IV

But from another point of view there was an element of power in the

older religion which seems at first blush to be utterly lacking in the

type of new religion we are describing. A prominent world-evangelist

of the Young Men’s Christian Association was recently lecturing to the

college students of New York City on the ethical and religious life.

It was significant to note that most of his talk to students concerned

itself with temptations and that the invariable outcome of each talk

was that the one infallible means of meeting temptation was to realize

God’s presence in one’s life, to companion with God, to feel him near

and watchful, ever sympathetic, ever ready with divine help. Students

do indeed get power from that kind of belief. They feel themselves

before an all-seeing eye, a hand is on their shoulder, a voice is in

their ear; and when the difficult moment comes they are not alone. How

utterly uncompanioned, how lonely, on the other hand, must be the

student who knows no beneficent, all-seeing, and all-caring Father.

When his difficult moment comes he stands in desolate isolation.

Victory or defeat then must hang upon his own puny strength and

wavering determination. It is a favorite argument with Roman Catholics

that the belief in God is the one surest guard against the sexual

irregularity of young men. Remove God, the one strong bulwark, from

their lives, and the flood of their passions will sweep them to their

destruction.

Such considerations as these must indeed give one pause; yet I feel

assured that they need not hold us long. How does a man get strength

for right living? He begins—in his childhood as in the childhood of

the race—by getting it through fear. The child is told, upon pain of

punishment, not to do certain things. There will come a time when it

will know why it ought not to do these things; but in its first months

and, in a degree, through its early years, it refrains from doing them

simply by reason of the pressure of the superior power of its parents.

Later it refrains through unconscious imitation and affection. It

lives in the light and love of its parents; and it consciously and

unconsciously shapes its life after the pattern of their lives. When

difficulties press, the child flees to the mother or the father for

comfort and advice. Those are delicious days, of warm trust and joy

and loving security. The child nestles up against the stronger power

of those it loves. But the child grows to manhood and womanhood.

Whence then does it get its strength for right living? The fear of the

infant days, the imitation and affection of childhood and youth are

now transformed into a new attitude,—an understanding of the reason

in the right and the unreason in the wrong. There are many factors and

influences that now take the place of parent power and affection: the

love and admiration of one’s group, the customs of one’s people, the

stimulus of great persons. But the essential power now is the power of

_insight_—of so understanding the forces and principles of life that

one’s whole self is surrendered in deep reverence and service to the

things that ought to be. Assuredly, no character is mature until it

has reached this last stage. There is indeed something beautiful about

the boy who in the midst of temptation goes to his father and talks it

all out with him; who clings to the father’s hand to lead him safely

through the dangerous ways. But the boy is only on the way to moral

and spiritual maturity; he is not yet morally and spiritually mature.

The doctrine that the great evangelist and the evangelical churches in

general preach is a doctrine admirably adapted to a condition of moral

and spiritual immaturity; it is a doctrine, in short, for little boys

and girls; it is not a doctrine for morally and spiritually mature men

and women. I doubt even, in fact, whether it is a doctrine for college

youths and maidens; for I note in my own relations with college men

and women that there is among them the growing consciousness of right

for right’s sake, a growing cleanness and earnestness of life; and

this is so, I take it, not because they believe such conduct and

attitude to be commanded or because they are aware of a heavenly

Father who watches, but because their eyes have been opened to see the

truth and the truth has made them free.

I believe that the problem of how to teach a young man to meet

temptation is a deeply serious problem. But I believe small good will

come of falling back upon the old easy expedient of half-frightening,

half-cajoling the young man into submission by reminding him of the

all-watching eye and the all-considering heart of the great Father.

That way is so easy that it is really unfair to the victims. It is

like hypnotizing a man into morality. The way of the new religion is

the harder but more lasting, more self-respecting way of developing

the whole moral self of the boy and the youth and the man,—beginning

far back in childhood and unremittingly, understandingly continuing

the training, until when the child becomes the youth and the youth the

man, righteousness is the firm, sweet habit of his life. We human

beings have an inveterate love of shirking our tasks. We neglect the

essential moral culture of the infant and the child; we let the

moments and the days slip by in the life of the youth without putting

any hard thought upon his training in self-control, in courage, in

moral insight; and then suddenly, when signs of danger begin to show

in the young man, we grow panic-stricken and implore him to call on

God to save him. The fact is that the task was ours and we shirked it.

Ours was the responsibility; and we had no right to put it off on a

miracle-working Deity.

“When half-gods go,” says Emerson, “the gods arrive.” When once we give

up this easy way of moral and religious hypnosis; when once we believe

that God, the watchful policeman of the universe, no longer exists, we

shall solemnly and seriously take up the task we have so long cast

upon a deity’s shoulders—_our_ task of shaping and directing and

making strong the moral possibilities of the children we bring into

the world. From the old consolation, in short, of divine protection,

we shall awake to a new loyalty to our fundamental moral obligations.

It is significant in this connection to note that the farther we go

back in the history of religion, the more the moral reference of

situations is secondary and the supernatural reference primary. The

ten commandments, for example, were first of all a divine behest, and

only secondarily a series of laws founded on the essential

requirements of human well-being. But as we come nearer to our own

day, the moral quality of situations tends more and more to usurp the

primacy of the old supernatural reference. The limit of such evolution

is the disappearance altogether of the supernatural, the evaluation,

ultimately, of all situations and activities in terms of their

inherent good or bad for the life of humanity and the world.

* * * * *

The old loyalty, in short, was the loyalty of loving children; the new

loyalty is the loyalty of strong-charactered men and women. Has the

time come for moral and spiritual maturity? To some of us there is no

longer an alternative. “When I was a child I spake as a child; I

understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish

things.” In the light of spiritual maturity, the god of magic, the god

of miraculous power, the god of loving protection, the god of

all-seeing care—the Parent God—must give way to the God that is the

very inner ideal life of ourselves, our own deep and abiding

possibilities of being; the God _in us_ that stimulates us to what is

highest in value and power.