distinguished from the fighting forces of the war there lay a
commercial and financial imperialism, directed by small and powerful
minorities, largely supported by a sympathetic press which used the
machinery of representative democracy to overthrow a more naked and
brutal imperialism whose machinery was that of a military autocracy?
Motives, scales of value, methods and desired ends, were much the same
for all these small governing groups as they operated from behind the
various shibboleths whose magic they used to nerve the arms of the
contending forces. The conclusion of the war has revealed the common
springs of action of the professional soldier, statesman, banker,
ecclesiastic, in our present civilization. On the whole they accept
the rule of physical might as the ultimate justification of conduct.
They are the leaders and spokesmen in an economic, social and
political establishment which, pretending to civilization, always
turns when strained or imperiled by foreign or domestic dangers to
physical force as the final arbiter.
It is truly ominous to see the gradual extension of this naturalistic
principle still going on in the state. The coal strike was settled,
not by arbitration, but by conference, and "conferences" appear to
be replacing disinterested arbitration. This means that decisions are
being made on the principle of compromise, dictated by the expediency
of the moment, not by reference to any third party, or to some fixed
and mutually recognized standards. This is as old as Pythagoras and
as new as Bergson and Croce; it assumes that the concept of justice
is man-made, produced and to be altered by expediences and
practicalities, always in flux. But the essence of a civilization is
the humanistic conviction that there is something fixed and abiding
around which life may order and maintain itself.
Progress rests on the Platonic theory that laws are not made by man
but discovered by him; that they exist as eternal distinctions
beyond the reach of his alteration. Again, an unashamed and rampant
naturalism has just been sweeping this country in the wave of mean
and cruel intolerance which insists upon the continued imprisonment
of political heretics, which would prohibit freedom of speech by
governmental decree and oppose new or distasteful ideas by the
physical suppression of the thinker. The several and notorious
attempts beginning with deportations and ending with the unseating of
the New York assemblymen, to combat radical thinking by physical
or political persecution--attempts uniformly mean and universally
impotent in history--are as sinister as they are stupid. The only
law which justifies the persecution and imprisonment of religious and
political heretics is neither the law of reason nor the law of
love, but the law of fear, hence of tyranny and force. When a
twentieth-century nation begins to raise the ancient cry, "Come now
and let us kill this dreamer and we shall see what will become of his
dreams," that nation is declining to the naturalistic level. For
this clearly indicates that the humane and religious resources of
civilization, of which the church is among the chief confessed and
appointed guardians, are utterly inadequate to the strain imposed
upon them. Hence force, not justice, though they may sometimes have
happened to coincide, and power, not reason or faith, are becoming the
embodiment of the state today.
We come now to the final question of our chapter. How has this renewal
of naturalism affected the church and Christian preaching? On the
whole today, the Protestant church is accepting this naturalistic
attitude. In a signed editorial in the _New Republic_ for the last
week of December, 1919, Herbert Croly said, under the significant
title of "Disordered Christianity": "Both politicians and property
owners consider themselves entitled to ignore Christian guidance in
exercising political and economic power, to expect or to compel the
clergy to agree with them and if necessary to treat disagreement as
negligible. The Christian church, as a whole, or in part, does not
protest against the practically complete secularization of political,
economic and social life."
You may say such extra-ecclesiastical strictures are unsympathetic and
ill informed. But here is what Washington Gladden wrote in January,
1918: "If after the war the church keeps on with the same old
religion, there will be the same old hell on earth that religious
leaders have been preparing for centuries, the full fruit of which we
are gathering now. The church must cease to sanction those principles
of militaristic and atheistic nationalism by which the rulers of the
earth have so long kept the earth at war."[20] Thus from within the
sanctuary is the same indictment of our naturalism.
[Footnote 20: The _Pacific_, January 17, 1918.]
But you may say Dr. Gladden was an old man and a little extreme in
some of his positions and he belonged to a past generation. But there
are many signs at the present moment of the increasing secularizing
of our churches. The individualism of our services, their casual
character, their romantic and sentimental music, their minimizing of
the offices of prayer and devotion, their increasing turning of the
pulpit into a forum for political discussion and a place of common
entertainment all indicate it. There is an accepted secularity today
about the organization. Church and preacher have, to a large degree,
relinquished their essential message, dropped their religious values.
We are pretty largely today playing our game the world's way. We are
adopting the methods and accepting the standards of the market. In
an issue last month of the _Inter-Church Bulletin_ was the following
headline: "Christianity Hand in Hand with Business," and underneath
the following:
"George W. Wickersham, formerly United States attorney-general,
says in an interview that there is nothing incompatible between
Christianity and modern business methods. A leading lay official of
the Episcopal Church declares that what the churches need more than
anything else is a strong injection of business method into their
management. 'Some latter-day Henry Drummond,' he said, 'should write a
book on Business Law in the Spiritual World.'"
In this same paper, in the issue of March 27, 1920, there was
an article commending Christian missions. The first caption ran:
"Commercial Progress Follows Work of Protestant Missions," and its
subtitle was "How Missionaries Aid Commerce." Here is Business Law in
the Spiritual World! Here is the church commended to the heathen and
the sinner as an advertising agent, an advance guard of commercial
prosperity, a hawker of wares! If the _Bulletin_ ever penetrates to
those benighted lands of the Orient upon which we are thus anxious
to bestow the so apparent benefits of our present civilization it is
conceivable that even the untutored savage, to say nothing of Chinamen
and Japanese, might read it with his tongue in his cheek.
Such naïve opportunism and frantic immediacy would seem to me
conclusive proof of the disintegration and anarchy of the spirit
within the sanctuary. It is a part of it all that everyone has today
what he is pleased to call "his own religion." And nearly everyone
made it himself, or thinks he did. Conscience has ceased to be a check
upon personal impulse, the "thou shalt not" of the soul addressed to
untutored desires, and become an amiable instinct for doing good to
others. The Christian is an effusive creature, loving everything and
everybody; exalting others in terms of himself. We abhor religious
conventions; in particular we hasten to proclaim that we are free from
the stigma of orthodoxy. We do not go to church to learn, to meditate,
to repent and to pray; we go to be happy, to learn how to keep young
and prosperous; it is good business; it pays. We have a new and most
detestable cant; someone has justly said that the natural man in us
has been masquerading as the spiritual man by endlessly prating
of "courage," "patriotism"--what crimes have been committed in
its name!--"development of backward people," "brotherhood of man,"
"service of those less fortunate than ourselves," "natural ethical
idealism," "the common destinies of nations"--and now he rises up and
glares at us with stained fingers and bloodshot eyes![21] In so far
as we have succumbed to naturalism, we have become cold and shrewd and
flexible; shallow and noisy and effusive; have been rather proud to
believe anything in general and almost nothing in particular; become
a sort of religious jelly fish, bumping blindly about in seas of
sentiment and labeling that peace and brotherhood and religion!
[Footnote 21: _Rousseau and Romanticism_, p. 376.]
Here, then, is the state of organized religion today in our churches.
They are voluntary groups of men and women, long since emancipated
from the control of the church as such, or of the minister as an
official, set free also from allegiance to historic statements,
traditional, intellectual sanctions of our faith; moulded by the
time spirit which enfolds them to a half-unconscious ignoring or
depreciation of what must always be the fundamental problem of
religion--the relationship of the soul, not to its neighbor, but to
God. Hence the almost total absence of doctrinal preaching--indeed,
how dare we preach Christian doctrine to the industry and politics and
conduct of this age? Hence the humiliating striving to keep up
with popular movements, to conform to the moment. Hence the placid
acceptance of military propaganda and even of vindictive exhortation.
Is it any wonder then that we cannot compete with the state or the
world for the loyalty of men and women? We have no substitute to
offer. Who need be surprised at the restlessness, the fluidity, the
elusiveness of the Protestant laity? And who need wonder that at this
moment we are depending upon the externals of machinery, publicity and
money to reinstate ourselves as a spiritual society in the community?
A well-known official of our communion, speaking before a meeting of
ministers in New York City on Tuesday, March 23, was quoted in the
_Springfield Republican_ of the next day as saying: "The church holds
the only cure for the possible anarchy of the future and offers the
only preventative for the hell which we have had for the last five
years. But to meet this challenge the church can only go as far--as
the money permits."
Has not the time arrived when, if we are to find ourselves again in
the world, we should ask, What is this religion in which we believe?
What is the real nature of its resources? What the real nature of its
remedies? Do we dare define it? And, if we do, would we dare to assert
it, come out from the world and live for it, in the midst of the
paganism of this moment? Is it true that without the loaves and the
fishes we can do nothing? If so, then we, too, have succumbed to
naturalism indeed!
CHAPTER FOUR
THE UNMEASURED GULF
You may remember that when Daniel Webster made his reply to Hayne
in the Senate he began the argument by a return to first principles.
"When the mariner," said he, "has been tossed for many days in thick
weather and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the
first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his
latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his
true course. Let us imitate this prudence and before we float
further on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we
departed." He then asked for the reading of the resolution.
It is to some such rehearsing of our original message, a restatement
of the thesis which we, as preachers, are set to commend, that we turn
ourselves in these pages. The brutal dislocations of the war, and the
long and confused course of disintegrating life that lay behind it,
have driven civilization from its true course and deflected the church
from her normal path, her natural undertakings. Let us try, then, to
get back to our charter; define once more what we really stand for;
view our human life, not as captain of industry, or international
politician, or pagan worldling, or even classic hero, would regard
it, but see it through the eyes of a Paul, an Augustine, a Bernard,
a Luther, the Lord Jesus. We have already remarked how timely and
necessary is this redefining of our religious values. If, as Lessing
said, it is the end of education to make men to see things that are
large as large and things that are small as small, it is even more
truly the end of Christian preaching. What we are most in need of
today is a corrected perspective of our faith; without it we darken
counsel as we talk in confusion. So, while we may not attempt here a
detailed and reasoned statement of religious belief, we may try to say
what is the fundamental attitude, both toward nature and toward man,
that lies underneath the religious experience. We have seen that we
are not stating that attitude very clearly nowadays in our pulpits;
hence we are often dealing there with sentimental or stereotyped or
humane or even pagan interpretations. Yet nothing is more fatal for
us; if we peddle other men's wares they will be very sure that we
despise our own.
We approach, then, the third and final level of experience to which we
referred in the first lecture. We have seen that the humanist accepts
the law of measure; he rests back upon the selected and certified
experience of his race; from within himself, as the noblest inhabitant
of the planet, and by the further critical observation of nature he
proposes to interpret and guide his life. He is convinced that this
combined authority of reason and observation will lead to the _summum
bonum_ of the golden mean in which unbridled self-expression will be
seen as equally unwise and indecent and ascetic repression as both
unworthy and unnecessary. It is important to again remind ourselves
that confidence in the human spirit as the master of its own fate,
and in reason and natural observation as offering it the means of this
self-control and understanding, are essential humanistic principles.
The humanist world is rational, social, ethical.
Over against this reasonable and disciplined view of man and of
his world stands naturalism. It exploits the defects of the classic
"virtue"; it is, so to speak, humanism run to seed. Just as religion
so often sinks into bigotry, cruelty and superstitition, so humanism,
in lesser souls, declines to egotism, license and sentimentality.
Naturalism, either by a shallow and insincere use of the materialistic
view of the universe, or by the exalting of wanton feeling and
whimsical fancy as ends in themselves, attempts the identification of
man with the natural order, permits him to conceive of each desire,
instinct, impulse, as, being natural, thereby defensible and
valuable. Hence it permits him to disregard the imposed laws of
civilization--those fixed points of a humane order--and to return
in principle, and so far as he dares in action, to the unlimited and
irresponsible individualism of the horde. Inevitably the law of the
jungle is deliberately exalted, or unconsciously adopted, over against
the humanist law of moderation and discipline.
The humanist, then, critically studies nature and mankind, finding in
her matrix and in his own spirit data for the guidance of the race,
improving upon it by a cultivated and collective experience. The
naturalist uncritically exalts nature, seeks identification with it so
that he may freely exploit both himself and it. The faith of the one
is in the self-sufficiency of the disciplined spirit of mankind; the
unfaith of the other is in its glorification of the natural world and
in its allegiance to the momentary devices and desires of the separate
heart. It will be borne in mind that these definitions are too
clear-cut; that these divisions appear in the complexities of human
experience, blurred and modified by the welter of cross currents,
subsidiary conflicting movements, which obscure all human problems.
They represent genuine and significant divisions of thought and
conduct. But they appear in actual experience as controlling emphases
rather than mutually exclusive territories.
Now, the clearest way to get before us the religious view of the world
and the law which issues from it is to contrast it with the other two.
In the first place, the religious temperament takes a very different
view of nature than either romantic, or to a less degree
scientific, naturalism. Naturalism is subrational on the one hand or
non-imaginative on the other, in that it emphasizes the _continuity_
between man and the physical universe. The religious man is
superrational and nobly imaginative as he emphasizes the _difference_
between man and nature. He does not forget man's biological kinship to
the brute, his intimate structural and even psychological relation to
the primates, but he is aware that it is not in dwelling upon these
facts that his spirit discovers what is distinctive to man as man.
That he believes will be found by accenting the _chasm_ between man
and nature. He does not know how to conceive of a personal being
except by thinking of him as proceeding by other, though not
conflicting, laws and by moving toward different secondary ends from
those laws and ends which govern the impersonal external world. This
sense of the difference between man and nature he shares with the
humanist, only the humanist does not carry it as far as he does and
hence may not draw from it his ultimate conclusions.
The religious view, then, begins with the perception of man's
isolation in the natural order; his difference from his surroundings.
That sense of separateness is fundamental to the religious nature. The
false sentiment and partial science of the pagan which stresses the
identification of man and beast is the first quarrel that religionist
and humanist alike have with him. Neither of them sanctions
this perversion of thought and feeling which either projects the
impressionistic self so absurdly and perilously into the natural
order, or else minimizes man's imaginative and intellectual power,
leveling him down to the amoral instinct of the brute. "How much
more," said Jesus, "is a man better than a sheep!" One of the greatest
of English humanists was Matthew Arnold. You remember his sonnet,
entitled, alas! "To a Preacher," which runs as follows:
"In harmony with Nature? Restless fool,
Who with such heat doth preach what were to thee,
When true, the last impossibility--
To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool!
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lie all his hopes of good,
Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;
Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore;
Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest;
Nature forgives no debt and fears no grave;
Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest.
Man must begin; know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.
Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!"
Religionist and humanist alike share this clear sense of separateness.
Literature is full of the expression of it. Religion, in especial,
has little to do with the natural world as such. It is that other and
inner one, which can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell, with
which it is chiefly concerned. Who can forget Othello's soliloquy as
he prepares to darken his marriage chamber before the murder of his
wife?
"Put out the light, and then put out the light.
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat,
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the rose
I cannot give it vital growth again,
It needs must wither."
Indeed, how vivid to us all is this difference between man and nature.
"I would to heaven," Byron traced on the back of the manuscript of
_Don Juan_,
"I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am bone, blood, marrow, passion, feeling."
Ah me! So at many times would most of us. And in that sense that we
are not is where the religious consciousness takes its beginning.
Here is the sense of the gap between man and the natural world felt
because man has no power over it. He cannot swerve nor modify its
laws, nor do his laws acknowledge its ascendency over them. But
what makes the gulf deeper is the sense of the immeasurable moral
difference between a thinking, feeling, self-estimating being and all
this unheeding world about him. Whatever it is that looks out from the
windows of our eyes something not merely of wonder and desire but also
of fear and repulsion must be there as it gazes into so cruel as well
as so alien an environment. For a moral being to glorify nature as
such is pure folly or sheer sentimentality. For he knows that her
apparent repose and beauty is built up on the ruthless and unending
warfare of matched forces, it represents a dreadful equilibrium of
pain. He knows, too, that that in him which allies him with
this natural world is his baser, not his better part. This nobly
pessimistic attitude toward the natural universe and toward man so far
as he shares in its characteristics, is found in all classic systems
of theology and has dominated the greater part of Christian
thinking. If it is ignored today by the pseudo-religionists and
the sentimentalists; it is clearly enough perceived by contemporary
science and contemporary art. The biologist understands it. "I know of
no study," wrote Thomas Huxley, "which is so unutterably saddening
as that of the evolution of humanity as set forth in the annals of
history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the
marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more
intelligent than the other brutes; a blind prey to impulses which as
often as not lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions
which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his
physical life with barren toil and battle. He attains a certain degree
of comfort, and develops a more or less workable theory of life in
such favorable situations as the plains of Mesopotamia or of Egypt,
and then, for thousands and thousands of years struggles with various
fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed and misery, to
maintain himself at this point against the greed and ambition of his
fellow men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise persecuting all
those who first try to get him to move on; and when he has moved
a step farther he foolishly confers post-mortem deification on his
victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want to move a
step yet farther."[22]
[Footnote 22: "Agnosticism," the _Nineteenth Century_, February,
1889.]
And no less does the artist, the man of high and correct feeling,
perceive the immeasurable distance between uncaring nature and
suffering men and women. There is, for instance, the passage in _The
Education of Henry Adams_, in which Adams speaks of the death of
his sister at Bagni di Lucca. "In the singular color of the Tuscan
atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting
with midsummer blood. The sick room itself glowed with the Italian joy
of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft
shadows; even the dying woman shared the sense of the Italian summer,
the soft velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fullness of
Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even
gayly, racked slowly to unconsciousness but yielding only to violence,
as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these
hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the
same air of sensual pleasure.