inconceivable; only it will be similar to our present life in its
purest moments, and will surely be no sudden leap into a quite
different spiritual condition, but a continuation, in which each man
can receive only that for which he has become ripe here. The difference
will therefore, perhaps, be smaller than is commonly thought.
But the scientists are quite right in denying immortality to a soul
that is simply a function of physical organs. Whatever in our nature
can be comprehended by the methods of natural science can not possibly
be immortal, but passes into annihilation, or rather into dissolution
and change, just as surely as any other object in the physical world.
But there is apparently something else in man besides bones, muscles,
sinews, veins, and nerves, and this something else can be embodied
again in some other form. And this seems to me relatively more
conceivable than a sudden and complete annihilation of the spiritual
life.
Death, in itself, is therefore nothing terrible, nor even something
undesirable, and whoever still fears it is certainly not yet upon the
right path of life. The only fearful thing is the backward glance,
when one is old, upon a life quite perverted and useless, or upon a
great accumulation of guilt unforgiven.
Not we shall pass away, but the present world shall pass away: this
is the one great thought which must lift us above all the terrors
of uncertainty. The other bright point in this darkness which the
understanding alone can not illumine, is the thought that the Lord of
all existence, whom we have already learned to know here as a sure
friend, must be quite the same for us there also as he was here, only
still nearer joined to us and still clearer known.
His voice--and this all know who have once stood near the dark
exit-gate of this life--his voice we shall be able to hear at last,
when all else has already sunk away behind us. Then, only one step
further, and
“_I hope to see my pilot face to face,
When I have crossed the bar._”
VII. THE PROLEGOMENA OF CHRISTIANITY
VII. THE PROLEGOMENA OF CHRISTIANITY
The cardinal fault of Christianity, which has persisted from generation
to generation for centuries, is perhaps this: that Christianity has
for long been no genuine, vigorous conviction of all those who bear
its name, but only a general notion of somewhat the same meaning as
“humanity” or “civilization.” Thus year after year many thousands
are received into its formal constituency without ever in their
lives receiving a correct idea of its demands, or a firm trust in
its promises, or, least of all, any definite resolution and will to
hold themselves in duty bound by these demands and promises. The
“Christian” nations distinguish themselves from the non-Christian in
much the same way as the ancient “Greeks” distinguished themselves from
the “Barbarians”; and the Christian faith has grown to be a special
confession _within_ the borders of Christendom; while quite other
convictions, never shared by Christ and his first confessors, and
conceptions of the world which claim an equal right in a “Christian”
state, venture to stand opposed to Christianity.
We may leave it undecided whether this is a fate that overtakes every
religion which ripens into a “world-religion,” but may nevertheless
doubt whether the formation of such a world-religion by means of a
great attenuation of all religious demands ever lay in the original
meaning and task of Christianity; even if one may grant that, even in
this form it has been a magnificent tool of civilization and, in fact,
is still such.
Yet it is certain that this course of evolution was dimly felt, even by
the first generation of Christians, as an unavoidable though deplorable
fate, and that the formal victory of the Christian religion over the
heathen cults in the Roman Empire, and the consequent transformation
into a Roman state religion, brought into it an element that Christ
himself, before Pilate, the Roman governor of Judæa, had disavowed in
the most distinct manner. All which has since been called “the Church,”
or “the relations between the Church and the State,” and which has
taken up so great a space in the thoughts of the nations, has, as an
organization, no support in the original records of Christianity;
indeed, it often almost seems as though the attainment of a definite
goal of human development and the consequent end of the present age of
the world were dimly surmised by the early Christians to be nearer than
proved possible, in the sequel. The Kingdom of God is wholly founded
upon the freedom of the human will, and it depends on that with what
speed and intensity Christianity will or can come to realization in an
individual, or in a nation, or in an epoch.
It is a serious article of belief with the Protestant group of
churches, that not merely in a general way, but for every single
individual during his earthly life, Christianity is to be realized
through a “church”; this “church” stands for the continuous visible
embodiment of Christianity, and accordingly it receives the individual
into its constituency as a mere unit in the totality, in order that it
may furnish him a safe passage through the judgment that shall finally
take place on all the deeds of men. And this does not prevent many men,
in all the Christian communions, from believing that membership in
these communions is the chief matter; and they busy themselves about
the fundamental conditions of such a membership only for a couple of
hours on Sundays.
This accounts for the title of this chapter. For we are going to
ask, not what belongs dogmatically to the Christian doctrine, but
what kind of preliminary dispositions are required in the human
intellect and will before we can accept and understand the teachings
of Christianity. In this sense they are “prolegomena.” If some reader,
after going through this chapter, should say that the very substance
of Christianity itself lies therein, I shall not disturb him in his
conception; for his conception would at any rate do him less harm than
the other view, which would declare these preliminaries to be too
difficult, or not necessary, for entrance into the church of Christ.
These first steps are quite easily outlined in a few words: first,
to regard God as an actual existence and not as a mere philosophical
idea of the schools,--and then, in consequence, to fear him alone and
to serve him alone--to have no other idols beside him, neither men,
nor possessions, nor glory; secondly, to love the men among whom one
is placed “as oneself,” as Christ says, in practical words we can
understand--not often more than oneself apparently, and as a matter
of fact, in most cases less; thirdly, not to devote one’s life to
pleasure even of the so-called “noblest” sorts, nor, on the other
hand, to suffering, to mere asceticism,--but to surrender oneself to
the doing of the will of God, in the firm confidence that this must
be practicable, though not through one’s own moral power, yet through
the divine help and grace; and, fourthly, if any one should at first
doubt whether all this is possible for man, to believe that, so far as
concerns himself, the matter lies only in his _will_, the only thing he
can, but must, contribute thereto.
These are the “prolegomena” of Christianity which every one must
consider, before he resolves, upon reaching his years of discretion,
to make a real entrance into the Christian life, instead of going
forward upon the broader way, easier at the first, but sure to be
unsatisfactory in the end.
If he does not consider these things, or if he relies upon his own
strength in the conduct of life because he trusts in the possibility of
an ethical uplifting tendency already present in human nature and does
not think he needs any transcendental support, then he is either like
the man in the Gospel who built a house upon the sand which stood only
as long as the weather was fair, or like that other who began to build
a tower which afterward he could not finish.
Or if he finds these demands too high-pitched, then, even under the
best conditions, there springs up in him that consumptive, anæmic,
half-hearted Christianity which is forever evading the urgings of
conscience and is consequently always dissatisfied--that hypocritical
and unlovely Christianity which we all know only too well.
It is not necessary to say much in “explanation” of these demands.
The requirements of the Christian religion are not usually lacking in
clearness; it is the human will that is lacking in the resoluteness to
accept them. It much prefers to have them explained away.
Belief in God is naturally the first and the most necessary preliminary
stipulation of Christianity, without which it does not exist, or is but
an empty dissembling name for an entirely different way of thinking.
This is also the case when the word “God” is accepted as a designation
for the totality of all things, or the Absolute Being, or, as with
most adherents of “deism,” as an expression for a something that
exercises no influence upon worldly things, but somehow exists only as
the law that in the beginning created the universe, but is now forever
unchangeable; where it itself came from and why it no longer continues
vital and active, no one can tell.
To be sure, we can not explain a “living” God, as we have often already
said. All explanations or so-called proofs of God are defective, both
the positive and the negative. It is not worth the trouble to linger
over them. God is something that can not be explained, but he is not
something that can not be experienced. But he is to be experienced
only by those who “keep his laws,” and one may be practically quite
sure that those people who will not do this are atheists at bottom, in
spite of all their asseverations; just as there are men, on the other
hand, whom God probably still regards as his followers, though we have
ourselves long given up regarding them as such.
The experience of God expresses itself thus: first, in spiritual
tranquillity, satisfaction, quieting of the thirst for truth (as Christ
calls it), a sort of strengthening of the spirit and of the inner life
such as is vainly to be attained in any other way, whether through
philosophy, or through a refusal to think at all about such things;
second, in inward serenity which, gained in any other way, is not so
long-enduring; and finally, in a general deeper intensity of life, the
effective cause of physical and spiritual health and so of the manifold
blessing which springs from this belief in God, both for individuals
and for nations.
It is this blessing that is showing itself when all one’s
circumstances, apparently of their own motion, so shape themselves that
what is truly excellent (the furthering of the inner, the protection of
the outer life) always prevails, and danger is averted; on the other
hand, no travelling in byways, no wrong actions, are attended with
good results. The latter is the usual punishment of evil men, whereby
they are hardened and kept from turning to a better life. It is also
the ever-visible means of distinguishing between the divine blessing
and that outwardly similar worldly “good fortune” in which even the
shrewdest of men often put an inconceivable and quite groundless
confidence, until, some time or other, it leaves them in the midst
of dire difficulties; for the most part at the very moment when they
believed they had definitely secured it and had attained to the proud
summit of their desires. Men are never faithful to the mere “children
of fortune,” but only to their fortune; while they can not, if they
wanted to, oppose those endowed with the divine blessing.
On this point the Old Testament contains many positive assurances
and many actual examples, and it may in general be said that for the
presentation of the Laws of God the New Testament alone would not
suffice; nor is that its purpose, for it always implies a knowledge of
the Old Testament.
“The man who keepeth my laws shall thereby live,” is the sum of these
promises. For these laws are the principle of life itself, and to
ignore them is to come within the jurisdiction of death. That may be
put to the test, and ought to be put to the test, if it is done with a
sincere desire to know what to believe, and if it is not continually
repeated after one has once gained a sufficiently clear knowledge. But
for those who will not do even that there is nothing left save to make
for themselves other gods “to go before them.”
These gods are, as a rule, human beings or the products of their mind
in some form,--once again to-day, as in the period of the so-called
Renaissance, preëminently in the form of art. Great crudeness of morals
and the absence indeed of all ethical conceptions may go hand in hand
with the finest and highest culture in this special direction, thus
showing that art can not be the highest goal men can strive for and
attain. We ought not to have had to experience this for the second
time, though it is often to be feared that we are now doing so.
We should never make idols for ourselves of even the dearest and best
men, not to speak of those who are highly gifted or hold a high place
in the world’s esteem. Not only the New Testament, but even the Old,
lays down in a very practical way the proper and easily recognized
limit; for they prescribe that we are to love God “above all,” and
men “as ourselves,” no more and no less. Even the simplest person can
easily compute this; and if in certain exuberant, “heavenly” moments of
life it seems too little, yet, taking one’s whole life into account, it
is really more than any of us perform, and at any rate is much more
salutary for our neighbor.
The opposite quality to “reliance upon men” is (what at first seems
unlikely) sympathetic compassion; when reliance departs, compassion
enters to heal. This is something quite different from what is
ordinarily called “love to men,” and is much more. It is something,
too, that does not naturally lie within us; we have to learn it,
usually late in life and through troublous paths. But when a man has
it, then it is henceforth sure that he is “fit for the Kingdom of God.”
If it is not men and their works, then it is possessions, ambition,
or the continuous search for enjoyment that stands most in the way
of that sincere union of the human soul with the divine spirit which
necessarily forms the foundation of all Christianity;--above all, it is
the “deceitfulness of riches,” as the Gospel well calls it, the very
common delusion that possession and happiness are identical, a delusion
from which the man first awakes when he holds in his hands that for
which he was striving and for which he had often sacrificed body and
soul; and now for the first he discovers that, looked at closely, it
was not, even on the best interpretation, worth all this exertion.
In the Gospel are found these words of Jesus: Lay not up for yourselves
treasures upon the earth; ye can not serve God and Mammon; whosoever
he be of you that renounces not all that he hath, he can not be my
disciple. If I were an adherent of the atheistic Socialism of our
day, I would constantly hold up these sayings of their Lord and
Master before the sincere followers of Christianity, who are by far
the most dangerous opponents of Socialism; for if they should obey
these sayings, without any further effort the solution of the social
question would follow. But there are many passages of the Bible which
are almost divested of their value because of a kind of disqualifying
law of customary usage; or they are at least not spoken of in religious
circles, because they have little that is “edifying” for many of those
present.
If we must admit that such passages designate the goal or ideal toward
which we should strive, rather than that to which every one can at once
attain, we should, nevertheless, keep our eyes continually upon it
and have the earnest will to make our way thither; else all the other
messages of the Gospel profit us nothing and are for us as if they
were not there.
To speak practically, then, one must never fix his heart upon
possessions, nor regard them as the most important thing to be lived
and striven for, nor make them the measure of his valuation of men and
circumstances, nor be unready or disinclined to diminish them at any
time for the sake of God or the common good, and if necessary even to
give them up altogether. They who can do this when it is required of
them are the only men who are free and worthy of God’s kingdom. At
different times in life they will often be put to this test, and if
this has never yet happened, it is no good sign for their inner life or
for their standing in God’s grace. Often it goes no farther than the
testing of their will, and when the will has surrendered, God does not
require of them the actual deed, or he lets the trial so shape itself
that in the end it is the more easily endurable. Sometimes, however, as
with Job, it comes to a real loss of all one’s goods; and not always
is there finally a double compensation therefor, but there always is
a complete consolation for what one has done, provided one will seek
for it and not merely helplessly and weakly bewail. In order always
to have the mastery of oneself and to put this to the proof, it may
often be a good thing, even before one resolves upon Christianity, to
make the test of Polycrates, who cast a much-treasured ring into the
sea. Try it once, this surrender of your dearest possession; though,
to be sure, the test will in most cases come to you unbidden, if it
is your lot to become a free man by God’s grace instead of a slave to
Mammon. But no matter how it comes to you, if you have shown yourself
able to make this surrender, you will be set free from the strongest
fetter with which the spirit of the world keeps man bound; the rest of
your possessions will henceforth become more a matter of indifference
to you. Of course, in this question of possessions, the concern is
rather with the spirit and the will than with the mere deed. One can
also “possess as though he possessed not” (though the possibility of
deception here is very great), and if one no longer spends anything
for mere enjoyment or luxury, but applies everything to useful
ends, not counting among such ends the mere senseless heaping up of
possessions for heirs and successors down to the remotest ages, then
one may believe his actions respond to the real meaning of the words
of Christ. We at least will not cast the first stone at those who so
comport themselves.
One good help in this, besides the firm resolve to forego all luxury,
is, as already explained in a former chapter, systematic giving;
another is, to reckon and calculate as little as possible, and to busy
oneself as little with money as is compatible with a necessary order in
one’s business and private affairs. For money has an evil charm about
it like that of philosophical heresy; neither will easily let a man go
again when once he has become much involved in them.
Glory is for many just as strong a fetter as mammonism--not only
the excessive eagerness for the ordinary human and civic honors
(exposed though they always are to the judgment of contemporaries
or, in the greater instances, of posterity) but also the anxiety for
respectability. As to the former, Paul, one of the most abused of men,
has left us a very good statement in 1 Cor. iv. 3 ff.; and that any one
loses the regard of his citizens quite without blame is really much
rarer than is commonly supposed. On the other hand, God often enough
makes one’s former enemies to be those who become the most satisfied
with him, and the prophetic words of Isaiah come splendidly to take
the place of the earlier underestimation: “And the sons of them that
afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee; and all they that despised
thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet.” But one
must be able to endure things if he is to adopt Christianity; those
too-sensitive Christians who crave the esteem of even those they do not
themselves esteem only show that the world and its praise are still far
from being enough a matter of indifference to them.
The real positions of honor are, after riches, the most dangerous thing
there is for faith; on this point the Gospel leaves not the least
doubt. Whoever runs into this danger quite of his own free will, even
perhaps with eager zeal, quite commonly perishes therein, so far as
concerns his better and only worthful life. But whoever, by his calling
or by his lot, is compelled to accept such positions and yet would like
to become or remain a Christian, has every cause to be watchful, and to
be thankful for occasional humiliations, an article in which, happily,
the world seldom lets him be lacking.
For the greater number of men in the ordinary situations of life
the hardest part in the prolegomena of Christianity is perhaps the
conquering of one’s desire for pleasure. The humbler classes often
escape this desire with still less success than do the wealthy and
the aristocratic, who may have learned, through experience, to place
a better estimate upon the worth or worthlessness of the pleasures of
the material life. One often finds in the lower classes a much more
unrestrained passion for pleasure, which, joined with the atheistic
mood they purposely cultivate, sometimes degenerates into a true
savagery and makes them like animals, and animals not of the noblest
sort, either.
But unfortunately the upper strata of society often enough lead the way
by their own bad example. They often complain of the love of pleasure
and the frivolity of the serving classes; but things would go better if
the servants did not perceive in their masters the same propensities
that restlessly agitate them.
Pleasure set up as a rule of life, sensuousness (taken in the widest
sense) established as the controlling power in the life of a man--this
is the infallible death of all faith in transcendent things. These
two powers, pleasure and faith, do not long exist side by side in a
man, but the one or the other must leave the field. Happy he in whom
it is the power of the sensual element that retreats before that of
the spiritual, vigorously striving for the mastery. For every victory
over the love of pleasure (what is not otherwise always the case on the
so-called path of virtue) brings at once its own reward in an increased
vigor of the ideal life, and often in a broad spiritual progress in the
wider sense. We can truthfully say that the most of the great advances
in the inner life are ushered in by some renunciation which brings its
own compensation.
That to the love of pleasure all sorts of attractive names are given
and that it in truth assumes now finer, now coarser, forms, should not
lead us astray. It is, nevertheless, under all circumstances, that
trait in us which most resembles animal nature and forthwith reveals
its ignoble character in the fact that it is always united with egotism
and the exploitation of others for our own selfish inclinations. The
partial naïveté of the ancient world is wanting in humanity now, for
their eyes have been opened to its meaning; and a universal failure to
conquer the love of pleasure through higher interests would, in these
days, be an unprecedented and quite impossible relapse of humanity into
an earlier age.
With the pursuit of pleasure dies the inclination for riches and honor,
which are partly only means in that pursuit and not ends in themselves;
and instead there springs up joy in work, the best salvation from all
evil, that otherwise always surrounds and tempts a man in one way or
another. For when the pursuit of pleasure disappears as a rule of life,
then a man must work, or the world is too dreary. On the other hand,
with the pursuit of pleasure as his innermost spring of action, a man
will always look upon work as only a means, and a disagreeable one, to
the attainment of pleasure.