the division. There is rebellion and perverseness mingled with the
helplessness and ignorance and sorrow. No man ever understands or can
speak to the religious life unless he has the consciousness of this
inner moral cleft. No man will ever be able to preach with power about
God unless he does it chiefly in terms of God's difference from man
and man's perilous estate and desperate need of Him. Indeed, God is
not like us, not like this inner life of ours; this is what we want
to hear. God is different; that is why we want to be able to love Him.
And being thus different, we are separated from Him, both by the inner
chasm of the divided soul and the outer chasm of remote and hostile
nature. Then comes the final question: How are we, being helpless, to
reach Him? How are we, being guilty, to find Him?
When men deal with these queries, with this range of experience, this
set of inward perceptions, then they are preaching religiously. And
then, I venture to say, they do not fail either of hearers or of
followers. Then there is what Catherine Booth used to call "liberty
of speech"; then there is power because then we talk of realities.
For what is it that looks out from the eyes of religious humanity?
Rebellion, pride? no! Humility, loneliness, something of a just and
deserved fear; but most of all, desire, insatiable, unwavering, an
intense desire. This passion of the race, its never satisfied hunger,
its incredible intensity and persistency of striving and longing,
is at once the tragedy and glory, the witness to the helplessness,
the revelation of the capacity of the race. The mainspring of human
activity, the creative impulse from which in devious ways all the
thousand-hued motives of our lives arise, is revealed in the ancient
cry, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!" That unquenched
thirst for Him underlies all human life, as the solemn stillness of
the ocean underlies the restless upper waves. The dynamic of the world
is the sense of the divine reality. The woe of the world is man's
inability to discover and appropriate that reality. Who that has
entered truly into life does not perceive beneath all the glitter of
its brilliance, the roar of its energy and achievement, the note of
melancholy? The great undertone of life is solemn in its pathetic
uniformity. The poets and prophets of the world have seized unerringly
upon that melancholy undertone. Who ever better understood the
futility and helplessness of unaided man, the certain doom that tracks
down his pride of insolence, or his sin, than the Greek tragedians?
Sophocles, divided spirit that he was, heard that note of melancholy
long ago by the Ægean, wrote it into his somber dramas, with their
turbid ebb and flow of human misery. Sometimes the voices of our
humanity as they rise blend and compose into one great cry that is
lifted, shivering and tingling, to the stars, "Oh, that I knew where I
might find Him!" Sometimes and more often they sink into a subdued and
minor plaint, infinitely touching in its human solicitude, perplexity
and pain. Again, James Stephens has phrased it for us in his verse
_The Nodding Stars_.[29]
[Footnote 29: _Songs from the Clay_, p. 68.]
"Brothers, what is it ye mean,
What is it ye try to say
That so earnestly ye lean
From the spirit to the clay.
"There are weary gulfs between
Here and sunny Paradise,
Brothers! What is it ye mean
That ye search with burning eyes,
"Down for me whose fire is clogged,
Clamped in sullen, earthy mould,
Battened down and fogged and bogged,
Where the clay is seven-fold."
Now we understand the tragic aspect of nature and of the human soul
caught in this cosmic dualism without which corresponds to the ethical
dualism within. This perception of the One behind the many in nature,
of the thing-in-itself, as distinguished from the many expressions of
that thing, is the chief theme for preaching. This is what brings men
to themselves. Herein, as Dr. Newman Smyth has pointed out, appears
the unique marvel of personality. "It becomes conscious of itself as
individual and it individualizes the world; it is the one discovering
itself among the many. In the midst of uniformities of nature, moving
at will on the plane of natural necessities, weaving the pattern of
its ideas through the warp of natural laws, runs the personal life.
On the same plane and amid these uniformities, yet itself a sphere of
being of another order; in it, yet disentangled from it, and having
its center in itself, it lives and moves and has its being, breaking
no thread of nature's weaving, subject to its own law, and manifesting
a dynamic of its own."[30]
[Footnote 30: _The Meaning of the Personal Life_, p. 173.]
The source, then, as we see it, of all human hopes and human dignity,
the urge that lies behind all metaphysics and much of literature and
art, the thing that makes men eager to live, yet nobly curious to die,
is this conviction that One like unto ourselves but from whom we have
made ourselves unlike, akin to our real, if buried, person, walketh
with us in the fiery furnace of our life. There is a Spirit in man
and the breath of the Almighty giveth him understanding. Starting from
this interpretation, we can begin to order the baffling and teasing
aspects, the illusive nature of the world. Why this ever failing, but
never ending struggle against unseen odds to grasp and understand
and live with the Divine? Why, between the two, the absolute and the
changeless spirit, unseen but felt, and the hesitant and timid spirit
of a man, would there seem to be a great gulf fixed? Because we are
wrong. Because man finds the gulf within himself. He chafes at the
limitations of time and space? Yes; but he chafes more at the mystery
and weakness, the mingled deceitfulness and cunning and splendor of
the human heart. Because there is no one of us who can say, I have
made my life pure, I am free from my sin. He knows that the gulf is
there between the fallible and human, and the more than human; he does
not know how to cross it; he says,
"I would think until I found
Something I can never find
Something lying on the ground
In the bottom of my mind."
Here, then, can we not understand that mingling of mystic dignity
and profound humility, of awe-struck pride and utter self-abnegation,
wherewith the man of religion regards his race and himself? He is the
child of the Eternal; he, being man, alone knows that God is. "When I
consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars
which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him,
or the son of man that Thou visitest him?" Here is the humility: "Why
so hot, little man!" Then comes the awe-struck pride: "Yet Thou hast
made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and
honor." "Alone with the gods, alone!" God is the high and lofty one
which inhabiteth eternity, but He is also nigh unto them who are of a
broken and a contrite heart.
Here we are come to the very heart of religion. Man's proud
separateness in the universe; yet man's moral defection and his
responsibility for it which makes him know that separateness; man's
shame and helplessness under it. Over against the denial or evasion
of moral values by the naturalist and the dullness to the sense
of moral helplessness by the humanist, there stands the sense of
moral difference, the sense of sin, of penitence and confession. No
preaching not founded on these things can ever be called religious or
can ever stir those ranges of the human life for which alone preaching
is supposed to exist.
What is the religious law, then? It is the law of humility. And what
is the religious consciousness? The sense of man's difference from
nature and from God. The sense of his difference from himself within
himself and the longing for an inner harmony which shall unite him
with himself and with the beauty and the spirit without. So what
is the religious passion? Is it to exalt human nature? It would
be more true to say it is to lose it. What is the end for us? Not
identification with nature and the natural self, but pursuit of the
other than nature, the more than natural self. Our humility is not
like that of Uriah Heep, a mean opinion of ourselves in comparison
with other men. It is the profound consciousness of the weakness and
the nothingness of our kind, and of the poor ends human nature sets
its heart upon, in comparison with that Other One above and beyond and
without us, to whom we are kin, from whom we are different, to whom we
aspire, to reach whom we know not how.
This, then, is what we mean when we turn back from the language of
experience to the vocabulary of philosophy and theology and talk about
the absolute values of religion. We mean by "absolute values" that
behind the multifarious and ever changing nature, is a single and a
steadfast cause--a great rock in a weary land. We have lost the old
absolute philosophies and dogmatic theologies and that is good and
right, for they were outworn. But we are never going to lose the
central experience that produced them, and our task is to find a
new philosophy to express these inner things for which the words
"supernatural," "absolute," are no longer intelligible. For we still
know that behind man's partial and relative knowledge, feeling,
willing, is an utter knowledge, a perfect feeling, a serene and
unswerving will; that beneath man's moral anarchy there is moral
sovereignty; that behind his helplessness there is abundant power
to save. Perhaps this Other is always changing, but, if so, it is a
Oneness which is changing. In short, the thing that is characteristic
of religion is that it dwells, not on man's likenesses, but on his
awful differences from nature and from God; sees him not as little
counterparts of deity, but as broken fragments only to be made whole
within the perfect life. It sees relativity as the law of our being,
yes, but relativity, not of the sort that excludes, but is included
in, a higher absolute, even as the planet swings in infinite space.
The trouble with much preaching is that it lacks the essentially
religious insight; in dwelling on man's identities it confuses or
drugs, not clarifies and purges, the spirit. Thus, it obscures the
gulf. Sometimes it evades it, or bridges it by minimizing it, and
genuinely religious people, and those who want to be religious, and
those who might be, know that such preaching is not real and that it
does not move them and, worst of all, the hungry sheep look up and
are not fed. For in such preaching there is no call to humility, no
plea for grace, no sense that the achievement of self-unity is as
much a rescue as it is a reformation. But this sense of the need of
salvation is integral to religion; this is where it has parted company
with humanism. Humanism makes no organic relations between man and
the Eternal. It is as though it thought these would take care of
themselves! In the place of grace it puts pride; pride of caste, of
family, of character, of intellect. But high self-discipline and
pride in the human spirit are not the deepest or the highest notes man
strikes. The cry, not of pride in self, but for fellowship with the
Infinite, is the superlative expression of man. Augustine sounded the
highest note of feeling when he wrote, "O God, Thou hast made us for
Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." The
words of the Lord Jesus gave the clearest insight of the human mind
when He said, "And when he came to himself, he said, I will arise and
go to my Father."
CHAPTER FIVE
GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE
I hope the concluding paragraphs of the last chapter brought us back
into the atmosphere of religion, into that sort of mood in which the
reality of the struggle for character, the craving of the human spirit
to give and to receive compassion, the cry of the lonely soul for the
love of God, were made manifest. These are the real goods of life to
religious natures; they need this meat which the world knoweth not of;
there is a continuing resolve in them to say, "Good-by, proud world,
I'm going home!" The genuinely religious man must, and should indeed,
live in this world, but he cannot live of it.
Merely to create such an atmosphere then, to induce this sort of mood,
to shift for men their perspectives, until these needs and values rise
once more compelling before their eyes, is a chief end of preaching.
Its object is not so much moralizing or instructing as it is
interpreting and revealing; not the plotting out of the landscape
at our feet, but the lifting of our eyes to the hills, to the fixed
stars. Then we really do see things that are large as large and things
that are small as small. We need that vision today from religious
leaders more than we need any other one thing.
For humanism and naturalism between them have brought us to an almost
complete secularization of preaching, in which its characteristic
elements, its distinctive contribution, have largely faded from
liberal speaking and from the consciousness of its hearers. We have
emphasized man's kinship with nature until now we can see him again
declining to the brute; we have proclaimed the divine Immanence
until we think to compass the Eternal within a facile and finite
comprehension. By thus dwelling on the physical and rational elements
of human experience, religion has come to concern itself to an
extraordinary degree with the local and temporal reaches of faith.
We have lost the sense of communion with Absolute Being and of the
obligation to standards higher than those of the world, which that
communion brings. Out of this identification of man with nature has
come the preaching which ignores the fact of sin; which reduces free
will and the moral responsibility of the individual to the vanishing
point; which stresses the control of the forces of inheritance and
environment to the edge of fatalistic determinism; which leads man
to regard himself as unfortunate rather than reprehensible when moral
disaster overtakes him; which induces that condoning of the moral
rebel which is born not of love for the sinner but of indifference to
his sin; which issues in that last degeneration of self-pity in
which individuals and societies alike indulge; and in that repellent
sentimentality over vice and crime which beflowers the murderer while
it forgets its victim, which turns to ouija boards and levitated
tables to obscure the solemn finality of death and to gloze over the
guilty secrets of the battlefield.
Thus it has come about that we preach of God in terms of the
drawing-room, as though he were some vast St. Nicholas, sitting up
there in the sky or amiably informing our present world, regarding
with easy benevolence His minute and multifarious creations, winking
at our pride, our cruelty, our self-love, our lust, not greatly
caring if we break His laws, tossing out His indiscriminate gifts,
and vaguely trusting in our automatic arrival at virtue. Even as in
philosophy, it is psychologists, experts in empirical science and
methods, and sociologists, experts in practical ethics, who may be
found, while the historian and the metaphysician are increasingly
rare, so in preaching we are amiable and pious and ethical and
practical and informative, but the vision and the absolutism of
religion are a departing glory.
What complicates the danger and difficulty of such a position, with
its confusion of natural and human values, and its rationalizing
and secularizing of theistic thinking, is that it has its measure of
reality. All these observations of naturalist and humanist are half
truths, and for that very reason more perilous than utter falsehoods.
For the mind tends to rest contented within their areas, and so the
partial becomes the worst enemy of the whole. What we have been doing
is stressing the indubitable identity between man and nature and
between the Creator and His creatures to the point of unreality,
forgetting the equally important fact of the difference, the
distinction between the two. But sound knowledge and normal feeling
rest upon observing and reckoning with both aspects of this law of
kinship and contrast. All human experience becomes known to us through
the interplay of what appear to be contradictory needs and opposing
truths within our being. Thus, man is a social animal and can only
find himself in a series of relationships as producer, lover, husband,
father and friend. He is a part of and like unto his kind, his spirit
immanent in his race. But man is also a solitary creature, and in that
very solitariness, which he knows as he contrasts it with his social
interests, he finds identity of self, the something which makes us
"us," which separates us from all others in the world. A Crusoe,
marooned on a South Sea island, without even a black man Friday for
companionship, would soon cease to be a man; personality would forsake
him. But the same Crusoe is equally in need of solitude. The hell of
the barracks, no matter how well conducted, is their hideous lack of
privacy; men condemned by shipwreck or imprisonment to an unbroken and
intimate companionship kill their comrade or themselves. We are all
alike and hence gregarious; we are all different and hence flee as a
bird to the mountain. The reality of human personality lies in neither
one aspect of the truth nor the other, but in both. The truth is found
as we hold the balance between identity and difference. Hence we are
not able to think of personality in the Godhead unless we conceive of
God as being, within Himself, a social no less than a solitary Being.
Again, this law that the truth is found in the balance of the
antinomies appears in man's equal passion for continuity and
permanency and for variety and change. The book of Revelation tells
us that the redeemed, before the great white throne, standing upon the
sea of glass, sing the song of Moses and the Lamb. What has the one
to do with the other? Here is the savage, triumphant chant of the far
dawn of Israel's history, joined with the furthest and latest possible
events and words. Well, it at least suggests the continuity of the
ageless struggle of mankind, showing that the past has its place
in the present, relieving man's horror of the impermanence, the
disjointed character of existence. He wants something orderly and
static. But, like the jet of water in the fountain, his life is
forever collapsing and collapsing, falling in upon itself, its
apparent permanence nothing but a rapid and glittering succession of
impermanences. The dread of growing old is chiefly that, as years
come on, life changes more and faster, becomes a continual process of
readjustment. Therefore we want something fixed; like the sailor with
his compass, we must have some needle, even if a tremulous one, always
pointing toward a changeless star. Yet this is but one half of the
picture. Does man desire continuity?--quite as much does he wish for
variety, cessation of old ways, change and fresh beginnings. The
most terrible figure which the subtle imagination of the Middle Ages
conjured up was that of the Wandering Jew, the man who could not die!
Here, then, we arrive at knowledge, the genuine values of experience,
by this same balancing of opposites. Continuity alone kills; perpetual
change strips life of significance; man must have both.
Now, it is in the religious field that this interests us most. We have
seen that what we have been doing there of late has been to ignore the
fact that reality is found only through this balancing of the law of
difference and identity, contrast and likeness. We have been absorbed
in one half of reality, identifying man with nature, prating of his
self-sufficiency, seeing divinity almost exclusively as immanent in
the phenomenal world. Thus we have not merely been dealing with only
one half of the truth, but that, to use a solecism, the lesser half.
For doubtless men do desire in religion a recognition of the real
values of their physical nature. And they want rules of conduct, a
guide for practical affairs, a scale of values for this world. This
satisfies the craving for temporal adjustment, the sense of the
goodness and worth of what our instinct transmits to us. But it does
nothing to meet that profound dissatisfaction with this world and that
sense of the encumbrances of the flesh which is also a part of reality
and, to the religious man, perhaps the greater part. He wants to turn
away from all these present things and be kept secretly in a pavilion
from the strife of tongues. Here he has no continuing city. Always
while we dwell here we have a dim and restless sense that we are in an
unreal country and we know, in our still moments, that we shall only
come to ourselves when we return to the house of our Father. Hence
men have never been satisfied with religious leaders who chiefly
interpreted this world to them.
And indeed, since July, 1914, and down to and including this very
hour, this idealizing of time, which we had almost accepted as our
office, has had a ghastly exposure. Because there has come upon us all
one of these irrevocable and irremediable disasters, for which time
has no word of hope, to which Nature is totally indifferent, for which
the God of the outgoings and incomings of the morning is too small.
For millions of living and suffering men and women all temporal
and mortal values have been wiped out. They have been caught in a
catastrophe so ruthless and dreadful that it has strewed their bodies
in heaps over the fields and valleys of many nations. Today central
and south and northeastern Europe and western Asia are filled with
idle and hungry and desperate men and women. They have been deprived
of peace, of security, of bread, of enlightenment alike. Something
more than temporal salvation and human words of hope are needed
here. Something more than ethical reform and social readjustment and
economic alleviation, admirable though these are! Something there must
be in human nature that eclipses human nature, if it is to endure so
much! What has the God of this world to give for youth, deprived of
their physical immortality and all their sweet and inalienable human
rights, who are lying now beneath the acre upon acre of tottering
wooden crosses in their soldier's graves? Is there anything in this
world sufficient now for the widow, the orphan, the cripple, the
starving, the disillusioned and the desperate? What Europe wants to
know is why and for what purpose this holocaust--is there anything
beyond, was there anything before it? A civilization dedicated to
speed and power and utility and mere intelligence cannot answer these
questions. Neither can a religion resolved into naught but the ethics
of Jesus answer them. "If in this world only," cries today the voice
of our humanity, "we have hope, then we are of all men the most
miserable!" When one sees our American society of this moment
returning so easily to the physical and the obvious and the practical
things of life; when one sees the church immersed in programs, and
moralizing, and hospitals, and campaigns, and membership drives, and
statistics, and money getting, one is constrained to ask, "What shall
be said of the human spirit that it can forget so soon?"
Is it not obvious, then, that our task for a pagan society and a
self-contained humanity is to restore the balance of the religious
consciousness and to dwell, not on man's identity with Nature, but
on his far-flung difference; not on his self-sufficiency, but on his
tragic helplessness; not on the God of the market place, the office
and the street, an immanent and relative deity, but on the Absolute,
that high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity? Indeed, we are being
solemnly reminded today that the other-worldliness of religion, its
concern with future, supertemporal things, is its characteristic and
most precious contribution to the world. We are seeing how every human
problem when pressed to its ultimate issue becomes theological. Here
is where the fertile field for contemporary preaching lies. It
is found, not in remaining with those elements in the religious
consciousness which it shares in common with naturalism and humanism,
but in passing over to those which are distinctive to itself alone. It
has always been true, but it is especially true at this moment, that
effective preaching has to do chiefly with transcendent values.