Now whence was it that a religion, so serious in
its restraints, so beautiful in its outward form and
practices, and commanding such reverence from all
that beheld it, was yet charged by Truth itself with
having inwardly such an abominable nature? It
was only for this one reason, because it was a religion
of self.
_William Law._
As heaven or hell depends on the choice between self-giving and
self-seeking, so does the worship of the true God or the false. Names
may be mockeries here. The self-seeking Christian, worshipping, as he
may tell us, the God and Father of his Lord Jesus Christ, is doing
nothing of the kind. He is worshipping that which he serves. If he could
really use the true God as a means towards the end he has at heart, that
is, make God serve him, he would do so. This, in fact, is what he tries
to do. Naturally he cannot succeed. And the God whom he thinks he
worships is fiction and an idol; it is one who is his instrument in
self-seeking, and that is a fictitious God. 'God is a Spirit; and they
that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.' 'Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and
with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.' Here is the first clue to
Christian worship. And the second is 'like unto it':—'Thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyself.' The Christian comment on this is
characteristic:—'He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen how
can he love God whom he hath not seen?' And the test is crucial. There
is no true worship without love, and no love of God without love of the
brother-man. So the argument works itself out and finally excludes the
consistent and impenitent self-seeker from the worship of God.
Indeed, in the nature of life in man, this exclusion is inevitable.
Unless a man makes his neighbour and that neighbour's interests his own,
he necessarily excludes him from himself. In the nature of living
personal beings this must be, for only in harmony do persons coincide,
only by the stretching out of my interests and myself to embrace do I
include. I must grow if my neighbour is to become for me 'as myself' and
be loved as myself. So that love of myself which is evil when confined
to interests solely mine, becomes good as it expands. So the contracting
of life within my narrow boundaries is escaped, and although I still
love myself I love a self that grows out and forth to the inclusion of
all, even to the inclusion of God, whom then I shall love with the
ardour which in the contracted self is the very torment of its hell.
Only the directing of that ardour beyond the self can prevent it from
being a consuming fire within the self. Therefore unless I learn to
worship God (and here again words, names may mock at realities), I shall
'perish' in my own flame.
Worship is no pious luxury: it is a necessity of the spiritual life.
Every man who is growing in the spirit is a worshipper of God. He may
never use the name, he may be one of those who would say 'Lord, when saw
we thee?' but his love is showing him the true God in his own spirit and
his own truth, and, in showing him too the divine way of Love with men,
commands his worship. He has discovered the marvel of self-giving, and
in that discovery the marvel of the divine way he cannot but adore; his
life, in fact, is adoration.
From other men this way is hidden; and a God that may command their
worship must be a different God and take another way. He must declare
himself in a power they can recognize, that kind of power which has
kinship with the forces of men's machines and has uses like the uses of
machines. This God, who may perhaps, through what seems to them worship,
be made a means towards their own ends, is above all a God of an all but
material power. So, may be, they cringe before him, pour out praises,
make sacrifices, pay a dutiful service such as a supreme power of that
kind may well call forth in the men they are. And then, if there comes
among them a prophet, he pleads with them in God's name, 'I will have
mercy and not sacrifice.' 'To what purpose cometh there to me incense
from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country? Your burnt offerings
are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet unto me.'
Just such men as these self-seekers came to Jesus, asking for a miracle,
a sign. 'An evil and adulterous generation,' he said, 'seeketh after a
sign.' Why 'evil and adulterous'? Surely because in seeking a sign such
as would please them they were blind to the divine truth in the presence
of which they stood, and, open-eyed for their own interests, were in
their hearts trafficking with a false God.
That the craving for such signs, such miracle, is always evil and
adulterous can hardly be said. Yet truly it partakes, in large measure,
of the nature of sin. And at best it is blindness, blindness to the true
marvels of God in his manifestation through 'the things that are made'
and are being made. We who have learnt of the history of earth have our
souls filled with marvel, and with mystery too. It is not easy for us to
see how any generation that looks for more, while it has that, can be
other than evil and adulterous. But the fact is that familiarity does
blind men to both marvel and mystery. If it did not, the very stones we
tread under foot would proclaim their witness to God, and every moment
of our own life would call forth adoration of him.
In regard to this matter there is a pressing need for the meeting of
science and philosophy with religion. Science and philosophy tear away
the veil with which familiarity hides from us the mysteriousness and
marvel of all things and of our own personal and common life. They show
us unfathomed depths for wonder where we had seen nothing but a smooth
accustomed surface. But it is religion that shows us God in all those
depths, God made known even by the very surface, and turns our wonder
into worship. It is science and philosophy that shall purge religion of
the taint it has derived from both the ignorant, and the evil and
adulterous, generations after generations who have made it seem what it
seems. I say 'seem what it seems,' for this is not what it is. That is
no true religion, certainly no religion after the mind of Christ, which
passes over the marvels of the lily of the field and of the man indwelt
by God and one with God, taking them as things that are of course; while
making much of signs interpreted as 'intervention' and therefore taken
as the only signs of a God who is nowhere and nothing to us unless he
intervenes.
We stand amazed, we who have learnt now to see God everywhere. Can any
religious man open his eyes, we ask, and not see signs of God? Can he
search in any human life without finding signs in abundance there, signs
of the life-giving presence or of the dreadful death-dealing absence of
God? What more can he ask or desire? 'Lord God of hosts,' we exclaim,
'heaven and earth are full of thy glory!'
Then we turn to history, the long history of man, and the long history
of the Christian religion which goes back, beyond the sublime figure who
proclaimed it in Palestine, to the beginnings of the worship of God. We
discover those beginnings in the first men who turned their eyes from
self to the brother. We look along the ages and cease to be surprised.
In his long-drawn education man has but slowly learnt to find God in
more and more of his own life and the world. Step by step he has felt
his way, led by the spirit given him, to the knowledge of the God and
Father of Jesus Christ, the incarnate and redeeming God of all men, the
God who comes to indwell all things. Only now, in a new fulness of time,
are the teaching of Jesus and the revelation of his life and death
finding a new context in new knowledge and reflective thought. Only now
are we beginning to see why, if knowledge and reflective thought have so
far done their work, it may well be an evil and adulterous generation
that seeks for any other signs than those which they and Christ reveal.
Just what the earthly presence of the God-revealing Jesus was to that
generation—a test of their single-mindedness and will to receive and
welcome divine truth—so, when his life and witness meet with a new
emphasis in the less but concurrent witness of new knowledge, this
generation of religious men is put to the same test. Will they receive
new witness to his truth and to God? or will they reject it because it
has no likeness to those signs that to their minds are alone fitted to
show God? Will they or will they not have humility enough to learn of
scientific and philosophic 'builders of Jerusalem' concerning the true
methods of God?
We cannot tell; that is, of this generation. But we may trust in the
prevailing strength of truth. Generations pass, but that endures. And
the prophet's word goes on:—'the hour cometh, and now is, when the true
worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.'
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