Produced by Eric Betts and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS
OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE CREED OF JESUS AND OTHER SERMONS
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS
HYMNS OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD EDITED BY H.S. COFFIN AND A.W. VERNON
_The Same for Use in Baptist Churches_ REV. CHARLES W. GILKEY, Co-editor
IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING (Second printing)
UNIVERSITY SERMONS (Second printing)
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS WITH A CHRISTIAN APPLICATION TO PRESENT CONDITIONS
Some Christian Convictions
A PRACTICAL RESTATEMENT IN TERMS OF PRESENT-DAY THINKING
BY HENRY SLOANE COFFIN
MINISTER IN THE MADISON AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AND ASSOCIATE
PROFESSOR IN THE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK CITY
_Non enim omnis qui cogitat credit sed cogitat omnis qui credit, et
credendo sogitat et cogitando credit_.--AUGUSTINE
COPYRIGHT, 1915 BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published, 1915 Second printing, 1915 Third printing, 1916 Fourth
printing, 1920
TO D.P.C.
SOCIÆ REI HUMANÆ ATQUE DIVINÆ
PREFACE
Bishop Burnet, in his _History of His Own Time_, writes of Sir Harry
Vane, that he belonged "to the sect called 'Seekers,' as being satisfied
with no form of opinion yet extant, but waiting for future discoveries."
The sect of Sir Harry Vane is extraordinarily numerous in our day; and
at various times I have been asked to address groups of its adherents,
both among college students and among thoughtful persons outside
university circles, upon the fundamental beliefs of Christianity. Some
of my listeners had been trained in the Church, but had thrown off their
allegiance to it; others had been reared in Judaism or in agnosticism;
others considered themselves "honorary members" of various religious
communions--interested and sympathetic, but uncommitted and
irresponsible; more were would-be Christians somewhat restive
intellectually under the usual statements of Christian truths. It was
for minds of this type that the following lectures were prepared. They
are not an attempt at a systematic exposition of Christian doctrine,
but an effort to restate a few essential Christian convictions in terms
that are intelligible and persuasive to persons who have felt the force
of the various intellectual movements of recent years. They do not
pretend to make any contribution to scholarship; they aim at the less
difficult, but perhaps scarcely less necessary middleman's task of
bringing the results of the study of scholars to men and women who (to
borrow a phrase of Augustine's) "believe in thinking" and wish to "think
in believing."
They may be criticised by those who, satisfied with the more traditional
ways of stating the historic Christian faith, will dislike their
discrimination between some elements in that faith as more, and others
as less, certain. I would reply that they are intentionally but a
partial presentation of the Gospel for a particular purpose; and further
I find my position entirely covered by the words of Richard Baxter in
his _Reliquiæ_: "Among Truths certain in themselves, all are not equally
certain unto me; and even of the Mysteries of the Gospel, I must needs
say with Mr. Richard Hooker, that whatever men pretend, the subjective
Certainty cannot go beyond the objective Evidence: for it is caused
thereby as the print on the Wax is caused by that on the Seal. I am not
so foolish as to pretend my certainty to be greater than it is, merely
because it is a dishonour to be less certain. They that will begin all
their Certainty with that of the Truth of the Scripture, as the
_Principium Cognoscendi_, may meet me at the same end; but they must
give me leave to undertake to prove to a Heathen or Infidel, the Being
of God and the necessity of Holiness, even while he yet denieth the
Truth of Scripture, and in order to his believing it to be true."
In preparing the lectures for publication I have allowed the spoken
style in which they were written to remain; several of the chapters,
however, have been somewhat enlarged.
I am indebted to two of my colleagues, Professor James E. Frame and
Professor A.C. McGiffert, for valuable suggestions in two of the
chapters, and especially to my friend, the Rev. W. Russell Bowie, D.D.,
of St. Paul's Church, Richmond, Va., who kindly read over the
manuscript.
CONTENTS
Introduction--Some Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century Which
Have Affected Christian Beliefs 1
Chapter 1. Religion 23
Chapter 2. The Bible 49
Chapter 3. Jesus Christ 78
Chapter 4. God 118
Chapter 5. The Cross 140
Chapter 6. The New Life--Individual and Social 160
Chapter 7. The Church 181
Chapter 8. The Christian Life Everlasting 205
SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS
INTRODUCTION
SOME MOVEMENTS OF THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WHICH HAVE AFFECTED
CHRISTIAN BELIEFS
When King Solomon's Temple was a-building, we are told that the stone
was made ready at the quarry, "and there was neither hammer nor axe nor
any tool of iron heard in the house." The structures of intellectual
beliefs which Christians have reared in the various centuries to house
their religious faith have been built, for the most part, out of
materials they found already prepared by other movements of the human
mind. It has been so in our own day, and a brief glance at some of the
quarries and the blocks they have yielded may help us to understand the
construction of the forms of Christian convictions as they appear in
many minds. Some of the quarries named have been worked for more than a
century; but they were rich to begin with, and they have not yet been
exhausted. Some will not seem distinctive veins of rock, but new
openings into the old bed. Many blocks in their present form cannot be
certainly assigned to a specific quarry; they no longer bear an
identifying mark. Nor can we hope to mention more than a very few of the
principal sources whence the materials have been taken. The plan of the
temple and the arrangement of the stones are the work of the Spirit of
the Christian Faith, which always erects a dwelling of its own out of
the thought of each age.
_Romanticism_ has been one rich source of material. This literary
movement that swept over Germany, Britain, France and Scandinavia at the
opening of the Nineteenth Century, itself influenced to some degree by
the religious revival of the German Pietists and the English
Evangelicals, was a release of the emotions, and gave a completer
expression to all the elements in human nature. It brought a new feeling
towards nature as alive with a spiritual Presence--
Something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
It baptized men into a new sense of wonder; everything became for them
miraculous, instinct with God. It quickened the imagination, and sent
writers, like Sir Walter Scott, to make the past live again on the pages
of historical novels. Sights and sounds became symbols of an inner
Reality: nature was to Emerson "an everlasting hint"; and to Carlyle,
who never tires of repeating that "the Highest cannot be spoken in
words," all visible things were emblems, the universe and man symbols of
the ineffable God.
To the output of this quarry we may attribute the following elements in
the structure of our present Christian thought:
(1) That religion is something more and deeper than belief and conduct,
that it is an experience of man's whole nature, and consists largely in
feelings and intuitions which we can but imperfectly rationalize and
express. George Eliot's Adam Bede is a typical instance of this
movement, when he says: "I look at it as if the doctrines was like
finding names for your feelings."
(2) That God is immanent in His world, so that He works as truly "from
within" as "from above." He is not external to nature and man, but
penetrates and inspires them. While an earlier theology thought of Him
as breaking into the course of nature at rare intervals in miracles, to
us He is active in everything that occurs; and the feeding of the five
thousand with five loaves and two fishes, while it may be more
startling, is not more divine than the process of feeding them with
bread and fish produced and caught in the usual way. Men used to speak
of Deity and humanity as two distinct and different things that were
joined in Jesus Christ; no man is to us without "the inspiration of the
Almighty," and Christ is not so much God _and_ man, as God _in_ man.
(3) That the Divine is represented to us by symbols that speak to more
parts of our nature than to the intellect alone. Horace Bushnell
entitled an essay that still repays careful reading, _The Gospel a Gift
to the Imagination._ One of our chief complaints with the historic
creeds and confessions is that they have turned the poetry (in which
religious experience most naturally expresses itself) into prose,
rhetoric into logic, and have lost much of its content in the process.
Jesus is to the mind with a sense for the Divine the great symbol or
sacrament of the Invisible God; but to treat His divinity as a formula
of logic, and attempt to demonstrate it, as one might a proposition in
geometry, is to lose that which divinity is to those who have
experienced contact with the living God through Jesus.
A second quarry, which Christianity itself did much to open, and from
which later it brought supplies to rebuild its own temple of thought, is
_Humanitarianism_. Beginning in the Eighteenth Century with its struggle
for the rights of man, this movement has gone on to our own day, setting
free the slaves, reforming our prisons, protesting against war and
cruelty, protecting women and children from economic exploitation, and
devoting itself to all that renders human beings healthier and happier.
It found itself at odds with current theological opinions at a number of
points. Preachers of religion were emphasizing the total depravity of
man; and humanitarians brought to the fore the humanity of Jesus, and
bade them see the possibilities of every man in Christ. They were
teaching the endless torment of the impenitent wicked in hell; and with
its new conceptions of the proper treatment of criminals by human
justice, it inveighed against so barbarous a view of God. They
proclaimed an interpretation of Calvary that made Christ's death the
expiation of man's sin and the reconciliation of an offended Deity; in
McLeod Campbell in Scotland and Horace Bushnell in New England, the
Atonement was restated, in forms that did not revolt men's consciences,
as the vicarious penitence of the one sensitive Conscience which creates
a new moral world, or as the unveiling of the suffering heart of God,
who bears His children's sins, as Jesus bore His brethren's
transgressions on the cross. They were insisting that the Bible was
throughout the Word of God, and that the commands to slaughter Israel's
enemies attributed to Him, and the prayers for vengeance uttered by
vindictive psalmists, were true revelations of His mind; and
Humanitarianism refused to worship in the heavens a character less good
than it was trying to produce in men on earth. These men of sensitive
conscience did for our generation what the Greek philosophers of the
Fifth Century B.C. did for theirs--they made the thought of God moral:
"God is never in any way unrighteous--He is perfect righteousness; and
he of us who is the most righteous is most like Him" (Plato, _Theæt_.
176c).
From this movement of thought our chief gains have been:
(1) A view of God as good as the best of men; and that means a God as
good as Jesus of Nazareth. Older theologians talked much of God's
decrees; we speak oftener of His character.
(2) The emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus and of our ability and duty
to become like Him. Spurred by Romanticism's interest in imaginatively
reconstructing history, many _Lives of Christ_ have been written; and it
is no exaggeration to say that Jesus is far better known and understood
at present than He has been since the days of the evangelists.
A third quarry is the _Physical Sciences_. As its blocks were taken out
most Christians were convinced that they could never be employed for the
temple of faith. They seemed fitted to express the creed of materialism,
not of the Spirit. Science was interested in finding the beginnings of
things; its greatest book during the century bore the title, _The Origin
of Species_; and the lowly forms in which religion and human life itself
appeared at their start seemed to degrade them. Law was found dominant
everywhere; and this was felt to do away with the possibility of prayer
and miracle, even of a personal God. Its investigations into nature
exposed a world of plunder and prey, where, as Mill put it, all the
things for which men are hanged or imprisoned are everyday performances.
The scientific view of the world differed totally from that which was in
the minds of devout people, and with that which was in the minds of the
writers of the Bible. A large part of the last century witnessed a
constant warfare between theologians and naturalists, with many
attempted reconciliations. Today thinking people see that the battle was
due to mistakes on both sides; that there is a scientific and a
religious approach to Truth; and that strife ensues only when either
attempts to block the other's path. Charles Darwin wisely said, "I do
not attack Moses, and I think Moses can take care of himself." Both
physicists and theologians were wrong when they thought of "nature" as
something fixed, so that it is possible to state what is natural and
what supernatural; "nature" is plastic, responding all the while to new
stimuli, and the title of a recent book, _Creative Evolution_, indicates
a changed scientific and philosophical attitude towards the world.
From this scientific movement we shall find in our present Christian
convictions, with much else, these items:
(1) The conception of the unity of all life. When Goethe in a flash of
insight saw the structure of the entire tree in a single leaf, and of
the complete skeleton of the animal in the skull of a sheep, he gave the
mind of man a new assurance of the unity that pervades the whole
creation. And when scientific men asserted the universality of law, they
made it forever impossible for us to divide life into separate
districts--the secular and the sacred, the natural and the
supernatural. Principles discovered in man's spirit in its responses to
truth, to love, to companionship, to justice, hold good of his response
to God. There is a "law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus"; and it
must be ascertained and worked with. But "laws" are recognized as our
labels for the discoveries we have made of God's usual methods of
working, and they do not stand between us and Him, barring our personal
fellowship with Him in prayer, nor between Him and His world, excluding
His new and completer entrances into the world's life.
(2) The thought of development or evolution as the process by which
religious ideas and institutions, like all other forms of life, live and
grow in a changing world.
(3) The abandonment of the attempt to prove God's existence and
attributes from what can be seen in His world. We cannot expect to find
in the conclusion more than the premises contain, and "nature" as it now
is can never yield a personal and moral, much less a Christian, God.
And not from nature up to nature's God,
But down from nature's God look nature through.
(4) A readjustment of our view of the Bible, which frankly recognizes
that its scientific ideas are those of the ages in which its various
writers lived, and cannot be authoritative for us today.
(5) A larger view of God, commensurate with the older, bigger, more
complex and more orderly world the physical sciences have brought to
light.
A fourth source of materials, which is but another vein of this
scientific quarry, is _the historical and literary investigation of the
Bible_. This has not been so recently opened as is commonly supposed,
but has been worked at intervals throughout the history of the Church,
and notably at the Protestant Reformation. Luther carefully reexamined
the books of the Bible, and declared that it was a matter of
indifference to him whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch,
pronounced the _Books of the Chronicles_ less accurate historically than
the _Books of the Kings_, considered the present form of the books of
_Isaiah_, _Jeremiah_ and _Hosea_ probably due to later hands, and
distinguished in the New Testament "chief books" from those of less
moment. Calvin, too, discussed the authorship of some of the books, and
suggested Barnabas as the writer of the _Epistle to the Hebrews_. But
the Nineteenth Century witnessed a very thorough application to the
Scriptures of the same methods of historical and literary criticism to
which all ancient documents were subjected. The result was the discovery
of the composite character of many books, the rearrangement of the
Biblical literature in the probable order of its writing, and the use of
the documents as historical sources, not so much for the periods they
profess to describe, as for those in and for which they were written.
We can assign the following elements in our contemporary Christian
thought to these scholarly investigations:
(1) The conception of revelation as progressive--a mode of thought that
falls in with the idea of development or evolution.
(2) The distinction between the Bible as literature, with the history,
science, ethics and theology of its age, and the religious experience of
which it is the record, and in which we find the Self-disclosure of God.
(3) An historical rather than a speculative Christ. We do not begin
(however we may end) with a Figure in the heavens, the eternal Son of
God, but with Jesus of Nazareth. This method of approaching Him
reinforces the emphasis on His manhood which came from Humanitarianism.
Christianity, like the fabled giant, Antæus, has always drawn fresh
strength for its battles from touching its feet to the ground in the
Jesus of historic fact. It was so when Francis of Assisi recovered His
figure in the Thirteenth Century, and when Luther rediscovered Him in
the Sixteenth. There can be little doubt but that fresh spiritual forces
are to be liberated, indeed are already at work, from this new contact
with the Jesus of history.
Still another opening in the scientific quarry is _Psychology_. The last
century saw great advances in the investigation of the mind of man,
which revolutionized educational methods, gave new tools to novelists
and historians, and threw new light on every aspect of the human spirit.
Psychologists turned their attention to religion, and have done much to
chart out the movements of man's nature in his response to his highest
inspirations. They have altered methods of Biblical education in our
Sunday Schools, have shown us helpful and harmful ways of presenting
religious appeals, and have given us scientific standards to test the
value of the materials employed in public worship.
We may ascribe the following elements in our Christian thought to them:
(1) The normal character of the religious experience. Faith had been
regarded as the product of deception or as an aberration of the human
spirit; it now is established as a natural element in a fully developed
personality. A psychological literary critic, Sainte Beuve, writes: "You
may not cease to be a skeptic after reading Pascal; but you must cease
to treat believers with contempt." William James has given us a great
quantity of _Varieties of Religious Experience_, and he deals with all
of them respectfully.
(2) The part played by the Will in religious experience. Man "wills to
live," and in his struggle to conserve his life and the things that are
dearer to him than life, he feels the need of assistance higher than any
he can find in his world. He "wills to believe," and discovers an
answer to his faith in the Unseen. This is a reaffirmation of the
definition, "faith is the giving substance to things hoped for, a test
of things not seen." And the student of religious psychology has now
vastly more material on which to work, because the last century opened
up still another quarry for investigation in _Comparative Religion_. An
Eighteenth Century writer usually divided all religions into true and
false; today we are more likely to classify them as more and less
developed. Investigators find in the varied faiths of mankind many
striking resemblances in custom, worship and belief. It is not possible
to draw sharp lines and declare that within one faith alone all is
light, and within the rest all is darkness. Everything that grows out of
man's experience of the Unseen is interesting, and no thought or
practice that has seemed to satisfy the spiritual craving of any human
being is without significance. Our own faith is often clarified by
comparing it with that of some supposedly unrelated religion. Many a
usage and conviction in ethnic cults supplies a suggestive parallel to
something in our Bible. The development of theology or of ritual in
some other religion throws light on similar developments in
Christianity. The widespread sense of the Superhuman confirms our
assurance of the reality of God. "To the philosopher," wrote Max Müller,
"the existence of God may seem to rest on a syllogism; in the eyes of
the historian it rests on the whole evolution of human thought." Under
varied names, and with very differing success in their relations with
the Unseen, men have had fellowship with the one living God. It was this
unity of religion amid many religions that the Vedic seers were striving
to express when they wrote, "Men call Him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni;
sages name variously Him who is but One."
This study of comparative religion has gained for us:
(1) A much clearer apprehension of what is distinctive in Christianity,
and a much more intelligent understanding of the completeness of its
answer to religious needs which were partially met by other faiths.
(2) A new attitude towards the missionary problem, so that Christians go
not to destroy but to fulfil, to recognize that in the existing
religious experience of any people, however crude, God has already made
some disclosure of Himself, that in the leaders and sages of their faith
He has written a sort of Old Testament to which the Christian Gospel is
to be added, that men may come to their full selves as children of God
in Jesus Christ.
A final quarry, which promises to yield, perhaps, more that is of value
to faith than any of those named, is the _Social Movement_. In the
closing years of the Eighteenth Century social relations were looked on
as voluntary and somewhat questionable productions of individuals, which
had not existed in the original "state of nature" where all men were
supposed to have been free and equal. The closing years of the
Nineteenth Century found men thinking of society as an organism, and
talking of "social evolution." This conception of society altered men's
theories of economics, of history, of government. Nor did these newer
theories remain in the classrooms of universities or the meetings of
scientists; they became the platforms of great political parties, like
the Socialists in Germany and France, and the Labor Party in Britain.
Men are thinking, and what is more _feeling_, today, in social terms;
they are revising legislation, producing plays and novels, and
organizing countless associations in the interest of social advance. We
are still too much in the thick of the movement to estimate its results,
and we can but tentatively appraise its contributions to our Christian
thought.
(1) It has given men a new interest in religion. The intricacies of
social problems predispose men to value an invisible Ally, and such
prepossession is, as Herbert Spencer said, "nine-points of belief." The
social character of the Christian religion, with its Father-God and its
ideals of the Kingdom, gives it a peculiar charm to those whose hearts
have been touched with a passion for social righteousness. A recent
historian of the thought of the last century, after reviewing its
scientific and philosophic tendencies, makes the remark that "an
increasing number of thinkers of our age expect the next step in the
solution of the great problems of life to be taken by practical
religion."
(2) It has made us realize that religion is essentially social. Men's
souls are born of the social religious consciousness; are nourished by
contact with the society of believers, in fellowship with whom they grow
"a larger soul," and find their destiny in a social religious
purpose--the Kingdom of God.
(3) It has taught us that religious susceptibility is intimately
connected with social status. Spiritual movements have always found some
relatively unimpressionable classes. In primitive Christian times "not
many well-educated, not many influential, not many nobly born were
called"; and in our own age the two least responsive strata in society
are the topmost and the bottom-most--those so well off that they often
feel no pressure of social obligation, and those without the sense of
social responsibility because they have nothing. It is the interest of
spiritual religion to do away with both these strata, placing social
burdens on the former and imposing social privileges on the latter, for
responsibility proves to be the chief sacrament of religion.
(4) It has brought the Church to a new place of prominence in Christian
thought. Men realize their indebtedness for their own spiritual life to
the collective religious experience of the past, represented in the
Church; their need of its fellowship for their growth in faith and
usefulness; and the necessity of organized religious effort, if society
is to be leavened with the Spirit of Christ. Church membership becomes a
duty for every socially minded Christian. And the social purpose renders
Church unity a pressing task for the existing Christian communions. John
Bunyan's pilgrim could make his progress from the City of Destruction to
the New Jerusalem with a few like-minded companions; but a Christian
whose aim is the transformation of the City of Destruction into the City
of God needs the coöperation of every fellow believer. Denominational
exclusiveness becomes intolerable to the Christian who finds a whole
world's redemption laid on his conscience.
(5) It demands a social reinterpretation of many of the Church's
doctrines, a reinterpretation which gives them richer meaning. The
vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ, for example, becomes intelligible
and kindling to those who have a social conscience and know something of
bearing the guilt of others; and the New Testament teaching of the Holy
Spirit is much more real and clear to those who have felt the social
spirit of our day lifting them out of themselves into the life of the
community, quickening their consciences and sympathies, and giving them
a sense of brotherhood with men and women very unlike themselves. Vinet
wrote a generation ago, "_L'Esprit Saint c'est Dieu social_."
We have by no means exhausted the list of quarries from which stones,
and stones already prepared for our purpose, can be and are taken for
the edifice of our Christian convictions. The life of men with Christ in
God preserves its continuity through the ages; it has to interpret
itself to every generation in new forms of thought. Under old monarchies
it was the custom on the accession of a sovereign to call in the coins
of his predecessor and remint them with the new king's effigy. The
silver and the gold remain, but the impress on them is different. The
reminting of our Christian convictions is a somewhat similar process:
the precious ore of the religious experience continues, but it bears the
stamp of the current ruling ideas in men's view of the world. But
lifeless metal, however valuable, cannot offer a parallel to the vital
experiences of the human spirit. The remolding of the forms of its
convictions does more than conserve the same quantity of experience; a
more commodious temple of thought enables the Spirit of faith to expand
the souls of men within. In theology by altering boundaries we often
gain territory. We not only make the map of our soul's life with God
clearer to ourselves, so that we live within its confines more
intelligently; we actually increase the size of the map, and possess a
larger life with God.
CHAPTER I
RELIGION
Religion is experience. It is the response of man's nature to his
highest inspirations. It is his intercourse with Being above himself and
his world.
Religion is _normal_ experience. Its enemies call it "an indelible
superstition," and its friends assert that man is born believing. That a
few persons, here and there, appear to lack the sense for the Invisible
no more argues against its naturalness than that occasionally a man is
found to be colorblind or without an ear for music. Mr. Lecky has
written, "That religious instincts are as truly part of our natures as
are our appetites and our nerves is a fact which all history
establishes, and which forms one of the strongest proofs of the reality
of that unseen world to which the soul of man continually tends."
Some have sought to discredit religion as a surviving childishness. A
baby is dependent upon its parents; and babyish spirits, they say,
never outgrow this sense of dependence, but transfer that on which they
rely from the seen to the unseen. While, however, other childish things,
like ghosts and fairies, can be put away, man seems to be "incurably
religious," and the most completely devout natures, although childlike
in their attitude towards God, give no impression of immaturity. When
one compares Jesus of Nazareth with the leaders in State and Church in
the Jerusalem of His day, He seems the adult and they the children. And
further, those who attempt to destroy religion as an irrational survival
address themselves to the task of a Sisyphus. Although apparently
successful today, their work will have to be done over again tomorrow.
On no other battlefield is it necessary so many times to slay the slain.
Again and again religion has been pronounced obsolete, but passing
through the midst of its detractors it serenely goes its way. When men
laboriously erect its sepulchre, faith,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
Will arise and unbuild it again.
Its indestructible vitality is evidence that it is an inherent element
in human nature, that the unbeliever is a subnormal man.
Religion is an affair of the _whole_ personality. Some have emphasized
the part feeling plays in it. Pascal describes faith as "God felt by the
heart," and Schleiermacher finds the essence of religion in the sense of
utter dependence. Many of us recognize ourselves as most consciously
religious in
that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on.
Our highest inspirations commonly come to us in a wistful yearning to be
like the Most High, in a sense of reconciliation with Him, in a glowing
enthusiasm for His cause, in the calm assurance of His guidance and
protection, in the enlargement of our natures as they become aware of
His indwelling. "We _feel_ that we are greater than we _know_."
Others give prominence to the rôle of the intellect. God is the most
reasonable explanation of the facts of life. Religious truths and men's
minds harmonize as though they had been made for each other. The thought
of Deity gives them perfect mental satisfaction. Dante tells us: "The
life of my heart, that of my inward self, was wont to be a sweet thought
which went many times to the feet of God, that is to say in thought I
contemplated the kingdom of the Blessed." And a present-day English
thinker, Mr. F.H. Bradley, writes: "All of us, I presume, more or less
are led beyond the region of ordinary facts. Some in one way and some in
another, we seem to touch and have communion with what is beyond the
visible world. In various manners we find something higher which both
supports and humbles, both chastens and transports us. And, with various
persons, the intellectual effort to understand the universe is a
principal way of their experiencing the Deity."
Still others lay the chief stress upon the will. Man wills to live; but
in a universe like ours where he is pitted against overwhelming forces,
he is driven to seek allies, and in his quest for them he wills to
believe in a God as good as the best in himself and better. Faith is an
adventure; Clement of Alexandria called it "an enterprise of noble
daring to take our way to God." We trust that the Supreme Power in the
world is akin to the highest within us, to the highest we discover
anywhere, and will be our confederate in enabling us to achieve that
highest. Kant found religion through response to the imperative voice of
conscience, in "the recognition of our duties as divine commands."
Pasteur, in the address which he delivered on taking his seat in the
Académie Française, declared: "Blessed is he who carries within himself
a God, an ideal, and who obeys it; ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal
of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and
great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite."
But while all these views are correct in their affirmations, it is
perilous to exalt one element in religious experience lest we slight
others of equal moment. There is danger in being fractionally religious.
No man really finds God until he seeks Him with his whole nature. Some
persons are sentimentally believers and mentally skeptics; they stand at
the door of the sanctuary with their hearts in and their heads out.
Writing as an old man, Coleridge said of his youth, "My head was with
Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John." An
unreasoning faith is sure to end in folly; it is a mind all fire without
fuel. A true religious experience, like a coral island, requires both
warmth and light in which to rise. An unintelligent belief is in
constant danger of being shattered. Hardy, in sketching the character of
Alec D'Uberville, explains the eclipse of his faith by saying, "Reason
had had nothing to do with his conversion, and the drop of logic that
Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its
effervescence to stagnation."
Others, at the opposite extreme, are merely convinced without being
converted. They are appealed to by the idea of God, rather than led into
actual fellowship of life with Him. A striking instance is the
historian, Edward Gibbon, who, at the age of sixteen, unaided by the
arguments of a priest and without the æsthetic enticements of the Mass,
was brought by his reading to embrace Roman Catholicism, and had himself
baptized by a Jesuit father in June, 1753. By Christmas of 1754 he had
as thoughtfully read himself out of all sympathy with Rome. He was
undoubtedly sincere throughout, but his belief and subsequent unbelief
were purely matters of judgment. The bases of our faith lie deeper than
our intelligence. We reach God by a passionate compulsion. We seek Him
with our reason only because we have already been found of Him in our
intuitions.
Still others use their brains busily in their religion, but confine them
within carefully restricted limits. Outside these their faith is an
unreasoning assumption. Their mental activity spends itself on the
details of doctrine, while they never try to make clear to themselves
the foundations of their faith. They have keen eyes for theological
niceties, but wear orthodox blinders that shut out all disturbing facts.
Cardinal Newman, for example, declared that dogma was the essential
ingredient of his faith, and that religion as a mere sentiment is a
dream and a mockery. But he was so afraid of "the all-corroding,
all-dissolving skepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries" that
he placed the safeguard of faith in "a right state of heart," and
refused to trust his mind to think its way through to God. Martineau
justly complained that "his certainties are on the surface, and his
uncertainties below." We are only safe as believers when, besides
keeping the heart clean, we
press bold to the tether's end
Allotted to this life's intelligence.
Those, again, who insist that in religion the willingness is all, forget
that it seems no more in our power to believe than it is to love. We
apparently "fall into" the one as we do into the other; we do not choose
to believe, we cannot help believing. And unless a man's mind is
satisfied with the reasonableness of faith, he cannot "make believe."
Romanes, who certainly wished for fellowship with the Christian God as
ardently as any man, confessed: "Even the simplest act of will in regard
to religion--that of prayer--has not been performed by me for at least a
quarter of a century, simply because it has seemed so impossible to
pray, as it were, hypothetically, that much as I have always desired to
be able to pray, I cannot will the attempt." Christianity has ever laid
stress upon its intellectual appeal. By the manifestation of the truth
its missionaries have, from Paul's day, tried to commend themselves. We
do not hear of "Evidence Societies" among non-Christian faiths. When the
Emperor Julian attempted to restore the ancient paganism, he did not
argue for its superior credibility, but contented himself with abusing
the creed of Christians and extolling the beauty of the rituals of the
religion it had supplanted. But the propaganda of the gospel of Jesus is
invariably one of persuasion, convincing and confirming men's minds with
its truth.
It would be as false, however, to neglect the part a man's willingness
has in his faith. To believe in the Christian God demands a severe moral
effort. It can never be an easy thing to rely on love as the ultimate
wisdom and power in the universe. "The will to believe," if not
everything, is all but everything, in predisposing us to listen to the
arguments of the faith and in rendering us inflammable to its kindling
emotions.
But no man can be truly religious who is not in communion with God with
"as much as in him is." Somebody has finely said that it does not take
much of a man to be a Christian, but it takes all there is of him. An
early African Christian, Arnobius, tells us that we must "cling to God
with all our senses, so to speak." And Thomas Carlyle gave us a picture
of the ideal believer when he wrote of his father that "he was religious
with the consent of his whole faculties." It is faith's ability to
engross a man's entire self, going down to the very roots of his being,
that renders it indestructible. It can say of those who seek to
undermine it, as Hamlet said of his enemies:
It shall go hard,
But I will delve one yard below their mines.
As an experience, God is a discovery which each must make for himself.
Religion comes to us as an inheritance; and at the outset we can no more
distinguish the voice of God from the voices of men we respect, than the
boy Samuel could distinguish the voice of Jehovah from that of Eli. But
we gradually learn to "possess our possession," to respond to our own
highest inspirations, whether or not they inspire others. Pascal well
says: "It is the consent of yourself to yourself and the unchanging
voice of your own reason that ought to make you believe." So far only
as we repeat for ourselves the discoveries of earlier explorers of Him
who is invisible have we any religion of our own. And this personal
experience is the ground of our certainty; "as we have heard, so have we
seen in the city of our God."
Religious experience, and even Christian experience, appears in a great
variety of forms; and there is always a danger lest those who are
personally familiar with one type should fail to acknowledge others as
genuine. The mystics are apt to disparage the rationalists; hard-headed,
conscientious saints look askance at seers of visions; and those whose
new life has broken forth with the energy and volume of a geyser hardly
recognize the same life when it develops like a spring-born stream from
a small trickle, increased by many tributaries, into a stately river.
The value of an experience is to be judged not by its form, but by its
results. Fortunately for Christianity the New Testament contains a
variety of types. With the first disciples the light dawns gradually; on
St. Paul it bursts in a flash brighter than noonday. The emotional
heights and depths of the seer on Patmos contrast with the steady level
disclosed in the practical temperament of the writer of the _Epistle of
James_. But underneath the diversity there is an essential unity of
experience: all conform to that which Luther (as Harnack summarizes his
position) considered the essence of Christian faith--"unwavering trust
of the heart in God who has given Himself to us in Christ as our
Father."
Religious experience has been defined as man's _response_ to God; it
often appears rather his _search_ for Him. But that is characteristic
only of the beginning of the experience. The experienced know better
than to place the emphasis on their initiative in establishing
intercourse with the Divine. "We love, because He first loved us," they
say. The Apostle, who speaks of his readers as those who "have come to
know God," stops and corrects himself, "or rather _to be known of God_."
Believers discover that God was "long beforehand" with them. Their very
search is but an answer to His seeking; in their every movement towards
Him, they are aware of His drawing. The verse which begins, "My soul
followeth hard after Thee," continues "Thy right hand upholdeth me."
Religious experience, like all other, is limited by a man's capacity for
it; and some men seem to have very scant capacity for God. It is not
easy to establish a point of contact between a Falstaff or a Becky Sharp
and the Father of Jesus Christ. There is no community of interest or
kinship of spirit. "Faith is assurance of things _hoped for_;" and where
there is no craving for God, He is likely to remain incredible.
Prepossession has almost everything to do with the commencement of
belief. It is only when circumstances force a man to feel that a God
would be desirable that he will risk himself to yield to his highest
inspirations, and give God the chance to disclose Himself to him. It is
a case of nothing venture, nothing have. Faith is always a going out
whither we know not, but in each venture we accumulate experience and
gradually come to "know Whom we have believed." Without the initial
eagerness for God which opens the door and sends us out we remain
debarred from ever knowing. As the _Theologia Germanica_ puts it, "We
are speaking of a certain Truth which it is possible to know by
experience, but which ye must believe in before ye know."
The capacity for religious experience can be cultivated. Faith, like an
ear for music or taste in literature, is a developable instinct. It
grows by contagious contact with fellow believers; as "the sight of
lovers feedeth those in love," the man of faith is nourished by
fellowship with the believing Church. It is increased by familiarity
with fuller and richer experiences of God; continuous study of the Bible
leads men into its varied and profound communion with the Most High. It
is enlarged by private and social worship; prayer and hymn and message
were born in vital experiences, and they reproduce the experience.
Browning, in characteristic verse, describes the effect of the service
upon the worshippers in Zion Chapel Meeting:
These people have really felt, no doubt,
A something, the motion they style the Call of them;
And this is their method of bringing about,
By a mechanism of words and tones,
(So many texts in so many groans)
A sort of reviving and reproducing,
More or less perfectly (who can tell?),
The mood itself, which strengthens by using.
An unexpressed faith dies of suffocation, while utterance intensifies
experience and leads to fresh expression; religion, like Shelley's
Skylark, "singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singeth." Above all,
the instinct for the Unseen is developed by exercise; obedience to our
heavenly visions sharpens the eyes of the heart. Charles Lamb pictures
his sister and himself "with a taste for religion rather than a strong
religious habit." Such people exclude themselves from the power and
peace, the limitless enrichment, of conscious friendship with the living
God.
Indeed it is not conceivable that a man can have really tasted
fellowship with the Most High without acquiring an appetite for more of
Him. The same psalmist who speaks of his soul as satisfied in God, at
once goes on, "My soul followeth hard after Thee." He who does not
become a confirmed seeker for God is not likely ever to have truly found
Him. There is something essentially irreligious in the attitude
portrayed in the biography of Horace Walpole, who, when Queen Caroline
tried to induce him to read Butler's _Analogy_, told her that his
religion was fixed, and that he had no desire either to change or to
improve it. A believer's heart is fixed; his soul is stayed on God; but
his experience is constantly expanding.
Constancy is perhaps an inaccurate word to employ of man's intercourse
with the Invisible. Even in the most stedfast and unwavering this
intercourse is characterized by
tidal movements of devoutest awe
Sinking anon to farthest ebb of doubt.
And in the world's life there are ages of faith and ages of criticism.
Both assurance and questioning appear to be necessary. Professor Royce
asserts that "a study of history shows that if there is anything that
human thought and cultivation have to be deeply thankful for, it is an
occasional, but truly great and fearless age of doubt." And in
individuals it is only by facing obstinate questionings that faith is
freed from folly and attains reasonableness.
Nor can religious experience, however boldly it claims to know, fail to
admit that its knowledge is but in part. Our knowledge of God, like the
knowledge we have of each other, is the insight born of familiarity; but
no man entirely knows his brother. And as for the Lord of heaven and
earth, how small a whisper do we hear of Him! Some minds are
constitutionally ill-adapted for fellowship with Him because they lack
what Keats calls "negative capability"--"that is, when a man is capable
of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go a
fine isolated verisimilitude, caught from the Penetralium of mystery,
from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge." We have
to trust God with His secrets, as well as try to penetrate them as far
as our minds will carry us. We have to accustom ourselves to look
uncomplainingly at darkness, while we walk obediently in the light.
"They see not clearliest who see all things clear."
But to many it seems all darkness, and the light is but a phantom of the
credulous. How do we know that we _know_, that the inference we draw
from our experience is correct, that we are in touch with a living God
who is to any extent what we fancy Him to be? Our experience consists of
emotions, impulses, aspirations, compunctions, resolves; we infer that
we are in communion with Another--the Christian God; but may not this
explanation of our experience be mistaken?
Religious experience is self-evidencing to the religious. God is as real
to the believer as beauty to the lover of nature on a June morning, or
to the artistic eye in the presence of a canvas by a great master. Men
are no more argued into faith than into an appreciation of lovely sights
and sounds; they are immediately and overwhelmingly aware of the
Invisible.
The rest may reason, and welcome; 'tis we musicians know.
Faith does not require authority; it confers it. To those who face the
Sistine Madonna, in the room in the Dresden Gallery where it hangs in
solitary eminence, it is not the testimony of tradition, nor of the
thousands of its living admirers throughout the world, that renders it
beautiful; it makes its own irresistible impression. There are similar
moments for the soul when some word, or character, or event, or
suggestion within ourselves, bows us in admiration before the
incomparably Fair, in shame before the unapproachably Holy, in
acceptance before the indisputably True, in adoration before the
supremely Loving--moments when "belief overmasters doubt, and we know
that we know." At such times the sense of personal intercourse is so
vivid that the believer cannot question that he stands face to face with
the living God.
Such moments, however, are not abiding; and in the reaction that follows
them the mind will question whether it has not been the victim of
illusion. John Bunyan owns: "Though God has visited my soul with never
so blessed a discovery of Himself, yet afterwards I have been in my
spirit so filled with darkness, that I could not so much as once
conceive what that God and that comfort was with which I had been
refreshed." Many a Christian today knows the inspiration and calm and
reinforcement of religion, only to find himself wondering whether these
may not come from an idea in his own head, and not from a personal God.
May we not be in a subjective prison from whose walls words and prayers
rebound without outer effect?
How far may we trust our experience as validating the inferences we draw
from it? The Christian thought of God is after all no more than an
hypothesis propounded to account for the Christian life. May not our
experiences be accounted for in some other way? We must distinguish
between the adequacy of our thought of God and the fact that there is a
God more or less like our thought of Him. Our experience can never
guarantee the entire correctness of our concept of Deity; a child
experiences parental love without knowing accurately who its parents
are--their characters, position, abilities, etc. But the child's
experience of loving care convinces the child that he possesses living
parents. Is it likely that, were God a mere fancy, a fancy which we
should promptly discard if we knew it as such, our experience could be
what it is? An explanation of an experience, which would destroy that
experience, is scarcely to be received as an explanation. Religion is
incomparably valuable, and to account for it as self-hypnosis would end
it for us as a piece of folly. Can life's highest values be so dealt
with? Moreover, we cannot settle down comfortably in unbelief; just when
we feel most sure that there is no God, something unsettles us, and
gives us an uncanny feeling that after all He is, and is seeking us. We
find ourselves responding, and once more we are strengthened,
encouraged, uplifted. Can a mere imagination compass such results?
How shall we test the validity of the inference we draw from our
experience?
One test is the satisfaction that it gives to _all_ elements in our
complex personality. One part of us may be deceived, but that which
contents the entire man is not likely to be unreal. Arthur Hallam
declared that he liked Christianity because "it fits into all the folds
of one's nature." Further, this satisfaction is not temporary but
persistent. In childhood, in youth, in middle age, at the gates of
death, in countless experiences, the God we infer from our spirit's
reactions to Him meets and answers our changing needs. Matthew Arnold
writes: "Jesus Christ and His precepts are found to hit the moral
experience of mankind; to hit it in the critical points; to hit it
lastingly; and, when doubts are thrown upon their really hitting it,
then to come out stronger than ever." Unless we are to distrust
ourselves altogether, that which appeals to our minds as reasonable, to
our hearts as lovable, to our consciences as commanding, and to our
souls as adorable, can hardly be "such stuff as dreams are made on."
Nor are we looking at ourselves alone. We are confirmed by the completer
experiences of the generations who have preceded us. "They looked unto
Him and were radiant." Those thousands of beautiful and holy faces in
each century, "lit with their loving and aflame with God," can scarcely
have been gazing on light kindled solely by their own imaginations.
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images,
And grows to something of great constancy.
Religion has written its witness into the world's history, and we can
appeal to an eloquent past.
Look at the generations of old, and see:
Who did ever put his trust in the Lord, and was ashamed?
Or who did abide in His fear, and was forsaken?
Or who did call upon Him, and He despised him?
And its witness comes from today as certainly, and more widely, than
from any believing yesterday. Ten thousand times ten thousand, and
thousands of thousands, out of every kindred and tongue and nation,
throughout the world, testify what the God and Father of Jesus Christ
means to them. Are we all self-deceived?
Nor are we limited to the experiences of those who at best impress us as
partially religious. For the final confirmation of our faith we look to
the ideal Believer, who not only has an ampler religious experience than
any other, but also possesses more power to create faith, and to take us
farther into the Unseen; we look unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of
faith. His life and death, His character and influence, remain the
world's most priceless possession. Was the faith which produced them,
the faith which inspired Him, an hallucination? There is contained in
that life more proof that God is, than in all other approach of God to
man, or of man to God.
The other test of the correctness of our inference drawn from our
religious experience is its practical value, the way in which it works
in life. "He that willeth to do His will shall know." Coleridge bursts
out indignantly: "'Evidences of Christianity'! I am weary of the word.
Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the
self-knowledge of the need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own
evidence." Religion approaches men saying, "O taste and see that the
Lord is good." He cannot be good unless He _is_. A fancied Deity, an
invention however beautiful of men's brain, supposed to be a living
Being, cannot be a blessing, but, like every other falsehood, a curse.
If our religion is a stained glass window we color to hide the void
beyond, then in the name of things as they are, whether they have a God
or not, let us smash the deceiving glass, and face the darkness or the
daylight outside. "Religion is nothing unless it is true," and its
workableness is the test of its truth. Behind the accepted hypotheses of
science lie countless experiments; and anyone who questions an
hypothesis is simply bidden repeat the experiment and convince himself.
Behind the fundamental conviction of Christians are generations of
believers who have tried it and proved it. The God and Father of Jesus
is a tested hypothesis; and he who questions must experiment, and let
God convince him. To commit one's self to God in Christ and be redeemed
from most real sins--turned from selfishness to love, from slavery to
freedom; to trust Him in most real difficulties and perplexities, and
find one's self empowered and enlightened;--is to discover that faith
works, and works gloriously. A man's idea of God may be, and cannot but
be, inadequate; but it corresponds not to nothing existent, but to
Someone most alive. That which comes to us through the idea is witness
of the Reality behind it.
Nor are we confined to the witness of our personal discoveries. There is
a social attestation of the workableness of faith. The surest way of
establishing the worth of our religious experience is to share it with
another; the strongest confirmation of the objective existence of Him
with whom we have to do is to lead another to see Him. The most
effective defender of the faith is the missionary. "It requires," as
David Livingstone said, "perpetual propagation to attest its
genuineness." Not they who sit and study and discuss it, however
cleverly and learnedly, discover its truth; but they who spend and are
spent in attempting to bring a whole world to know the redeeming love of
One who is, and who rewards with indubitable sonship with Himself those
who prove wholeheartedly loyal.
For our final assurance we appeal confidently to the future. The glory
of the Lord will only be fully revealed when all flesh see it together.
But with personal certainty, based on our own experience, corroborated
by the testimony of all the saints, we both wait hopefully and work
tirelessly for the day when our God through Christ shall be all in all.