proofs which theology can give us! - -We are thus once more reduced to a condition of sheer naturalism. Our -stream of consciousness is only a rapid succession of passing states, -each “state” causally attached to a molecular process in the brain. -“Every _psychosis_ is the result of a _neurosis_.” There is no soul, -there is no creative spiritual pilot of the stream, there is no freedom, -there are no moral values, there is nothing but passing “cosmic weather,” -sometimes peeps of sunshine, sometimes moonshine, sometimes drizzle or -blizzard, and sometimes cyclone or waterspout! To meet the appalling -thinness of this “cinema” of mind states, we are given the comfort of -believing that there is an under-threshold world within, possibly more -real and surely more important than this little rivulet of states which -make up our conscious life. There is a “fringe” to consciousness more -wonderful than that which adorned the robe of the high priest. This -“fringe” defies description and baffles all analysis. It is a halo or -penumbra which surrounds every “state” and holds all the states vitally -together, so that “states” turn out to be unsundered in some deeper -mysterious currents of being. Others would call this same underlying, -mysterious part of us the subliminal “self,” i.e., under-threshold -“self.” It is a kind of semi-spiritual matrix where the states of -consciousness are formed and gestated. It is the source to which we -may trace everything that can not be explained by the avenues of the -senses. Demons and divinities knock at its doors and visitants from -superterrestrial shores peep in at its windows. It is often treated, -especially of course by Frederic Myers, as a deeper “self,” more or less -discontinuous with our conscious upper self, the self of mind states. -All work of genius is due to “subliminal uprushes,” “an emergence into -the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other -ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped -themselves beyond his will in profounder regions of his being.” As is -well known, Professor James resorts to these “subliminal uprushes” for -his explanation of all the deeper religious experiences and he has done -much to give credit to these “profounder regions of our being” and to -make the subliminal theory popular. He does not, however, as Myers does, -treat it as another “self,” an intermediary between earth and heaven, a -messenger and a mediator of all those higher and diviner aspects of life -which transcend the sphere of sense and of the empirical world. - - -II - -No theory certainly is sound which begins by cutting the subconscious -and the conscious life apart into two more or less dissociated selves. -There is every indication and evidence of continuity and correlation -between what is above and what is below the threshold which in any case -is as relative and artificial a line as is the horizon. The so-called -“uprushes” of the genius are finely correlated with his normal experience -into which they “uprush.” The “uprushes” which convey truth to Socrates -beautifully fit, first, the character of the man and, secondly, the -demands of the temporal environment. Dante’s “uprushes” correspond to -the psychological climate of the medieval world, and Shakespeare’s -“uprushes” are well suited to the later period of the Renaissance. All -subliminal communications are congruent and consonant with the experience -of the person who receives them. The visions of apocalyptic seers are -all couched in the imagery of the apocalyptic schools, and so, too, the -reports of mediums are all in terms of spiritualistic beliefs. We shall -never find the solution of our religious problems by dividing the inner -life of man into two unrelated selves, by whatever name we call them, -for any religion that is to be real must go all the way through us, must -unify all our powers, and must furnish a spring and power by which we -live here and now in the sphere of our consciousness, our character, and -our will. - -It proves to be just as impossible to cut consciousness up into the -fragmentary bits or units called mind states, or to sunder it into -a so-called “self as knower” and “self as known.” Consciousness is -never a shower of shot—a series of discontinuous units. It is the most -completely integral unity known to us anywhere in the universe. There -are no “parts” to it; it is without breaks or gaps. It is one undivided -whole. The only unit we can properly talk about is our unique persisting -personal self in conscious relation to an environment. We can, of course, -treat consciousness in the abstract as an aggregate of states and we can -formulate a scientific account of this constructed entity as we can of -any other abstracted section of reality. But this abstracted entity is -forever totally different from the warm and intimate inner life within -us, as we actually live it and feel its flow. Any state or process which -we may talk about is only an artificial fragment of a larger, deeper -reality which gives the “fragment” its peculiar being and makes it what -it is. Underneath all that appears and happens in the conscious flow is -the personal self for whom the appearances occur. Any psychologist who -explicitly leaves this out of his account always implicitly smuggles it -in again. - -The most striking fact of experience is _knowing that we know_. The -same consciousness which knows any given object in the same pulse of -consciousness knows itself as knowing it. Self-consciousness is present -in all consciousness of objects. The thinker that thinks is involved in -and is bound up with all knowledge, even of the simplest sort. Every -idea, every feeling, and every act of will is what it is because it -is in living unity with our entire personal self. If any such “state” -got dissociated, slipped away and undertook to do business on its own -hook, it would be as unknown to us as our guardian angel is. The mind -that knows can never be separated from the world that is known. One can -think in abstraction of a mind apart by itself and of a world equally -isolated—but no such mind and no such world actually exist. To be a -real mind, a real self, is to be in active commerce with a real world -given in experience. One thinks his object in the same unified pulse -of consciousness in which he thinks himself and vice versa. There is -no self-consciousness without object-consciousness, and there is no -object-consciousness without self-consciousness. Outer and inner, knower -and known, are not two but forever one. The “soul,” therefore, is not -something hidden away in behind or above and beyond our ideas and -feelings and will activities. It is the active living unity of personal -consciousness—the one psychic integer and unit for a true psychology. It -binds all the items of experience into one indivisible unity, one organic -whole through which our personal type of life is made possible. At every -moment of waking, intelligent life we look out upon each fact, each -event, each experience from a wider self which organizes the new fact in -with its former experiences, weaves it into the web of its memories and -emotions and purposes, makes the new fact a part of itself, and yet at -the same time knows itself as transcending and outliving the momentary -fact. - -When we study the personal self deeply enough, not as cut up into -artificial units, but as the living, undivided whole, which is implied in -all coherent experience, we find at once a basis for those ideal values -that are rightly called spiritual and for “those mighty hopes that make -us men.” The first step toward a genuine basis of spiritual life is to -be found in the restoration of the personal self to its true place as -the ultimate fact, or datum, of self-conscious experience. As soon as -we come back to this central reality, our unified, unique, self-active -personality, we find ourselves in possession of material enough; as -Browning would say, - - “For fifty hopes and fears - As old and new at once as nature’s self, - To rap and knock and enter in our soul, - Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, - Round the ancient idol, on his base again,— - The grand Perhaps!” - -What we find at once, even without a resort to a subliminal self, or to -“uprushes,” is that our normal, personal self-consciousness is a unique, -living, self-active, creative center of energies, dealing not only with -space and time and tangible things, but dealing as well with realities -which are space- and time-transcending. “The things that are not” prove -to be immense factors in our lives and constantly “bring to naught the -things that are.” The greatest events of history have not been due to -physical forces; they have been due to plans and ideals which were real -only in the viewless minds of men. What _was not yet_ brought about what -was to be. Alexander the Great with his physical forces, sweeping across -the ancient world like a cataclysm of nature, was certainly no more truly -a world-builder than was Jesus, who had no armies, who used no tangible -forces, but merely put into operation those “things that were not,” i.e., -his ideas of what ought to be and his conviction that love is stronger -than Roman legions. The simplest and humblest of us, like the Psalmist, -find the Meshech where we sojourn too straitened and narrow for us. We -have all cried, “Woe is me that I sojourn in Meshech!” The reason that -we discover the limits and bounds of our poor Meshech is that we are all -the time going beyond the hampering Meshech that tries to contain and -imprison us. - -The thing which spoils all our finite camping places is our unstilled -consciousness that we are made for something more than we have yet -realized or attained. Our ideals are an unmistakable intimation of our -time-transcending nature. We can no more stop with _that which is_ than -Niagara can stop at the fringe of the fall. All consciousness of the -higher rational type is continually carried forward toward the larger -whole that would complete and fulfill its present experience. We are -aware of the limit only because we are already beyond it. The present is -a pledge of more; the little arc which we have gives us a ground of faith -in the full circle which we seek. A study of man’s life which does not -deal with this inherent idealizing tendency is like _Hamlet_ with Hamlet -left out. Martineau declared: - - “Amid all the sickly talk about ‘ideals’ which has become the - commonplace of our age, it is well to remember that so long - as they are dreams of future possibility and not faiths in - present realities, so long as they are a mere self-painting - of the yearning spirit and not its personal surrender to - immediate communion with an infinite Perfection, they have no - more solidity or steadiness than floating air-bubbles, gay in - the sunshine and broken by the passing wind.... The very gate - of entrance to religion, the moment of its new birth, is the - discovery that your ideal is the everlasting Real, no transient - brush of a fancied angel wing, but the abiding presence and - persuasion of the Soul of souls.”[14] - -In the same vein Pringle-Pattison, one of the wisest of our living -teachers, has said: - - “Consciousness of imperfection, the capacity for progress, - and the pursuit of perfection, are alike possible to man only - through the universal life of thought and goodness in which - he shares and which, at once an indwelling presence and an - unattainable ideal, draws him ‘on and always on.’”[15] - -It is here in these experiences of ours which spring out of our real -nature, but which always carry us beyond _what is_ and which make it -impossible for us to live in a world composed of “things,” no matter -how golden they are, that we have the source of our spiritual values. -When we talk about values we may use the word in two senses. In the -ordinary sense we mean something extrinsic, utilitarian. We mean that -we possess something which can be exchanged for something else. It is -precious because we can sell it or swap it or use it to keep life going. -In the other sense we see value in reference to something which _ought -to be_, whether it now is or not. It is _fit_ to be, it would justify -its being in relation to the whole reality. When we speak of ethical or -spiritual values we are thinking of something that will minister to the -highest good of persons or of a society of persons. Value in this loftier -meaning always has to do with ideals. A being without any conscious -end or goal, i.e., without an ideal, would have no sense of worth, no -spiritual values. It does not appear on the level of instinct. It arises -as an appreciation of what ought to be realized in order to complete and -fulfill any life which is to be called good. Obviously a person with -rich and complex interests will have many scales of value, but lower and -lesser ones will fall into place under wider and higher ones, so that one -forms a kind of hierarchical system of values with some overtopping end -of supreme worth dominating the will. - -It becomes one of the deepest questions in the world what connection -there is between man’s spiritual values or ideals and the eternal nature -of things in the universe. Are these ideals of ours, these values which -seem to raise us from the naturalistic to the spiritual level, just -our subjective creations, or are they expressions of a coöperating and -rational power beyond us and yet in us, giving us intimations of what -is true and best in a world more real than that of matter and motion? -These ideal values, such as our appreciation of beauty, our confidence -in truth, our dedication to moral causes, our love for worthy persons, -our loyalty to the Kingdom of God, are not born of selfish preference -or individual desire. They are not capricious like dreams and visions. -They attach to something deeper than our personal wishes, in fact our -faith in them and our devotion to them often cause us to take lines of -action straight against our personal wishes and our individual desires. -They stand the test of stress and strain, they weather the storms of time -which submerge most things, they survive all shock and mutations and only -increase in worth with the wastage of secondary goods. They rest on no -mere temporary impulse or sporadic whim. They have their roots deep in -the life of the race. They have lasted better than Andes or Ararat, and -they are based upon common, universal aspects of rational life. They are -at least as sure and prophetic as are laws of triangles and relations of -space. If we can count on the permanence of the multiplication table and -on the continuity of nature, no less can we count on the conservation of -values and the continued significance of life. - -They seem thus to belong to the system of the universe and to have the -guardianship of some invisible Pilot of the cosmic ship. The streams -of moral power and the spiritual energies that have their rise in good -persons are as much to be respected facts of the universe as are the -rivers that carry ships of commerce. Moral goodness is a factor in the -constitution of the world, and the eternal nature of the universe backs -it as surely as it backs the laws of hydrogen. It does not back every -ideal, for some ideals are unfit and do not minister to a coherent and -rationally ordered scheme of life. Those ideals only have the august -sanction and right of way which are born out of the age-long spiritual -travail of the race and which tend to organize men for better team -efforts, i.e., which promote the social community life, the organism of -the Spirit. Through these spiritual forces, revealed in normal ethical -persons, we are, I believe, nearer to the life of God and closer to -the revealing centers of the universe than we are when we turn to the -subliminal selves of hysterics. The normal interior life of man is -boundless and bottomless. It is not a physical reality, to be measured by -foot rules or yardsticks. It is a reality of a wholly different order. -It is essentially spiritual, i.e., of spirit. In its organized and -differentiated life this personal self of ours is often weak and erratic. -We feel the _urge_ which belongs to the very nature of _spirit_, but we -blunder in our direction, we bungle our aims and purposes, we fail to -discover what it is that we really want. But we are never insulated from -the wider spiritual environment which constitutes the true inner world -from which we have come and to which we belong. There are many ways of -correspondence with this environment. No way, however, is more vital, -more life-giving than this way of dedication to the advancement of the -moral ideals of the world. - - - - -FOOTNOTES - - -[1] 1 Cor. VI. 9-11. - -[2] _Primary Factors of Organic Evolution_, p. 483. - -[3] Bosanquet, _Value and Destiny of the Individual_, p. 320. - -[4] F. C. S. Schiller, _Humanism_, pp. 228-9. - -[5] Shaler, _The Individual_, p. 194. - -[6] “The Flight of the Duchess.” - -[7] _Letters of William James_, Vol. II. p. 76. - -[8] _Ibid._, Vol. II. p. 269. - -[9] Watson, _Behavior_, p. 1. - -[10] See Ralph Barton Perry’s article “A Behavioristic View of Purpose” -in the _Journal of Philosophy_, February 17, 1921. - -[11] Pillsbury, _Fundamentals of Psychology_, p. 4. - -[12] _Psychology_ (Briefer Course), p. 197. - -[13] _Ibid._, p. 203. - -[14] Martineau, _A Study of Religion_ (2d ed.), I, 12. - -[15] _The Philosophical Radicals_, pp. 97-98. - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's Spiritual Energies In Daily Life, by Rufus M. 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