this quick sensitiveness to beauty. Some of them cannot find the
eternal and transcendent God in a loveliness which, by temperament,
they either underrate or do not really see. There are a great many
good people who cannot take beauty seriously. They become wooden and
suspicious and uncomfortable whenever they are asked to perceive or
enjoy a lovely object. Incredible though it seems, it appears to them
to be unworthy of any final allegiance, any complete surrender, any
unquestioning joy. But there are other ways in which they, too, may
come to this sense of transcendence, other aspects of experience which
also demand it. Most often it is just such folk who cannot perceive
beauty, because they are practical or scientific or condemned to mean
surroundings, who do feel to the full the grim force and terror of
the external world. Prudence, caution, hard sense are to the fore with
them! Very well; there, too, in these perceptions is an open door for
the human spirit to transcend its environment, get out of its physical
shell. The postulate of the absolute worth of beauty may be an
argument for God drawn from subjective necessity. But the postulate of
sovereign moral Being behind the tyranny and brutality of nature is
an argument of objective necessity as well; here we all need God to
explain the world.
For we deal with what certainly appear to be objective aspects of the
truth, when we regard ourselves in our relation to the might of the
physical universe. For even as men feed upon its beauty, so they have
found it necessary to discover something which should enable them to
live above and unafraid of its material and gigantic power. We have
already seen how there appears to be a cosmic hostility to human life
which sobers indeed those who are intelligent enough to perceive
it. It is only the fool or the brute or the sentimentalist who is
unterrified by nature. The man of reflection and imagination sees his
race crawling ant-like over its tiny speck of slowly cooling earth and
surrounded by titanic and ruthless forces which threaten at any moment
to engulf it. The religious man knows that he is infinitely greater
than the beasts of the field or the clods of the highway. Yet Vesuvius
belches forth its liquid fire and in one day of stark terror the great
city which was full of men is become mute and desolate. The proud
liner scrapes along the surface of the frozen berg and crumples like
a ship of cards. There is a splash, a cry, a white face, a lifted
arm, and then all the pride and splendor, all the hopes and fears, the
gorgeous dreams, the daring thoughts are gone. But the ice floats on
unscarred and undeterred and the ocean tosses and heaves just as it
did before.
Now, if this is all, if there is for us only the physical might of
nature and the world is only what it seems to be; if there is no other
God except such as can be found within this sort of cosmic process,
then human life is a sardonic mockery, and self-respect a silly
farce, and all the heroism of the heart and the valor of the mind the
unmeaning activities of an insignificant atom. The very men who will
naturally enter your churches are the ones who have always found that
theory of life intolerable. It doesn't take in all the facts. They
could not live by it and the soul of the race, looking out upon this
universe of immeasurable material bulk, has challenged it and dared to
assert its own superiority.
So by this road these men come back to the transcendent God without
whom they cannot guard that integrity of personality which we are all
set to keep. For here there is no way of believing in oneself, no
way of enduring this world or our place in it and no tolerable way of
understanding it except we look beneath this cosmic hostility and
find our self-respect and a satisfying cosmic meaning in perceiving
spiritual force, a conscious ethical purpose, which interpenetrates
the thunder and the lightning, which lies behind the stars as they
move in their perpetual courses. "Through it the most ancient heavens
are fresh and strong." Integrity of personality in such a world as
this, belief in self, without which life is dust and ashes in the
mouth, rest on the sublime assumption that suffusing material force
is ethical spirit, more like unto us than it, controlling force in the
interest of moral and eternal purposes. In these purposes living, not
mechanical, forces play a major part.
Of course, to all such reasoning the Kantians and humanists reply that
these notions of an objective and eternal beauty, of a transcendent
and actual Cosmic Being exist within the mind. They are purely
subjective ideas, they are bounded by the inexorable circle of our
experience, hence they offer no proof of any objective reality which
may in greater or less degree correspond to them.
However, there must be a "source" of these ideas. To which the
philosophers reply, Yes, they are "primitive and necessary," produced
by reason only, without borrowing anything from the senses or the
understanding. Yet there is no sufficient evidence that the idea of
God is thus produced by any faculty of mind acting in entire freedom
from external influence. On the contrary, the idea appears to owe much
to the operation of external things upon the mind; it is not then the
wholly unaffected product of reason. It is a response no less than
an intuition. Like all knowledge a discovery, but the discovery of
something there which could be discovered, hence, in that sense, a
revelation.
It is not necessary, then, for men to meet their situation in the
cosmos by saying with Kant: We will act as though there were a God,
although we are always conscious that we have no real knowledge of
Him as an external being. In the light of the tragic circumstances of
humanity, this is demanding the impossible. No sane body of men will
ever get sufficient inspiration for life or find an adequate solution
for the problem of life by resting upon mere value judgments which
they propose, by an effort of will, to put in the place of genuine
reality judgments. Indeed, there is a truly scholastic naïveté, a
sort of solemn and unconscious humor, in seriously proposing that
men should vitalize and consecrate their deepest purposes and most
difficult experiences by hypothesizing mere appearances and illusions.
Nor are we willing either to say with Santayana that all our sense of
the beauty of the world is merely pleasure objectified and that we can
infer no eternal Beauty from it. We are aware that there cannot be an
immediate knowledge of a reality distinct from ourselves, that all
our knowledge must be, in the nature of the case, an idea, a mental
representation, that we can never know the Thing Itself. But if we
believe, as we logically and reasonably may, that our subjective ideas
are formed under the influence of objects unknown but without us,
produced by stimuli, real, if not perceived apart from our own
consciousness, then we may say that what we have is a mediate or
representative knowledge not only of an Eternal Being but formed under
the influence of that Being. Nor does the believer ask for more. He
does not expect to see the King in His beauty; he only needs to know
that He is, that He is there.
How self-verifying and moving, then, are the appeals ready to our
hands. As long as man with the power to question, to strive, to
aspire, to endure, to suffer, lives in a universe of ruthless and
overwhelming might, so long, if he is to understand it or maintain
his reason and his dignity, he will believe it to be controlled by a
Spirit beyond no less than within, from whom his spirit is derived. It
is out of the struggle to revere and conserve human personality, out
of the belief in the indefectible worth and honor of selfhood that
our race has fronted a universe in arms, and pitting its soul against
nature has cried, "God is my refuge: underneath me, at the very moment
when I am engulfed in earthquake shock or shattered in the battle's
roar, there are everlasting arms!" There is something which is too
deep for tears in the unconquerable idealism, the utter magnanimity
of the faith of the human spirit in that which will answer to itself,
as evidenced in this forlorn and glorious adventure of the soul.
Sometimes we are constrained to ask ourselves, How can the heart of
man go so undismayed through the waste places of the world?
But, of course, the preacher's main task is to interpret man's moral
experience, which drives him out to search for the eternal in
the terms of the "other" and redeeming God. We have spoken of the
depersonalizing of religion which paganism and humanism alike have
brought upon the world. One evidence of that has been the way in
which we have confounded the social expressions of religion with its
individual source. We are so concerned with the effect of our religion
upon the community that we have forgotten that the heart of religion
is found in the solitary soul. All of which means that we have here
again yielded to the time spirit that enfolds us and have come to
think of man as religious if he be humane. But that is not true. No
man is ever religious until he becomes devout. And indeed no man of
our sort--the saint and sinner sort--is ever long and truly humane
unless the springs of his tenderness for men are found in his ever
widening and deepening gratitude to God! Hence no man was ever yet
able to preach the living God until he understood that the central
need in human life is to reconcile the individual conscience to
itself, compose the anarchy of the spiritual life. Men want to be
happy and be fed; but men must have inward peace.
We swing back, therefore, to the native ground of preaching, approach
the religious problem, now, not from the aesthetic or the scientific,
but from the moral angle. Here we are dealing with the most poignant
of all human experiences. For it is in this intensely personal world
of moral failure and divided will that men are most acutely aware of
themselves and hence of their need of that other-than-self beyond.
The sentimental idealizing of contemporary life, the declension of the
humanist's optimism into that superficial complacency which will not
see what it does not like or what it is not expedient to see, makes
one's mind to chuckle while one's heart doth ache. There is a brief
heyday, its continuance dependent upon the uncontrollable factors
of outward prosperity, physical and nervous vigor, capacity for
preoccupation with the successive novelties of a diversified and
complicated civilization, in which even men of religious temperament
can minimize or ignore, perhaps sincerely disbelieve in, their divided
life. Sometimes we think we may sin and be done with it. But always in
the end man must come back to this moral tragedy of the soul. Because
sin will not be done with us when we are done with it. Every evil
is evil to him that does it and sooner or later we are compelled
to understand that to be a sinner is the sorest and most certain
punishment for sinning.
Then the awakening begins. Then can preaching stir the heart until
deep answereth unto deep. It can talk of the struggle with moral
temptation and weakness; of the unstable temperament which oscillates
between the gutter and the stars; of the perversion or abuse of
impulses good in themselves; of the dreadful dualism of the soul. For
these are inheritances which have made life tragic in every generation
for innumerable human beings. Whoever needed to explain to a company
of grown men and women what the cry of the soul for its release from
passion is? Every generation has its secret pessimists, brooding over
the anarchy of the spirit, the issues of a distracted life. We need
not ask with Faust, "Where is that place which men call 'Hell'?" nor
wait for Mephistopheles to answer,
"Hell is in no set place, nor is it circumscribed,
For where we are--is Hell!"
Now, it is from such central and poignant experiences as these that
men have been constrained to look outward for a God. For these mark
the very disintegration of personality, the utter dissipation of
selfhood. That is the inescapable horror of sin. That is what we mean
when we say sinners are lost; so they are, they are lost to their own
selves. With what discriminating truth the father in the parable of
the lost boy speaks. "This, my son," he says, "was dead though he is
alive again." So it is with us; being is the price we pay for sinning.
The more we do wrong the less we are. How then shall we become alive
again?
It is out of the shame and passion, the utter need of the human heart,
which such considerations show to be real that men have built up their
redemptive faiths. For all moral victory is conditioned upon help from
without. To be sure each will and soul must strive desperately, even
unto death, yet all that strife shall be in vain unless One stoops
down from above and wrestles with us in the conflict. For the sinner
must have two things, both of them beyond his unaided getting, or he
will die. He must be released from his captivity. Who does not know
the terrible restlessness, that grows and feeds upon itself and then
does grow some more, of the man bound by evil and wanting to get out?
The torture of sin is that it deprives us of the power to express
ourselves. The cry of moral misery, therefore, is always the groaning
of the prisoner. Oh, for help to break the bars of my intolerable
and delicious sin that I may be myself once more! Oh, for some power
greater than I which, being greater, can set me free!
But more than the sinner wants to be free does he want to be kept.
Along with the passion for liberty is the desire for surrender. Again,
then, he wants something outside himself, some Being so far above the
world he lives in that it can take him, the whole of him, break his
life, shake it to its foundations, then pacify, compose it, make it
anew. He is so tired of his sin; he is so weary with striving; he
wants to relinquish it all; get far away from what he is; flee like
a bird to the mountain; lay down his life before the One like whom he
would be. So he wants power, he wants peace. He would be himself, he
would lose himself. He prays for freedom, he longs for captivity.
Now, out of these depths of human life, these vast antinomies of the
spirit, has arisen man's belief in a Saviour-God. Sublime and awful
are the sanctions upon which it rests. Out of the extremity and
definiteness of our need we know that He must be and we know what He
must be like. He is the One to whom all hearts are open, all desires
known, from whom no secrets are hid. Who could state the mingling of
desire and dread with which men strive after, and hide from, such
a God? We want Him, yet until we have Him how we fear Him. For that
inclusive knowledge of us which is God, if only we can bear to come to
it, endows us with freedom. For then all the barriers are down, there
is nothing to conceal, nothing to explain, nothing to hold back. Then
reality and appearance coincide, character and condition correspond.
I am what I am before Him. Supreme reality from without answers and
completes my own, and makes me real, and my reality makes me free.
But if He thus knows me, and through that knowledge every inner
inhibition melts in His presence and every damning secret's out, and
all my life is spread like an open palm before His gaze, and I am come
at last, through many weary roads, unto my very self, why then I can
let go, I can relinquish myself. The dreadful tension's gone and in
utter surrender the soul is poured out, until, spent and expressed,
rest and peace flood back into the satisfied life. So the life is
free; so the life is bound. So a man stands upon his feet; so he
clings to the Rock that is higher than he. So the life is cleansed in
burning light; so the soul is hid in the secret of God's presence. So
men come to themselves; so men lose themselves in the Eternal. There
is perfect freedom at last because we have attained to complete
captivity. There is power accompanied by peace. That is the gift which
the vision of a God, morally separate from, morally other than we,
brings to the inward strife, the spiritual agony of the world. This
is the need which that faith satisfies. It is, I suppose, in this
exulting experience of moral freedom and spiritual peace which comes
to those men who make the experiment of faith that they, for the most
part, find their sufficient proof of the divine reality. Who ever
doubted His existence who could cry with all that innumerable company
of many kindreds and peoples and tongues:
"He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay;
And he set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.
And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God."
Here, then, is the preaching which is religious. How foolish are we
not to preach it more! How trivial and impertinent it is to question
the permanence of the religious interpretation of the world! What
a revelation of personal insignificance it is to fail to revere the
majesty of the devout and aspiring life! That which a starved and
restless and giddy world has lost is this pool of quietness, this
tower of strength, this cleansing grace of salvation, this haven of
the Spirit. Belief in a transcendent deity is as natural as hunger
and thirst, as necessary as sleep and breathing. It was the inner and
essential needs of our fathers' lives which drove them out to search
for Him. It will be the inner and essential needs of the lives of our
children that shall bring them to the altar where their fathers and
their fathers' fathers bowed down before them. Are we going to be
afraid to keep its fires burning?
And so we come to our final and most difficult aspect of this
transcendent problem. We have talked of the man who is separate from
nature, and who knows himself as man because behind nature he sees
the God from whom he is separate, too. We have seen how he needs
that "otherness" in God to maintain his personality and how the gulf
between him and that God induces that sense of helplessness which
makes the humility and penitence of the religious life. We must come
now to our final question. How is he to bridge the gulf? By what power
can he go through with this experience we have just been relating and
find his whole self in a whole world? How can he dare to try it? How
can he gain power to achieve it?
Perhaps this is the central difficulty of all religion. It is
certainly the one which the old Greeks felt. Plato, the father of
Christian theology, and all neo-platonists, knew that the gulf is
here between man and God and they knew that something or someone must
bridge it for us. They perceived that man, unaided, cannot leap it at
a stride. We proceed, driven by the facts of life, to the point where
the soul looks up to the Eternal and confesses the kinship, and knows
that only in His light shall it see light, and that it only shall be
satisfied when it awakes in His likeness. But how shall the connection
be made? What shall enable us to do that mystic thing, come back
to God? We have frightful handicaps in the attempt. How shall the
distrust that sin creates, the hardness that sin forms, the despair
and helplessness that sin induces, the dreadful indifference which
is its expression,--how shall they be removed? How shall the unfaith
which the mystery, the suffering, the evil of the world induce be
overcome? Being a sinner I do not dare, and being ignorant I do not
believe, to come. God is there and God wants us; like as a father
pitieth his children so He pitieth us. He knoweth our frame, He
remembereth that we are dust. We know that is true; again we do not
know it is true. All the sin that is in us and all which that sin
has done to us insists and insists that it is not true. And the mind
wonders--and wonders. What shall break that distrust; and melt away
the hardness so that we have an open mind; and send hope into despair,
hope with its accompanying confidence to act; change unfaith to
belief, until, in having faith, we thereby have that which faith
believes in? How amazing is life! We look out into the heavenly
country, we long to walk therein, we have so little power to stir hand
or foot to gain our entrance. We know it is there but all the facts of
our rebellious or self-centered life, individual and associated alike,
are against it and therefore we do not know that it is there.
Philosophy and reason and proofs of logic cannot greatly help us here.
No man was ever yet argued into the kingdom of God. We cannot convince
ourselves of our souls. For we are creatures, not minds; lives, not
ideas. Only life can convince life; only a Person but, of course,
a transcendent person that is more like Him than like us, can make
that Other-who-lives certain and sure for us. This necessity for some
intermediary who shall be a human yet more-than-human proof that
God is and that man may be one with Him; this reinforcing of the old
argument from subjective necessity by its verification in the actual
stuff of objective life, has been everywhere sought by men.
Saviours, redeemers, mediators, then, are not theological manikins.
They are not superfluous figures born of a mistaken notion of
the universe. They are not secondary gods, concessions to our
childishness. They, too, are called for in the nature of things. But
to really mediate they must have the qualities of both that which they
transmit and of those who receive the transmission. Most of all they
must have that "other" quality, so triumphant and self-verifying that
seeing it constrains belief. A mediator wholly unlike ourselves would
be a meaningless and mocking figure. But a mediator who was chiefly
like ourselves would be a contradiction in terms!
So we come back again to the old problem. Man needs some proof that he
who knows that he is more than dust can meet with that other life from
whose star his speck has been derived. Something has got to give him
powerful reinforcement for this supreme effort of will, of faith. If
only he could know that he and it ever have met in the fields of time
and space, then he would be saved. For that would give him the will to
believe; that would prove the ultimate; give him the blessed assurance
which heals the wounds of the heart. Then he would have power to
surrender. Then he would no longer fear the gulf, he would walk out
onto it and know that as he walked he was with God.
Some such reasoning as this ought to make clear the place that Jesus
holds in Christian preaching and why we call Him Saviour and why
salvation comes for us who are of His spiritual lineage, through Him.
Of course it is true that Jesus shows to all discerning eyes what man
may be. But that is not the chief secret of His power; that is not
why churches are built to Him and His cross still fronts, defeated
but unconquerable, our pagan world. Jesus was more-than-nature and
more-than-human. It is this "other" quality, operative and objectified
in His experience within our world, which gives Him the absoluteness
which makes Him indispensable and precious. The mystery is deepest
here. For here we transfer the antinomy from thought to conduct; from
inner perception to one Being's actual experience. Here, in Him, we
say we see it resolved into its higher synthesis in actual operation.
Here, then, we can almost look into it. Yet when we do gaze, our eyes
dazzle, our minds swerve, it is too much. It is not easy, indeed, at
the present time it seems to be impossible to reconcile the Christ
of history with the Christ of experience. Yet there would be neither
right nor reason in saying that the former was more of a reality
than the latter. And all the time the heart from which great thoughts
arise, "the heart which has its reasons of which the mind knows
nothing," says, Here in Him is the consummate quality, the absolute
note of life. Here the impossible has been accomplished. Here the
opposites meet and the contradictions blend. Here is something so
incredible that it is true.
Of course, Jesus is of us and He is ours. That is true and it is
inexpressibly sweet to remember it. Again, to use our old solecism,
that is the lesser part of the truth; the greater part, for men of
religion, is that Jesus is of God, that He belongs to Him. His chief
office for our world has not been to show us what men can be like; it
has been to give us the vision of the Eternal in a human face. For if
He does reveal God to man then He must hold, as President Tucker says,
the quality and substance of the life which He reveals.