published the _Origin of Species_ and gave to the world the
evolutionary hypothesis, foreshadowed by Goethe and other
eighteenth-century thinkers, simultaneously formulated by Wallace
and himself. Here is a theory, open to objections certainly, not yet
conclusively demonstrated, but the most probable one which we yet
possess, as to the method of the appearance and the continuance of
life upon the planet. It conceives of creation as an unimaginably
long and intricate development from the inorganic to the organic, from
simple to complex forms of life. Like Kantianism and the humanistic
movement generally, the evolutionary hypothesis springs from reasoned
observation of man and nature, not from any _a priori_ or speculative
process. With this theory, long a regulative idea of our world,
preaching was forced to come to some sort of an understanding. It
strikes a powerful blow at the scholastic notion of a dichotomized
universe divided between nature and supernature, divine and human.
It reinforced humanism by minimizing, if not making unnecessary,
the objective and external source and external interpretations of
religions. It pushes back the initial creative _act_ until it is lost
in the mists and chaos of an unimaginably remote past. Meanwhile,
creative _energy_, the very essence of transcendent life, is, as we
know it, not transcendent at all, but working outward from within,
a part of the process, not above and beyond it. The inevitable
implication here is that God is sufficiently, if not exclusively,
known through natural and human media. Science recognizes Him in the
terms of its own categories as in and of His world, a part of all its
ongoings and developments. But His creative life is indistinguishable
from, if not identical with, its expressions. Here, then, is a
practical obliteration of the line once so sharply drawn between the
natural and the supernatural. Hence the demarcation between the divine
and human into mutually exclusive states has disappeared.
This would seem, then, to wipe out also any knowledge of absolute
values. Christian theism has interpreted God largely in static, final
terms. The craving for the absolute in the human mind, as witnessed by
the long course of the history of thought, as pathetically witnessed
to in the mixture of chicanery, fanaticism and insight of the modern
mystical and occult healing sects, is central and immeasurable. But
God, found, if at all, in the terms of a present process, is not
static and absolute, but dynamic and relative; indefinite, incomplete,
not final. And man's immense difference from Him, that sense of
the immeasurable space between creator and created, is strangely
contracted. The gulf between holiness and guiltiness tends also to
disappear. For our life would appear to be plastic and indefinite,
a process rather than a state, not open then to conclusive moral
estimates; incomplete, not fallen; life an orderly process, hence not
perverse but defensible; without known breaks or infringements, hence
relatively normal and sufficiently intelligible.
A second factor was the rise of the humane sciences. In the seventh
and eighth decades of the last century men were absorbed in the
discovery of the nature and extent of the material universe. But
beginning about 1890, interest swerved again toward man as its
most revealing study and most significant inhabitant. Anthropology,
ethnology, sociology, physical and functional psychology, came to
the front. Especially the humane studies of political science and
industrial economics were magnified because of the new and urgent
problems born of an industrial civilization and a capitalistic state.
The invention and perfection of the industrial machine had by now
thoroughly dislocated former social groupings, made its own ethical
standards and human problems. In the early days of the labor movement
William Morris wrote, "we have become slaves of the monster to which
invention has given birth." In 1853, shortly after the introduction of
the cotton gin into India, the Viceroy wrote: "The misery is scarcely
paralleled in the history of trade." (A large statement that!) "The
bones of the cotton workers whiten the plains of India."
But the temporary suffering caused by the immediate crowding out
of cottage industry and the abrupt increase in production was
insignificant beside the deeper influence, physical, moral, mental,
of the machine in changing the permanent habitat and the entire mode
of living for millions of human beings. It removed them from those
healthy rural surroundings which preserve the half-primitive,
half-poetic insight into the nature of things which comes from
relative isolation and close contact with the soil, to the nervous
tension, the amoral conditions, the airless, lightless ugliness of
the early factory settlements. Here living conditions were not merely
beastly; they were often bestial. The economic helplessness of the
factory hands reduced them to essential slavery. They must live where
the factory was, and could work only in one factory, for they could
not afford to move. Hence they must obey their industrial master in
every particular, since the raw material, the plant, the tools, the
very roof that covered them, were all his! In this new human condition
was a powerful reinforcement, from another angle of approach, of
the humanistic impulse. Man's interest in himself, which had been
sometimes that of the dilettante, largely imaginative and even
sentimental, was reinforced by man's new distress and became concrete
and scientific.
Thus man regarded himself and his own world with a new and urgent
attention. The methods and secondary causes of his intellectual,
emotional and volitional life began to be laid bare. The new situation
revealed the immense part played in shaping the personality and
the fate of the individual by inheritance and environment. The
Freudian doctrine, which traces conduct and habit back to early
or prenatal repressions, strengthens the interest in the physical
and materialistic sources of character and conduct in human life.
Behavioristic psychology, interpreting human nature in terms of
observation and action, rather than analysis and value judgments,
does the same. It tends to put the same emphasis upon the external and
sensationalistic aspects of human experience.
That, then, which is a central force in religion, the sense of the
inscrutability of human nature, the feeling of awe before the natural
processes, what Paul called the mystery of iniquity and the mystery of
godliness, tends to disappear. Wonder and confident curiosity succeed
humility and awe. That which is of the essence of religion, the sense
of helplessness coupled with the sense of responsibility, is stifled.
Whatever else the humane sciences have done, they have deepened man's
fascinated and narrowing absorption in himself and given him apparent
reason to believe that by analyzing the iron chain of cause and effect
which binds the process and admitting that it permits no deflection
or variation, he is making the further questions as to the origin,
meaning and destiny of that process either futile or superfluous. So
that, in brief, the check to speculative thinking and the repudiation
of central metaphysical concepts, which the earlier movement brought
about, has been accentuated and sealed by the humane sciences and the
new and living problems offered them for practical solution. Thus the
generation now ending has been carried beyond the point of combating
ancient doctrines of God and man, to the place where it has become
comparatively indifferent, rather than hostile, to any doctrine of
God, so absorbed is it in the physical functions, the temporal needs
and the material manifestations of human personality.
Finally, as the natural and humane sciences mark new steps in the
expanding humanistic movement, so in these last days, critical
scholarship, itself largely a product of the humanistic viewpoint, has
added another factor to the group. The new methods of historical and
literary criticism, of comparative investigation in religion and the
other arts, have exerted a vast influence upon contemporary religious
thought. They have not merely completed the breakdown of an arbitrary
and fixed external authority and rendered finally invalid the notion
of equal or verbal inspiration in sacred writings, but the present
tendency, especially in comparative religion, is to seek the source
of all so-called religious experience within the human consciousness;
particularly to derive it all from group experience. Here, then, is
a theory of religious origins which once more turns the spirit of man
back upon itself. Robertson Smith, Jane Harrison, Durkheim, rejecting
an earlier animistic theory, find the origin of religion not in
contemplation of the natural world and in the intuitive perception
of something more-than-world which lies behind it, but in the group
experience whose heightened emotional intensity and nervous energy
imparts to the one the exaltation of the many. Smith, in the _Religion
of the Semites_,[9] emphasizes, as the fundamental conception of
ancient religion, "the solidarity of the gods and their worshipers as
part of an organic society." Durkheim goes beyond this. There are
not at the beginning men and gods, but only the social group and the
collective emotions and representations which are generated through
membership in the group.
[Footnote 9: P. 32.]
Here, then, is humanism again carried to the very heart of the
citadel. Religion at its source contains no real perceptions of any
extra-human force or person. What seemed to be such perceptions
were only the felt participation of the individual in a collective
consciousness which is superindividual, but not superhuman and always
continuous with the individual consciousness. So that, whatever may or
may not be true later, the beginning of man's metaphysical interests,
his cosmic consciousness, his more-than-human contacts, is simply his
social experience, his collective emotions and representations. Thus
Durkheim: "We are able to say, in sum, that the religious individual
does not deceive himself when he believes in the existence of a moral
power upon which he depends and from which he holds the larger portion
of himself. That power exists; it is society. When the Australian
feels within himself the surging of a life whose intensity surprises
him, he is the dupe of no illusion; that exaltation is real, and it
is really the product of forces that are external and superior to the
individual."[10] Yes, but identical in kind and genesis with himself
and his own race. To Leuba, in his _Psychological Study of Religion_,
this has already become the accepted viewpoint. Whatever is enduring
and significant in religion is merely an expression of man's social
consciousness and experience, his sense of participation in a common
life. "Humanity, idealized and conceived as a manifestation of
creative energy, possesses surprising qualifications for a source
of religious inspiration." Professor Overstreet, in "The Democratic
Conception of God," _Hibbert Journal_, volume XI, page 409, says: "It
is this large figure, not simply of human but of cosmic society which
is to yield our God of the future. There is no place in the future for
an eternally perfect being and no need--society, democratic from end
to end, can brook no such radical class distinction as that between a
supreme being, favored with eternal and absolute perfection, and the
mass of beings doomed to the lower ways of imperfect struggle."
[Footnote 10: _Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse_, p. 322.]
There is certainly a striking immediacy in such language. We leave for
later treatment the question as to the historical validity of such
an attitude. It certainly ignores some of the most distinguished and
fruitful concepts of trained minds; it rules out of court what are
to the majority of men real and precious factors in the religious
experience. It would appear to be another instance, among the many, of
the fallacy of identifying the part with the whole. But the effect
of such pervasive thought currents, the more subtle and unfightable
because indirect and disguised in popular appearance and influence,
upon the ethical and spiritual temper of religious leaders, the
very audacity of whose tasks puts them on the defensive, is vast
and incalculable. At the worst, it drives man into a mechanicalized
universe, with a resulting materialism of thought and life; at the
best, it makes him a pragmatist with amiable but immediate objectives,
just practical "results" as his guide and goal. Morality as, in
Antigone's noble phrase, "the unwritten law of heaven" sinks down and
disappears. There is no room here for the Job who abhors himself and
repents in dust and ashes nor for Plato's _One behind the Many_; no
perceptible room, in such a world, for any of the absolute values, the
transcendent interests, the ethics of idealism, any eschatology, or
for Christian theodicy. That which has been the typical contribution
of the religious perceptions in the past, namely, the comprehensive
vision of life and the world and time _sub specie aeternitatis_ is
here abandoned. Eternity is unreal or empty; we never heard the music
of the spheres. We are facing at this moment a disintegrating age.
Here is a prime reason for it. The spiritual solidarity of mankind
under the humanistic interpretation of life and destiny is dissolving
and breaking down. Humanism is ingenious and reasonable and clever but
it is too limited; it doesn't answer enough questions.
Before going on, in a future chapter, to discuss the question as to
what kind of preaching such a world-view, seen from the Christian
standpoint, needs, we are now to inquire what the effect of this
humanistic movement upon Christian preaching has already been.
That our preaching should have been profoundly influenced by it is
inevitable. Religion is not apart from the rest of life. The very
temperament of the speaker makes him peculiarly susceptible to the
intellectual and spiritual movements about him. What, then, has
humanism done to preaching? Has it worked to clarify and solidify
the essence of the religious position? Or has preaching declined and
become neutralized in religious quality under it?
First: it has profoundly affected Christian preaching about God.
The contemporary sermon on Deity minimizes or leaves out divine
transcendence; thus it starves one fundamental impulse in man--the
need and desire to look up. Instead of this transcendence modern
preaching emphasizes immanence, often to a naïve and ludicrous degree.
God is the being who is like us. Under the influence of that monistic
idealism, which is a derived philosophy of the humanistic impulse,
preaching lays all the emphasis upon divine immanence in sharpest
contrast either to the deistic transcendence of the eighteenth century
or the separateness and aloofness of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures,
or of the classic Greek theologies of Christianity. God is, of course;
that is, He is the informing principle in the natural and human
universe and essentially one with it. Present preaching does not
confess this identification but it evades rather than meets the
logical pantheistic conclusion. So our preaching has to do with God
in the common round of daily tasks; with sweeping a room to His glory;
with adoration of His presence in a sunset and worship of Him in a
star. Every bush's aflame with Him; there are sermons in stones and
poems in running brooks. Before us, even as behind, God is and all is
well. We are filled with a sort of intoxication with this intimate and
protective company of the Infinite; we are magnificently unabashed as
we familiarly approach Him. "Closer is He than breathing; nearer than
hands or feet." Not then by denying or condemning or distrusting the
world in which we live, not by asserting the differences between God
and humanity do we understand Him. But by closest touch with nature
do we find Him. By a superb paradox, not without value, yet equally
ineffable in sentimentality and sublime in its impiety we say,
beholding man, "that which is most human is most divine!"
That there is truth in such comfortable and affable preaching is
obvious; that there is not much truth in it is obvious, too. To
what extent, and in what ways, nature, red with tooth and claw,
indifferent, ruthless, whimsical, can be called the expression of the
Christian God, is not usually specifically stated. In what way man,
just emerging from the horror, the shame, the futility of his last and
greatest debauch of bloody self-destruction, can be called the chief
medium of truth, holiness and beauty, the matrix of divinity, is not
entirely manifest. But the fatal defect of such preaching is not that
there is not, of course, a real identity between the world and its
Maker, the soul and its Creator, but that the aspect of reality which
this truth expresses is the one which has least religious value, is
least distinctive in the spiritual experience. The religious nature is
satisfied, and the springs of moral action are refreshed by dwelling
on the "specialness" of God; men are brought back to themselves, not
among their fellows and by identifying them with their fellows, but
by lifting them to the secret place of the Most High. They need
religiously not thousand-tongued nature, but to be kept secretly in
His pavilion from the strife of tongues. It is the difference between
God and men which makes men who know themselves trust Him. It is the
"otherness," not the sameness, which makes Him desirable and potent in
the daily round of life. A purely ethical interest in God ceases to be
ethical and becomes complacent; when we rule out the supraphenomenal
we have shut the door on the chief strength of the higher life.
Second: modern preaching, under this same influence and to a yet
greater degree, emphasizes the principle of identity, where we need
that of difference, in its preaching about Jesus. He is still the most
moving theme for the popular presentation of religion. But that
is because He offers the most intelligible approach to that very
"otherness" in the person of the godhead. His healing and reconciling
influence over the heart of man--the way the human spirit expands and
blossoms in His presence--is moving beyond expression to any observer,
religious or irreligious. Each new crusade in the long strife for
human betterment looks in sublime confidence to Him as its forerunner
and defense. To what planes of common service, faith, magnanimous
solicitude could He not lift the embittered, worldlyized men and women
of this torn and distracted age, which is so desperately seeking its
own life and thereby so inexorably losing it! But why is the heart
subdued, the mind elevated, the will made tractable by Him? Why,
because He is enough like us so that we know that He understands, has
utter comprehension; and He is enough different from us so that we are
willing to trust Him. In what lies the essence of the leadership of
Jesus? He is not like us: therefore, we are willing to relinquish
ourselves into His hands.
Now, that is only half the truth. But if I may use a paradox, it is
the important half, the primary half. And it is just that essential
element in the Christian experience of Jesus that modern preaching,
under the humanistic impulse, is neglecting. Indeed, liberal preachers
have largely ceased to sermonize about Him, just because it has become
so easy! Humanism has made Jesus obvious, hence, relatively impotent.
With its unified cosmos, its immanent God, its exalted humanity, the
whole Christological problem has become trivial. It drops the cosmic
approach to the person of Jesus in favor of the ethical. It does not
approach Him from the side of God; we approach nothing from that
side now; but from the side of man. Thus He is not so much a divine
revelation as He is a human achievement. Humanity and divinity are
one in essence. The Creator is distinguished from His creatures in
multifarious differences of degree but not in kind. We do not see,
then, in Christ, a perfect isolated God, joined to a perfect isolated
man, in what were indeed the incredible terms of the older and
superseded Christologies. But rather, He is the perfect revelation of
the moral being, the character of God, in all those ways capable of
expression or comprehension in human life, just because he is the
highest manifestation of a humanity through which God has been forever
expressing Himself in the world. For man is, so to speak, his own
cosmic center; the greatest divine manifestation which we know.
Granted, then, an ideal man, a complete moral being, and _ipso facto_
we have our supreme revelation of God.
So runs the thrice familiar argument. Of course, we have gained
something by it. We may drop gladly the old dualistic philosophy, and
we must drop it, though I doubt if it is so easy to drop the dualistic
experience which created it. But I beg to point out that, on the
whole, we have lost more religiously than we have gained. For we have
made Jesus easy to understand, not as He brings us up to His level,
but as we have reduced Him to ours. Can we afford to do that?
Bernard's mystical line, "The love of Jesus, what it is, none but His
loved ones know," has small meaning here. The argument is very good
humanism but it drops the word "Saviour" out of the vocabulary
of faith. Oh, how many sermons since, let us say, 1890, have been
preached on the text, "He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father."
And how uniformly the sermons have explained that the text means
not that Jesus is like God, but that God is like Jesus--and we have
already seen that Jesus is like us! One only has to state it all to
see beneath its superficial reasonableness its appalling profanity!
Third: we may see the influence of humanism upon our preaching in the
relinquishment of the goal of conversion. We are preaching to educate,
not to save; to instruct, not to transform. Conversion may be gradual
and half-unconscious, a long and normal process under favorable
inheritance and with the culture of a Christian environment. Or it
may be sudden and catastrophic, a violent change of emotional and
volitional activity. When a man whose feeling has been repressed by
sin and crusted over by deception, whose inner restlessness has been
accumulating under the misery and impotence of a divided life, is
brought into contact with Christian truth, he can only accept it
through a volitional crisis, with its cleansing flood of penitence and
confession and its blessed reward of the sense of pardon and peace and
the relinquishment of the self into the divine hands. But one thing is
true of either process in the Christian doctrine of conversion. It is
not merely an achievement, although it is that; it is also a rescue.
It cannot come about without faith, the "will to believe"; neither can
it come about by that alone. Conversion is something we do; it is also
something else, working within us, if we will let it, helping us to
do; hence it is something done for us.