THE INNER LIFE
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THE INNER LIFE
BY
RUFUS M. JONES, A.M., LITT.D.
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HAVERFORD COLLEGE
AUTHOR OF “STUDIES IN MYSTICAL RELIGION”
“SPIRITUAL REFORMERS,” ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1917
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1916,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1916.
Reprinted January, 1917.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
INTRODUCTION
There is no inner life that is not also an outer life. To withdraw from
the stress and strain of practical action and from the complication of
problems into the quiet cell of the inner life in order to build its
domain undisturbed is the sure way to lose the inner life. The finest
of all the mystical writers of the fourteenth century—the author of
_Theologia Germanica_—knew this as fully as we of this psychologically
trained generation know it. He intensely desired a rich inner life, but
he saw that to be beautiful within he must live a radiant and effective
life in the world of men and events. “I would fain be,” he says, “to the
eternal God what a man’s hand is to a man”—_i.e._ he seeks, with all the
eagerness of his glowing nature, to be an efficient instrument of God in
the world. In the _practice_ of the presence of God, the presence itself
becomes more sure and indubitable. Religion does not consist of inward
thrills and private enjoyment of God; it does not terminate in beatific
vision. It is rather the joyous business of carrying the Life of God into
the lives of men—of being to the eternal God what a man’s hand is to a
man.
There is no one exclusive “way” either to the supreme realities or to
the loftiest experiences of life. The “way” which we individuals select
and proclaim as the only highway of the soul back to its true home turns
out to be a revelation of our own private selves fully as much as it is
a revelation of a _via sacra_ to the one goal of all human striving.
Life is a very rich and complex affair and it forever floods over and
inundates any feature which we pick out as essential or as pivotal to
its consummation. God so completely overarches all that is and He is so
genuinely the fulfillment of all which appears incomplete and potential
that we cannot conceivably insist that there shall be only one way of
approach from the multiplicity of the life which we know to the infinite
Being whom we seek.
Most persons are strangely prone to use the “principle of parsimony.”
They appear to have a kind of fascination for the dilemma of _either-or_
alternatives. “Faith” or “works” is one of these great historic
alternatives. But this cleavage is too artificial for full-rounded
reality. Each of these “halves” cries for its other, and there cannot be
any great salvation until we rise from the poverty of either half to the
richness of the united whole which includes both “ways.”
So, too, we have had the alternative of “outer” or “inner” way forced
upon us. We are told that the only efficacious way is the way of the
cross, treated as an outer historical transaction; and we have, again,
been told that there is no way except the inner way of direct experience
and inner revelation. There are those who say, with one of George
Chapman’s characters:
“I’ll build all inward—not a light shall ope
The common out-way.
I’ll therefore live in dark; and all my light
Like ancient temples, let in at my top.”
Over against the mystic who glories in the infinite depths of his own
soul, the evangelical, with excessive humility, allows not even a spark
of native grandeur to the soul and denies that the inner way leads to
anything but will-o’-the-wisps. This is a very inept and unnecessary
halving of what should be a whole. It spoils religious life, somewhat as
the execution of Solomon’s proposal would have spoiled for both mothers
the living child that was to be divided. Twenty-five hundred years ago
Heraclitus of Ephesus declared that there is “a way up and a way down and
both are one.” So, too, there is an outer way and an inner way and both
are one. It takes both diverse aspects to express the rich and complete
reality, which we mar and mangle when we dichotomize it and glorify our
amputated half. There is a fine saying of a medieval mystic: “He who can
see the inward in the outward is more spiritual than he who can only see
the inward, in the inward.”
This little book on the “Inner Life” does not assume to deal with the
whole of the religious life. It recognizes that the outer in the long
run is just as essential as the inner. This one inner aspect is selected
for emphasis, without any intention of slighting the importance of the
other side of the shining shield. Men to-day are so overwhelmingly
occupied with objective tasks; they are so busy with the field of outer
action, that it is a peculiarly opportune time to speak of the interior
world where the issues of life are settled and the tissues of destiny
are woven. There will certainly be some readers who will be glad to turn
from accounts of trenches lost or won to spend a little time with the
less noisy but no less mysterious battle line inside the soul, and from
problems of foreign diplomacy to the drama of the inner life.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION v
CHAPTER I. THE INNER WAY 1
Sec. 1. The Momentous Choice 1
Sec. 2. Making a Life 9
Sec. 3. The Spirit of the Beatitudes 14
Sec. 4. The Way of Contagion 23
Sec. 5. The Second Mile 30
CHAPTER II. THE KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 39
Sec. 1. Bags that Wax not Old 39
Sec. 2. Otherism 46
Sec. 3. Scavengers and the Kingdom 50
Sec. 4. “The Beyond is Within” 56
Sec. 5. The Attitude toward the Unseen 61
CHAPTER III. SOME PROPHETS OF THE INNER WAY 70
Sec. 1. The Psalmist’s Way 70
Sec. 2. The New and Living Way 77
Sec. 3. An Apostle of the Inner Way 82
Sec. 4. The Ephesian Gospel 90
CHAPTER IV. THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 97
Sec. 1. Waiting on God 97
Sec. 2. In the Spirit 105
Sec. 3. The Power of Prayer 111
Sec. 4. The Mystery of Goodness 116
Sec. 5. “As One having Authority” 123
Sec. 6. Seeing Him Who is Invisible 133
CHAPTER V. A FUNDAMENTAL SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 138
CHAPTER VI. WHAT DOES RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE TELL US ABOUT GOD 164
THE INNER LIFE
CHAPTER I
THE INNER WAY
I
THE MOMENTOUS CHOICE
Every scrap of writing that sheds any light on the life of Jesus, and
every incident that gives the least detail about His movements or
His teaching are precious to us. One can hardly conceive the joy and
enthusiasm that would burst forth in all lands, if new fragments of
papyrus or of parchment could be unearthed that would add in any measure
to our knowledge of the way this Galilean life was lived “beneath the
Syrian blue.” But it may now probably be taken for granted that the
material will never be forthcoming—and it surely is not now in hand—for
an adequate biography of Him. The lives of Jesus that have been written
in modern times have a certain value, as suggestive revelations of what
the writers thought He ought to have been or ought to have done, but
biographies, in the true sense of the word, they are not. The Evangelists
performed for us an inestimable service, but they did not furnish us the
sort of data necessary for a detailed biography, expressed in clock-time
language.
Our “sources” are much more adequate when we turn our attention from
external events to the inner way which His life reveals, though they
still allow for free play of imagination and for much fluidity of
subjective interpretation. It is possible, however, I believe, to look
through the genuine words that are preserved and to see, with clairvoyant
insight, the inner kingdom of the soul in that Person whose interior life
was the richest of all those who have walked our earth. There are curious
little playthings to be bought in Rome. If one looks through a pin-hole
peep somewhere in one of these tiny toys, one sees to his surprise the
whole mighty structure of St. Peter’s Cathedral, standing out as large
as it looks in reality. Perhaps we can find some pin-hole peeps in the
gospels that in a similar way will let us see the marvelous inner world,
the extraordinary spiritual life, of this Person whose outer biography so
baffles us.
Our first single glimpse of His interior life must be got without the
help of any actual word of His. It is given to us in the gospel accounts
of His discovery of His mission. How long the consciousness of mission
had been gestating we cannot tell. What books He read, if any, are never
named. What ripening influence the days of toil in the carpenter shop may
have had, is unnoted. What dawned upon Him as He meditated in silence is
not reported. What formative ideas may have come from the little groups
of “the quiet ones in the land” can only be guessed at. We are merely
told that He increased in wisdom as He advanced in stature, which is
the only conceivable way that personality can be attained. Suddenly the
moment of clear insight came and He _saw_ what He was in the world for.
It was usual for the great prophets of His people to discover their
mission in some such moment of clarified inward sight. Isaiah saw the
Lord with His train filling the temple, felt his lips cleansed, and heard
the call “who will go?” Ezekiel saw the indescribable living creature
with the hands of a man under the wings of the Spirit and heard himself
called to his feet for his commission. So here, there was a sudden
invading consciousness from beyond. The world with its solid hills
appears only the fragment, which it is, and the World of wider Reality
floods in and reveals itself. The sky seems rent apart, the Spirit, as
though once more brooding over a world in the making, covers Him from
above, and gives inward birth to a conviction of uniqueness of Life and
uniqueness of mission. He feels Himself in union with His Father.[1]
This experience of the invading Life, awakening a consciousness of
unique personal mission, brought with it, as an unavoidable sequence,
the stress and strain of a very real temptation. The inner world of
self-consciousness has strange watershed “divides” that shape the
currents of the life as the mountain ridges of the outer world do the
rivers. No new nativity, no fresh awakening, can come to a soul without
forcing the momentous issue of its further meaning, or without raising
the urgent question, how shall the new insight, the fresh light, the
increased power be wrought into life? The deepest issues turn, not
upon the choice of “things,” but upon the choice of the kind of self
that is to be, and the most decisive dramas are those that are enacted
in the inner world before the footlights of our private theater. The
temptation is described by the Evangelists in such conventional language
and in such popular and pictorial imagery that its immense inner
reality is often missed by the reader. This oriental, pictorial way of
presenting the drama of the soul catches the western mind in the toils of
literalism. The picture is taken for the reality. What we have here in
the temptation, when we go into the heart of the matter, is the momentous
choice of the kind of Person that is to emerge. It is the immemorial
battle between the higher and the lower self within. It was the line of
least resistance to accept popular expectation, to go forth to realize
the dream of the age. A person conscious of divine anointing, fired with
passionate loyalty to the nation’s hopes, gifted with extraordinary power
of moving men to new issues would feel at once that he had only to put
himself forth as the expected Messiah in order to carry the enthusiastic
people with him. Let him but come with the spectacular powers of the
Messiah that was eagerly looked for, the power to turn stones to bread,
to leap from the pinnacle of the temple without injury, to break the
Roman yoke and make Jerusalem once again the city of God’s chosen
people—and success was sure to follow. God’s ancient covenant was an
absolute pledge to the faithful that He would in His own time make bare
His arm and deliver His people. As soon as the anointed one appeared all
the forces of the unseen world would be at his command and his triumph
would be assured.
The appeal of a career like that is no fictitious “temptation.” It is of
a piece with what besets us all. It is out of the very stuff of nature.
At some such crossroad we have all stood—with the issue of our inner
destiny in unstable equilibrium.
Over against it, another “way” is set, another kind of life is dimly
outlined, another type of anointed one is seen to be possible, another
kingdom, totally different from the one of popular expectation, is
descried. This kingdom of His spiritual vision cannot come by miracle
or by power; it can come only through complete adjustment of will to the
will of the Father-God. This anointed one of His higher aspiration will
be no temporal ruler, no political king, no spectacular wonder-worker.
He will rule only by the conquering power of love and goodness. He
will venture everything on sheer faith in the Father’s love and on the
appeal of uncalculating goodness of heart and will. This new kind of
life that draws Him from the line of least resistance is a life of utter
simplicity, which discounts what the world calls “goods,” which draws
upon an unseen environment for its resources and which expands inwardly,
rather than outwardly, after the manner of the green bay tree. The new
“way” that opens to His sight, and that beckons Him from all other ways
of glory, is a way of suffering and sacrifice, a way of the cross. It
offers itself not because self-giving is a better way than an easy, happy
path, but because it is the _only way_ by which love in a world like
ours can reach its goal; it is the only way by which the kingdom of God
can be formed in the lives of men like us.
He came forth from those momentous days of inner struggle with the issue
settled, and with the first step taken in the way of the Kingdom.
II
MAKING A LIFE
Our present-day age has a kind of passion for the study of developing
_processes_. We do not feel quite at home with any subject until we can
work our way back to its origin or origins and then follow it in its
unfoldings, explaining the higher and more complex stages in terms of the
lower and more simple ones.
That method, however, cannot be successfully used to unlock the secret
of the gospels. We do not find beginnings here; we cannot follow genetic
processes; we are unable to discriminate higher and lower stages of
insight. We must launch out at the very start in mid-sea. Whatever words
of Christ one begins with indicate that He has already arrived at an
absolute insight—I mean, that He has found a way of living that is no
longer relatively good, but intrinsically and absolutely good.
It is an inveterate habit with men like us to estimate everything in
terms of relative results. We are pragmatists by the very push of our
immemorial instincts. Our first question, consciously or unconsciously,
is apt to be, what effects will come, if I act so, or so? Will this
course work well? Will it further some issue or some interest? And this
deep-lying pragmatic tendency—this aim at results—appears woven into the
very fiber even of much of the religion of the world.
Sometimes the results sought are near, sometimes they are remote;
sometimes they are sought for this world, sometimes they are sought
for the next world; sometimes the pragmatic aim at results is crudely
and coarsely selfish, sometimes it is refined, or altogether veiled,
but religion has no doubt often enough been an impressive kind of
double-entry bookkeeping, the piling up of credits or of merits which
some day will bring the sure result that is sought.
Just that entire pragmatic attitude Christ has left forever behind. His
inner way, His interior insight, passes on to a new level of life, to a
totally different type of religious aspiration and to another method of
valuation. For Him the beyond is always within. The only good thing is
a life that is intrinsically good; the only blessedness worth talking
about is a kind of blessedness which attaches by a law of inner necessity
to the character of the life itself. It makes no difference what world
one may eventually be in—if only it is still a world of spiritual
issues—goodness, holiness, likeness to God, will still constitute
blessedness as they do in this world.
When once this insight is reached, it affects all the pursuits and all
the valuations of the soul. All “other things” at once become secondary,
and “entering into life,” “seeking life,” “finding life,” becomes the
primary thing. “Making a life” overtops in importance even “making a
living”—the life is more than meat, more than raiment, more than gaining
the whole world. It is better to enter into life halt and maimed—with
right hand cut off and eye plucked out—than bend all one’s energies
to preserve the body whole and yet to miss _life_. The way to life is
strait, the entering gate is narrow. One cannot _enter_ without facing
the stern necessity of focusing the vision on the central purpose,
without getting “a single eye,” without letting go _many things_ for the
sake of _one thing_.
Sacrifice, surrender, negation, are inherently involved in any great
onward-marching life. They go with any choice that can be made of a rich
and intense life. It is impossible to find without losing, to get without
giving, to live without dying. But sacrifice, surrender, negation, are
never for their own sake; they are never ends in themselves. They are
involved in life itself.
One great spiritual law comes to light and becomes operative, as soon as
the interior insight is won, as soon as the inner way is found: The law
that _the soul can have what it wants_. This law of the interior life,
of the inner way, Christ affirms again and again in varying phrase. The
inner attitude, the settled trend of desire, the persistent swing of the
will, are the very things that make life. The person who cherishes hate
in his soul forms a disposition of hatred and must live in the atmosphere
which that spirit forms. The person who longs for deeds that are wrong,
and allows desire to play with free scope is inwardly as though he did
the deed. He is what he wants to be. And so, too, on the other hand,
the rightly fashioned will is its own reward and has its own peculiar
blessedness. The person who hungers and thirsts for goodness will get
what he wants. He who seeks, with undivided aspiration, will always
find. He who knocks with persistent desire for the gates of life to open
will see them swing apart for him to go through to his goal. He who asks,
with the ground swell of his whole inner being, for the things which
minister to life and feed its deepest roots, will get what he asks for.
The very pity of the Pharisee’s way of life is that he has his reward—he
gets what he is seeking. The glory of the other way is the glory of the
imperfect—the glory of living toward the flying goal of likeness to the
Father in heaven.
III
THE SPIRIT OF THE BEATITUDES
In putting the emphasis for the moment on the inner way of religion, we
must be very careful not to encourage the heresy of treating religion
as a withdrawal from the world, or as a retreat from the press and
strain of the practical issues and problems of the social order. That
is the road to spiritual disaster, not to spiritual power. Christ gives
no encouragement to the view that the spiritual ideal—the Kingdom of
God—can ever be achieved apart from the conquest of the whole of life or
without the victory that overcomes the world. Religion can no more be cut
apart from the intellectual currents, or from the moral undertakings,
or from the social tasks of an age, than any other form of life can be
isolated from its native environment. To desert this world, which presses
close around us, for the sake of some remote world of our dreams, is to
neglect our one chance to get a real religion.
But at the same time the only possible way to realize a kingdom of God
in this world, or in any other world, is to begin by getting an inner
spirit, the spirit of the Kingdom, formed within the lives of the few
or many who are to be the “seed” of it. The “Beatitudes” furnish one of
these extraordinary pin-hole peeps, of which I spoke in a former section,
through which this whole inner world can be seen. Here, in a few lines,
loaded with insight, the seed-spirit of the Kingdom comes full into
sight. We are given no new code, no new set of rules, no legal system at
all. It is the proclamation of a new spirit, a new way of living, a new
type of person. To have a world of persons of this type, to have this
spirit prevail, would mean the actual presence of the Kingdom of God,
because this spirit would produce not only a new inner world, but a new
outer world as well.
The first thing to note about the _blessedness_ proclaimed in the
beatitudes is that it is not a prize held out or promised as a final
reward for a certain kind of conduct; it attaches by the inherent nature
of things to a type of life, as light attaches to a luminous body, as
motion attaches to a spinning top, as gravitation attaches to every
particle of matter. To be this type of person is to be living the happy,
blessed life, whatever the outward conditions may be. And the next thing
to note is that this type of life carries in itself a principle of
advance. One reason why it is a blessed type of life is that it cannot
be arrested, it cannot be static. The beatitude lies not in attainment,
not in the arrival at a goal, but in the _way_, in the spirit, in the
search, in the march.
I suspect that the nature of “the happy life” of the beatitudes can
be adequately grasped only when it is seen in contrast to that of the
Pharisee who is obviously in the background as a foil to bring out the
portrait of the new type. The pity of the Pharisee’s aim was that it
could be reached—he gets his reward. He has a definite limit in view—the
keeping of a fixed law. Beyond this there are no worlds to conquer. Once
the near finite goal is touched there is nothing to pursue. The immediate
effect of this achievement is conceit and self-satisfaction. The trail of
calculation and barter lies over all his righteousness. There is in his
mind an equation between goodness and prosperity, between righteousness
and success: “If thou hast made the most High thy habitation there shall
no evil befall thee; neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.”
The person who has loss or trouble or suffering must have been an overt
or a secret sinner, as the question about the blind man indicates.
The goodness portrayed in the “beatitudes” is different from this by
the width of the sky. Christ does not call the _righteous person_
the happy man. He does not pronounce the attainment of righteousness
blessed, because a “righteousness” that gets attained is always external
and conventional; it is a kind that has definable, quantitative
limits—“how many times must I forgive my brother?” “Who is my neighbor?”
The beatitude attaches rather to hunger and thirst for goodness. The
aspiration, and not the attainment, is singled out for blessing. In the
popular estimate, happiness consists in getting desires satisfied. For
Christ the real concern is to get new and greater desires—desires for
infinite things. The reach must always exceed the grasp. The heart must
forever be throbbing for an attainment that lies beyond any present
consummation. It is the “glory of going on,” the joy of discovering unwon
territory beyond the margin of each, spiritual conquest.
Poverty of spirit—another beatitude-trait—is bound up with hunger for
goodness as the convex side of a curve is bound up with the concave
side. They are different aspects of the same attitude. The poor in
spirit are by no means poor-spirited. They are persons who see so much
to be, so much to do, such limitless reaches to life and goodness that
they are profoundly conscious of their insufficiency and incompleteness.
Self-satisfaction and pride of spiritual achievement are washed clean
out of their nature. They are open-hearted, open-windowed to all truth,
possessed of an abiding disposition to receive, impressed with a sense
of inner need and of childlike dependence. Just that attitude is its own
sure reward. By an unescapable spiritual gravitation the best things in
the universe belong to open-hearted, open-windowed souls. Again, in the
beatitude on the mourner, He reverses the Pharisaic and popular judgment.
Losses and crosses, pains and burdens, heartaches and bereavements,
empty chairs and darkened windows, are the antipodes of our desires and
last of all things to be expected in the list of beatitudes. They were
then, and still often are, counted as visitations of divine disapproval.
Christ rejects the superficial way of measuring the success of a life
by the smoothness of its road or by its freedom from trial, and He will
not allow the false view to stand; namely, that success is the reward
of piety, and trouble the return for lack of righteousness. There is
no way to depth of life, to richness of spirit, by shun-pikes that go
around hard experiences. The very discovery of the nearness of God, of
the sustaining power of His love, of the sufficiency of His grace, has
come to men in all ages through pain, and suffering and loss. We always
go for comfort to those who have passed through deeps of life and we may
well trust Christ when He tells us that it is not the lotus-eater but the
sufferer who is in the way of blessing and is forming the spirit of the
Kingdom.
Meekness and mercy and peace-making are high among the qualities that
characterize the inner spirit of the kingdom. Patience, endurance,
steadfastness, confidence in the eternal nature of things, determination
to win by the slow method that is right rather than by the quick and
strenuous method that is wrong are other ways of naming meekness.
Mercy is tenderness of heart, ability to put oneself in another’s
place, confidence in the power of love and gentleness, the practice of
forgiveness and the joyous bestowal of sympathy. Peace-making is the
divine business of drawing men together into unity of spirit and purpose,
teaching them to live the love-way, and forming in the very warp and
woof of human society the spirit of altruism and loyalty to the higher
interests of the group. These traits belong to the inmost nature of
God and of course those who have them are blessed, and it is equally
clear that the Kingdom is theirs. There is furthermore, in this happy
way of life, a condition of heart to which the vision of God inherently
attaches. He is no longer argued about and speculated upon. He is seen
and felt. He becomes as sure as the sky above us or our own pulse beat
within us. We spoil our vision with selfishness, we cloud it with
prejudices, we blur it with impure aims. We cast our own shadow across
our field of view and make a dark eclipse. It is not better spectacles
we need. It is a pure, clean, sincere, loving, forgiving, passionately
devoted heart. God who is love can be _seen_, can be found, only by a
heart that intensely loves and that hates everything that hinders love.
IV
THE WAY OF CONTAGION
We have seen that religion cannot be sundered from the intellectual
currents, or from the moral undertakings, or from the social tasks of the
world. It cannot be _merely_ inward. It can preserve its inward power
only as it lives in actual correspondence with its whole environment and
becomes also outward. But the primary thing for Christ, we saw, was the
attainment of an inner spirit, the seed-spirit of the Kingdom, the spirit
of the beatitudes—the attainment of a type of life to which blessedness
inherently attaches.
The question at once arises, how shall this inner spirit be spread and
propagated? How is religion of the inner type to grow and expand? There
are two characteristic ways of propagating religious ideas, of carrying
spiritual discoveries into the life of the world. One way is the way of
_organization_; the other way is the way of _contagion_. The way of
organization, which is as old as human history, is too familiar to need
any description. Our age has almost unlimited faith in it. If we wish to
carry a live idea into action, we _organize_. We select officials. We
make “motions.” We pass resolutions. We appoint committees or boards or
commissions. We hold endless conferences. We issue propaganda material.
We have street processions. We use placards and billboards. We found
institutions, and devise machinery. We have collisions between “pros”
and “antis” and stir up enthusiasm and passion for our “cause.” The
Christian Church is probably the most impressive instance of organization
in the entire history of man’s undertakings. It has become, in its
historical development, almost infinitely complex, with organizations
within organizations and suborganizations within suborganizations. It has
employed every known expedient, even the sword, for the advancement of
its “cause,” it has created a perfect maze of institutions and it has
originated a vast variety of educational methods for carrying forward its
truth.
But great as has been the historical emphasis on organization, it
nevertheless occupies a very slender place in the consciousness of
Christ. There is no clear indication that He appointed any officials,
or organized any society, or founded any institution. There are two
“sayings” in Matthew which use the word “Church,” but they almost
certainly bear the mark and coloring of a later time, when the Church
had already come into existence and had formed its practices and its
traditions. And even though the great “saying” at Cæsarea Philippi
were accepted as the actual words of Jesus, it is still quite possible
to see in it the announcement of a spiritual fellowship, spreading by
inspiration and contagion, rather than the founding of an official
institution. It is, no doubt, fortunate on the whole that the Church
was organized, and that the great _idea_ found a visible body through
which to express itself, though nobody can fail to see that the Church,
while meaning to propagate the gospel, has always profoundly modified and
transformed it, and that it has brought into play a great many tendencies
foreign to the original gospel.
Christ’s way of propagating the truth—the way that inherently fits
the inner life and spirit of the gospel of the Kingdom—was the way of
personal _contagion_. Instead of founding an institution, or organizing
an official society, or forming a system, or creating external machinery,
He counted almost wholly upon the spontaneous and dynamic influence of
life upon life, of personality upon personality. He would produce a
new world, a new social order, through the contagious and transmissive
character of personal goodness. He practically ignored, or positively
rejected, the method of _restraint_, and trusted absolutely to the
conquering power of loyalty and consecration. It was His faith that,
if you get into the world anywhere a _seed_ of the Kingdom, a nucleus
of persons who exhibit the blessed life, who are dedicated to expanding
goodness, who rely implicitly on love and sympathy, who try in meek
patience the slow method that is right, who still feel the clasping
hands of love even when they go through pain and trial and loss, this
seed-spirit will spread, this nucleus will enlarge and create a society.
If the new spirit of passionate love, and of uncalculating goodness gets
formed in one person, by a silent alchemy a group of persons will soon
become permeated and charged with the same spirit, new conditions will be
formed, and in time children will be born into a new social environment
and will suck in new ideals with their mother’s milk.
Persons of the blessed life, Christ says, are the saving _salt_ of the
earth. They carry their wholesome savor into everything they touch. They
do not try to save themselves. They are ready like salt to dissolve and
disappear, but, the more they give themselves away, the more antiseptic
and preservative they become to the society in which they live. They keep
the old world from spoiling and corrupting not by attack and restraint,
not by excision and amputation, but by pouring the preservative savor
of their lives of goodness into all the channels of the world. This
preservative and saving influence on society depends, however, entirely
on the continuance of the inner quality of life and it will be certain to
cease if ever the salt lose its savor, _i.e._ if the _soul_ of religion
wanes or dies away and only the outer form of it remains.
But such lives are more than antiseptic and preservative; they are
kindling and illuminative. They become “candles of the Lord.” Candles
emit their light and kindle other candles by burning themselves up and
transmitting their flame. When a life is set on fire, and is radiant with
self-consuming love, it will invariably set other lives on fire. Such a
person may teach many valuable ideas, he may organize many movements,
he may attack many evil customs, but the best thing he will ever do will
be to fuse and kindle other souls with the fire of his passion. His own
burning, shining life is always his supreme service.
“The greatest legacy the hero leaves his race
Is—to have been a hero.”
Such a person will be eager to decrease that his kindling power may
increase. He will not care to save himself, or to reap a reward for his
service. He may not even know that he is shining, like the early saint
who “wist not that his face did shine.” But for all that, men will see
the way by his light and will catch the glory of living because he
exhibits it. He can no more be hid than can a hill-top city, or the
headlight of a locomotive, or the newly risen sun.
That is Christ’s way of spreading the life of the Kingdom, that is His
method of propagating the inner spirit, and of producing a society of
blessed people.
V
THE SECOND MILE
It may seem to some incongruous to be writing about an inner way of life
in these days when _action_ is felt by so many to be the only reality and
when in every direction outside there is dire human need to be met.
“Leave, then, your wonted prattle,
The oaten reed forbear;
For I hear a sound of battle,
And trumpets rend the air.”
But more than ever is it necessary for us to center down to eternal
principles of life and action, to attain and maintain the right inner
spirit, and to _see_ what in its faith and essence Christianity really
means. Precisely now when the Sermon on the Mount seems least to be the
program of action and the map of life, is it a suitable time for us to
endeavor to discover what Christ’s way means, by looking through the
literal phrases in clairvoyant fashion to the spirit treasured and
embalmed within the wonderful words?
There is one phrase which seems to me to be, in a rare and peculiar
degree, the key to the entire gospel—I mean the invitation to go “the
second mile”: “If any man compel you to go a mile, go two miles.” It is
always dangerous, I know, to fly away from the literal significance of
words and to indulge in far-fetched “spiritual” interpretations. But it
is even more dangerous, perhaps, to read words of oriental imagery and
paradox as though they were the plain prose speech of the occidental
mind, and to be taken only at their face value.
There will probably always be Tolstoys—great or small—who will make the
difficult, and never very successful, experiment of taking this and the
other “commands” of the Sermon on the Mount in a literal and legalistic
sense, but to do so is almost certainly to be “slow of heart,” and
to miss Christ’s meaning. Whatever else may be true or false in our
interpretations of the teachings of Christ, it may always be taken for
certain that He did not inaugurate a religion of the legalistic type,
consisting of commands and exact directions, to be literally followed
and obeyed as a way to secure merit and reward. To go “the second mile,”
then, is an attitude and character of spirit rather than a mere rule and
formula for the legs.
Christ always shows a very slender appreciation of any act of religion or
of ethics which does not reach beyond the stage of _compulsion_. What is
done because it _must_ be done; because the law requires it, or because
society expects it, or because convention prescribes it, or because the
doer of it is afraid of consequences if he omits it, may, of course, be
rightly done and meritoriously done, but an act on that level is not yet
quite in the region where for Christ the highest moral and religious
acts have their spring. The typical Pharisee was an appalling instance
of the inadequacy of “the first-mile” kind of religion and ethics. He
plodded his hard mile, and “did all the things required” of him. In the
region of commands, or “touching the law” he was “blameless.” But there
was no spontaneity in his religion, no free initiative, no enthusiastic
passion, no joyous abandon, no gratuitous and uncalculating acts. He did
things enough, but he did them because he _had_ to do them, not because
some mighty love possessed him and flooded him and inspired him to go not
only the expected mile, but to go on without any calculation out beyond
milestones altogether. Just here appears the new inner way of Christ’s
religion. The legalist, like the rich young man, “does all the things
that are commanded in the law,” but still painfully “lacks” something.
To get into Christ’s way, to “follow” in any real sense, he must cut his
cables and swing out from the moorings where he is _tied_. He must catch
such a passion of love that giving either of his money or of himself,
shall no longer be for him an imposed duty but rather a joy of spirit.
The parable of the “great surprise” is another illustration, a glorious
illustration, of the spirit of the “second mile.” The “blessed ones” in
the picture (which is an unveiling of actual everyday life in its eternal
meaning rather than a portraiture of the day of judgment) find themselves
at home with God, drawn into His presence, crowned with His approval, and
sealed with His fellowship. They are surprised. They had not been adding
up their merits or calculating their chances of winning heaven. They are
beautifully artless and naïve: “When saw we Thee hungry and fed Thee?”
They have been doing deeds of love, saying kind words, relieving human
need, banishing human loneliness, making life easier and more joyous,
because they had caught a spirit of love and tenderness, and, therefore,
“could not do otherwise,” and now they suddenly discover that those whom
they helped and rescued and served were bound up in one inseparable life
with God himself, so that what was done to them was done to Him, and they
find that _their_ spontaneous and uncalculating love was one in essence
and substance with the love of God and that they are eternally at home
with Him.
The tender, immortal stories of the woman who broke her alabaster vase of
precious nard and “filled all the house with the odor,” and of the woman
(perhaps the same one) who had been a sinner and who from her passion of
love for her great forgiveness wet Christ’s feet with her tears, even
before she could open her cruse of ointment, are the finest possible
illustrations of the spirit of “the second mile.” They picture, in
subtly suggestive imagery, the immense contrast between the spontaneous,
uncalculating act of one who “loves much” and does with grace what love
prompts; and acts, on the other hand, like that of Simon the pharisaic
host, who offers Jesus a purely conventional and grudging hospitality,
or like that of the disciples who sit indeed at the table with Jesus but
come to it absorbed with the burning question, “who among us is to be
first and greatest,” not only at the table but “in the Kingdom!”
What grace and unexpected love come into action in the simple deed of the
“Samaritan” who, from nobility of nature, does what official Priest and
Levite leave undone! The hated foreigner, spit at and stoned as he walked
the roads of Judea, under no obligation to be kind or serviceable, is the
real “neighbor,” the bearer of balm and healing, the dispenser of love
and sympathy. He may have no ordination to the priesthood, but he finely
exhibits the attitude of grace which belongs in the religion of “the
second mile.”
But we do not reach the full significance of “the second mile” until we
see that it is something more than the highest level of human grace.
What shines through the gospels everywhere, like a new-risen sun, is
the revelation that _this_—this grace of the second mile—is the supreme
trait and character-nature of God as well. How surprising and unexpected
is that extraordinary unveiling of the divine nature in the story of
the prodigal boy! It is wonderful enough that one who has wasted his
substance and squandered his own very life should still be able in his
squalor and misery to come to himself and want to go home; but the fact
which radiates this sublime story like a glory is the uncalculating,
ungrudging, unlimited love of the Father, which remains unchanged by the
boy’s blunder, which has never failed in the period of his absence, and
which bursts out in the cry of joy: “This my son was dead and is alive
again, he was lost and is found.”
It is, and always has been, the very center of our Christian faith that
the real nature and character of God come full into view in Christ,
that God is in mind and heart and will revealed in the Person whom we
call Christ. “The grace,” then, “of the Lord Jesus Christ,” of which
we are reminded in that great word of apostolic benediction, is a true
manifestation of the deepest nature and character of God Himself. The
Cross is not an artificial scheme. The Cross is the eternal grace, the
spontaneous, uncalculating love of God made visible and vocal in our
temporal world. It is the apotheosis of the spirit of the second mile.