THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US
I
WHERE THE BEYOND BREAKS THROUGH
If we sprinkle iron filings over a sheet of paper and move a magnet
beneath the paper, the filings become active and combine and recombine
in a great variety of groupings and regroupings. A beholder who knows
nothing of the magnet underneath gazes upon the whole affair with a sense
of awe and mystery, though he feels all the time that there must be some
explanation of the action and that some hidden power behind is operating
as the cause of the groupings and regroupings of the iron particles.
Something certainly that we do not see is revealing its presence and its
power.
Our everyday experience is full of another series of activities even
more mysterious than these movements of the iron. Whenever we open our
eyes we see objects and colors confronting us and located in spaces far
and near. What brings the object to us? What operates to produce the
contact? How does the far-away thing hit our organ of vision? This was to
the ancient philosopher a most difficult problem, a real mystery. He made
many guesses at a solution, but no guess which he could make satisfied
his judgment. Our answer is that an invisible and intangible substance
which we call ether—luminiferous ether—fills all space, even the space
occupied by visible objects, and that this ether which is capable of
amazing vibrations, billions of them a second, is set vibrating at
different velocities by different objects. These vibrations bombard the
minute rods and cones of the retina at the back of the eye and, presto,
we see now one color and now another, now one object and now another.
This ether would forever have remained unknown to us had not this
marvelous structure of the retina given it a chance to break through and
reveal itself. In many other ways, too, this ether breaks through into
revelation. It is responsible apparently for all the immensely varied
phenomena of electricity, probably, too, of cohesion and gravitation.
Here, again, the revelations remained inadequate and without clear
interpretation until we succeeded in constructing proper instruments and
devices for it to break through into active operation. The dynamo and
the other electrical mechanisms which we have invented do not make or
create electricity. They merely let it come through, showing itself now
as light, now as heat, now again as motive power. But always it was there
before, unnoted, merely potential, and yet a vast surrounding ocean of
energy there behind, ready to break into active operation when the medium
was at hand for it.
Life is another one of those strange mysteries that cannot be explained
until we realize that something more than we see is breaking through
matter and revealing itself. The living thing is letting through some
greater power than itself, something beyond and behind, which is needed
to account for what we see moving and acting with invention and purpose.
Matter of itself is no explanation of life. The same elemental stuff is
very different until it becomes the instrument of something not itself
which organizes it, pushes it upward and onward, and reveals itself
through it. Something has at length come into view which is more than
force and mechanism. Here is intelligent purpose and forward-looking
activity and something capable of variation, novelty, and surprise.
And when living substance has reached a certain stage of organization,
something higher still begins to break through—consciousness appears,
and on its higher levels consciousness begins to reveal truth and moral
goodness. It is useless to try to explain consciousness—especially
truth-bearing consciousness—as a function of the brain, for it cannot be
done. That way of explanation no more explains mind than the Ptolemaic
theory explains the movements of the heavenly bodies. Once more,
something breaks through and reveals itself, as surely as light breaks
through a prism and reveals itself in the band of spectral colors. This
consciousness of ours, as I have said, is not merely awareness, not only
intelligent response; it lays hold of and apprehends, i.e., reveals,
truth and goodness. What I think, when I really think, is not just
my private “opinion,” or “guess,” or “seeming”; it turns out to have
something universal and absolute about it. My multiplication-table is
everybody’s multiplication-table. It is true for me and for beyond me.
And what is true of my mathematics is also true of other features of my
thinking. When I properly organize my experience through rightly formed
concepts, I express aspects that are real and true for everybody—I attain
to something which can be called truth. The same way in the field of
conduct: I can discover not only what is subjectively right, but I can
go farther and embody principles which are right not only for me but for
every good man. Something more than a petty, tiny, private consciousness
is expressing itself through my personality. I am the organ of something
more than myself.
Perhaps more wonderful still is the way in which beauty breaks through.
It breaks through not only at a few highly organized points, it breaks
through almost everywhere. Even the minutest things reveal it as well
as do the sublimest things, like the stars. Whatever one sees through
the microscope, a bit of mould for example, is charged with beauty.
Everything from a dewdrop to Mount Shasta is the bearer of beauty. And
yet beauty has no function, no utility. Its value is intrinsic, not
extrinsic. It is its own excuse for being. It greases no wheels, it bakes
no puddings. It is a gift of sheer grace, a gratuitous largess. It must
imply behind things a Spirit that enjoys beauty for its own sake and
that floods the world everywhere with it. Wherever it can break through
it does break through, and our joy in it shows that we are in some sense
kindred to the giver and revealer of it.
Something higher and greater still breaks through and reveals a
deeper Reality than any that we see and touch. Love comes through—not
everywhere like beauty, but only where rare organization has prepared an
organ for it. Some aspects of love appear very widely, are, at least,
as universal as truth and moral goodness. But love in its full glory,
love in its height of unselfishness and with its passion of self-giving
is a rare manifestation. One person—the Galilean—has been a perfect
revealing organ of it. In his life it broke through with the same perfect
naturalness as the beam of light breaks through the prism of waterdrops
and reveals the rainbow. Love that understands, sympathizes, endures,
inspires, recreates, and transforms, broke through and revealed itself so
impressively that those who see it and feel it are convinced that here at
last the real nature of God has come through to us and stands revealed.
And St. Paul, who was absolutely convinced of this, went still further.
He held, with a faith buttressed in experience, that this same Christ,
who had made this demonstration of love, became after his resurrection
an invisible presence, a life-giving Spirit who could work and act as a
resident power within receptive, responsive, human spirits, and could
transform them into a likeness to himself and continue his revelation
of love wherever he should find such organs of revelation. If that, or
something like it, is true it is a very great truth. It was this that
good old William Dell meant when he said: “The believer is the only book
in which God himself writes his New Testament.”
II
CONQUERING BY AN INNER FORCE
There are few texts that have been more dynamic in the history of
spiritual religion than the one which forms the keynote of the message of
the little book of Habakkuk: “The righteous man lives by faith” (2:4). It
became the central feature of St. Paul’s message. It was the epoch-making
discovery in Luther’s experience, and it has always been the guiding
principle of Protestant Christianity.
The profound significance of the words is often missed because the text
is so easily turned into a phrase that is supposed just of itself to work
a kind of magic spell, and secondly because the meaning of “faith” is so
frequently misinterpreted. When we go back to the original experience out
of which the famous text was born we can get fresh light upon the heart
of its meaning. The little book begins with a searching analysis of the
conditions of the time. With an almost unparalleled boldness the prophet
challenges God to explain why the times are so badly out of joint, why
the social order is so topsy-turvy, and why injustice is allowed to run a
long course unchecked. God seems unconcerned with affairs—the moral pilot
appears not to be steering things.
Then comes a moment of mental relief. The prophet hits upon the
conclusion, arrived at by other prophets also, that God is about to use
the Chaldeans as a divine instrument to chastise the wicked element in
the nation, to right the wrongs of the disordered world, and to execute
judgment. But as he begins to reflect he becomes more perplexed than
ever. How can God, who is good, use such a terrible instrument for moral
purposes? This people, which is assumed to be an instrument of moral
judgment in a disordered world, is itself unspeakably perverse. It is
fierce and wolfish. Its only god is might. It cares only for success. It
catches men, like fish, in its great dragnet, and “then he sacrificeth
unto his net and burneth incense unto his drag.” How can such a pitiless
and insolent people, dominated by pride and love of conquest, be used to
work out the ends of righteousness and to act for God who is too pure
even to look upon that which is evil and wrong? Here the prophet finds
himself suddenly up against the ancient problem of the moral government
of the universe and the deep mystery of evil in it. He cannot untangle
the snarled threads of his skein. No solution of the mystery lies at
hand. He decides to climb up into his “watch-tower” and wait for an
answer from God. If it does not come at once, he proposes to stay until
it does come—“if it tarry, wait for it; it will surely come.” At length
the vision comes, so clear that a man running can read it. It is just
this famous discovery of the great text that a man cannot hope to get the
world-difficulties all straightened out to suit him, he cannot in some
easy superficial way justify the ways of God in the course of history;
but, at least, he can live unswervingly and victoriously by his own
soul’s insight, the insight of faith that God can be trusted to do the
right thing for the universe which he is steering. It is beautifully
expressed in a well-known stanza of Whittier’s:
“I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.”
Many things remain unexplained. The mysteries are not all dissipated.
But I see enough light to enable me to hold a steady course onward, and
I have an inner confidence in God which nothing in the outward world can
shatter. This is the message from Habakkuk’s watch-tower: There is a
faith which goes so far into the heart of things that a man can live by
it and stand all the water-spouts which break upon him.
Josiah Royce once defined faith as an insight of the soul by which one
can stand everything that can happen to him, and that is what this text
means. You arrive at such a personal assurance of God’s character that
you can face any event and not be swept off your feet. If this is so,
it means that the most important achievement in a man’s career is the
attainment of just this inner vision, the acquisition of an interior
spiritual confidence which itself is the victory.
William James used often to close his lecture courses at Harvard with
what he called a “Faith-ladder.” Round after round it went up from a mere
possibility of hope to an inner conviction strong enough to dominate
action. He would begin with some human faith which outstrips evidence and
he would say of it: It is at least not absurd, not self-contradictory,
and, therefore, it might be true under certain conditions, in some kind
of a world which we can conceive. It may be true even in this world and
under existing conditions. It is fit to be true; it ought to be true. The
soul in its moment of clearest insight feels that it must be true. It
shall be true, then, at least for me, for I propose to act upon it, to
live by it, to stake my existence on it.
This watch-tower of Habakkuk is a similar faith-ladder. He sees no way
to explain why the good suffer, or to account for the catastrophes of
history, but at least he has found a faith in God which holds him like
adamant: “Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit
be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall
yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold and there shall
be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy
in the God of my salvation.... He will make me to walk upon mine high
places.” Faith like that is always contagious. The unshaken soul kindles
another soul who believes in his belief, and the torch goes from this man
on his watch-tower to St. Paul, and from him on to the great reformer,
and then to an unnamed multitude, who through their soul’s insight can
stand everything that may happen!
III
LIVING IN THE PRESENCE OF THE ETERNAL
Some time ago I received a letter from a young minister who was about to
settle for religious work in a large manufacturing town. He and I were
strangers to each other in the flesh but friends through correspondence,
and because we were kindred spirits he wrote to me to say: “I have before
me the great work of living in the eternal God and in a humanity toiling
in factories and shops. Oh, if I could only make the presence of the
Eternal real to myself and to my people!” Another minister, laboring in
a large suburb of New York City, also a stranger to me except through
correspondence, wrote to say that he was glad for every voice which
holds up before men the reality of the invisible Church and the idea of
the universal priesthood of believers. These letters coming within a
week—and they are samples of many similar ones—are signs of the times,
and show clearly that thoughtful men all about us are done with the husk
of religion and are devoting themselves to the heart of the matter. There
is a deep movement under way which touches all denominations and is
steadily preparing in our busy, hurrying, materialistic America a true
seed of the vital, spiritual religion that will later bear rich blossoms
and ripe harvest.
I want for the moment to return to the central desire of the young
minister, in the hope that it may inspire some of us, especially some of
our young ministers who are facing their new spiritual tasks: “I have
before me the great work of living in the eternal God and in a humanity
toiling in factories and shops. Oh, if I could only make the presence of
the Eternal real to myself and to them!”
It is perhaps a new idea to some that living in the eternal God is
“work.” We are so accustomed to the idea that all that is required of us
is a passive mind and a waiting spirit that we have never quite realized
this truth: No person can live in the eternal God unless he is ready for
the most intense activity and for the most strenuous life. Gladstone,
in his old age, surprised his readers with his impressive phrase, “the
work of worship.” The fact is, no man ever yet found his way into the
permanent enjoyment of God along paths of least resistance or by any lazy
methods. How many of us have been humiliated to discover, in the silence
or in the service, that nothing spiritual was happening within us. Our
mind, unbent and passive enough, was like a stagnant pool, or, if not
stagnant, was darting its feelers out and following in lazy fashion any
line of suggestion which pulled it. Instead of finding ourselves “living
in the eternal God” and in the high enjoyment of him, we catch ourselves
wondering what the next strike will be, or thinking about the mean and
shabby way some one spoke to us an hour ago! There is no use blaming a
mind because it wanders—everybody’s mind wanders—but the real achievement
is to make it wander in a region which ministers to our spiritual life;
and that can be done only by getting supremely interested in the things
of the Spirit. That is where the “work” lies; that is where the effort
comes in. Attention is always determined by the fundamental interest.
What we love supremely we attend to. It gets us, it holds us. One of the
colloquial phrases for being in love with a person is “paying attention
to” the person. It is a true phrase and goes straight to reality.
If we are to discover and enjoy the eternal Presence we must become
passionately earnest in spirit and glowing with love for the Highest.
My friend brings two important things together: He proposes to undertake
the work of living in the eternal God and in toiling humanity. The two
things go together and cannot be safely separated. It is in the actual
sharing of life through love and sympathy and sacrifice, in going out of
self to feel the problems and difficulties and sufferings of others, that
we find and form a life rich in higher interests and centered on matters
of eternal value. A man who has traveled through the deeps of life with
a fellow man comes to his hour of worship with a mind focused on the
Eternal and with a spirit girded for the inward wrestling, without which
blessings of the greater sort do not come. And every time such a man
finds himself truly at home in the eternal God and fed from within, he
can go out, with the strength of ten, to the tasks of toiling humanity.
This is one of those spiritual circles which work both ways: He that
dwells in God loves, and he that loves finds God, St. John tells us.
It is fine to see a strong man, trained in all his faculties, going to
his work with the quiet prayer: “Oh, that I may make the presence of the
Eternal real to myself and to my people.” It is a good prayer for all of
us.