teaching social hygiene to adolescents (on the whole an admirable
thing to do) but proceeding on the assumption that when youth knows
what is right and what is wrong, and why it is right and why it is
wrong, and what are the consequences of right and wrong, that then,
_ipso facto_, youth will become chaste,--well if they would acquaint
themselves either with the ethics of Aristotle or with the Christian
doctrine of salvation. For if men think that knowledge by itself ever
yet produced virtue in eager and unsated lives, they are either knaves
or fools. They will find that knowledge uncontrolled by a purified
spirit and a reinforced will is already teaching men not how to
be good, but how to sin the more boldly with the better chance of
physical impunity. "Philosophy," says Black, "is a feeble antagonist
before passion, because it does not supply an adequate motive for the
conflict."[37] There were few men in the nineteenth century in whom
knowledge and virtue were more profoundly and completely joined than
in John Henry Newman. But did that subtle intellect suffice? could it
make the scholar into the saint? Hear his own words:
"O Holy Lord, who with the children three
Didst walk the piercing flame;
Help, in those trial hours which, save to Thee,
I dare not name;
Nor let these quivering eyes and sickening heart
Crumble to dust beneath the tempter's dart.
"Thou who didst once Thy life from Mary's breast
Renew from day to day;
O might her smile, severely sweet, but rest
On this frail clay!
Till I am Thine with my whole soul, and fear
Not feel, a secret joy, that Hell is near."
So, only when we include in the term "knowledge" understanding plus
good will, is the humanist position true, and this, I suppose, is
what Aristotle meant when he finally says, "Vice is consistent with
knowledge of some kind, but it excludes knowledge in the full and
proper sense of the word."[38]
[Footnote 37: _Culture and Restraint_, p. 104.]
[Footnote 38: _Ethics_, Book VII, ch. v, p. 215.]
Now, so finespun a discussion of intricate and psychological
subtleties is mildly interesting presumably to middle-aged scholars,
but I submit that a half truth that needs so much explanation and
so many admissions before it can be made safe or actual, is a rather
dangerous thing to offer to adolescence or to a congregation of
average men and women. It cannot sound to them very much like the good
news of Jesus. Culture is a precious thing, but no culture, without
the help of divine grace and the responsive affection on our part
which that grace induces, will ever knit men together in a kingdom
of God, a spiritual society. As long ago as the second century Celsus
understood that. He says in his polemic against Christianity, as
quoted by Origen, "If any one suppose that it is possible that the
people of Asia and Europe and Africa, Greeks and barbarians, should
agree to follow one law, he is hopelessly ignorant."[39] Now, Celsus
was proceeding on the assumption that Christianity was only another
philosophy, a new intellectual system, and he was merely exposing the
futility of all such unaided intellectualism.
[Footnote 39: _Origen, contra Celsum_, VIII, p. 72.]
It is, therefore, of prime importance for the preacher to remember
that humanism, or any other doctrine which approaches the problem of
life and conduct other than by moral and spiritual means, can never
take the place of the religious appeal, because it does not touch the
springs of action where motives are born and from which convictions
arise. You do not make a man moral by enlightening him; it is nearer
the truth to say that you enlighten him when you make him moral.
"Blessed are the pure in heart," said Jesus, "for they shall see
God. If any man wills to do the will, he shall know the doctrine."
Education does not wipe out crime nor an understanding mind make a
holy will. The last half of the nineteenth century made it terribly
clear that the learning and science of mankind, where they are
divorced from piety, unconsecrated by a spiritual passion, and largely
directed by selfish motives, can neither benefit nor redeem the race.
Consider for a moment the enormous expansion of knowledge which the
world has witnessed since the year 1859. What prodigious accessions
to the sum of our common understanding have we seen in the natural and
the humane sciences; and what marvelous uses of scientific knowledge
for practical purposes have we discovered! We have mastered in these
latter days a thousand secrets of nature. We have freed the mind from
old ignorance and ancient superstition. We have penetrated the secrets
of the body, and can almost conquer death and indefinitely prolong
the span of human days. We face the facts and know the world as our
fathers could never do. We understand the past and foresee the future.
But the most significant thing about our present situation is this:
how little has this wisdom, in and of itself, done for us! It has made
men more cunning rather than more noble. Still the body is ravaged and
consumed by passion. Still men toil for others against their will,
and the strong spill the blood of the weak for their ambition and the
sweat of the children for their greed. Never was learning so diffused
nor the content of scholarship so large as now. Yet the great cities
are as Babylon and Rome of old, where human wreckage multiplies, and
hideous vices flourish, and men toil without expectancy, and live
without hope, and millions exist--not live at all--from hand to mouth.
As we survey the universal unrest of the world today and see the
horrors of war between nation and nation, and between class and class,
it would not be difficult to make out a case for the thesis that the
scientific and intellectual advances of the nineteenth century
have largely worked to make men keener and more capacious in their
suffering. And at least this is true; just so far as the achievement
of the mind has been divorced from the consecration of the spirit,
in just so far knowledge has had no beneficent potency for the human
race.
Is it not clear, then, that preaching must deal again, never more
indeed than now, with the religion which offers a redemption from sin?
This is still foolishness to the Greeks, but to those who believe it
is still the power of God unto salvation. Culture is not religion.
When the preacher substitutes the one for the other, he gives stones
for bread, and the hungry sheep go elsewhere or are not fed. It is
this emasculated preaching, mulcted of its spiritual forces, which
awakes the bitterest distrust and deepest indignation that human
beings know. They are fighting the foes of the flesh and the enemies
of the spirit, enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
standing by the open graves of their friends and kindred, saying
there, "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me." And then,
with all this mystery and oppression of life upon them they enter the
doors of the house of God and listen to a polite essay, are told of
the consolations of art, reminded of the stupidity of evil, assured of
the unreality of sin, offered the subtle satisfactions of a cultivated
intelligence. In just so far as they are genuine men and women, they
resent such preaching as an insult, a mockery and an offense. No, no;
something more is needed than the humanist can offer for those who are
hard-pressed participants in the stricken fields of life.
Religious preaching, then, begins with these two things: man's
solitary place in nature, man's inability to hold that place alone.
Hence two more things are necessary as essentials of great preaching
in a pagan day. The clear proclamation of the superhuman God, the
transcendent spirit who is able to control and reinforce the spirit of
man, and the setting forth of some way or some mediator, through whom
man may meet and touch that Spirit so far removed yet so infinitely
near and dear to him. It is with these matters that we shall be
occupied in the next chapter.
CHAPTER SIX
THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD
If the transcendent element in man which endows him with the proud if
tragic sense of personality is the first message of the preacher to
a chattering and volatile world, and the second is the setting forth
of what this endowment demands and how pitiably man fails to meet it,
then the third message is of the Rock that is higher than he, even
inclusive of his all, in whose composed and comprehensive Being his
baffled and divided person may be gathered up, brought to its own
consummation of self. The rivers that pour tumultuously to their ocean
bed, the ascending fire ever falling backward but leaping upward to
the sun, are poor figures to express the depth and irresistible urge
of the passion in man for completeness, for repose, for power, for
self-perception in self-expression, for victory and the attainment
of the end. Conscious and divided spirit that he is, man turns away,
sooner or later, with utter weariness and self-disgust from the nature
which pleases him by betraying him, which maims his person that he
may enjoy his senses, and reaches out after the other-worldly, the
supernatural, the invisible and eternal Hope and Home of the Soul.
Humanism which bids men sufficiently find God within themselves, if
they think they need to find Him at all, seems not to comprehend this
passion of pride and humility, this inner perception of the futility
and the blunder of the self-contained life. Life is so obviously
not worth its brevity, its suffering, its withheld conclusions, its
relative insignificance, if it must thus stand alone. All that can
save it, preserve to it worth and dignity, maintain its self-respect
and mastery, is to find that abundant power without which confesses,
certifies and seals the divinity within.
How foredoomed to failure, then, especially in an age when men are
surmounting life by placating it, enjoying it by being easy with
themselves--how foredoomed to failure is the preaching which continues
in the world of religion this exaltation of human sufficiency and
natural values, domesticating them within the church. It is to laugh
to see them there! It means so transparent a surrender, so pitiable a
confession of defeat. If anything can bring the natural man into the
sanctuary it is that there he has to bring his naturalness to the bar
of a more-than-natural standard. If he comes at all, it will not
be for entertainment and expansion but because there we insist on
reverence and restraint. If church and preacher offer only a pietized
and decorous naturalism, when he can get the real thing in naked and
unashamed brutality without; if they offer him only another form of
humanistic living, he will stay away. Such preaching is as boresome
as it is unnecessary. Such exercise of devotion is essentially
superfluous and a rather humorous imposition upon the world. The only
thing that will ever bring the natural man to listen to preaching is
when it insists upon something more-than-the-natural and calls him to
account regarding it; when it speaks of something different and better
for him than this world and what it can offer. "Take my _yoke_ upon
you" is the attractive invitation, "make inner obeisance and outward
obedience to something higher than thy poor self."
It is clear, then, that these observations have a bearing upon our
preaching of the doctrine of God. There is a certain illogicality,
something humorous, in going into a church, of all places in the
world, to be told how like we are to Him. The dull and average
personality, the ordinary and not very valuable man, can probably
listen indifferently and with a slow-growing hardness and dim
resentment to that sort of preaching for a number of years. But the
valuable, the highly personalized people, the saints and the sinners,
the great rebels and the great disciples, who are the very folk for
whom the church exists, would hate it, and they would know the final
bitterness of despair if they thought that this was so. Either saint
or sinner would consider it the supreme insult, the last pitch of
insolence, for the church to be telling them that it is true.
For they know within themselves that it is a lie. Their one hope hangs
on God because His thoughts are not their thoughts, nor His ways their
ways; because He seeth the end from the beginning; because in Him
there is no variableness, neither shadow that is caused by turning;
because no man shall see His face and live. They, the sinners and the
saints, do not want to be told that they, within themselves, can heal
themselves and that sin has no real sinfulness. That is tempting them
to the final denial, the last depth of betrayal, the blurring of moral
values, the calling of evil good and the saying that good is evil.
They know that this is the unpardonable madness. In the hours when
they, the saints and sinners, wipe their mouths and say, "We have done
no harm"; in the days when what they love is ugliness because it is
ugly and shameless, and reckless expression because it is so terrible,
so secretly appalling, so bittersweet with the sweetness of death,
they know that it is the last affront to have the church--the one
place where men expect they will be made to face the facts--bow these
facts out of doors.
No, we readily grant that the religious approach to the whole truth
and to final reality is like any other one, either scientific,
economic, political, a partial approach. It sets forth for the most
part only a group of facts. When it does not emphasize other facts,
it does not thereby deny them. But it insists that the truth of man's
differences, man's helplessness which the differences reveal, and
man's fate hanging therefore upon a transcendent God, are the key
truths for the religious life. It is with that aspect of life the
preacher deals, and if he fails to grapple with these problems and
considerations, ignores these facts, his candlestick has been removed.
The argument for a God, then, within His world, but also distinct
from it, above its evil custom and in some sense untouched by
its all-leveling life, is essential to the preservation of human
personality, and personality is essential to dignity, to decency, to
hope. The clearest and simplest thing to be said about the Hebrew God,
lofty and inaccessible Being, with whom nevertheless His purified and
obedient children might have relationships, or about the "living
God" of Greek theology, far removed from us but with whose deathless
goodness, beauty and truth our mortality by some mediator may be
endowed, is that the argument that supports such transcendence is
the argument from necessity. It is the facts of experience, the very
stuff of human life, coming down alike from Hebraic and Hellenic
civilization, which demand Him. Immanence and transcendence are merely
theistic terms for identity and difference. Through them is revealed
and discovered personality, the "I" which is the ultimate fact of
my consciousness. I can but reckon from the known to the unknown.
The world which produced me is also, then, a cosmic identity and
difference. In that double fact is found divine personality. But
that aspect of His Person, that portion of the fact which feeds
the imaginative and volitional life, is the glorious and saving
unlikeness of God--His unthinkable and inexpressible glory; His utter
comprehension and unbelievable compassion; His justice which knows no
flaw and brooks no evasion and cannot be swerved; His power which
may not be withstood and hence is a sure and certain tenderness; His
hatred of sin, terrible and flaming, a hatred which will send sinful
men through a thousand hells, if they will have them, and can only be
saved thereby; His love for men, which is what makes Him hate their
sin and leads Him by His very nature as God to walk into hell with the
sinner, suffering with him a thousand times more than the sinner is
able to understand or know,--like the Paul who could not wish himself,
for himself, in hell, but who did wish himself accursed of God for
his brethren's sake; like Jesus, who, in Gethsemane, would for Himself
avoid His cross, but who accepted it and was willing to hang, forsaken
of God, upon it, for the lives of men, identifying Himself to the
uttermost with their fate. Yes; it is such a supernal God--that God
who is apart, incredible, awful--that the soul of humanity craves and
needs.
Of course, here again, as throughout these discussions, we are
returning to a form of the old dualism. We cannot seem to help it. We
may construct philosophies like Hegel's in which thesis and antithesis
merge in a higher synthesis; we may use the dual view of the world as
representing only a stage, a present achievement in cosmic progress or
human understanding. But that does not alter the incontestable witness
of present experience that the religious consciousness is based upon,
interwoven with, the sense of the cosmic division without, and the
unresolved moral dualism within the individual life. It is important
enough to remember, however, that we have rejected, at least for this
generation, the old scholastic theologies founded on this general
experience. Fashions of thought change with significant facility;
there is not much of the Absolute about them! Nevertheless we cannot
think with forgotten terms. Therefore ours is no mechanically divided
world where man and God, nature and supernature, soul and body, belong
to mutually exclusive territories. We do not deny the principle of
identity. Hence we have discarded that old view of the world and all
the elder doctrines of an absentee creator, a worthless and totally
depraved humanity, a legalistic or substitutionary atonement, a
magical and non-understandable Incarnation which flowed from it. But
we are not discarding with them that other aspect of the truth, the
principle of separateness, nor those value judgments, that perpetual
vision of another nature, behind and beneath phenomena, from which
the old dualism took its rise. It is the form which it assumed, the
interpretation of experience which it gave, not the facts themselves,
obscure but stubborn as they are, which it confessed, that we have
dropped. Identity and difference are still here; man is a part of his
world, but he is also apart from it. God is in nature and in us; God
is without and other than nature and most awfully something other than
us.
Indeed, the precise problem of the preacher today is to keep the old
supernatural values and drop the old vocabulary with the philosophy
which induced it. We must acknowledge the universe as one, and yet be
able to show that the He or the It, beyond and without the world, is
its only conceivable beginning, its only conceivable end, the chief
hope of its brevity, the only stay of its idealism. It was the
arbitrary and mechanical completeness of the old division, not the
reality that underlay the distinction itself, which parted company
with truth and hence lost the allegiance of the mind. It was that the
old dualism tried to lock up this, the most baffling of all realities,
in a formula,--that was what undid it. But we shall be equally foolish
if now, in the interests of a new artificial clearness, we deny
another portion of experience just as our fathers ignored certain
other facts in the interests of their too well-defined systems. We
cannot hold to the old world view which would bend the modern mind to
the support of an inherited interpretation of experience and therefore
would not any longer really explain or confirm it. Neither can we hold
new views which mutilate the experience and leave out some of the most
precious elements in it, even if in so doing we should simplify the
problem for the mind. It would be an unreal simplification; it would
darken, not illumine, the understanding; we should never rest in it.
Nor do we need to be concerned if the intellect cannot perfectly
order or easily demonstrate the whole of the religious life, fit each
element with a self-verifying defense and explanation. No man of the
world, to say nothing of a man of faith or imagination, has ever yet
trusted to a purely intellectual judgment.
So we reject the old dualism, its dichotomized universe, its two sorts
of authority, its prodigious and arbitrary supernaturalism. But we do
not reject what lay behind it. Still we wrestle with the angel, lamed
though we are by the contest, and we cannot let him go until the day
breaks and the shadows flee away. It would be easier perhaps to give
up the religious point of view, but for that ease we should pay with
our life. For that swift answer, achieved by leaving out prime factors
in the problem, we should be betraying the self for whose sake alone
any answer is valuable. It does not pay to cut such Gordian knots! Our
task, then, is to preach transcendence again, not in terms of the old
absolutist philosophy, but in terms of the perceptions, the needs, the
experience of the human heart and mind and will which produced that
philosophy.
Nor is this so hard to do. Now, as always for the genuinely religious
temperament, there are abundant riches of material lying ready to its
hand. It is not difficult to make transcendence real and to reveal to
men their consummate need of it when we speak of it in the language
of experience and perception. What preaching should avoid is
the abstractions of an archaic system of thought with all their
provocative and contentious elements, the mingled dogmatism and
incompleteness which any worked-out system contains. It is so foolish
in the preacher to turn himself into a lay philosopher. Let him keep
his insight clear, through moral discipline keep his intuitions high,
his spirit pure, and then he can furnish the materials for philosophy.
Thus an almost universal trait of the religious temperament is in
its delight in beauty. Sometimes it is repressed by an irreligious
asceticism or narrowed and stunted by a literal and external faith.
But when the religious man is left free, it is appropriate to his
genius that he finds the world full of a high pleasure crowded with
sound, color, fragrance, form, in which he takes exquisite delight.
There is, in short, a serene and poetic naturalism, loosely called
"nature-worship," which is keenly felt by both saints and sinners.
All it needs for its consecration and perfection is to help men to
see that this naturalism is vital and precious because, as a matter
of fact, it is something more than naturalism, and more than pleasure
objectified.
Recall, for instance, the splendors of the external world and that
best season of our climate, the long, slow-breathing autumn. What
high pleasure we take in those hushed days of mid-November in the
soft brown turf of the uplands, the fragrant smell of mellow earth and
burning leaves, the purple haze that dims and magnifies the quiescent
hills. Who is not strangely moved by that profound and brooding peace
into which Nature then gathers up the multitudinous strivings, the
myriad activities of her life? Who does not love to lie, in those
slow-waning days upon the sands which hold within their golden cup the
murmuring and dreaming sea? The very amplitude of the natural world,
its far-flung grace and loveliness, spread out in rolling moor and
winding stream and stately forest marching up the mountain-side,
subdues and elevates the spirit of a man.
Now, so it has always been and so men have always longed to be the
worshipers of beauty. Therefore they have believed in a conscious and
eternal Spirit behind it. Because again we know that personality is
the only thing we have of absolute worth. A man cannot, therefore,
worship beauty, wholly relinquish himself to its high delights, if he
conceives of this majestic grace as impersonal and inanimate. For that
which we worship must be greater than we. Behind it, therefore, just
because it seems to us so beautiful, must be something that calls to
the hidden deeps of the soul, something intimately akin to our own
spirits. So man worships not nature, but the God of nature; senses an
Eternal Presence behind all gracious form. For that interprets beauty
and consecrates the spell of beauty over us. This gives a final
meaning to what the soul perceives is an utter loveliness. This gives
to beauty an eternal and cosmic significance commensurate to its charm
and power. As long as men's hearts surge, too, when the tide yearns
up the beach; as long as their souls become articulate when the birds
sing in the dawn, and the flowers lift themselves to the sun; so long
will men believe that only from a supreme and conscious Loveliness,
a joyous and a gracious Spirit could have come the beauty which is so
intimately related to the spirit of a man.