A WAYFARER'S FAITH: ASPECTS OF THE COMMON BASIS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE
By
T. Edmund Harvey
London: Wells Gardner, Barton and Co., Ltd.
3 & 4, Paternoster Buildings, B.C. and 44, Victoria Street, S.W.
[1913]
[Printed] Headley Brothers, Bishopsgate E.C.; and Ashford, Kent
Some of these pages were originally prepared by the writer for the use
of his fellow members in the Society of Friends. He is indebted to the
courtesy of the Editor of /The Nation/ for permission to make use of two
chapters which have appeared in its columns in a slightly different form.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER[...]PAGE
I. THE COMMON BASIS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE I
II. THE INNER LIFE OF THE CHURCH 2O
III. THE PROPHET IN THE CHURCH 33
IV. SACRAMENTS OF LIFE 58
V. SOME OF NATURE'S SACRAMENTS 85
VI. INSTITUTIONS AND INSPIRATION 91
VII. PRIESTS AND PONTIFFS 97
VIII. THE ANSWER OF FAITH 116
IX. THE HOUSE OF PEACE 135
X. THE PATH TO UNITY 145
CHAPTER I. THE COMMON BASIS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE.
THERE is a well known story of how a man of letters a century ago, when
questioned as to his religious views, answered that all sensible men
were of one religion, and to the further query as to what that religion
might be, made the curt response: "Sir, sensible men never say." The
story is characteristic of its age, and of the attitude towards religion
of some of its ablest men. Many of the greatest thinkers, whatever the
religious opinions of the circle in which they were educated may have
been, held themselves aloof from controversy on questions of creed and
church, looking upon such disputes with the kindly contempt of tolerant
beings who themselves had reached a larger and freer atmosphere than
that which surrounded those who struggled amid the dust of the plains
beneath their feet. Something of this spirit, which is so clearly
manifested in the world of politics and letters, can be seen too in many
of the prominent religious organisations of the day. Men were weary of
the hateful bitterness which had characterised the theological [p.2]
controversies of the seventeenth century, and the wider outlook which
came with the age of illumination showed itself even as late as the
beginning of the nineteenth century, when in Germany Catholic and
Protestant ecclesiastical authorities united in a common religious
celebration at Fulda of the anniversary of the mission of Saint
Boniface. But beneath the surface of this toleration, which seemed to be
increasing between Catholic, Protestant and Jew, we may perhaps feel
that the uniting influence lay not so much in a profound sense of the
underlying verities common to all their various forms of faith as in a
certain vagueness as to any form of dogmatic belief, a distrust of dogma
in itself, if not an indifference to the things which that dogma
attempted to represent. Men were willing to leave others free to have
their own religious beliefs, and distrusted the enthusiasm of the
fanatic, of the man who wished to convert others to view life as he
himself did. The profession of a recognition of good in all religions
went hand in hand with the recognition of their imperfection, and a
doubt as to how far they were not so much alike sharing in truth as
alike mingled with error. This attitude is illustrated by Lessing's
famous fable of the three rings, which is perhaps the most quoted
passage in "Nathan the Wise." None but the father can tell the true ring
from the counterfeits which he has had made; the sons must therefore
each treat the others as in the same position as himself. No one creed
can claim to [p.3] itself a pre-eminence over the others, none but God
can distinguish the true from the false. The lesson of tolerance which
Lessing taught in his drama was one of which our age, as well as his
own, has need, but if we are only to view all forms of faith with
respect because we are conscious of the difficulty of discerning the
true from the false, we have reached a position which may indeed promote
friendly relationships in the ordinary intercourse of life, but which
cannot in the end be satisfactory either to ourselves or to others.
Tolerance founded upon doubt can never be an inspiring virtue.
Is it not possible for us, however, since we realise this, to take a
further step? We need to feel, not the imperfections of all the varying
creeds, religions and irreligions, but the inherent strength of each,
and from a consciousness of this to rise to some dim realization of the
golden thread of truth which runs through all sincere faiths, however
degraded or erroneous they may at first sight appear to be.
In the eighteenth century there swept over Europe a wave of new thought,
which liberated men's minds from old superstitions and the narrowness of
former dogmatism, and produced a sort of freemasonry of new ideas
between men whose national religious and political upbringing had been
wholly different. But this wave of liberal thought failed to produce a
permanent sense of unity; in due time came a counter-movement when men
[p.4] turned from the generalisations and the vague optimism of these
syncretist philosophers. The attacks which the sceptical critics had
levelled on the older creeds were too negative in character: content to
find out the weakness of their opponents' position and to expose it to
contempt and ridicule, they had failed to realise the strength which lay
deeper than the intellectual interpretations of belief which they had
assailed.
Thus the nineteenth century has witnessed in the political world an
extraordinary revival of national spirit, especially amongst smaller
peoples, and on the other hand a similar revival within the different
religious communities. The eighteenth century humanists would have
foreseen the one as little as the other. To them it seemed that beneath
the clear light of reason the old dogmas of the sects would each lose
their force, just as the ignorant patriotism of their day, which they
saw to be so largely built upon mistaken prejudice, would give away to
their wide cosmopolitan spirit which felt itself above these petty views.
The revival of national feeling among the little peoples of Europe, with
no wealth of capital or military force to give them aid, which we have
witnessed during the last century, is, however, hardly less remarkable
than the revival of life amongst the different Churches and religious
communities of the western world. There was surely something lacking in
the theory of life of these men of broad view of a former day who for
[p.5] all their breadth could not find room for enthusiasm such as this.
We are beginning to see that the truer cosmopolitan of the future will
not cease to be a citizen of his own country when he becomes a citizen
of the world, that the wider fellowship will lose its content and its
meaning if it is to involve a denial of patriotism and not rather to
subsume it as a necessary element in the true international spirit; and
so in the inner life of the soul we must seek to harmonize the various
contending creeds, not by destroying any particular creed, or attempting
to replace it by some, vague generalisation, devoid of life or of
attractive and inspiring force, but by attempting to appeal to the best
in each, realising that each must have some value of its own, just as
the poorest of peoples has its own peculiar traits and virtues; and thus
gradually draw the sympathies and thoughts of men nearer together by
reason of the common life from which must spring all that is good in the
religion of each one.
There is a beautiful saying of Penn's which sets forth what many good
men of very different creeds must have felt again and again before he
gave the thought expression: "The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious,
and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has
taken off the mask they will know one another, though the divers
liveries they wear here makes them strangers." May we not venture to
carry further the thought and say, that this religion includes [p.6]
every servant of truth, and every man who is recognizing in practice in
his own life the need of his fellows, by subordinating his own happiness
and interest to theirs? That there is in reality a religion which all
good men share we do, indeed, recognise in practice in everyday life;
how else can we explain the appeal to conscience, to the sense of duty,
to the unselfish desire to benefit others, which is constantly made to
men of the most divergent religious views, whose theories of life would
not be accepted by each other for a moment?
How is it then possible for us to make more clear to our eyes and to
others this common basis of religion, and to build more securely upon it
the structure of our lives?
We must not be disappointed if it is difficult to give intellectual
expression to this basis of life; at best such expression must be
imperfect, and we can only hope to arrive at it very slowly. Perhaps
some hint of the way in which one may look at the problem may be given
by that strange poem of W. B. Yeats "The Indian upon God." The poet
pictures the way in which the creatures of earth each frame their own
idea of the Divine Creator after their own image; some vast Brocken
spectre, perhaps, some may say, cast by the reflection of imagination
upon the clouds of the world without. And yet the poem has surely within
it another meaning. To each creature comes, coloured, it is true, by
different visions, [p.7] some dim picture of the Maker, some sense of
sustaining presence in the world and in their own lives:
/I passed along the water's edge, below the humid trees,/
/My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes round my knees,/
/My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moorfowl pace/
/All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them cease to chase/
/Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak:/
/"Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong and weak,/
/Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky./
/The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye."/
/I passed a little further on, and heard a lotus talk:/
/"Who made the world, and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,/
/For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide/
/Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide."/
/A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes/
/Brimful of starlight, and he said, "The stamper of the skies,/
/He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He/
/Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me? "/
/I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:/
/"Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay,/
/He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night/
/His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light."/
One can readily understand that some readers might be shocked by what
would seem to them to be idolatrous images. Yet does not the whole poem
show something more than the fact that men worship images of God after
their own likeness? Beneath the grossest idolatry there [p.8] may be at
least some sense of contact with the Unseen. Though man, like his
fellow-creatures, cannot behold unveiled the vision of the Eternal,
somewhere under every imperfect picture which our dogmas have framed of
Him does not there lie at least some trait of faint resemblance? And,
however much we may endeavour to remove from our minds all
anthropomorphic conceptions we needs must think as men. Our most
abstract thoughts are but spiritualised metaphors, the ghosts and
shadows of the fully-coloured language of our earlier days or of a more
primitive people. The moment we think of the origin and meaning of
words, we realise that this is so; when we speak of conceiving a
thought, grasping an idea, abandoning an argument, we are using
metaphors which were once bold and vivid but are now scarcely perceived
as such at all. And so in all our formulated thoughts of the Unseen we
may be said to be in a sense idolaters. But only sinfully so, if we
wilfully cleave to the lower forms when we have had vision of a higher.
The fact that we express our thoughts on religion through the medium of
the terms of the material world does not mean that the religious truths
which they express are dependent upon, and are evolved out of, the
physical world, any more than the intellectual processes of conception
and perception are dependent on or derived from the physical processes
after which they are named. But it does surely mean that we must
recognise the necessary [p. 9] imperfection of our efforts to express
the unseen realities, whether in religious creed or philosophical dogma.
If we are convinced that there is a real unity underlying the religious
life of every sincere man, whether he call himself religious or no, how
can we best promote the growth of this sense of unity, so that in every
form of faith the best may be strengthened and drawn into a sense of
membership of a wider whole?
In the first place we must endeavour to be faithful to the best ideal of
our own party, of our own church or creed, to insist on the positive
side of what it teaches rather than its negations. The true protestant,
for instance, should be zealous to protest for a living ideal which he
feels to correspond to his needs, and not, as too often has been the
case in the past, merely to protest against evils and mistakes connected
with another ideal.
Then realizing the vastness of truth, and the limitations of our own
powers of apprehending it, we must be willing to recognize that there
must be other aspects of truth which we, as individuals or as a
religious community, have not yet apprehended, and that the whole truth
must needs be too great for any human mind or system to express. This
attitude of mind should surely be perfectly compatible with an
enthusiastic loyalty to that vision of the truth which has been given to
us or our community, and with a desire to share this vision with others.
[p.10]
To attempt to surrender our own expression of the Truth as we see it,
and replace it by an expression drawn from the vision of others is to
make in the inner life an error like that of the school of Bologna in
painting. The Caracci and their followers deliberately aimed at
acquiring the peculiar excellencies of each of the great masters who
preceded them, the harmonies of Raphael, the colour of Titian, the
vigour and the grandiose forms of Michael Angelo. They hoped to combine
all these and thus achieve a higher perfection than their masters, but
in so doing they failed to express themselves in their own way, for they
were always painting things as they imagined they ought to see them, and
not as they really saw them.
The great artist, like Rembrandt, will honour and admire a Raphael or a
Correggio without seeking to imitate them or to borrow their technique.
And so while we recognise the vision of truth that comes to men of
different views from our own, we must not abandon our own vision, or our
attempt to express it faithfully, because we know that we see a part and
not the whole.
Every great religious movement has been in its origin or at its highest
point universal in its aspiration, claiming to make appeal to all
mankind and to become at length the religion of the whole world. And it
is this very universal claim which seems to some dispassionate critics
so narrow- spirited and fanatical, which bears witness to the force and
reality of that deepest religious life [p.11] which underlies all
difference of dogma, and finds its expression in all these varying
faiths. At the moment of its budding forth, the tiny twig feels within
it the expanding life of the whole tree. "I am the true tree, and the
tree that is to be." it may be imagined as saying; though the great
boughs above it do not stir in the wind that shakes it to and fro. The
twig may have within it the possibility of growth to a size exceeding
the stem from which it now springs, or it may remain only a twig; but in
either case it is a part of the tree, and in a sense it is the tree; its
life is the tree's life. So every great religious movement, when at its
best and highest, looks forward to world-wide extension; it may be that
the flood of life takes new channels and only a tiny sect remains to
bear witness to what has been, but yet, when its members were filled
with their first enthusiasm, and went forth into the world to win others
to their views, they were strong because somehow or other they had come
into touch with the eternal; their creed and organisation may have
corresponded only to the need of the day, and of a limited number of
people, or it may have been of wider application and able to endure for
a longer time, but in spite of these limitations, the creed and
organisation represent an inner life through which their members came
into touch with the source of all life and strength.
Our task then must be to strive to be more conscious of this fact in our
own lives, and [p.12] in elaborating our own systems, as well as in
dealing with and considering the religious views of others. In
discarding the transient elements, the husks of dogma, we have to
respect the seed-corn of life within them. The recognition of this will
make us more reverent towards even the hoary errors of antiquity, and
the methods of thought and life which to us are outworn, but were once
living, and still may be living to some.
This surely is the lesson which we may draw from that touching story
related by John Cassian of the monk Serapion, which Auguste Sabatier
once told to his pupils. In his old age the good monk had suddenly been
brought to realise, by the preaching of two missioners, the error which
he had committed in thinking of the Eternal as a being like himself,
fashioned in human form. His friends gathered round him to thank God for
his deliverance from the grievous anthropomorphic heresy, when, in the
midst of their prayers, the old man fell in tears to the ground with the
pathetic cry: "Woe's me, wretched man that I am! they have taken away my
God and I have none to hold to or worship or pray to now."
In our work of thought or of practical endeavour we shall need above all
to realise the value of humble reverence for truth for its own sake, and
of the recognition that wherever goodness is, there is that which the
theist knows as the Divine, which others my speak of as the enduring
spiritual [p.13] ideal, but which, by whatever name we call it is the
inspiring and illuminating reality which shines through every unselfish
deed and thought, and makes our lives of worth.
We are sensible of this uniting force, however much our ethical ideals
may differ. We cannot explain the common principles which justify the
ideal of a Gordon and that of a Tolstoy, but we must surely feel that
those ideals are in some way branches from the same good tree; it may
well be that just as in the intellectual world different bents of genius
each have their place and justification, so too in the moral have
different types of the ethical ideal. The scientific mind, the
practical, executive talent of the businessman, the speculative powers
of the metaphysician and the creative gifts of the poet and artist, each
have their place, and no one human mind can combine them all. So, too,
it may be with the moral ideals realised here in our human lives.
Because one is good, another is not wholly wrong. There may be varieties
of goodness just as there are differences of shape and beauty between
flower and flower. But while we recognise this, we surely need too to
realise that there must ultimately be some vital connection between
these different ideals, although we ourselves may not be able to
perceive the unifying influence or principle. Is it not here that the
Union of Ethical Societies fails, in that after insisting upon "the
supreme importance of the knowledge, love and practice of the Right,"
[p.14] their manifesto goes on to disclaim "the acceptance of any one
ultimate criterion of right" as a condition of ethical fellowship? Yet
unless there be some such criterion, can we speak of "the Right" at all?
The capital "R" is an unconscious survival of the theistic expression of
thought, or rather the expression of the essentially religious spirit of
man, which in spite of a creed of intellectual agnosticism, recognises
the Divine in life and does obeisance to it under another name. The idea
of good and the thought of God are not connected together merely by a
similarity of sound; they have but one origin. Thus, if where goodness
is, there God is, we must be able to find evidence, even where there may
be no intellectual knowledge of God, of the recognition of a unique
worth in the good apart from all attempted explanations of its value.
And perhaps we cannot do better than take an example from the writings
of a master sceptic, to show how in spite even of an apparent intention
to make mock of the failure of the good and unselfish man, and of the
utterly impracticable nature of his ideal, a kind of homage is yet paid
to the ideal and to its votary, and through them to the source of their
inspiration.
Readers of Voltaire's "Candide" will recall the figure of the Anabaptist
Jacques, the upright and unselfish man who perishes in spite of all his
trust in overruling good. Voltaire in picturing his death would appear
to be casting scorn upon [p. 15] a complacent view of a universe where
such a thing might happen again and again, and as far as any practical
teaching goes he would seem merely to point out that righteousness and
faith may be not only unavailing to ward off calamity, but may actually
bring it upon those who make such a standard their sole guide. And yet,
even as you read, you feel how much nobler and better it is to perish
like Jacques, with the unswerving faith of a good man, than to live on
contentedly digging one's garden and enjoying its fruits in selfish
peace. And however much we may be conscious that in the moment of trial,
face to face with mortal peril, we ourselves might swerve aside, might
hesitate and fail, we yet know that if we could make our choice in a
cool hour, reviewing calmly what we ought to do, and what we would do if
we could be true to the best that is in us, we should choose the
honourable failure of the good man rather than the success of the bad.
In itself we know it to be better, apart from all thought of
consequence. And in practice we know how in the presence of the
loveliness of an unselfish act all lower thoughts of pleasure and of
profit fade away! Face to face with the enduring ideal that shines forth
from. the good deed, lower ideals shrivel and sink into nothingness.
Even truer is this of goodness made real to us in personality, and here
it is that those of us who call ourselves Christians may find the
keystone to the continual self-revelation of God to man, in that supreme
revelation of the Divine [p.16] nature in the unique personality of
Jesus, which for the Church is the centre of inspiration and the
explanation of the light which shines in all other lives.
If we can unite in reverencing the good and unselfish spirit, wherever
it manifests itself in human lives, so too, we need to reverence every-
where the search after truth, and the service of Truth for its own sake.
Surely one of the most helpful signs our age is found in this increasing
recognition of spiritual kinship between seekers after Truth of most
divergent creed; not the least of the benefits of the Higher Criticism
and the problems with which the minds of men have been confronted
through the advance of science has been that in the readjustment of
thought and life which is going on all about us, men have grown aware
that they are not fighting their battles alone, but that far and near
are kindred spirits going through a like struggle, and even that those
whom they had fancied foemen were really their allies. This is the
beginning of a movement wider and deeper than the so-called religious
controversies which embitter the surface of our political life, the
prelude to a new and wider Catholicism of the spirit, in which all the
servants of Truth and humanity may unite without sacrifice of conviction
in a sense of true brotherhood. Something of this underlying unity is
recognised both in the supreme moments of our individual lives and in
great times of national crisis, such as [p.17 ] come in the birthpangs
of a new movement or the brave endeavour to stem some rising tide of
evil. Thus it came about that in the great uprising of German democracy
of 1848, the colours which symbolised the new hopes of the people were
often consecrated by a public religious ceremony in which all faiths
united, and in the little Bavarian town of Furth, the Jewish Rabbi, as
representing the smallest denomination of the town, was by common
consent chosen to perform the ceremony. But we do not need to go so far
back or to such a distant place to find instances of the way in which
men of varying creed have found themselves uniting with those who are
opposed to all forms of religion in defence of some common cause,
inspired by some uniting ideal, though but dimly realized. Here, surely,
is the truest test of that which is Catholic, the /quod semper, quod
ubique, quod ab omnibus/, which the dogmas of theology can but
imperfectly explain, but which is realized even now by all who seek to
serve whole-heartedly the truth, and therefore, too, their fellowmen.
There remains a further practical question to be faced. If we recognise
that the good finds expression in various ways, that men in act and
thought alike may differ from each other, and yet the inner source of
their spiritual life may be the same, are we to abandon the endeavour to
find some intellectual synthesis of their divergent ideals? Must we
cease to attempt to express [p.18] in terms of thought that which we
recognize as transcending all human thought and much more our imperfect
terms? Surely this would be a mistake. Though not only for our own lives
but for the whole life of humanity upon the earth it should prove that
our processes of creed building and church making are necessarily
imperfect, we must still for ever strive to express in thought and in
act the life of the spirit, which grows and deepens as it is faithfully
expressed. Creed and deed alike, we feel, are but the raiment of the
life; they fade and are outgrown, yet they are not to be fiercely torn
to pieces or lightly thrown aside. Even though we may never hope to be
able to explain to ourselves or to others the common basis of our
ethical ideals and of our religious life, we must never cease to try to
find some explanation and to give what expression to it we can.
The vision of truth that we have now, our intellectual expression of our
relationship to the world, and of our duty in it, is we recognise,
imperfect; it is no key to the universe, to unlock every mystery for us,
still less for others; but it may prove a sufficient lamp, and one whose
rays grow ever brighter, to light our footsteps onward or (to change the
metaphor) it may be a clue to the great labyrinth about us which may be
of use to others besides ourselves, though some may come to the goal by
a very different way. Certainly the experience of all the great mystics
would [p.19] seem to show that as we ascend the Heavenly mountain, one
from one side, one from another, our paths draw nearer to each other,
and so across the night between, we may listen to our fellow pilgrims'
voices, and realize that some day we shall meet face to face.