difference from Nature, to point out the illusoriness of her phenomena
for him, the derived reality and secondary value of her facts.
These are things that need religious elucidation. The phrase
"other-worldliness" has come, not without reason, to have an evil
connotation among us, but there is nevertheless a genuine disdain
of this world, a sense of high superiority to it and profound
indifference toward it, which is of the essence of the religious
attitude. He who knows that here he is a stranger, sojourning in
tabernacles; that he belongs by his nature, not to this world, but
that he seeks a better, that is to say, a heavenly country, will for
the joy that is set before him, endure a cross and will despise
the shame. He will have a conscious superiority to hostile facts of
whatever sort or magnitude, for he knows that they deceive in so
far as they pretend to finality. When religion has thus acquired a
clear-sighted and thoroughgoing indifference to the natural order,
then, and then only, it begins to be potent within that order. Then,
as Professor Hocking says, it rises superior to the world of facts and
becomes irresistible.[31]
[Footnote 31: _The Meaning of God in Human Experience_, p. 518.]
The time is ripe, then, first, for the preacher to emphasize the
inward and essential difference between man and nature which exists
under the outward likeness, to remind him of this more-than-nature,
this "otherness" of man, without which he would lose his most precious
possession, the sense of personality. Faith begins by recognizing this
transcendent element in man and the acceptance of it is the foundation
of religious preaching. What was the worst thing about the war? Not
its destruction nor its horrors nor its futilities, but its shames;
the dreadful indignities which it inflicted upon man; it treated men
as though they were not souls! No such moral catastrophe could have
overwhelmed us if we had not for long let the brute lie too near the
values and practices of our lives, depersonalizing thus, in politics
and industry and morals and religion, our civilization. It all
proceeded from the irreligious interpretation of human existence, and
the fruits of that interpretation are before us.
The first task of the preacher, then, is to combat the naturalistic
interpretation of humanity with every insight and every conviction
that is within his power. If we are to restore religious values,
rebuild a world of transcendent ends and more-than-natural beauty, we
must begin here with man. In the popular understanding of the phrase
all life is not essentially one in kind; physical self-preservation
and reproduction are not the be-all and the end-all of existence.
There is something more to be expressed in man without which these are
but dust and ashes in the mouth. There is another kind of life mixed
in with this, the obvious. If we cannot express the other world, we
shall not long tolerate this one. To think that this world is all,
leans toward madness; such a picture of man is a travesty, not a
portrait of his nature. Only on some such basic truths as these can
we build character in our young people. Paganism tells them that it
is neither natural nor possible to keep themselves unspotted from the
world. Over against it we must reiterate, You can and you must! for
the man that sinneth wrongeth his own soul. You are something more
than physical hunger and reproductive instinct; you are of spirit no
less than dust. How, then, can you do this great sin against God!
How abundant here are the data with which religious preaching may
deal. Indeed, as Huxley and scores of others have pointed out, it is
only the religious view of man that builds up civilization. A great
community is the record of man's supernaturalism, his uniqueness. It
is built on the "higher-than-self" principle which is involved in the
moral sense itself. And this higher-than-self is not just a collective
naturalism, a social consciousness, as Durkheim and Overstreet and
Miss Harrison would say. The simplest introspective act will prove
that. For a man cannot ignore self-condemnation as if it were only a
natural difficulty, nor disparage it as though it were merely humanly
imposed. We think it comes from that which is above and without,
because it speaks to the solitary and the unique, not the social
and the common part of us. Hence conscience is not chiefly a tribal
product, for it is what separates us from the group and in our
isolation unites us with something other than the group. "Against
Thee, Thee only, have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight." So
religious preaching perpetually holds us up above our natural selves
and the natural order.
Thus man must live by an other-than-natural law if he is to preserve
the family, which is the social unit of civilization. Its very
existence depends upon modifying and transforming natural hunger by a
diviner instinct, by making voluntary repressions, willing sacrifices
of the lower to the higher, the subordinating of the law of self and
might to the law of sacrifice and love--this is what preserves family
life. Animals indeed rear and cherish their young and for the mating
season remain true to one another, but no animality _per se_ ever yet
built a home. There must be a more-than-natural law in the state. Our
national life and honor rest upon the stability of the democracy and
we can only maintain that by walking a very straight and narrow path.
For the peace of freedom as distinguished from precarious license is
a more-than-natural attainment, born of self-repression and social
discipline, the voluntary relinquishment of lesser rights for higher
rights, of personal privileges for the sake of the common good.
Government by the broad and easy path, following the lines of least
resistance, like the natural order, saying might is right, means
either tyranny or anarchy. _Circumspice_! One of the glories of
western civilization is its hospitals. They stand for the supernatural
doctrine of the survival of the unfit, the conviction of the community
that, to take the easy path of casting out the aged and infirm,
the sick and the suffering, would mean incalculable degeneration
of national character, and that the difficult and costly path of
protection and ministering service is both necessary and right. And
why is the reformatory replacing the prison? Because we have learned
that the obvious, natural way of dealing with the criminal certainly
destroys him and threatens to destroy us; and that the hard, difficult
path of reeducating and reforming a vicious life is the one which the
state for her own safety must follow.
Genuine preaching, then, first of all, calls men to repentance, bids
them turn away from their natural selves, and, to find that other and
realer self, enter the straight and narrow gate. The call is not an
arbitrary command, born of a negative and repressive spirit. It is a
profound exhortation based upon a fundamental law of human progress,
having behind it the inviolable sanction of the truth. Such preaching
would have the authentic note. It is self-verifying. It stirs to
answer that quality--both moral and imaginative--in the spirit of man
which craves the pain and difficulty and satisfaction of separation
from the natural order. It appeals to a timeless worth in man which
transcends any values of mere intelligence which vary with the ages,
or any material prosperity which perishes with the using, or any
volitional activity that dies in its own expenditure. Much of the
philosophy of Socrates was long ago outmoded, but Socrates himself, as
depicted in the Phaedo, confronting death with the cup of hemlock in
his hand, saying with a smile, "There is no evil which can happen to
a good man living or dead," has a more-than-natural, an enduring and
transcendent quality. Whenever we preach to the element in mankind
which produces such attitudes toward life and bid it assert itself,
then we are doing religious preaching, and then we speak with power.
Jesus lived within the inexorable circle of the ideas of His time;
He staked much on the coming of the new kingdom which did not appear
either when or as He had first expected it. He had to adjust, as do we
all, His life to His experience, His destiny to His fate. But when He
was hanging on His cross, forgotten of men and apparently deserted by
His God, something in Him that had nothing to do with nature or the
brute rose to a final expression and by its more-than-natural reality,
sealed and authenticated His life. Looking down upon His torturers,
understanding them far better than they understood themselves, He
cried, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." That
cry has no place in nature; it has no application and no meaning
outside the human heart and that which is above, not beneath, the
human heart, from which it is derived. There, then, again was the
supernatural law; there was the more-than-nature in man which makes
nature into human nature; and there is the thing to whose discovery,
cultivation, expression, real preaching is addressed. Every time a man
truly preaches he so portrays what men ought to be, must be, and can
be if they will, that they know there is something here
"that leaps life's narrow bars
To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven!
A seed of sunshine that doth leaven
Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars,
And glorify our clay
With light from fountains elder than the Day."[32]
[Footnote 32: J.R. Lowell, _Commemoration Ode_, stanza IV, ll. 30-35.]
Such preaching is a perpetual refutation of and rebuke to the
naturalism and imperialism of our present society. It is the call
to the absolute in man, to a clear issue with evil. It would not cry
peace, peace, when there is no peace. It would be living and active,
and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of
both joints and marrow, quick to discern the thoughts and intents of
the heart.
Following this insistence upon the difference from nature, the
more-than-natural in man, the second thing in religious preaching
will have to be, obviously, the message of salvation. That is to say,
reducing the statement to its lowest terms, if man is to live by such
a law, the law of more-than-nature, then he must have something also
more-than-human to help him in his task. He will need strength from
outside. Indeed, because religion declares that there is such divine
assistance, and that faith can command it, is the chief cause and
reason for our existence. When we cease to preach salvation in some
form or other, we deny our own selves; we efface our own existence.
For no one can preach the more-than-human in mankind without
emphasizing those elements of free will, moral responsibility, the
need and capacity for struggle and holiness in human life which it
indicates, and which in every age have been a part of the message of
Him who said, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father, which is
in heaven, is perfect."
Therefore, as we have previously corrected the half truth of the
naturalist who makes a caricature, not a portrait of man, we must now
in the same way turn to the correcting of the humanist's emphasis upon
man's native capacity and insist upon the complementary truth which
fulfills this moral heroism of mankind, namely, the divine rescue
which answers to its inadequacy. Man must struggle for his victory; he
can win; he cannot win alone. We must then insist upon the doctrine
of salvation, turning ourselves to the other side of the humanist's
picture. Man cannot live by this more-than-natural law unaided. For
not only has he the power to rise above Nature; the same thing gives
him equal capacity to sink beneath her, and, when left to himself, he
generally does so. The preacher does not dare deny the sovereignty
of sin. Humanism hates the very name of sin; it has never made
any serious attempt to explain the consciousness of guilt. Neither
naturalist nor humanist can afford to admit sin, for sin takes man, as
holiness does, outside the iron chain of cause and effect; it breaks
the law; it is not strictly natural. It makes clear enough that man
is outside the natural order in two ways. He is both inferior and
superior to it. He falls beneath, he rises above it. When he acts like
a beast, he is not clean and beastly, but unclean and bestial. When he
lifts his head in moral anguish, bathes all his spirit in the flood
of awe and repentance, is transfigured with the glorious madness of
self-sacrifice, he is so many worlds higher than the beast that their
relationship becomes irrelevant. So we must deal more completely
than humanists do with the central mystery of our experience; man's
impotent idealism, his insight not matched with consummation; the fact
that what he dares to dream of he is not able alone to do.
For the humanist exalts man, which is good; but then he makes him
self-sufficient for the struggle which such exaltation demands, which
is bad. In that partial understanding he departs from truth. And what
is it that makes the futility of so much present preaching? It is the
acceptance of this doctrine of man's moral adequacy and consequently
the almost total lack either of the assurance of grace or of the
appeal to the will. No wonder such exhortations cannot stem the tide
of an ever increasing worldliness. Such preaching stimulates the mind;
in both the better and the worse preachers, it moves the emotions but
it gives men little power to act on what they hear and feel to the
transformation of their daily existence. Thus the humanistic sense of
man's sufficiency, coupled with the inherent distrust of any notion of
help from beyond and above, any belief in a reinforcing power which a
critical rationalism cannot dissect and explain, has gradually ruled
out of court the doctrine of salvation until the preacher's power,
both to experience and to transmit it, has atrophied through disuse.
Who can doubt that one large reason why crude and indefensible
concepts of the Christian faith have such a disconcerting vitality
today is because they carry, in their outmoded, unethical, discredited
forms, the truth of man's insufficiency in himself and the confident
assurance of that something coming from without which will abundantly
complete the struggling life within? They offer the assurance of that
peace and moral victory which man so ardently desires, because they
declare that it is both a discovery and a revelation, an achievement
and a rescue. There are vigorous and rapidly growing popular movements
of the day which rest their summation of faith on the quadrilateral of
an inerrant and verbally inspired Scripture, the full deity of Jesus
Christ, the efficacy of His substitutionary atonement, the speedy
second coming of the Lord. No sane person can suppose that these cults
succeed because of the ethical insight, the spiritual sensitiveness,
the intellectual integrity of such a message. It does not possess
these things. They succeed, in spite of their obscurantism, because
they do confess and meet man's central need, his need to be saved.
The power of that fact is what is able to carry so narrow and so
indefensible a doctrine.
So the second problem of the preacher is clear. Man asserts his
potential independence of the natural law. But to realize that, he
must bridge the gulf between himself and the supernatural lawgiver
to whose dictates he confesses he is subject. He is not free from the
bondage of the lower, except through the bondage to the higher. Nor
can he live by that higher law unaided and alone. Here we strike at
the root of humanism. Its kindly tolerance of the church is built
up on the proud conviction that we, with our distinctive doctrine of
salvation, are superfluous, hence sometimes disingenuous and always
negligible. The humanist believes that understanding takes the place
of faith. What men need is not to be redeemed from their sins, but to
be educated out of their follies.
But does right knowing in itself suffice to insure right doing?
Socrates and Plato, with their indentification of knowledge and
virtue, would appear to think so; the church has gone a long way,
under humanistic pressure, in tacit acquiescence with their doctrine.
Yet most of us, judging alike from internal and personal evidence
and from external and social observation, would say that there was no
sadder or more universal experience than that of the failure of right
knowledge to secure right performance. Right knowledge is not in
itself right living. We have striking testimony on that point from one
of the greatest of all humanists, no less a person than Confucius.
"At seventy," he says, "I could follow what my heart desired without
transgressing the law of measure."[33] The implication of such
testimony makes no very good humanistic apologetic! Most of us, when
desire has failed, can manage to attain, unaided, the identification
of understanding and conduct, can climb to the poor heights of a
worn-out and withered continence. But one wonders a little whether,
then, the climbing seems to be worth while.
[Footnote 33: _Analects_, II, civ.]
But the doctrine usually begins by minimizing the free agency of
the individual, playing up the factors of compulsion, either of
circumstance or inheritance or of ignorance, as being in themselves
chiefly responsible for blameful acts. These are therefore considered
involuntary and certain to be reformed when man knows better and has
the corresponding strength of his knowledge. But Aristotle, who deals
with this Socratic doctrine in the third book of the _Ethics_, very
sensibly remarks, "It is ridiculous to lay the blame of our wrong
actions upon external causes rather than upon the facility with which
we ourselves are caught by such causes, and, while we take credit for
our noble actions to ourselves, lay the blame of our shameful actions
upon pleasure."[34] "The facility with which we are caught"--there
is the religious understanding there is that perversion of will which
conspires with the perils and chances of the world so that together
they may undo the soul.
[Footnote 34: _Ethics_, Book III, ch. ii, p. 61.]
Of course, as Aristotle admits, there is this half truth lying at the
root of the Socratic identification of virtue and knowledge that every
vicious person is ignorant of what he ought to do and what he ought to
abstain from doing in the sense that what he is about to do could
not be defended upon any ground of enlightened self-interest. And
so, while he finds sin sweet and evil pleasant, these are delusive
experiences, which, if he saw life steadily and whole, he would know
as such. But one reason for this ignorance is unwillingness to know.
Good men do evil, and understanding men sin, partly because they are
misled by false ideas, partly, also, because, knowing them false,
they cannot or will not give them up. This is what Goethe very well
understood when he said, "Most men prefer error to truth, because
truth imposes limitations and error does not."
And another reason is that when men do know, they find a deadly and
mysterious, a sort of perverted joy--a sweet and terrible and secret
delight,--in denying their own understanding. Thus right living calls
for a repeated and difficult exercise of the will, what Professor
Babbitt calls "a pulling back of the impulse to the track that
knowledge indicates." Such moral mastery is not identical with moral
perception and most frequently is not its accompaniment, unless
observation and experience are alike fallacious. Thus the whole
argument falls to the ground when we confess that possession of
knowledge does not guarantee the application of it. Therefore the two
things, knowledge and virtue, according to universal experience, are
not identical. Humanists indeed use the word "knowledge" for the most
part in an esoteric sense. Knowledge is virtue in the sense that it
enables us to see virtue as excellent and desirable; it is not virtue
in the sense that it alone enables us to acquire it.
Who, indeed, that has ever lived in the far country does not know
that one factor in its fascination was a bittersweet awareness of the
folly, the inevitable disaster, of such alien surroundings. Who
also does not know that often when the whole will is set to identify
conduct with conviction, it may be, for all its passionate and bitter
sincerity, set in vain. In every hour of every day there are hundreds
of lives that battle honestly, but with decreasing spiritual forces,
with passion and temptation. Sometimes a life is driven by the fierce
gales of enticement, the swift currents of desire, right upon the
jagged rock of some great sin. Lives that have seemed strong and fair
go down every day, do they not, and shock us for a moment with their
irremediable catastrophe? And we must not forget that before they went
down, for many a month or even year they have been hard beset lives.
Before that final and complete ruin, they have been drifting and
struggling, driven and fighting, sin drawing nearer and nearer, their
fated lives urged on, the mind growing darker, the stars in their
souls going out, the steering of their own lives taken from their
hands. Then there has been the sense of the coming danger, the dark
presentiment of how it all must end when the "powers that tend the
soul to help it from the death that cannot die, and save it even in
extremes, begin to vex and plague it." There has been the dreadful
sense of life drifting toward a great crash, nearer and nearer to what
must be the wreck of all things. What does the humanist have to offer
to these men and women who know perfectly well where they are, and
what they are about, and where they would like to be, but who can't
get there and who are, today and every day, putting forth their last
and somber efforts, trying in vain to just keep clear of ruin until
the darkness and the helplessness shall lift and something or someone
shall give them peace!
Now, it is this defect in the will which automatically limits the
power of the intellect. It is this which the Socratic identification
ignores. So while we might readily grant that it is in the essential
nature of things that virtue and truth, wisdom and character,
understanding and goodness, are but two aspects of one thing, is it
not trifling with one of the most serious facts of human destiny
to interpret the truism to mean that, when a man knows that a
contemplated act is wrong or foolish or ugly, he is thereby restrained
from accomplishing it? Knowledge is not virtue in the sense that
mere reason or mere perception can control the will. And this is the
conclusion that Aristotle also comes to when he says: "Some people
say that incontinence is impossible, if one has knowledge. It seems
to them strange, as it did to Socrates, that where knowledge exists in
man, something else should master it and drag it about like a slave.
Socrates was wholly opposed to this idea; he denied the existence of
incontinence, arguing that nobody with a conception of what was best
could act against it, and therefore, if he did so act, his action
must be due to ignorance." And then Aristotle adds, "The theory is
evidently at variance with the facts of experience."[35] Plato himself
exposes the theoretical nature of the assertion, its inhuman demand
upon the will, the superreasonableness which it expects but offers no
way of obtaining, when he says, "Every one will admit that a nature
having in perfection all the qualities which are required in a
philosopher is a rare plant seldom seen among men."[36]
[Footnote 35: _Ethics_, Book VII, ch. iii, pp. 206-207.]
[Footnote 36: _Republic_, VI, 491.]