life and preaching under humanistic influence. We are accepting
the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue. Hence we blur the
distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian. Education
supplants salvation. We bring the boys and girls into the church
because they are safer there than outside it; and on the whole it is
a good thing to do and really they belong there anyway. The church
member is a man of the world, softened by Christian feeling. He is
a kindly and amiable citizen and an honorable man; he has not been
saved. But he knows the unwisdom of evil; if you know what is right
you will do it. Intelligence needs no support from grace. It is
strange that the church does not see that with this relinquishment
of her insistence upon something that religion can do for a man that
nothing else can attempt, she has thereby given up her real excuse for
being, and that her peculiar and distinctive mission has gone. It is
strange that she does not see that the humanism which, since it is
at home in the world, can sometimes make there a classic hero,
degenerates dreadfully and becomes unreal in a church where unskilled
hands use it to make it a substitute for a Christian saint! But
for how many efficient parish administrators, Y.M.C.A. secretaries,
up-to-date preachers, character is conceived of as coming not by
discipline but by expansion, not by salvation, but by activity. Social
service solves everything without any reference to the troublesome
fact that the value of the service will depend upon the quality of the
servant. Salvation is a combination of intelligence and machinery. Sin
is pure ignorance or just maladjustment to environment. All we need is
to know what is right and wrong; the humane sciences will take care of
that; and, then, have an advertising agent, a gymnasium, a committee
on spiritual resources, a program, a conference, a drive for money,
and behold, the Kingdom of God is among us!
Fourth, and most significant: it is to the humanistic impulse and
its derived philosophies that we owe the individualistic ethics, the
relative absence of the sense of moral responsibility for the social
order which has, from the beginning, maimed and distorted Protestant
Christianity. It was, perhaps, a consequence of the speculative
and absolute philosophies of the mediaeval church that, since they
endeavored to relate religion to the whole of the cosmos, its
remotest and ultimate issues, so they conceived of its absoluteness as
concerned with the whole of human experience, with every relation of
organized society. Under their regulative ideas all human beings, not
a selected number, had, not in themselves but because of the Divine
Sacrifice, divine significance; reverence was had, not for supermen or
captains of industry, but for every one of those for whom Christ died.
There were no human institutions which were ends in themselves or
more important than the men which created and served them. The Holy
Catholic Church was the only institution which was so conceived; all
others, social, political, economic, were means toward the end of the
preservation and expression of human personality. Hence, the interest
of the mediaeval church in social ethics and corporate values; hence,
the axiom of the church's control of, the believers' responsibility
for, the economic relations of society. An unjust distribution of
goods, the withholding from the producer of his fair share of the
wealth which he creates, profiteering, predatory riches--these were
ranked under one term as avarice, and they were counted not among
the venial offenses, like aberrations of the flesh, but avarice was
considered one of the seven deadly sins of the spirit. The application
of the ethics of Jesus to social control began to die out as
humanism individualized Christian morals and as, under its influence,
nationalism tended to supplant the international ecclesiastical order.
The cynical and sordid maxim that business is business; that, in the
economic sphere, the standards of the church are not operative and the
responsibility of the church is not recognized--notions which are
a chief heresy and an outstanding disgrace of nineteenth-century
religion, from which we are only now painfully and slowly
reacting--these may be traced back to the influence of humanism upon
Christian thought and conduct.
In general, then, it seems to me abundantly clear that the humanistic
movement has both limited and secularized Christian preaching. It
dogmatically ignores supersensuous values; hence it has rationalized
preaching hence it has made provincial its intellectual approach and
treatment, narrowed and made mechanical its content. It has turned
preaching away from speculative to practical themes. It was,
perhaps, this mental and spiritual decline of the ministry to which a
distinguished educator referred when he told a body of Congregational
preachers that their sermons were marked by "intellectual frugality."
It is this which a great New England theologian-preacher, Dr. Gordon,
means when he says "an indescribable pettiness, a mean kind of retail
trade has taken possession of the preachers; they have substituted the
mill-round for the sun-path."
The whole world today tends toward a monstrous egotism. Man's
attention is centered on himself, his temporal salvation, his external
prosperity. Preaching, yielding partly to the intellectual and partly
to the practical environment, has tended to adopt the same secular
scale of values, somewhat pietized and intensified, and to move within
the same area of operation. That is why most preaching today deals
with relations of men with men, not of men with God. Yet human
relationships can only be determined in the light of ultimate ones.
Most preaching instinctively avoids the definitely religious themes;
deals with the ethical aspects of devotion; with conduct rather than
with worship; with the effects, not the causes, the expression, not
the essence of the religious life. Most college preaching chiefly
amounts to informal talks on conduct; somewhat idealized discussions
of public questions; exhortations to social service. When sermons do
deal with ultimate sanctions they can hardly be called Christian. They
are often stoical; self-control is exalted as an heroic achievement,
as being self-authenticating, carrying its own reward. Or they are
utilitarian, giving a sentimentalized or frankly shrewd doctrine of
expediencies, the appeal to an exaggerated self-respect, enlightened
self-interest, social responsibility. These are typical humanistic
values; they are real and potent and legitimate. But they are not
religious and they do not touch religious motives. The very difference
between the humanist and the Christian lies here. To obey a principle
is moral and admirable; to do good and be good because it pays is
sensible; but to act from love of a person is a joyous ecstasy, a
liberation of power; it alone transforms life with an ultimate and
enduring goodness. Genuine Christian preaching makes its final appeal,
not to fear, not to hope, not to future rewards and punishments, not
to reason or prudence or benevolence. It makes its appeal to love,
and that means that it calls men to devotion to a living Being, a
Transcendence beyond and without us. For you cannot love a principle,
or relinquish yourself to an idea. You must love another living
Being. Which amounts to saying that humanism just because it is
self-contained is self-condemned. It minimizes or ignores the living
God, in His world, but not to be identified with it; beyond it and
above it; loving it because it needs to be loved; blessing it because
saving it. In so doing, it lays the axe at the very root of the tree
of religion. Francis Xavier, in his greatest of all hymns, has stated
once for all the essence of the Christian motive and the religious
attitude:
"O Deus, ego amo te
Nec amo te ut salves me
Aut quia non amantes te
Aeternis punis igne.
"Nee praemii illius spe
Sed sicut tu amasti me
Sic amo et amabo te
Solem, quia Rex meus est."
What, then, has been the final effect of humanism upon preaching? It
has tempted the preacher to depersonalize religion. And since love is
the essence of personality, it has thereby stripped preaching of the
emotional energy, of the universal human interests and the
prophetic insight which only love can bestow. Over against this
depersonalization, we must find some way to return to expressing the
religious view and utilizing the religious power of the human spirit.
CHAPTER THREE
EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY
We ventured to say in the preceding chapter that, under the influences
of more than three centuries of humanism, the spiritual solidarity of
mankind is breaking down. For humanism makes an inhuman demand upon
the will; it minimizes the force of the subrational and it largely
ignores the superrational elements in human experience; it does not
answer enough questions. Indeed, it is frankly confessed, particularly
by students of the political and economic forces now working in
society, that the new freedom born in the Renaissance is, in some
grave sense, a failure. It destroyed what had been the common moral
authority of European civilization in its denial of the rule of the
church. But for nearly four centuries it has become increasingly clear
that it offered no adequate substitute for the supernatural moral and
religious order which it supplanted. John Morley was certainly one of
the most enlightened and humane positivists of the last generation.
In his _Recollections_, published three years ago, there is a final
paragraph which runs as follows: "A painful interrogatory, I must
confess, emerges. Has not your school held the civilized world,
both old and new alike, in the hollow of their hand for two long
generations past? Is it quite clear that their influence has been
so much more potent than the gospel of the various churches?
_Circumspice_. Is not diplomacy, unkindly called by Voltaire the field
of lies, as able as ever it was to dupe governments and governed by
grand abstract catchwords veiling obscure and inexplicable purposes,
and turning the whole world over with blood and tears, to a strange
Witch's Sabbath?"[11] This is his conclusion of the whole matter.
[Footnote 11: _Recollections_: II, p. 366 ff.]
But while the reasons for the failure are not far to seek, it is worth
while for the preacher to dwell on them for a moment. In strongly
centered souls like a Morley or an Erasmus, humanism produces a
stoical endurance and a sublime self-confidence. But it tends, in
lesser spirits, to a restless arrogance. Hence, both those lower
elements in human nature, the nature and extent of whose force it
either cloaks or minimizes, and those imponderable and supersensuous
values which it tends to ignore and which are not ordinarily included
in its definition of experience, return to vex and plague it. Indeed
the worst foe of humanism has never been the religious view of the
world upon whose stored-up moral reserves of uncompromising doctrine
it has often half-consciously subsisted. Humanism has long profited
from the admitted truth that the moral restraints of an age that
possesses an authoritative and absolute belief survive for some time
after the doctrine itself has been rejected. What has revealed the
incompleteness of the humanistic position has been its constant
tendency to decline into naturalism; a tendency markedly accelerated
today. Hence, we find ourselves in a disintegrating and distracted
epoch. In 1912 Rudolph Eucken wrote: "The moral solidarity of mankind
is dissolved. Sects and parties are increasing; common estimates and
ideals keep slipping away from us; we understand one another less
and less. Even voluntary associations, that form of unity peculiar to
modern times, unite more in achievement than in disposition, bring men
together outwardly rather than inwardly. The danger is imminent that
the end may be _bellum omnium contra omnes_, a war of all against
all."[12]
[Footnote 12: _Harvard Theo. Rev._, vol. V, no. 3, p. 277.]
That disintegration is sufficiently advanced so that we can see the
direction it is taking and the principle that inspires it. Humanism
has at least the value of an objective standard in the sense that it
sets up criteria which are without the individual; it substitutes a
collective subjectivism, if we may use the term, for personal whim
and impulse. Thus it proclaims a classic standard of moderation in all
things, the golden mean of the Greeks, Confucius' and Gautama's law
of measure. It proposes to bring the primitive and sensual element in
man under critical control; to accomplish this it relies chiefly upon
its amiable exaggeration of the reasonableness of human nature. But
the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue was the product of a
personality distinguished, if we accept the dialogues of Plato, by
a perfect harmony of thought and feeling. Probably it is not wise to
build so important a rule upon so distinguished an exception!
But the positive defect of humanism is more serious. It likewise
proposes to rationalize those supersensuous needs and convictions
which lie in the imaginative, the intuitive ranges of experience.
The very proposal carries a denial of their value-in-themselves.
Its inevitable result in the humanist is their virtual ignoring. The
greatest of all the humanists of the Orient was Confucius. "I venture
to ask about death," said a disciple to the sage. "While you do not
know life," replied he, "how can you know about death?"[13] Even more
typical of the humanistic attitude towards the distinctively religious
elements of experience are other sayings of Confucius, such as: "To
give oneself earnestly to the duties due to men, and while respecting
spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them may be called wisdom."[13]
The precise area of humanistic interests is indicated in another
observation. "The subjects on which the Master did not talk were
... disorder and spiritual beings."[13] For the very elements of
experience which humanism belittles or avoids are found in the world
where pagans like Rabelais robustly jest or the high spaces where
souls like Newman meditate and pray. The humanist appears to be
frightened by the one and repelled by the other; will not or cannot
see life steadily and whole. That a powerful primitivistic faith,
like Taoism, a sort of religious bohemianism, should flourish beside
such pragmatic and passionless moderation as classic Confucianism is
inevitable; that the worship of Amida Buddha, the Buddha of redemption
and a future heaven, of a positive and eternal bliss, should be the
Chinese form of the Indian faith is equally intelligible. After a like
manner it is the humanism of our Protestant preaching today from which
men are defecting into utter worldliness and indifference on the one
hand and returning to mediaeval and Catholic forms of supernaturalism
on the other.
[Footnote 13: _Analects_, XI, CXI; VI, CXX.]
For the primitive in man is a beast whom it is hard to chain nor does
humanism with its semi-scientific, semi-sentimental laudation of all
natural values produce that exacting mood of inward scrutiny in which
self-control has most chance of succeeding. Hence here, as elsewhere
on the continent, and formerly in China, in Greece and in Rome, a sort
of neo-paganism has been steadily supplanting it.
To the study of this neo-paganism we now address ourselves. It is
the third and lowest of those levels of human experience to which we
referred in the first lecture. The naturalist, you may remember,
is that incorrigible individual who imagines that he is a law unto
himself, that he may erect his person into a sovereign over the whole
universe. He perversely identifies discipline with repression and
makes the unlimited the goal both of imagination and conduct. Oscar
Wilde's epigrams, and more particularly his fables, are examples of
a thoroughgoing naturalist's insolent indifference to any form of
restraint. All things, whether holy or bestial, were material for his
topsy-turvy wit, his literally unbridled imagination. No humanistic
law of decency, that is to say, a proper respect for the opinions of
mankind, and no divine law of reverence and humility, acted for him
as a restraining force or a selective principle. An immediate and
significant example of this naturalistic riot of feeling, with its
consequent false and anarchic scale of values, is found in the
film dramas of the moving picture houses. Unreal extravagance of
imagination, accompanied by the debauch of the aesthetic and moral
judgment, frequently distinguishes them. In screenland, it is the
vampire, the villain, the superman, the saccharine angel child,
who reign almost undisputed. Noble convicts, virtuous courtesans,
attractive murderers, good bad men, and ridiculous good men, flit
across the canvas haloed with cheap sentimentality. Opposed to them,
in an ever losing struggle, are those conventional figures who stand
for the sober realities of an orderly and disciplined world; the
judge, the policeman, the mere husband. These pitiable and laughable
figures are always outwitted; they receive the fate which indeed, in
any primitive society, they so richly deserve!
How deeply sunk in the modern world are the roots of this naturalism
is shown by its long course in history, paralleling humanism. It has
seeped down through the Protestant centuries in two streams. One is
a sort of scientific naturalism. It exalts material phenomena and the
external order, issues in a glorification of elemental impulses, an
attempted return to childlike spontaneous living, the identifying of
man's values with those of primitive nature. The other is an emotional
naturalism, of which Maeterlinck is at the moment a brilliant and
lamentable example. This exchanges the world of sober conduct,
intelligible and straightforward thinking for an unfettered dreamland,
compounded of fairy beauty, flashes of mystical and intuitive
understanding intermixed with claptrap magic, a high-flown
commercialism and an etherealized sensuality.
Rousseau represents both these streams in his own person. His
sentimentalized egotism and bland sensuality pass belief. His
sensitive spirit dissolves in tears over the death of his dog but he
bravely consigns his illegitimate children to the foundling asylum
without one tremor. In his justly famous and justly infamous
_Confessions_, he presents himself Satan-wise before the Almighty at
the last Judgment, these _Confessions_ in his hand, a challenge to the
remainder of the human race upon his lips. "Let a single one assert
to Thee, if he dare: I am better than that man." But his preachment
of natural and spontaneous values, return to primitive conditions,
was equally aggressive. If anyone wants to inspect the pit whence the
Montessori system of education was digged, let him read Rousseau, who
declared that the only habit a child should have is the habit of not
having a habit, or his contemporary disciple, George Moore, who says
that one should be ashamed of nothing except of being ashamed.
There are admirable features in the schooling-made-easy system. It
recognizes the fitness of different minds for different work; that
the process of education need not and should not be forbidding; that
natural science has been subordinated overmuch to the humanities; that
the imagination and the hand should be trained with the intellect.
But the method which proposes to give children an education along
the lines of least resistance is, like all other naturalism, a
contradiction in terms, sometimes a _reductio ad absurdum_, sometimes
_ad nauseam_. As long ago as 1893, when Huxley wrote his Romanes
lecture on _Evolution and Ethics_, this identity of natural and human
values was explicitly denied. Teachers do not exist for the amusement
of children, nor for the repression of children; they exist for
the discipline of children. The new education is consistently
primitivistic in the latitude which it allows to whim and in its
indulgence of indolence. There is only one way to make a man out of
a child; to teach him that happiness is a by-product of achievement;
that pleasure is an accompaniment of labor; that the foundation of
self-respect is drudgery well done; that there is no power in any
system of philosophy, any view of the world, no view of the world,
which can release him from the unchanging necessity of personal
struggle, personal consecration, personal holiness in human life.
"That wherein a man cannot be equaled," says Confucius, "is his work
which other men cannot see."[14] The humanist, at least, does not
blink the fact that we are caught in a serious and difficult world. To
rail at it, to deny it, to run hither and thither like scurrying rats
to evade it, will not alter one jot or one tittle of its inexorable
facts.
[Footnote 14: _Doctrine of the Mean_, ch. xxxiii, v. 2.]
Following Rousseau and Chateaubriand come a striking group of
Frenchmen who passed on this torch of ethical and aesthetic rebellion.
Some of them are wildly romantic like Dumas and Hugo; some of them
perversely realistic like Balzac, Flaubert, Gautier, Zola. Paul
Verlaine, a near contemporary of ours, is of this first number; writer
of some of the most exquisite lyrics in the French language, yet a man
who floated all his life in typical romantic fashion from passion
to repentance, "passing from lust of the flesh to sorrow for sin in
perpetual alternation." Guy de Maupassant again is a naturalist of
the second sort, a brutal realist; de Maupassant, who died a suicide,
crying out to his valet from his hacked throat "_Encore l'homme au
rancart_!"--another carcass to the dustheap!
In English letters Wordsworth in his earlier verse illustrated the
same sentimental primitivism. It would be unfair to quote _Peter
Bell_, for that is Wordsworth at his dreadful worst, but even in
_Tinlern Abbey_, which has passages of incomparable majesty and
beauty, there are lines in which he declares himself:
"... well pleased to recognize
In nature, and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thought, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being."
Byron's innate sophistication saves him from the ludicrous depths to
which Wordsworth sometimes fell, but he, too, is Rousseau's disciple,
a moral rebel, a highly personal and subjective poet of whom Goethe
said that he respected no law, human or divine, except that of the
three unities. Byron's verse is fascinating; it overflows with a sort
of desperate and fiery sincerity; but, as he himself says, his life
was one long strife of "passion with eternal law." He combines both
the romantic and the realistic elements of naturalism, both flames
with elemental passion and parades his cynicism, is forever snapping
his mood in _Don Juan_, alternating extravagant and romantic feeling
with lines of sardonic and purposely prosaic realism. Shelley is a
naturalist, too, not in the realm of sordid values but of Arcadian
fancy. The pre-Raphaelites belong here, together with a group of young
Englishmen who flourished between 1890 and 1914, of whom John Davidson
and Richard Middleton, both suicides, are striking examples. Poor
Middleton turned from naturalism to religion at the last. When he had
resolved on death, he wrote a message telling what he was about to do,
parting from his friend with brave assumption of serenity. But he did
not send the postcard, and in the last hour of that hired bedroom in
Brussels, with the bottle of chloroform before him, he traced across
the card's surface "a broken and a contrite spirit thou wilt not
despise." So there was humility at the last. One remembers rather
grimly what the clown says in _Twelfth Night_,
"Pleasure will be paid some time or other."
This same revolt against the decencies and conventions of our humanist
civilization occupies a great part of present literature. How far
removed from the clean and virile stoicism of George Meredith or the
honest pessimism of Thomas Hardy is Arnold Bennett's _The Pretty Lady_
or Galsworthy's _The Dark Flower_. Finally, in this country we need
only mention, if we may descend so far, such naturalists in literature
as Jack London, Robert Chambers and Gouverneur Morris. One's only
excuse for referring to them is that they are vastly popular with the
people whom you and I try to interest in sermons, to whom we talk on
religion!