THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE
I
WAITING ON GOD
As worship, taken in its highest sense and widest scope, is man’s
loftiest undertaking, we cannot too often return to the perennial
questions: What is worship? Why do we worship? How do we best perform
this supreme human function? Worship is too great an experience to
be defined in any sharp or rigid or exclusive fashion. The history
of religion through the ages reveals the fact that there have been
multitudinous ways of worshiping God, all of them yielding real returns
of life and joy and power to large groups of men. At its best and truest,
however, worship seems to me to be _direct, vital, joyous, personal
experience and practice of the presence of God_.
The very fact that such a mighty experience as this is possible means
that there is some inner meeting place between the soul and God; in other
words, that the divine and human, God and man, are not wholly sundered.
In an earlier time God was conceived as remote and transcendent. He
dwelt in the citadel of the sky, was worshiped with ascending incense
and communicated His will to beings beneath through celestial messengers
or by mysterious oracles. We have now more ground than ever before
for conceiving God as transcendent; that is, as above and beyond any
revelation of Himself, and as more than any finite experience can
apprehend. But at the same time, our experience and our ever-growing
knowledge of the outer and inner universe confirm our faith that God is
also immanent, a real presence, a spiritual reality, immediately to be
felt and known, a vital, life-giving environment of the soul. He is a
Being who can pour His life and energy into human souls, even as the sun
can flood the world with light and resident forces, or as the sea can
send its refreshing tides into all the bays and inlets of the coast, or
as the atmosphere can pour its life-giving supplies into the fountains
of the blood in the meeting place of the lungs; or, better still, as the
mother fuses her spirit into the spirit of her responsive child, and lays
her mind on him until he believes in her belief.
It will be impossible for some of us ever to lose our faith in, our
certainty of, this vital presence which overarches our inner lives as
surely as the sky does our outer lives. The more we know of the great
unveiling of God in Christ, the more we see that He is a Being who can
be thus revealed in a personal life that is parallel in will with Him
and perfectly responsive in heart and mind to the spiritual presence. We
can use as our own the inscription on the wall of the ancient temple in
Egypt. On one of the walls a priest of the old religion had written for
his divinity: “I am He who was and is and ever shall be, and my veil hath
no man lifted.” On the opposite wall, some one who had found his way into
the later, richer faith, wrote this inscription: “Veil after veil have we
lifted and ever the Face is more wonderful!”
It must be held, I think, as Emerson so well puts it, that there is “no
bar or wall in the soul” separating God and man. We lie open on one side
of our nature to God, who is the Oversoul of our souls, the Overmind of
our minds, the Overperson of our personal selves. There are deeps in our
consciousness which no private plumb line of our own can sound; there are
heights in our moral conscience which no ladder of our human intelligence
can scale; there are spiritual hungers, longings, yearnings, passions,
which find no explanation in terms of our physical inheritance or of our
outside world. We touch upon the coasts of a deeper universe, not yet
explored or mapped, but no less real and certain than this one in which
our mortal senses are at home. We cannot explain our normal selves or
account for the best things we know—or even for our condemnation of our
poorer, lower self—without an appeal to and acknowledgment of a divine
Guest and Companion who is the real presence of our central being. How
shall we best come into conscious fellowship with God and turn this
environing presence into a positive source of inner power, and of energy
for the practical tasks and duties of daily life?
It is never easy to tell in plain words what prepares the soul for
intercourse with God; what it is that produces the consciousness of
divine tides, the joyous certainty that our central life is being flooded
and bathed by celestial currents. No person ever quite understands how
his tongue utters its loftiest words, how his pen writes its noblest
phrases, how his clearest insights came to him, how his most heroic
deeds got done, or how the finest strands of his character were woven.
Here is a mystery which we never quite uncover—a background which we
never wholly explore lies along the fringes of the most illumined part of
our lives. This mystery surrounds all the supreme acts of religion. They
cannot be _reduced_ to a cold and naked rational analysis. The intellect
possesses no master key which unlocks all the secrets of the soul.
We can say, however, that purity of heart is one of the most essential
preconditions for this high-tide experience of worship. That means, of
course, much more than absence of moral impurity, freedom from soilure
and stain of willful sins. It means, besides, a cleansing away of
prejudice and harsh judgment. It means sincerity of soul, a believing,
trusting, loving spirit. It means intensity of desire for God, singleness
of purpose, integrity of heart. The flabby nature, the duplex will, the
judging spirit, will hardly succeed in worshiping God in any great or
transforming way.
Silence is, again, a very important condition for the great inner action
which we call worship. So long as we are content to speak our own
_patois_, to live in the din of our narrow, private affairs, and to tune
our minds to stock broker’s tickers, we shall not arrive at the lofty
goal of the soul’s quest. We shall hear the noises of our outer universe
and nothing more. When we learn how to center down into the stillness and
quiet, to listen with our souls for the whisperings of Life and Truth,
to bring all our inner powers into parallelism with the set of divine
currents, we shall hear tidings from the inner world at the heart and
center of which is God.
But by far the most influential condition for effective worship is
group-silence—the waiting, seeking, expectant attitude permeating and
penetrating a gathered company of persons. We hardly know in what the
group-influence consists, or why the presence of others heightens the
sensitive, responsive quality in each soul, but there can be no doubt
of the fact. There is some subtle telepathy that comes into play in the
living silence of a congregation which makes every earnest seeker more
quick to feel the presence of God, more acute of inner ear, more tender
of heart to feel the bubbling of the springs of life than any one of them
would be in isolation. Somehow we are able to “lend our minds out,” as
Browning puts it, or at least to contribute toward the formation of an
atmosphere that favors communion and coöperation with God.
If this is so, if each assists all and all in turn assist each, our
responsibilities in meetings for worship are very real and very great and
we must try to realize that there is a form of ministry which is dynamic
even when the lips are sealed.
II
IN THE SPIRIT
There has surely been no lack of discussion on the Trinity during the
centuries of Christian history! But in all the welter and turmoil of
words there has been surprisingly little said about the Spirit. The
nature of the Father and the Son has always been the central theme, and
whatever is said of the Spirit is vague and brief. The Creeds are very
precise in their accounts of God the Father and of Christ the Son, but of
the Spirit, they merely say without explanation or expansion: “I believe
in the Holy Spirit.”
The mystics and the heretics have generally had more to say of the
Spirit. They have almost always claimed for themselves direct and inward
guidance; they have insisted that God is near at hand, a presence to
be felt, and they have endeavored to bring in a “dispensation” of the
religion of the Spirit. But they, too, have contented themselves with
vague and hazy accounts of the nature and operation of the Spirit. It
has largely remained a subject of mystery, a kind of “fringe” with no
definite idea corresponding to the word.
One reason for this haze and vagueness is due to the fact that the
Spirit has generally been supposed to act suddenly, miraculously, and
“as He lists,” so that no law or principle or method of His operation
can be discovered. He has been conceived as working upon or through the
individual in such a way that the individual is merely an “instrument,”
receiving and transmitting what comes entirely from “beyond” himself.
Consequently to be “in the Spirit” has meant to be “out of oneself,”
_i.e._ to be a channel for something that has had no origin in, and no
assistance from, our own personal consciousness. As Philo, the famous
Alexandrian teacher of the first century, states this view: “Ideas in an
invisible manner are suddenly showered upon me and implanted in me by an
inspiration from on high.”
There is no doubt that in some cases in all ages men and women have had
experiences like that of Philo’s. But they are by no means universal;
they are extremely rare and unusual. God does sometimes “give to His
beloved in sleep” and He does apparently sometimes open the windows of
the soul by sudden inrushes of light and power. It is, however, a grave
mistake to limit the sphere and operation of the divine Spirit to these
sudden, unusual, miraculous incursions. It is precisely that mistake—made
by so many spiritual persons—that has kept Christians in general from
realizing the immense importance of the work of the Spirit in everyday
religious life. The mistake is, of course, due to our persistent tendency
to separate the divine from the human as two independent “realities,” and
to treat the divine as something “away,” “above,” and “beyond.”
St. Paul, in spite of all his rabbinical training and the dualisms
of his age, is still the supreme exponent of the genuine, as opposed
to the false, idea of the Spirit. Whether the sermon on the Areopagus
as given in Acts is an exact report of an actual speech, or not, the
words, “in Him we live and move and are,” express very well St. Paul’s
mature conception of the all-pervasive immanence of God, though they
by no means indicate the extraordinary richness and boldness of his
thought. He identifies Christ and the Spirit—“the Lord is the Spirit.”[2]
The resurrected and glorified Christ, he holds, relives, reincarnates
Himself, in Christian believers. He becomes the spirit and life of their
lives. He makes through them a new body for Himself, a new kind of
revelation of Himself. They themselves are “letters of Jesus Christ,”
written by the Spirit. He is no longer limited to one locality of the
world or to one epoch of time. He is “present” wherever two or three
believers meet in loyalty to Him. He is revealed wherever any of His
faithful followers are working in love and devotion to extend the sway of
His Kingdom. The Church, which for St. Paul means always the fellowship
of believers, living in and through the Spirit, is “a growing habitation
of God.”
The “sign” of the Spirit’s presence is, however, no sudden miraculous
bestowal like an unknown tongue or an extraordinary gift of healing. It
is just a normal thing like the manifestation of love. It is proved by
the increase of fellowship, the growth of group-spirit, the spread of
community-loyalty. When love has come, the Spirit is there, and when
love comes, those who are in its spirit suffer long and are kind; they
envy not; they are not provoked; they do not exalt mistakes; they bear
all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. Love
constructs, because it is the inherent evidence of the Spirit, living,
working, operating in the persons who love. Through them the incarnation
of God is continued in the world, the Spirit of Christ finds its organ
of expression and life, and the Kingdom of God comes on earth as it
is in heaven. This “body,” this Church, this community-group of loyal
believers, is “the completion of Him who through all and in all is being
fulfilled.”[3]
If this Pauline idea of the Spirit is the true idea—and I believe it
is—then we are to look for the divine presence, the divine guidance,
the divine inspiration, not so much in sudden extraordinary inrushes
and miraculous bestowals, as in the processes which transform our
stubborn nature, which make us loyal and loving, which bind us into
fellowship with others, which form in us community-spirit and sympathetic
coöperation, and which make us efficient organs of the Christ-life and of
the growing Kingdom of God.
III
THE POWER OF PRAYER
It seems to me very clear that there is a native, elemental homing
instinct in our souls which turns us to God as naturally as the flower
turns to the sun. Apparently everybody in intense moments of human need
reaches out for some great source of life and help beyond himself. That
is one reason why we can pray and do pray, however conditions alter.
It is further clear that persons who pray in living faith, in some way
unlock reservoirs of energy and release great sources of power within
their interior depths. There is an experimental energy in prayer as
certainly as there is a force of gravitation or of electricity. In a
recent investigation of the value of prayer, nearly seventy per cent of
the persons questioned declared that they felt the presence of a higher
power while in the act of praying. As one of these personal testimonies
puts it: prayer makes it possible to carry heavy burdens with serenity;
it produces an atmosphere of spirit which triumphs over difficulties.
It certainly is true that a door opens into a larger life and a new
dimension when the soul flings itself out in real prayer, and incomes of
power are experienced which heighten all capacities and which enable the
recipient to withstand temptation, endure trial, and conquer obstacles.
But prayer has always meant vastly more than that to the saints of past
ages. It was assuredly to them a homing instinct and it was the occasion
of refreshed and quickened life, but, more than that, it meant to them
a time of intimate personal intercourse and fellowship with a divine
Companion. It was two-sided, and not a solitary and one-sided heightening
of energy and of functions. Nor was that all. To the great host of
spiritual and triumphant souls who are behind us prayer was an _effective
and operative power_. It accomplished results and wrought effects beyond
the range of the inner life of the person who was praying. It was a way
of setting vast spiritual currents into circulation which worked mightily
through the world and upon the lives of men. It was believed to be an
operation of grace by which the fervent human will could influence the
course of divine action in the secret channels of the universe.
Is this two-sided and objective view of prayer, as real intercourse and
as effective power, still tenable? Can men who accept the conclusions of
science still pray in living faith and with real expectation of results?
I see no ground against an affirmative answer. Science has furnished
no evidence which compels us to give up believing in the reality of
a personal conscious self which has a certain area of power over its
own acts and its own destiny, and which is capable of intercourse,
fellowship, friendship, and love with other personal selves. Science has
discovered no method of describing this spiritual reality, which we
call a self, nor can it explain what its ultimate nature is, or how it
creatively acts and reacts in love and fellowship toward other beings
like itself. This lies beyond the sphere and purview of science.
Science, again, has furnished no evidence whatever against the reality of
a great spiritual universe, at the heart and center of which is a living,
loving Person who is capable of intercourse and fellowship and friendship
and love with finite spirits like us. That is also a field into which
science has no _entrée_; it is a matter which none of her conclusions
touch. Her business is to tell how natural phenomena act and what their
unvarying laws are. She has nothing to say and can have nothing to say
about the reality of a divine Person in a sphere within or above or
beyond the phenomenal realm, _i.e._ the realm where things appear in the
describable terms of space and time and causality.
Real and convincing intimations have broken into our world that there
actually is a spiritual universe and a divine Person at the heart and
center of it who is in living and personal correspondence with us. This
is the most solid substance, the very warp and woof, of Christ’s entire
revelation. The universe is not a mere play of forces, nor limited to
things we see and touch and measure. Above, beyond, within, or rather in
a way transcending all words of space, there is a Father-God who is Love
and Life and Light and Spirit, and who is as open of access to us as the
lungs to the air. Nothing in our world of space disproves the truth of
Christ’s report. Our hearts tell us that it might be true, that it ought
to be true, that it is true. And if it is true, prayer, in all the senses
in which I have used it, may still be real and still be operative.
There is no doubt a region where events occur under the play of
describable forces, where consequent follows antecedents and where
law and causality appear rigid and unvarying. In that narrow, limited
realm of space particles we shall perhaps not expect interruptions or
interferences. We shall rather learn how to adjust to what is there, and
to respect it as the highest will of the deepest nature and wisdom of
things. But in the realm of personal relationships, in all that touches
the hidden springs of life, in the stress and strain of human strivings,
in the interconnections of man with man, and group with group, in the
vital matters by which we live or die, in the weaving of personal and
national issues and destinies, we may well throw ourselves unperplexed on
God, and believe implicitly that what we pray for affects the heart of
God and influences the course and current of this Deeper Life that makes
the world.
IV
THE MYSTERY OF GOODNESS
We generally use the word “mystery” to indicate the dark, baffling,
and forbidding aspects of our life-experience. The things which spoil
our peace and mar our harmonies and break our unions are for us
characteristically _mysteries_. Pain, suffering, and death are the most
ancient of mysteries, which philosophers and poets have always been
striving to solve and unravel. Evil in all its complicated forms and sin
in all its hideous varieties constitute another group of these dark and
forbidding mysteries, about which the race has forever speculated. The
problem of evil has been the prolific source both of mythological stories
and of systems of philosophy.
Every war that has swept the world, from that of Chedorlaomer to that
of Europe to-day, has driven this mystery of evil into the foreground
of consciousness, wherever the dark trail of ruin and devastation and
myriad woe has lain, or lies, across the lives and hearts of men. Now,
as always, burning homes, ruined business, masses of slain, maimed
bodies, the welter of animal instincts, the suffering of women and
little children, and the hates enflamed between races form the greatest
summation of baffling evils that man has known.
But it is an interesting fact that the mysteries referred to by the
greatest prophets of the soul are not of this dark and baffling type.
They are mysteries of light rather than mysteries of darkness. Christ
speaks of “the mystery of the Kingdom of God.” Saint Paul finds the
central mystery to be an incarnational revelation of a suffering, loving
God, who re-lives His life in us, and the author of the Epistle to
Timothy announces “the great mystery of _godliness_.”[4] Love is put
above all mysteries; the gospel of grace is more “unsearchable” than
any suffering of this present time, and the real mystery is to be found
rather in resurrection than in death: “Behold I show you a mystery. We
shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed and the dead shall be
raised.”
Science has confirmed this emphasis of the spiritual prophets. We come
back from the greatest books of the present time with the same conclusion
as this of the New Testament that the prime mysteries of the world are
mysteries of goodness and not of evil; of light and not of darkness.
We can pretty easily understand how there should be “evil” in a world
that has evolved under the two great biological conditions: (1) Every
being that survives wins out because he is more physically fit than his
neighbors in the struggle for existence, and (2) there is a tendency for
all inherited traits to persist in offspring. In order to have “nature”
at all, there must be a heavy tinge of redness in tooth and claw. The
primitive passions must be strong in order to insure any beings that can
survive. And if there is to be inheritance of parental traits, then the
tendencies of bygone ages are bound to persist on, even into a world of
more highly evolved beings, and there will be inherited “relics” of
fears, of appetites, of impulses, of instincts, and of desires, as there
are inherited “relics” in the physical structure, and men will continue
to do things which would better suit the animal level. And, finally, if
the world is to be made by evolving processes, there will of necessity
be an overlapping of “high” and “low.” The world cannot _go on_ without
carrying its past along with the advancing line, so that in the light of
the new and better that comes, the old and out-passed seems “evil” and
“bad.”
We can see plainly enough where the drive of selfishness came from,
where the passionate fears and angers and hates that mar our world
got into the system. What is not so clear and plain is how we came to
be possessed of a driving hunger for _goodness_, how we ever got a
bent for self-sacrifice, how we derived our disposition for love, how
we discovered that it is more blessed to give than to receive. The
mystery after all _is_ the mystery of goodness. The gradual growth of
a Kingdom of God, in which men live by love and brotherhood, in which
they give without expecting returns, in which they decrease that others
may increase, and in which their joy is fulfilled in the _spreading_ of
joy—that is, after all, the mystery.
The coming, into this checkerboard world, of One who practiced love in
all the varying issues of life,
“Who nailed all flesh to the cross
Till self died out in the love of his kind,”
and who Himself believed, and taught others to believe, that His Life was
a genuine revelation of God and the spiritual realm of reality—there is a
mystery.
That this Life which was in Him is an actual incursion from a higher,
inexhaustible world of Spirit, that we all may partake of it, draw upon
it, live in it, and have it live in us, so that in some sense it becomes
true that _Christ lives in us_ and we are raised from the dead—that is
the mystery.
This word “mystery” or “mysteries” did not, however, stand in the thought
of the early Christians for something mysterious and inscrutable. It
stood rather for some unspeakably precious reality which could be known
only by initiation and to the initiate. The “mysteries” of Mithra were
forever hidden to those on the outside; to those who formed the inner
circle the secret of the real presence of the god was as open and clear
as the sunlight under the sky. So, too, with the “mysteries” of the
gospel. They could not be conveyed by word of wisdom or by proof of
logic. Then, and always, the love of Christ “passes knowledge,” “the
peace of God” overtops processes of thought. Love, Grace, Goodness,
Godliness, Christlikeness breaking forth in men like us, remains a
“mystery”—a thing not “explainable” in terms of empirical causation
and not capable of being “known” except to those who see and taste and
touch, because they have been “initiated into this Life.” We shall
no doubt still puzzle over the dark enigmas of pain and death, of war
and its train of woe, but we shall do well to remember that there is
a greater mystery than any of these—the mystery of the suffering, yet
ever-conquering love of God which no one _knows_ except he who is
immersed in it.
V
“AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY”
The word “authority” has shifted its meaning many times. We do not mean
now by it what churchmen of former times meant when they used it. Even as
late as the beginning of the twentieth century a great French scholar,
Auguste Sabatier, wrote an influential book in which he contrasted
“Religions of Authority” with “Religions of the Spirit.” By religions of
authority he meant types of religion which rest on a dogmatic basis and
on the super-ordinary power of ecclesiastical officials to _guarantee_
the truth. However authoritative a religion of that type may once
have been, it is so no longer, at least with those who have caught the
intellectual spirit of our age.
“Authority” is found now for most of us where the common people who
listened to Jesus found it—in the convincing and verifying power of
the message itself. We should not now think for a moment of taking our
views on astronomy or geology or physiology—about the circulation of the
blood, for instance—on the “authority” of a priest, assuming that his
ordination supplied him with oracular knowledge on these subjects. We
want to know rather what the facts in any one of these fields compel us
to conclude, and we go for assistance to persons who have trained and
disciplined their powers of observation and who can make us see what
they see. Our “authority” in the last resort to-day is the _evidence_ of
observable facts and legitimate _inference_ from these facts. A religion
of authority, then, for our generation rests, not on the infallible
guarantee of any ordained man, or of any miraculously equipped church,
but on the spiritual nature of human life itself and on the verifiable
relations of the soul with the unseen realities of the universe.
I need hardly say—it is so plain that the runner can see it—that the
so-called Sermon on the Mount is one of the best illustrations available
of this type of authoritative religion. Whatever is declared as truth in
that discourse is true, not because a messenger from heaven brought it,
not because a supernatural authority guaranteed it, but _because it is
inherently so_, and if any statement here obviously conflicted with the
facts of life and stood confuted by the testimony of the soul itself,
it would in the end, in the long run as we say, have to go. The whole
message, from the beatitude upon the poor-in-spirit to the judgment test
of life in action, as revealed in the figure of the two houses, is a
message which can be verified and tried out as searchingly as can the
law of gravitation or the theory of luminiferous ether. All the results
that are here announced are results which attach to the essential nature
of the soul, and the conditions of blessedness are as much bound up with
the nature of things as are the conditions of physical health for a man,
or the conditions of literary success for an author.
Any one who has read William James’ chapter on “Habit” knows how it
feels to be reading something which verifies itself and which convicts
the judgment of the reader in almost every sentence. As one comes toward
the end of the chapter he finds these words: “Every smallest stroke of
virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van
Winkle excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, ‘I won’t
count this time!’ Well! he may not count it, and a kind heaven may not
count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among the nerve
cells and fibers the molecules are counting it, registering and storing
it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.” These words
have the irresistible drive of observable facts behind them. We have come
upon _something which is so because it is so_. It can no more be juggled
with or dodged than can the fact of the precession of the equinoxes. The
calm authority of that chapter might well be the envy of every preacher
of the gospel and of every writer of articles on religion. If either the
preacher or the religious writer expects to speak to the condition of
his age, then he must acquire this authoritative way of dealing with the
issues of life, for the other kind of “authority” has had its day.
It is interesting to discover that Tertullian and St. Augustine—two
men who, almost beyond all others, helped to forge this waning type of
“authority”—came very near risking the whole case of religion in their
day on the primary authority of first-hand experience and the testimony
of the soul itself. “I call in,” Tertullian wrote, “a new testimony; yea,
one that is better known than all literature, more discussed than all
doctrine, more public than all publications, greater than the whole man—I
mean all which is man’s. Stand forth, O soul, ... and give thy witness
... I want thy experience. I demand of thee the things thou bringest with
thee into man, the things thou knowest either from thyself or from thy
Author.... Whenever the soul comes to itself, as out of a surfeit or a
sleep or a sickness and attains something of its natural soundness, it
speaks of God.”
Nobody has ever shown more skill and subtlety in examining the actual
processes of the inner life than has Augustine, nor has any one more
powerfully revealed the native hunger of the soul for God, or the
coöperative working of divine grace in the inner region where all the
issues of life are settled. Take this vivid passage, picturing the
hesitating will, zig-zagging between the upward pull and the tug of the
old self just before the last great act of decision which led to his
conversion.
“Thus was I sick and suffering in mind, upbraiding myself more bitterly
than ever before, twisting and turning in my chains in the hope that they
would soon snap, for they had almost worn too thin to hold me. Yet they
did still hold me. But Thou wast instant with me in the inner man, with
merciful severity, redoubling the lashes of fear and shame, lest I should
cease from struggling.... I kept saying within my heart, ‘Let it be now,
now!’—and with the word I was on the point of going on to the resolve. I
had almost done it, but I had not done it; and yet I did not slip back
to where I was at first, but held my footing at a short remove and drew
breath. And again I tried; I came a little nearer, and again a little
nearer, and now—now—I was in act to grasp and hold it; but still I did
not reach it, nor grasp it, nor hold it, ... for the worse that I knew
so well had more power over me than the better that I knew not, and the
absolute point of time at which I was to change filled me with greater
dread the more nearly I approached it.”
That is straight out of life. The thing which really matters there is
not some fine-spun dogma or the power of some mitered priest, but the
answer of the soul, the obedience of the will in the presence of what is
unmistakably divine. “The whole work of this life,” he once said, “is
to heal the eye of the heart by which we see God.” Both these men made
great contributions to the imperial, authoritative church and they were
foremost architects of the immense system of dogma under which men lived
for long centuries, but the religion by which they themselves lived was
born in their own experience, and back of all their secondary authority
was this primary authority of the soul’s own testimony.
What our generation needs above everything, if I read its problems
rightly, is a clearer interpretation of the spiritual capacities and the
unseen compulsions of the ordinary human soul; that is to say, a more
authoritative and so more compelling psychological account of the actual
and potential nature of our own human self, with its amazing depths and
its infinite relationships. We have had fifteen hundred years under the
dogma of original sin and total depravity; now let us have a period of
actually facing our own souls as they reveal themselves, not to the
theologian, but to the expert in souls. We shall find them mysterious
and bad enough no doubt, but we shall also find that they are strangely
linked up with that unseen and yet absolutely real Heart of all things
whom we call God. And our generation also needs a more authoritative
account of Jesus Christ—more authoritative because more truly and more
historically drawn. We have had centuries of the Christ of dogma and
even to-day the Church is split and sundered by its attempt to maintain
dogmatic constructions about His Person. Was He monophysite? Was he
diphysite? Those dead questions have divided the world in former ages
and still rally oriental sects. Our problem is different. We want to
see how He lived. We want to discover what He said. We want to feel the
power of His attractive personality. We want to find out what His own
experience was and what bearing it has on life to-day. We need to have
Him reinterpreted to us in terms of life, so that once again He becomes
for us as real and as dynamic as He was for Paul in Corinth or for John
in Ephesus. The moment anybody succeeds in doing _that_, He proves to be
as much alive as ever, and religion becomes as authoritative as ever.
Theology is not extinct, but it is becoming wholly transformed and the
theology of the coming time will be a knowledge of God builded not on
abstract logic, but on a penetrating psychology of man’s inner nature
and a no less penetrating interpretation of history and biography,
especially at the points where the revelation of God has most evidently
shone forth and broken in upon us.
VI
SEEING HIM WHO IS INVISIBLE
The power “to see the invisible” is as essential in science, in
philosophy, in art, and in common life as it is in religion. The world
with which science deals is not made out of “things that do appear.”
Every step in the advance of science has been made by the discovery of
invisible things which explain the crude visible things of our uncritical
experience. We seldom see any of the things the scientists talk
about—atoms and molecules and cells, laws and causes and energies. These
things have been found first, not with the eyes of sense, but with the
vision of the mind.
Newton found the support that holds the earth to the sun and the moon to
the earth, but there was no visible cable, no mighty grooves in which
the poles of the earth’s axis spin. There was nothing to see, and yet his
mind discovered an invisible link that fastens every particle of matter
in the universe to every other particle, however remote. One fact after
another has forced the scientist to-day to draw upon an invisible world
of ether for his explanations of a vast number of the things that appear.
Gravitation, electrical phenomena, light and color vision, and, perhaps,
the very origin of matter, are due, his mind sees, to the presence of
this extraordinary world within, or behind, the world we see.
One of the greatest advances that has ever been made in the progress
of medicine was made through the discovery of invisible microbes as
the cause of contagious and infectious diseases. The ancients had also
believed the cause of many diseases to be the presence of invisible
agents, which they called “demons,” but they could hit upon no way of
_finding_ the “demons” or of banishing them. The scientific physician
“sees” the invisible microbe and he “sees” what will put this enemy _hors
de combat_.
The study of philosophy is chiefly the cultivation of the power to see
the invisible. Pythagoras is said to have required a period of a year of
silence as an initiation into the business of philosophy—because there
was nothing to talk about until the beginner had learned how to see the
invisible! The great realities to which the philosopher is dedicated
are not things to be found, even with microscopes or telescopes. Nobody
is qualified to enter the philosophical race at all—even for the
hundred-yard dash—unless in the temporal he can see the eternal, and in
the visible the invisible, and in the material the spiritual. There can
be no artistic creation until some one comes who has “the faculty divine”
to see
“The gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land.”
Such artistic creations must not be unreal. On the contrary, they must
be more real than the scenes we photograph or the factual events we
describe. They must present to us something that is in all respects _as
it ought to be_. The artist, the poet, the musician succeed in making
some object, or some character, or some series of events or sounds raise
us above our usual restraints of space and time and imperfection and for
a moment give us a glimpse of something eternal.
But we see the invisible in our common daily life much more than we
realize. The simple cobbler of shoes stitches and pegs at his little
shoe, and makes it as honestly as he can, for some child whom he has
never seen and perhaps never will see. The merchant expands his business
because he forecasts the expanding need for his articles in China,
Africa, or South America. The statesman at every move is dealing as much
with the country of his inner vision as with the country his eyes see.
So, too, is the parent as he plans for the discipline and education
of his child. No one can be a good person—however simple, or however
great—without leaving the things that are behind, _i.e._ the things that
are actual, and going on to realize what is not yet apprehended, what
exists only in forecast and vision. Religion, then, is not alone in
demanding the supreme faculty of seeing the invisible. We live on all
life-levels by faith, by assent to realities which are not there for
our eyes. Religion only demands of us that we _see_ the whole Reality
which this visible fragment of nature implies, that we _see_ the larger
spirit which our own human spirits call for, that we _see_ the eternal
significance revealed in the life of Christ and in the conquests of His
spirit through the ages.