A religion that is not founded in nature is all fiction
and falsity, and as mere a nothing as an idol.
_William Law._
The gain or the loss of life—this is what the Christian religion calls
us to face. Will you be a slave to the life you have and in the end lose
it, or at least all that makes it worth living? Or will you, in the
liberty wherewith Christ makes you free, take up your heritage of more
life in union with him?
There is a good deal in our experience that may be read with advantage
as commentary on this challenge of religion. There are men (we have
known them) who grow smaller before our eyes. We say that they are
wrapped up in themselves. There are others who as plainly grow larger.
Their interests expand; they take in more of the concerns of other men
and, as we put it, make them their own. These, obviously, far from being
wrapped up in themselves, are for ever breaking down barriers and
passing beyond them. If we do not see them for some time we find them
happily different. They are caring about ideas and aims and persons they
were not interested in before; they have been learning; they have, in
one word, grown. And those others will have shrunk. A man grows by the
spiritual food on which he feeds. And if such a statement sounds remote
from ordinary experience (which it is not), let us say that the more he
really has the more he really is.
Now religion acknowledges this and interprets it. In the eyes of a
religious man such growth means a growth in God. And he points out that
it happens only where a man has sought for its own sake, not for his,
what he has won. He says that the way of life is a way of
disinterestedness in regard to self and interestedness in all else. And,
as usual, he sends us to the Gospel for the fundamental principle
underlying what experience shows. 'Whosoever will save his life shall
lose it.' That is the kernel of the matter. Because love is the secret
of growth in spiritual life, whether intellectual, moral or aesthetic,
greed shall not procure its fruits. In the nature of things it cannot.
That is why growth in 'spirit and life' seems so paradoxical. When I
want food to eat I may be as greedy as I please. This will not prevent
me from having it. When I want food of the spirit greed will only take
me out of my true path and I shall find husks that the swine eat and
Dead Sea fruit.
I cannot even discover truth or beauty or holiness, much less win them
to myself, if I do not seek them for their own sake. I cannot see what
another man is, and I cannot make him at one with me in a real
fellowship, unless I care about him (as we say) because he is what he
is, and so make his interests mine. If I use any human being as a mere
instrument to serve my purpose I lose that human being, though I may
keep the instrument. Men and women, like goodness and truth and
beauty—and God—cannot be made mine unless I give myself to them.
'It is very hard to be a Christian.' It certainly is. The man who
husbands life forfeits it, and yet life is dear. 'Die to live, the
philosopher advises, as his counsel of prudence. But how is a man to lay
down life from nothing more than prudence? How can a man be a prudent
and careful adventurer of life? He may prudently and carefully be a
merchant, but never an adventurer. And true religion has no truck with
merchandise or merchants of the spirit. Its watchword is love—the love
that gives, the love God is, the love royal that seeks no gain, the love
of Christ.
So according to religion the way of giving is, in truth and experience,
the way of gain; but if we try to follow it for gain we find ourselves
altogether outside the way, not giving and therefore without gain. It is
hard to be a Christian. It is exceedingly hard to love as God loves. In
fact we cannot, unless God shall become man in us. He is the supreme
giver and our supreme gain. Inasmuch as we love the things and persons
God loves, for their own sake (which, naturally, we shall do when he
dwells in our hearts and our desires), we shall win them to ourselves;
whether they are, for instance, goodness, truth and beauty, or our
fellow-men. And in thus and to that extent winning the objects of our
love we shall unveil that reality we either call by those abstract
names, or find revealed in our fellows—the reality which is God. Under
those mere names God himself lies concealed. 'I am the way, the truth
and the life'—I myself, he says to the men who are discovering beauty or
holiness or truth, am that which you ignorantly worship. 'When saw we
thee?' they still may ask. Yet they knew him when through self-giving
they knew these. And names are nothing, where reality is tasted, touched
and handled.
As God communicates himself or gives himself to us men, in sheer love of
us, so must we communicate or give ourselves to all we seek. This is the
way of that life the Christian calls eternal. No man follows it unless
God be with him; but every man may follow it, and will, unless he
refuses God.
What, then, is it to refuse God? The answer is always the same. It is to
enclose the life of self within a prison of self-seeking, to shut
outside anything that seems likely to disturb this concentrated worship,
to try to drag inside anything likely to profit its narrow interests, to
use things and persons as its instruments of self-guarding and
self-seeking. And if self-guarding and self-seeking extend to the use of
the instruments of religion, as well they may in men and women of due
prudence and ambition, we have the type of Pharisee whom Jesus
denounced, or the type of priest who judged him and condemned him as the
enemy of God. All these are in some degree refusers of God. And a
religion that panders to self-guarding and self-seeking and encourages
greed or makes play with fear may be popular, but however
well-established, must be corrupt. So far as this goes, life is not in
it, and it does but help men to disguise from themselves their loss of
life.
The incarnation of God and the atonement of man with man and with God in
Christ are wrought by self-giving, that is by love. The whole process of
nature is a sacrament of God's self-giving, rising to the full
revelation of love. These things are one. It is profoundly true that 'a
religion that is not founded in nature is all fiction and falsity, and
as mere a nothing as an idol.' Yet the Christian religion, pre-eminently
founded in nature though it assuredly is, has been perverted, over and
over again, to be an organized means by which men falsify a nature that
is capable of an utmost self-giving to man and to God. The greedy and
the fearful have too often captured its organization, and the adventurer
of love has been driven out. But both beyond and within those built-up
walls the true religion of Christ has always lived and is lasting now.
Like the ferment in the meal it is everywhere alive in those who,
despite all the religious self-seeking around them, share the
self-sharing of God. These have always had the alchemist's touch; they
have turned dross to gold and have used it to ends of God. Like the
divine powers they overrule the errors of men. But the pity is that this
very fact not rarely hinders both the detection and the setting right of
those errors. 'See,' men say, 'this is the nursery of saints.' And
confusion of judgement goes on. It is a pragmatic test that shows the
danger of pragmatic tests. Let us get back to principles, for who shall
dare to say whether this or that is the nurture of saints. All things
work together for their good, as all things work together for the
truth-seeker's truth and for beauty in its discerner's eyes. For these,
nothing is common or unclean.
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