Perhaps the chief damage done by the confusion of tongues at Babel was
that it tended to a multiplicity of words. Whether it was so before
that time or not, it is certain that ever since there has been a
constant likelihood of religion and every other good thing being
drowned in floods of rhetoric. Where there are ten ways of saying a
thing it is so much easier to use them all than to do the thing in the
one way in which it may be done. Words become the chief enemies of
works. A volume containing all the words of the great Teacher would
look mighty insignificant beside the ponderous tomes of the modern
exponents of His teachings. That is because the minister has become
the preacher.
The tendency also is for laymen to prove their piety by becoming
teachers. It is so in every direction. Reforms dissipate into theses;
it is always easier to make speeches on the city beautiful than it is
to refrain from throwing the refuse in the street. We are all talking
about what ought to be done. Perhaps some leader will arise and
institute the order of the practicers.
Dreamers, philosophers, thinkers, writers have poured forth their
floods upon a thirsty world. But the only words that have been worth
anything to mankind have been those that have grown out of the
speaker's soul as it has been molded by his living and doing.
Because talking is so easy to the knowing ones it is not strange that
they should water their stock of superstitious prestige with the less
knowing ones from their reservoir of words. Then it is the most
natural thing for the glib man to set up the thing he can do most
easily as the thing essential to salvation, and thus a shibboleth
becomes the saving sign.
But salvation does not depend on any shibboleth. No man is going to
fail of seeing the Most High because he cannot render the precise name
by which one race chose to call Him, nor will the sun cease to shine
upon him should he seek the highest good in other ways than names. The
heart of the universe asks not that we be consistent with the
syllogisms of the past, but that we be true to the truth we know
ourselves.
Every man has some creed back of every deed; but when he puts his creed
up in front his deeds soon die. Where words reign they soon reign
alone, with nothing but words to serve them. Orthodoxy is so general,
because it is so easy and so meaningless. Catch the accent and you are
orthodox. But if heaven is to be won by an accent most honest men
would rather pay board, somewhere else.
No life can be interpreted in language alone. The church is but an
obscuration on Christianity when it meets only to analyze the life of
its Lord and never to exemplify His deeds. What must heaven think to
see a thousand able-bodied men and women gather in a beautiful building
to sing hymns of praise to their Diety [Transcriber's note: Deity?] and
to listen to arguments about His divinity while, within block of them,
there are, in sickness and squalor, distress and sorrow, the ones to
whom He sent these people to minister? The doctrines manufactured
about Him have hidden the directions given by Him.
The trouble is not that we have too much doctrine so much as that we
have the wrong kind. The Master's great teaching was, Do the divine
things, and the divine truths will take care of themselves.
The kingdom will never come until His will is done. Half-tones of
heaven will not keep people warm in winter; it is half tons of coal
they need. The world will believe in any church that tries to do good.
But the church does not believe in itself yet; half the people are
strenuously endeavouring to fool themselves into what they call
spiritual warmth. What they need is plain Christian perspiration. No
man really credits his own religion until he converts it into reality.
But the man who prides himself on his heterodoxy is often equally
guilty here. He ridicules the old type of piety and thinks to improve
on it with new sets of phrases. All these critics have is new
arrangements of words. Even the man who rejects all religion satisfies
himself with the cant phrase of irreligion.
We need most of all to treat religion as sensibly as we do business, to
leave the science to those interested while we give ourselves to the
practice of its art, the doing of its deeds, the living its life.