Produced by Al Haines
RELIGIOUS PERPLEXITIES
BY
PRINCIPAL L. P. JACKS
D.D., LL.D., D.LITT.
AUTHOR OF
"THE LEGENDS OF SMOKEOVER," ETC.
"Perplexed, yet not unto despair"
HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED
LONDON
1922
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
_A Foreword_
The substance of this little book was delivered in the form of two
lectures given at the invitation of the Hibbert Trustees in Manchester,
Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham during March and April, 1922. On
revising the spoken word for the press I have made certain
rearrangements which seemed to be required in committing the lectures
to the printed form. The first section is wholly new and may be
considered as a short introduction to the main theme. Such an
introduction is, I think, needed, but the time at my disposal did not
allow of its inclusion in the oral delivery of the lectures.
L. P. J.
_Contents_
I. THE SOURCE OF PERPLEXITY
II. RELIGIOUS PERPLEXITY IN GENERAL
III. PERPLEXITY IN THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
_I_
_The Source of Perplexity_
The first and greatest of religious perplexities, the source of all the
rest, arises in the mysterious fact of our existence as individual
souls. Our perplexities spring from the very root of life. Why are we
here at all?
Did we but know the purpose for which we are present in the world,
should we not have in our hands the key to all the questions we raise
about God, freedom, duty and immortality? But if we know not why we
are here how can we hope to answer these other questions?
Or again, if we were forced to acknowledge that our existence has no
purpose at all, would it not be futile to embark on inquiries
concerning God, freedom, duty and immortality? What meaning could
these terms have for beings who had learnt that their own existence was
purposeless?
The Westminster Confession affirms that the true end of man is "To
glorify God and to enjoy him for ever." A splendid saying! But might
not God be better glorified, and more fully enjoyed, if the particular
soul inhabiting my own body, with all its errors and defects, had not
been suffered to appear upon the scene? Might not another soul, sent
into the universe instead of mine, have played that part infinitely
better than I can ever hope to do? Why, then, among the host of
possibilities, did the lot fall upon _me_? Why _me_? Why _you_?
Why should God need to be glorified, or enjoyed, by you, by me, by
anyone? Why should he need anything? If, as some affirm, the universe
is the dwelling-place of the All Perfect, what reason can be given for
the existence, side by side with that All Perfect one, or within him,
of a multitude of imperfect images of his Perfection--like you and me?
In the presence of One who has all purposes already fulfilled in
himself what purpose can be served by our introduction into the scheme
of things? If you and I, and all such, were to be blotted out
forthwith and the All Perfect left in sole possession of the universe,
where would be the loss? You and I are apparently superfluous.
Philosophers, both ancient and modern, have addressed themselves to
this problem, not altogether, I think, without success, and yet not
quite successfully. Their arguments have not removed but greatly
deepened the mystery of our existence, bringing it to a critical point
where we must either accept it or run away from life and its perils--to
the point, in fact, where we must choose between life and death. If we
choose life we accept the risk that its burden may prove too heavy for
us. If death, we escape the perils of life but forfeit our share in
its victories.
The former is the heroic choice; the latter the cowardly. As Carlyle
was never tired of repeating, the ultimate question which every man has
to face and answer for himself is this: "Wilt thou be a hero or a
coward?" No philosophy can relieve us from the responsibility of
having to make that choice. All that philosophy can do, and it is a
great thing to accomplish even this, is to bring us to the point where
we see that the choice has to be made. This it does by forcing us to
raise the question: "Why am I here? For what end have I been sent into
the world?"
But let us inquire more closely what philosophers have done by way of
bringing us to this point--the point where a final decision between
heroism and cowardice becomes inevitable.
To the argument that _we_ are superfluous, that with a Perfect God in
possession of the universe no reason can be given why imperfect beings
should be here at all, the philosophers make reply that the One must
needs "differentiate itself into a Many," the Eternal Consciousness
"reproduce itself" in a multitude of time-bound mortals like you and
me, troublers of the Divine Perfection, which is all the more clearly
perfect because it suffers and at last overcomes the trouble that our
presence creates.
But while reasons have been offered why the One should thus "reproduce"
or "differentiate" itself as a Many, no reason, so far as I am aware,
has ever been found, nor ever can be, why there should be just so many
of these troublers as there are--no more and no less. Nor why _you_
and _I_ should be among them. To explain why human units exist, does
not explain the existence of any single individual we choose to
name--of Julius Caesar, of Napoleon, of Mr Lloyd George, whose
significance in the universe, it will be admitted, consists not in
their being mere human units required to make up a certain number, but
in their being just the kind of men they happen to be. So too the
proof that a human unit must needs be there to fill the niche in time
and space you now occupy is no proof that you, and no other, must needs
be the unit in question. Another, substituted in your place, could
play the part of one in a multitude as well as you, and the theory of
the One and the Many would not even notice the change. But it would
make a notable difference to the facts. And as with the units, so with
the totality. If the number of souls now drawing the breath of life
were halved or doubled, nay, if they were all suddenly blotted out and
their places filled by an entirely new multitude, men, angels or devils
as the case might be, philosophy might still maintain its theory of the
One and the Many as though nothing had happened. Why these rather than
those? Why _you_? Why _me_? Philosophy precipitates this question
and leaves it, at the end of all theorizing, unanswered, poignant and
tremendous. "Who can say positively," writes Sir Leslie Stephen, "that
it would not be better for the world at large if his neck were wrung
five minutes hence?"[1]
Unable, as every man is, to give a convincing reason why he should be
here at all, or why, being here, he should remain here any
longer,--unable to prove that it would not be better for the world at
large, if all necks, his own included, were wrung five minutes
hence--is there not something fundamentally irrational in our
determination to continue in existence as long as we possibly can--that
universal will-to-live, which forms the basis of all particular
volitions, and supplies the motive power to our plans, purposes,
preparations and policies for our own or others' good? Challenged to
show cause why we should linger here a moment longer, what answer could
any of us give that would have the slightest claim to "the universal
validity of reason"? Reason cannot be bullied into acquiescence by the
importance of individuals in their own eyes. Was there ever a great
man whose sudden extinction would not have been hailed with joy by a
considerable section of his contemporaries, or a little one who would
not have made things pleasanter for somebody by taking himself off?
If we limit the word "rational" to the processes of thought which issue
in demonstrations after the manner of mathematical arguments, and if
all behaviour is to be termed irrational which involves the taking of a
risk, I see no escape from the conclusion that human life is infected
with irrationality at its very core. So far as any of us act upon the
assumption that it is better for us to exist than not to exist we are
assuming what can never be "proved."
But, for my own part, I am not prepared to put these limitations on the
word "rational." The traditional logic of the schools, on which this
notion of rationality is founded, turns out on examination to cover no
more than a departmental activity of the human mind. The type of
conclusion to which it leads us is determined in advance by the rules
it lays down for its own procedure, in the one department where such
procedure is possible. Free activity, which is the essence of
self-consciousness, and the life of all creative work, lies entirely
outside its province, and the attempt to deal with it by departmental
rules yields nothing but the rank absurdity that freedom itself is
absurd.[2] The logic in question may be compared to a locomotive
engine which can move only on the rails that have been laid down for
it; and the philosopher who would apprehend the things of the spirit by
the means which it affords him is like a man who rides an engine rather
than a horse when he goes to hunt a fox. Logical machinery cannot
follow the movement of the live spirit, nor arrest it even for a
moment's inspection. Within its own province the rule of the
traditional logic is, indeed, absolute. But to make that province
co-extensive with the realm of truth, to extend the laws which govern
it into the universal laws of spirit is a fatal pedantry. So extended,
our logic leads not to truth but to falsehood and, ultimately, to the
paralysis of the very thought it seeks to regulate, nay, to the
extinction of thought itself. This procedure has no claim whatever to
usurp the name of "reason," but rather stands condemned as the very
type of what is unreasonable. Let those who deny this prove, if they
can, in terms acceptable to universal reason, that it would "not be
better for the world at large if their necks were wrung five minutes
hence."
There is a coward and a hero in the breast of every man. Each of the
pair has a "logic" of his own adapted to his particular purpose and
aim--which is safety for the coward and victory for the hero. The two
are perpetually at variance, the reason of the one being the unreason
of the other, the truth of the one being the falsehood of the other.
The inner strife, the division in our nature, the law in our members
warring against the law of our mind, on which so many great doctrines
of religion have hinged, has its origin at this point. Anyone who
watches himself narrowly may observe the strife going on, and going on
in just this form,--as an argument between the coward within him, who
is out for safety, and the hero within him, who is out for victory.
They have little common ground and can barely understand each other's
speech.
Everything the hero proposes is unreasonable to the coward. Everything
the coward proposes is detestable to the hero. The hero would pour
spikenard on the head of his beloved--that would be victorious. The
coward would sell it and give the money to the poor--that would be
"safer." The coward sees a danger in having children and limits his
family. The hero would have many sons. On all such points the coward,
judged by the standard of what passes muster as logic, is a better
reasoner than the hero. But the hero, though he has less to say for
himself, when brought before the seat of judgment, is nearer to the
fountain head of Reason. Would not the offence of the Cross, submitted
at the time to a sanhedrim of "logical" experts, have been condemned as
unadulterated folly? Such a sanhedrim is always in session within a
man, and the hero has much ado to stand up to its decrees.
Religion is a power which develops the hero in the man at the expense
of the coward in the man. As the change proceeds there comes a moment
when the cowardly method of reasoning, with its eye on safety, ceases
to dominate the soul. At the same moment the heroic element awakes and
looks with longing towards the dangerous mountain-tops. Thenceforward
the man's reason becomes the organ of the new spirit that is in him, no
longer fettered to the self-centre, but mounting up with wings as an
eagle. His powers as a reasoner are enriched, his survey of the facts
more comprehensive, his insight into their significance more
penetrating.
Religion has sometimes been represented as introducing a new faculty
called "faith" into the man's life, as adding this faith to the reason
he had before, or perhaps as driving reason out and putting faith in
its place. This is a misconception. Faith is neither a substitute for
reason nor an addition to it. Faith is nothing else than reason grown
courageous--reason raised to its highest power, expanded to its widest
vision. Its advent marks the point where the hero within the man is
getting the better of the coward, where safety, as the prime object of
life, is losing its charm and another Object, hazardous but beautiful,
dimly seen but deeply loved, has begun to tempt the awakened soul.
Another way of saying the same thing is to name religion the "new
birth" of the soul. But a new birth which, while changing all the rest
of the man, left his reason unchanged, which turned all the rest of him
into a hero, but kept him still reasoning with a coward's logic, would
not amount to very much. Unless I am mistaken the new birth must begin
in the seat of reason if it is to begin at all. Is not the man's
reason the very essence of the man? How then, can he be converted at
all unless he is converted there?
Most of the "defences of religion" that I am acquainted with ignore all
this. They claim to address themselves to reason. And so indeed they
do, but to reason in a low stage of its development, to the half-born
reason of the timid and unemancipated soul, to the unheroic side of
human nature, treating us as beings whose ultimate interest is to save
our own skins, and making use of the logic, admirable on its own field,
which self-interest has worked out for that very purpose and which is
incapable of reaching any other conclusion. Instead of raising reason
to the full-grown stature of religion, they bring religion down to the
level of reason while still at the stage of learning the alphabet of
its business. To this class of argument belong Locke's "proof" of the
existence of God, and Paley's of a Beneficent Designer. These argue as
though the search for God were like the search for a lost key or for an
invisible carpenter. To the same class may be assigned a more modern
type of apologia, which accommodates religion to the supposed demands
of physical science, or equates the Kingdom of Heaven with social
reform, or domesticates the eternal values to the service of temporal
utility, or harmonizes God with democracy, or with whatever else may be
the popular obsession of the moment--all of them based on the principle
of making concessions to the unconverted reason of carnal men, thereby
sacrificing the higher logic of the spirit to the lower logic of the
senses.
These constructions have no continuance. A slight shifting in the
point of view, a new "demand" from science, a step forward (or
backward) in the higher criticism, a change in the prevalent political
obsession, a fit of sickness in democratic aspiration, and down they
all go under a breath of the logic that created them, the modernism of
to-day becoming the obscurantism of to-morrow. Then the work of
accommodation must begin afresh; new concessions are offered to
"reason," with the result that rebellious criticism breaks out at
another point. Or the cry is raised, by desperate men, that religion
is not an affair of the "head" but of the "heart"--as though a religion
in which the "head" and the "heart" were at variance could be anything
else than a fatal disease of the soul. And may not these apostles of
the "heart" be reminded that their proposal to exclude the "head" from
the pale of religion has neither force nor meaning until the "head"
itself has ratified the bargain and consented to its own exclusion?
Which the "head" is not likely to do.
If, then, we are to limit the word "reason" to that side of us to which
the aforesaid logic makes its approach, we should realize from the
outset that none of us can adduce the faintest shadow of reason why he
should exist at all, or why, in Sir Leslie Stephen's words, it were not
better for the world at large if his neck were wrung five minutes
hence. Indeed, if the half-born logic of the unconverted reason is to
rule our actions, I am inclined to think that the advice to commit
universal suicide would be at least as "logical" as any other that
philosophy could tender to the human race at the present moment.
But the advice would not be accepted. Rightly or wrongly each one of
us insists on regarding his own existence as a fact of some
significance--insists on believing that, on the whole, it is better for
him to be here than not to be here. However firmly we may be convinced
that the One has done its duty when it has differentiated itself into a
Many, there is none of us who would take lightly to the proposal that
he, John Smith, as one of the Many, should forthwith be blotted out,
and another, Wong Fu, placed in the gap left vacant by his
disappearance. To most of us, I believe, nay to all, it does make an
enormous difference whether the particular niche in question is filled
by Wong Fu or by _me_, but a difference for which we should find it
extremely difficult to give a "logical" account.
In my youth I was much in contact with a group of excellent Christians
who held that the number of the "saved" had been definitely fixed by
divine pre-ordination, the extremists placing it as low as 40,000. But
looking back on those times I now see that the ardour with which we
believed these things was strictly relevant to the hope each of us
entertained that he himself might be included in the number aforesaid.
I am very sure that our faith would have collapsed immediately had the
revelation been made that the elect were composed exclusively of
converted Chinamen. Our conception of the One and the Many was not so
disinterested or abstract as to exclude ourselves from a fair chance of
having a share in whatever good things happened to be going.
And so it always is, even where more enlightened philosophies prevail.
The significance of the universe, whatever it may be, is, ultimately,
its significance for _me_; which is another way of saying that I attach
importance to the fact that just I, and nobody else, am here to
perceive the significance.
There are certain forms of mysticism, mostly Indian, which would wean
us from all this. They would delete the value which the soul perceives
in being just this soul and no other. But I am very sure they do not
succeed. Whatever fascination the thought of being absorbed into the
Infinite may have for me depends on my keeping it in mind that it is I,
and not somebody else, who is being absorbed. "To be interested in
one's finite self to the point of wanting to get rid of it is to have a
high sense of one's own importance." A divine egoism is here indicated
which the subject of religion shares with the Object. "_I_ am the Lord
thy God. Thou shalt have no other God but _me_."
In describing the value a man finds in his own existence as illogical,
as a thing for which no reason can be given, I am referring to logic
and reason as they are understood in the schools and made use of in the
superficial war of minds, the lower logic and the lower reason of the
unconverted or unheroic mind. But, illogical though it be in that
construction, I nevertheless regard it--this value which each man finds
in his being the man he is--as the growing point of the higher logic
which, when fully born, reveals the Kingdoms of the Real. This is the
root of the intuition of value, the first point of contact between the
human mind and the things that are eternal, Beauty, Goodness and Truth.
Morally it takes the form of courage, which is the foundation of
virtue. In a world where no reason can be given why _this_ soul should
exist at all, _this_ soul nevertheless resolves to _create_ a reason by
its own valour, in the sure and certain faith that the universe,
indifferent to the coward, will be friendly to the hero, will respond
to his effort, will lend him its own creative energy, and bring him at
last, in fellowship with the Divine Spirit which first prompted his
attempt, to the haven where he would be.
The life of this heroic spirit is religion in being. But can we go
further and name it Christianity? I think we can. It is to the heroic
spirit, waiting in all of us for the Divine summons which shall call it
from death to life, that the figure of Christ, dominating the ages,
makes its great appeal. But of this more hereafter.
[1] _A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps_.
[2] See an article in the _Hibbert Journal_ for April 1922 by Howard V.
Knox, "Is Determinism Rational?"
_II_
_Religious Perplexity in General_
There is such a thing as the will-to-disbelieve. It is impervious to
all appeals. No reason so cogent can be given for believing in the
reality of anything but that human ingenuity, egged on by the
will-to-disbelieve, can find some means of casting doubt upon it.
In this respect, religious belief is no worse off than any other kind
of belief whatsoever. We can find grounds for doubting our own
identity, for doubting the multiplication table, for doubting the
fundamental axioms of thought--_if we are determined to find them_. On
all these beliefs doubt has, in fact, been cast by resolute doubters.
Nothing is proof against the will-to-disbelieve, not even disbelief
itself. Every scepticism makes assumptions which a deeper scepticism
can question. No reason can be given for doubting which a sufficiently
obstinate doubter cannot doubt. No reason for believing, but a more
ardent believer will find it inadequate. Here doubt and belief
resemble one another.
The will-to-disbelieve is as necessary a part of our equipment as the
will to believe: the two wills being indeed the same in principle, but
the opposite in application. The former is a weapon of defence, a
protection against deceivers, never more useful than when engaged in
exposing shams, fraud and cant practised under the name of religion.
The latter is a weapon of attack, the principle of all that is creative
in human life. It is akin to love, the most valiant of all qualities,
whether it appears in a tigress defending her cubs or in a martyr dying
for mankind.
If we fall under the power of the will-to-disbelieve, we shall indeed
be well protected from fraud, but ill equipped for the creation of new
values, either in our own life or in that of others, which is the prime
business of man. For this we need the will to believe that the new
values are possible, which the will-to-disbelieve can always doubt.
I cannot agree with those philosophers who maintain that religion is
based on the will-to-believe. The two are clearly connected; but it
would be truer to say that the will-to-believe is based on religion.
Religion encourages a man to act on the assumption that the best things
are possible, and checks the will-to-disbelieve precisely at the point
where it questions this. It is the God within the man which so acts,
and the moment the man perceives its divine origin the will-to-believe
acquires a new energy. God is not a product, but the author and living
principle of the will-to-believe.
The will-to-disbelieve, if given a free rein, would at last involve us
in a depth of scepticism indistinguishable from complete cowardice.
But in actual life it never goes to this length, except in the world of
pure dialectics and in asylums for the insane. However sceptically
inclined a man may be, there comes a point where he suspends his
will-to-disbelieve in favour of the proposition that Truth (and perhaps
Beauty and Goodness also) is better than the opposite, though it is
quite easy for anyone so minded, and with a little skill in dialectics,
to find a point of view from which even this can be doubted. Unless
the sceptic believed that Truth is better than its opposite why should
he take the trouble to convict his opponent of error or to satisfy
himself of the soundness of his own opinions? Clearly he has made his
choice at that point--a truly heroic choice if we consider
it--committing himself to a position which needs courage to maintain,
and thereby proving that he is no coward. In his own way he has faced
and bravely answered the question which, in one form or another, has to
be faced and answered by everyone. He has chosen to be a hero.
Over every _aspect_ of human life there hangs the _prospect_ of a
possible better, inviting us to achieve it, but without proof that we
shall succeed, or even that it is worth our while to make the attempt.
The coward within us asks for the proof; cries out that the venture is
not _safe_, and summoning the will-to-disbelieve has no difficulty in
finding reasons for rejecting the invitation. The hero, on the
contrary, finds in the terms offered the exact conditions to which his
nature is fitted to respond. He would rather _create_ the proof by his
own valour than have it for nothing from the outset. He is not
dismayed at finding himself in a universe which puts him under no
_compulsion_ to believe in God, Freedom, Duty and Immortality. As a
free soul he prefers not to be _compelled_ to believe in anything--for
how then could he be free? The offer of a logic that cannot be
gainsaid does not attract him, for he knows very well that his
will-to-disbelieve can gainsay any logic that may be produced--he can
meet it all, if so minded, with the Everlasting No. He finds his own
nature as hero exquisitely adapted to the nature of the universe as
dangerous--on that side the ringing challenge, on this the joyous
response; man and the universe engaged together as loyal confederates
in the task of creating a better-than-what-is.
Such are the respective arguments of the coward and the hero. Let it
be remembered that these are not the names of two different men. They
are names for the same man, as one or other element of his nature comes
uppermost. Both are clamant at this moment in you and me, clamant in
you as you read these words, clamant in me as I write them.
The will-to-disbelieve is always most active where the controversial
interest reigns supreme; least active where men, in a spirit of mutual
loyalty, are engaged together in the positive attempt to achieve a
better-than-what-is. Into the relations of true lovers the
will-to-disbelieve never enters, though a Mephistopheles, standing by,
can always find reasons enough for prompting it, and sneer at them for
a brace of fools. The will of the true lovers is to believe in each
other and to reject all suggestions to the contrary. They will trust
each other to the uttermost, in spite of the fact that no conclusive
reason can be given why they should do so--heroic lovers that they are!
But whenever a human interest, great or small, is detached from its
roots in reality and turned into a subject for the war of minds, every
assertion made by the one side is a challenge to the other to assert
the contrary. The will-to-disbelieve is then in its glory, and finds
there are no lengths to which it cannot go. The more it is hammered,
the greater its vigour, the greater its ingenuity, in hitting back.
Meanwhile both sides are drifting further away from realities and the
primary interest in dispute succumbing to the secondary interests of
mere controversy. The dominant motive of the controversy has now
ceased to be the search for truth and become the resolution of the
disputants to overthrow their opponents and not be overthrown. There
is no issue. From the nature of the forces engaged the controversy
becomes endless.
As the mere plaything of professional controversialists the fate of
religion can never be decided. The professional controversialists
themselves do not desire that it should be; their interest is to keep
the game up for ever; for if a final issue were reached their
occupation would be gone. Happily for religion, its fate does not
depend on the fortunes of this ever-swaying battle. It depends on the
answer given by individual men and women to the question which faces
them all over the gateway of life--"Wilt thou be a hero or a coward?"
Religion is one of those high things, and there are many such in life,
which lose their meaning when they are over-defended, or
over-explained. In explaining them we are apt to explain them away,
and without being aware that we are doing so. Whenever the truths of
religion are too much defended they are cheapened; and when cheapened
they become incredible. Like the love of a man and a woman, or the
belief we have in the loyalty of our dearest friends, or the joy we
feel in the presence of beauty, or the grief of a broken heart, they
resent being made into mere topics for discussion. For this reason
religion has suffered as much from its would-be friends as from its
avowed enemies. To official Defenders of the Faith, crowned, mitred or
wigged, the Faith owes less than the Defenders in question have been
wont to claim. I have even heard it suggested, by extremists, that
there would be more believers in God if all the theologians would take
themselves off.
If religion is founded on Reality, as we are so fond of asserting, we
have no need to be over-anxious about its defence, since Reality can
always be trusted in the long run to look after itself and its
children. We compromise religion whenever our defence of it seems to
imply that its fortunes depend on us or on our arguments, an impression
too often created by apologetic literature--the impression of something
naturally weak which needs an immense amount of argumentative coddling
to keep it alive. I observe none of this in the presentation of
religion by the Founder of Christianity. His freedom from anxiety for
the morrow covered the fundamentals of faith.
The weakest religions, and the weakest phases in the history of every
religion, are those which spend most energy in defending themselves;
the strongest are those which _attack_ the oppositions, difficulties,
disproportions, iniquities, perils and mysteries that beset the soul.
Seen on the self-defensive, religion is apt to appear at its worst. It
rises to its best in the moment of attack. It represents the
expeditionary force of the soul, in its native element where mysteries
are encountered, where the seemingly impossible has to be attempted,
where creative work has to be done and where the call to play the man
is never silent. Most of the quarrels and divisions among believers,
which exhaust the energies meant for a Diviner Object, and deface the
history of religion, turn on the question of its defence. On the side
of defence religion falls asunder into sects which spend themselves in
achieving mutual paralysis. On the side of attack its forces converge.
Religion is rather that which defends us than that which we have to
defend. It stands for the attack upon the powers of darkness and of
spiritual wickedness, in high places and in low.
The defence of religion has been overdone. We have cooped up the faith
in theological fortresses, surrounding it with an immense array of
outworks--creeds, dogmas, apologetics, institutions--and we have used
up our resources in holding our "positions" against one another when we
ought to have been attacking the common enemy in the open field. These
outworks and defences, intended to save us from perplexity, have become
a greater source of perplexity than all the rest. It takes a lifetime
to understand them, and when understood most of them turn out futile.
It is the fashion nowadays to express alarm about the future of
religion. Hardly a day passes but we hear some utterance, read some
document, which sounds that note. But look closely and you will often
discover that what these people are really alarmed about is not
religion itself, but one or other of the entrenched camps in which
religion has been cooped up. Where is the church, where is the sect,
where is the creed-bolstered institution, unhampered by the cares of
these great fortresses? And indeed they are not safe. There is no
place on earth where a man's soul is less safe than when it immures
itself in one of these masterpieces of military architecture, mostly
mediaeval. We live in an age of long-range artillery and of high
explosives.
Are you then in search of a religion which will relieve you of
perplexity, remove peril out of your path, and surround your soul with
an unassailable rampart against doubt? I have to confess that I know
of none such. But I know of at least one religion which does far
greater things than these.
In the first place, the religion I am thinking of brings all our
perplexities to a focus; lifts them up on high; concentrates them on
two or three burning points, and shows us with a clearness that admits
of no mistaking what a tremendous mystery we are up against in life.
That is the first thing that a true religion does. But if it did that
only, it would do us no good but harm, for it would overwhelm us. So
it does the second. While on the one hand it reveals to us, as I have
said, the deep and amazing mystery of our existence, on the other it
reveals something yet deeper and more amazing in ourselves, something
divine in everyone of us, which is more than a match for what it has to
face. A true religion does both things, does them together, in the
same moment, in the same act. It throws a searchlight on our
perplexities and raises them to a high level. But in the very act of
so doing it raises the greatness of man to a higher level still. It
sharpens our consciousness of evil; thereby deepening our consciousness
of that in ourselves which opposes evil. Hear the Baron von Huegel.
"Christianity has not explained suffering and evil; no one has done so;
no one can do so. Yet it has done two things greater, more profound
and more profitable for us. From the first it has immensely widened
and deepened the fact, the reality, the awful potency and baffling
mystery of sorrow, pain, sin, things which abide with man across the
ages. But Christianity has also, from the first, increased the
capacity, the wondrous secret and force, which issues in a practical,
living, loving transcendence, utilization, transformation of sorrow and
pain and even of sin. Christianity gave to our souls the strength and
the faith to grasp life's nettle."
Observe that Christianity has done this _from the first_. And to the
last it will do the same. So far as I can see the religious
perplexities of to-day are not essentially different from those of
other times. They have indeed become more vocal, and there are more
people who can talk about them intelligently. But their nature is
unchanged. The first point to be noted about the religious
perplexities of to-day is their essential identity with those of
yesterday. They spring from the same root and they gather round the
same centres. Too much is being made of the special difficulties
besetting religion at the passing moment, those, for example, connected
with the progress of science and with the higher criticism--as though
this were the age of religious difficulty _par excellence_. Surely
that is a mistake. The difficulties of faith have _always_ been up to
the limit of human endurance. Religious belief has _always_ required
the full courage of the soul to sustain its high propositions. It has
_always_ been a "near thing," and those who speak of past ages when it
was easy are grossly misreading the history of the human mind. What
science and the higher criticism have done is to turn attention upon
new points, to divert perplexities into new channels, but not to alter
their essential character, not to change the stuff of which they are
made. The fact of evil is no discovery of the present age; it has been
challenging the faith of men for thousands of years; there is nothing
more poignant to be said about it to-day than was said ages ago by the
patriarch Job. The great troubles have not changed. Suffering and
death, the agony of bereavement, the tragedies of blighted hopes and
shipwrecked lives--these are not things peculiar to the twentieth
century.
In stressing the difficulties that come from science and criticism, are
we not in danger of losing sight of those greater and permanent
difficulties that enter into the very structure of human life, and
"abide with men across the ages"? A broken heart is the same in one
age, in one place, as in another: and wherever it exists the soul of
man has all that it can bear. Those who have faced these major
perplexities and conquered them, those who have passed through the
Valley of Humiliation and emerged victorious at the other end, will not
be greatly troubled by science and the higher criticism. But those who
begin their approach to religion by reconciling science with faith, or
adjusting the Creeds to the higher criticism, or solving conundrums
about the omnipotence of God, or making one set of abstractions fit in
with another, will find that all this argumentation avails them very
little when the lightning falls on the roof tree, or the Angel of Death
spreads his black wings over the house.
We are sometimes told that the Great War has enormously increased the
religious perplexities of mankind. I cannot see that it has. All the
problems it suggests, all the questions it raises, were equally
contained in the lesser wars that went before it, and even if the great
one had never occurred, there would still be enough suffering in the
world to challenge the strongest faith. An age which has needed the
Great War to rouse it to a sense of tragedy must have been living in a
fool's paradise up to date. Every problem suggested by the Great War
has been there, plain for all ages to see, since suffering and death,
since folly and wickedness, first came into the world. I do not doubt
that the war has administered a salutary shock to multitudes of
lethargic souls who would otherwise have continued to sleep on in the
sleep of spiritual death. But with the Christian Churches it is
different. It ill becomes them to treat the horrors of the war as a
novelty in human experience. All that the war can mean for them was
summarized long ago by the man who saw the "whole creation groaning and
travailing in pain together until now."
We can change the nature of our religious perplexities, change them
from things that depress into things that exalt us. But we cannot
banish them altogether. At the end of our labours, as at the
beginning, we shall find ourselves perplexed, _but not unto despair_.
These last words make the difference, and it is immense. They were
uttered by one who was deeply versed in the spiritual life.
"The present crisis in religion" is another phrase which recent
discussion has made familiar. That such a crisis exists no one in his
senses can doubt. But the phrase is often used in a way which suggests
that the "crisis" has no right to exist, that it constitutes a
misfortune peculiar to our own time, that it is an unnatural thing, and
that religion will never come to its own until the "crisis" has passed
away.
We find, however, that a "crisis" in religion is no new experience,
peculiar to the present day. The only ages of the past when a "crisis"
in religion did not exist were the spiritually dead ages. Whenever the
spirit of God has breathed upon the souls of men the effect has been to
awaken the sense of a great crisis. The Epistles of St Paul are full
of it. In the Confessions of St Augustine, written in the fifth
century, we see how critical he felt the then passing moment to be.
There was a crisis at the Reformation, and at the Renaissance. There
was a crisis when printing was invented, and when the Bible was
translated. There was a crisis when Whitefield and Wesley were urging
the masses to flee from the wrath to come. A more recent example can
be found in the writings of Carlyle. Everything that has been said
since the Great War about the spiritual bankruptcy of Europe, about the
need of religious reconstruction, about a change of heart in nations,
and governments and individuals, as the only alternative to a complete
disaster, was said by Carlyle three-quarters of a century ago, and said
by him with a force and trenchancy not since surpassed. Here, for
example, is what he wrote in the year 1850.
"In the days that are passing over us, even fools are arrested to ask
the meaning of them; few of the generations of men have seen more
impressive days. Days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation,
confusion worse confounded.... It is not a small hope that will
suffice us, the ruin being clearly ... universal. There must be a new
world if there is to be a world at all. That human beings in Europe
can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any
steadiness or continuance therein--this small hope is not now a tenable
one. These days of universal death must be days of universal rebirth,
if the ruin is not to be total and final. It is a time to make the
dullest man consider whence he came and whither he is bound. A
veritable New Era to the foolish as well as to the wise" (_Latter-Day
Pamphlets_).
That was written seventy-two years ago, and when was it truer than
to-day? The "religious crisis" is perennial, now taking one form, now
another, but always demanding from those who have to face it the utmost
of their courage, loyalty and love.
The religious crises which take place in the great world, in the
conditions of the age and so forth, are only the enlarged reflections
of personal crises constantly occurring to ourselves, which, even if
they were absent from the general conditions of the age, would still
present themselves, in our private experience, so long as suffering and
death were elements in life. The existence of a crisis is not
unnatural to religion, but perfectly natural, the atmosphere in which
it breathes most freely, the soil in which it strikes its deepest root.
We are wholly mistaking what religion is when we think of it as some
secret or power which is going to banish the great crises of our
experience and leave us with none to face. The truth is the very
opposite.
The penalty--no, not the penalty but the high reward--of having any
religion that is worth the name, is that it will conduct us into
critical situations, that it will reveal perplexities where without it
none would exist. From some perplexities religion does indeed give
release. It gives release from those that are not worthy of us, that
belittle us when we indulge them, that make us selfish, timid and
unloving--the care for self, the fear that something dreadful may
happen to us, either in this world or in the next, unless we take
immense precautions against its happening. But in releasing from these
perplexities, which are not worthy of us, it confronts us with others
on a higher level, where our finer essence finds the employment for
which it was made. Instead of hiding the great crises, instead of
banishing them, or giving us anaesthetics to make us unconscious of
their presence, religion reveals them, makes us aware of them, sharpens
our consciousness of their presence; but at the same time reveals us to
ourselves as beings who are capable of overcoming them. If on the one
hand it uncovers the pain of life and makes us feel it with a new
intensity, on the other it liberates the love that conquers pain, a
power mightier than death and sharper than agony.
One might almost define religion in these terms. That in each of us,
and in all of us which faces the crisis, which rises to meet it, which
feels, when confronted by it, that its hour is come and for this cause
it came into the world.
Do you say it is _hard_? It would be if we were made of poorer stuff.
But made as we are anything less would be too small for us, would leave
us dissatisfied, hungry and half employed. Yes, half employed, and not
the best half either. We are so made that until we "grasp the nettle
of life" the best part of us has nothing to do, loitering, so to speak,
at the street corners of life, like a starving labourer out of work.
On that upper level, where the best that is in us confronts the highest
that is demanded of us, we discover how finely the nature of man is
adapted to the world in which he lives, how well the two accord, the
noblest element in the one corresponding to the most challenging
element in the other, so that deep answers unto deep and the two make
music together. On the lower levels there is no adaptation; our
selfish desires are at odds with nature; we are out for a good time and
get no response; and there all is disenchantment, disappointment and
misery. But the keynote of the higher level is joy--the joy of the
labourer who has found his work, of the lover who has seen his object,
of the hero who has received his commission and his sword.
Towards the end of the war, or perhaps shortly afterwards, somebody
coined a more attractive phrase which was much on the lips of exuberant
reformers. They were going to make, so they said, "A world fit for
heroes to live in."
What kind of a world is that? Is comfort the keynote of it? Does it
provide the hero with an assured income and an easy life? Does it
guarantee him a pension for any heroism he displays? Does it ask of
its heroes only a limited term of service, and then superannuate them
at an early age, exposing them to peril for a short time and after that
withdrawing dangers from their path and surrounding them with the
safeguards of a protected respectability?
No; what these arrangements provide for is not the life of heroism, but
its death. Give the hero a world like that and what will he say?
"This world," he will say, "is _not_ fit for me to live in. It spells
extinction to all that makes life worth living to me. It is the flat
opposite to what I desire. It lacks everything that makes the world
divine. No God can dwell within it. No Christ will ever visit its
melancholy shores."
And yet, is it not something like this that many of us have had in mind
of late when we have been talking of "A world fit for heroes to live
in"? Have we not conceived it as a world where heroism is a mere
incident, almost an accident, which comes in brief patches and spells,
and when the rest of life is given over to the middling virtues and to
prearranged satisfactions? There are people who cry out for this;
there is something within us all that cries out for it; but the noblest
part of us scorns it; the heroic spirit would not have it at any price.
When the hero asks for a world fit for him to live in he is thinking of
something wholly different. He desires no satisfaction save that which
is the direct fruit of his own loyalty and self-devotion. He wants
continuous employment on the level of his highest self, where love
never sleeps at her task, and where the voices of faith and hope,
whispering of new worlds to conquer, are never silent. A divine
universe is, for him, just that; it breeds ideals for great souls to
pursue; gives them incentives to the pursuit; shares with them in the
perils of it; suffers with them in their failures and triumphs with
them in their victories. Is the Soul of the World at one with us in
these great endeavours? Does it meet us on that high level with the
companionship of a Spirit akin to ours, not only asking for our
loyalty, but giving it in return? If so, God exists; the universe is
divine; and the world is fit for heroes to live in. Hallelujah, for
the Lord reigneth!
This is the side of our nature which Christianity brought to light, in
all its splendour and power, when it revealed us to ourselves in the
person of Christ--that, in all of us, which stands above the
perplexities of life and is more than a match for them; which sees evil
with the clearest eye, and at the same time overcomes it with the
deepest love. At home in the bright hours of life, which grow brighter
under the radiance it pours into them, the Christ within is always
ready when the dark ones arrive. "I am equal to that," it cries.
"Through the power that is given me, through the fellowship I have with
the heart of a Divine universe, I can turn that evil into good, and
transfigure that sorrow into joy, and draw the stream of a deeper life
from the very thing that threatens to slay me. Now is the time, here
is the place, to show my Divine Creator that he has not made me for
nothing! For this cause was I born and for this hour came I into the
world."