Yet splendid as such religious life may be conceded to be, it will
apparently lack one of the primary consolations of the older belief,
the assurance, namely, that the fundamental government of the world is
just and good. “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.” If,
as we have been urging, God is not in his heaven, it may indeed, for
all we know to the contrary, be all wrong with the world. A few years
ago we were very much perturbed by certain conclusions reached by the
accredited masters of science. The universe was running down, they
said, and would end a lifeless, frozen mass. The thought of an
ever-living God was then a comfort against such ominous prophecy. If
God lives, it follows that all things of value will live, that the
world cannot go to ultimate ruin.
That old prophecy, however, of a frozen and lifeless world no longer
has honor in our land. Recent discoveries of new types of energy, a
more penetrating analysis both of the mathematics and mechanics of the
situation, show the prophecy to have been made on wholly insufficient
and insecure grounds. The old dogmatic materialism has had to give way
to a critical and open-minded evolutionism which tends more and more
to regard the cosmic process as one of expanding power, in which the
values for which we deeply care—conscious life, purposive direction,
science, art, morality—appear to have a place of growing security and
effectiveness. And yet the evolutionism of the day, unlike the older
religious thought, finds no cosmic certainty upon which it may utterly
bank. The universe, with all the high values that have been achieved,
_may_ indeed go to ruin. There is no absolute guarantee for the
future. All that modern evolutionism can say to us is that looking
over such history of the world as is accessible, and analyzing the
processes there found, it seems highly probable that the line of the
future will be a line of advance, an advance from relative
disorganization to organization, from a large degree of mechanical
indifference to increasing organic solidarity and integration, from
antagonisms and conflicts to mutuality and coöperation. But it is only
probable. There is no God who holds the destiny in his hands and makes
it certain of accomplishment.
In view of this uncertainty as to the world’s government and outcome,
it may be asked whether the new type of religion will not be weaker in
moral and spiritual vigor than the old. Do not vigor and initiative
spring from hope and sure confidence in the fundamental rightness of
the world? In answer to this one has but to ask the question: in what
type of situation does the human character grow strong and
heroic,—that in which there is no doubt of the happy outcome, in
which the individual plays his part, assured that nothing can happen
wrongly; or that in which the outcome is uncertain, in which the
individual realizes that he must fight his way, knowing not whether
victory or defeat will greet him, but assured only that whatever
happens, he must fight and fight to the end? Is it unfair to say that
the old religion with its confident, childlike resting on God (“He
loves the burthen”) developed a type of character that was not, in the
mass, conspicuously heroic? “God knows best”; “It will all come out
right”; “Thy will be done”—these are not expressions of fighting men;
they are expressions of men who resign themselves to the ruling of
powers greater than themselves. A civilization characterized by such
an attitude will not be one strenuously alive to eliminate the sorry
evils of life. But the men who believe that the issue of the universe
is in doubt, that there is no powerful God to lead the hosts to
victory, will, if they have the stuff of men in them, strike out their
manliest to help whatever good there is in the world to win its way
against the forces of evil. A civilization of such men will be a
tough-fibred civilization, strenuous to fight, grimly ready, like the
Old Guard, to die but never surrender.
There is, in short, something subtly weakening about the optimism of
the traditional religions. Like the historic soothing syrup, with its
unadvertised opiate, it soothes the distress not by curing the disease
but by temporarily paralyzing the function. “To trust God nor be
afraid” means in most cases—not all—to settle back from a too
anxious concern about the evils of the world. “God will take care of
his own!” How different is this from the attitude: “The task is ours
and the whole world’s and we must see it through!”