THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND THE SOCIAL ORDER
We have come to the last chapter of this book; and I am conscious that
those who have had the patience to follow its argument from the
beginning, may now feel a certain sense of incompleteness. They will
observe that, though many things have been said about the life of the
Spirit, not a great deal seems to have been said, at any rate directly,
about the second half of the title--the life of to-day--and especially
about those very important aspects of our modern active life which are
resumed in the word Social. This avoidance has been, at least in part,
intentional. We have witnessed in this century a violent revulsion from
the individualistic type of religion; a revulsion which parallels
upon-its own levels, and indeed is a part of, the revolt from Victorian
individualism in political economic life. Those who come much into
contact with students, and with the younger and more vigorous clergy,
are aware how far this revolt has proceeded: how completely, in the
minds of those young people who are interested in religion, the Social
Gospel now overpowers all other aspects of the spiritual life. Again
and again we are assured by the most earnest among them that in their
view religion is a social activity, and service is its proper
expression: that all valid knowledge of God is social, and He is chiefly
known in mankind: that the use of prayer is mainly social, in that it
improves us for service, otherwise it must be condemned as a merely
selfish activity: finally, that the true meaning and value of suffering
are social too. A visitor to a recent Swanwick Conference of the Student
Christian Movement has publicly expressed his regret that some students
still seemed to be concerned with the problems of their own spiritual
life; and were not prepared to let that look after itself, whilst they
started straight off to work for the social realization of the Kingdom
of God. When a great truth becomes exaggerated to this extent, and is
held to the exclusion of its compensating opposite, it is in a fair way
to becoming a lie. And we have here, I think, a real confusion of ideas
which will, if allowed to continue, react unfavourably upon the religion
of the future; because it gives away the most sacred conviction of the
idealist, the belief in the absolute character of spiritual values, and
in the effort to win them as the great activity of man. Social service,
since it is one form of such an effort, a bringing in of more order,
beauty, joy, is a fundamental duty--the fundamental duty--of the active
life. Man does not truly love the Perfect until he is driven thus to
seek its incarnation in the world of time. No one doubts this. All
spiritual teachers have said it, in one way or another, for centuries.
The mere fact that they feel impelled to teach at all, instead of saying
"My secret to myself"--which is so much easier and pleasanter to the
natural contemplative--is a guarantee of the claim to service which they
feel that love lays upon them. But this does not make such service of
man, however devoted, either the same thing as the search for, response
to, intercourse with God; or, a sufficient substitute for these
specifically spiritual acts.
Plainly, we are called upon to strive with all our power to bring in the
Kingdom; that is, to incarnate in the time world the highest spiritual
values which we have known. But our ability to do this is strictly
dependent on those values being known, at least by some of us, at
first-hand; and for this first-hand perception, as we have seen, the
soul must have a measure of solitude and silence. Therefore, if the
swing-over to a purely social interpretation of religion be allowed to
continue unchecked, the result can only be an impoverishment of our
spiritual life; quite as far-reaching and as regrettable as that which
follows from an unbridled individualism. Without the inner life of
prayer and-meditation, lived for its own sake and for no utilitarian
motive, neither our judgments upon the social order nor our active
social service will be perfectly performed; because they will not be the
channel of Creative Spirit expressing itself through us in the world of
to-day.
Christ, it is true, gives nobody any encouragement for supposing that a
merely self-cultivating sort of spirituality, keeping the home fires
burning and so on, is anybody's main job. The main job confided to His
friends is the preaching of the Gospel. That is, spreading Reality,
teaching it, inserting it into existence; by prayers, words, acts, and
also if need be by manual work, and always under the conditions and
symbolisms of our contemporary world. But since we can only give others
that which we already possess, this presupposes that we have got
something of Reality as a living, burning fire in ourselves. The soul's
two activities of reception and donation must be held in balance, or
impotence and unreality will result. It is only out of the heart of his
own experience that man really helps his neighbour: and thus there is an
ultimate social value in the most secret responses of the soul to grace.
No one, for instance, can help others to repentance who has not known it
at first-hand. Therefore we have to keep the home fires burning, because
they are the fires which raise the steam that does the work: and we do
this mostly by the fuel with which we feed them, though partly too by
giving free access to currents of fresh air from the outer world.
We cannot read St. Paul's letters with sympathy and escape the
conviction that in the midst of his great missionary efforts he was
profoundly concerned too with the problems of his own inner life. The
little bits of self-revelation that break into the epistles and,
threaded together, show us the curve of his growth, also show us how
much, lay behind them, how intense, and how exacting was the inward
travail that accompanied his outward deeds. Here he is representative of
the true apostolic type. It is because St. Augustine is the man of the
"Confessions" that he is also the creator of "The City of God." The
regenerative work of St. Francis was accompanied by an unremitting life
of penitence and recollection. Fox and Wesley, abounding in labours, yet
never relaxed the tension of their soul's effort to correspond with a
transcendent Reality. These and many other examples warn us that only by
such a sustained and double movement can the man of the Spirit actualize
all his possibilities and do his real work. He must, says Ruysbroeck,
"both ascend and descend with love."[149] On any other basis he misses
the richness of that fully integrated human existence "swinging between
the unseen and the seen" in which the social and individual,
incorporated and solitary responses to the demands of Spirit are fully
carried through. Instead, he exhibits restriction and lack balance. This
in the end must react as unfavourably on the social as on the personal
side of life: since the place and influence of the spiritual life in the
social order will depend entirely on its place in the individual
consciousness of which that social order will be built, the extent in
which loyalty to the one Spirit governs their reactions to common daily
experience.
Here then, as in so much else, the ideal is not an arbitrary choice but
a struck balance. First, a personal contact with Eternal Reality,
deepening, illuminating and enlarging all of our experience of fact, all
our responses to it: that is, faith. Next, the fullest possible sense of
our membership of and duty towards the social organism, a completely
rich, various, heroic, self-giving, social life: that is, charity. The
dissociation of these two sides of human experience is fatal to that
divine hope which should crown and unite them; and which represents the
human instinct for novelty in a sublimated form.
It is of course true that social groups may be regenerated. The success
of such group-formations as the primitive Franciscans, the Friends of
God, the Quakers, the Salvation Army, demonstrates this. But groups, in
the last resort, consist of individuals, who must each be regenerated
one by one; whose outlook, if they are to be whole men, must include in
its span abiding values as well as the stream of time, and who, for the
full development of this their two-fold destiny, require each a measure
both of solitude and of association. Hence it follows, that the final
answer to the repeated question: "Does God save men, does Spirit work
towards the regeneration of humanity (the same thing), one by one, or in
groups?" is this: that the proposed alternative is illusory. We cannot
say that the Divine action in the world as we know it, is either merely
social or merely individual; but both. And the next question--a highly
practical question--is, "How _both_?" For the answer to this, if we can
find it, will give us at last a formula by which we can true up our own
effort toward completeness of self-expression in the here-and-now.
How, then, are groups of men moved up to higher spiritual levels; helped
to such an actual possession of power and love and a sound mind as shall
transfigure and perfect their lives? For this, more than all else, is
what we now want to achieve. I speak in generalities, and of average
human nature, not of these specially sensitive or gifted individuals who
are themselves the revealers of Reality to their fellow-men.
History suggests, I think, that this group-regeneration is effected in
the last resort through a special sublimation of the herd-instinct; that
is, the full and willing use on spiritual levels of the characters which
are inherent in human gregariousness.[150] We have looked at some of
these characters in past chapters. Our study of them suggests, that the
first stage in any social regeneration is likely to be brought about by
the instinctive rallying of individuals about a natural leader, strong
enough to compel and direct them; and whose appeal is to the impulsive
life, to an acknowledged of unacknowledged lack or craving, not to the
faculty of deliberate choice. This leader, then, must offer new life and
love, not intellectual solutions. He must be able to share with his
flock his own ardour and apprehension of Reality; and evoke from them
the profound human impulse to imitation. They will catch his enthusiasm,
and thus receive the suggestions of his teaching and of his life. This
first stage, supremely illustrated in the disciples of Christ, and again
in the groups who gathered round such men as St. Francis, Fox, or Booth,
is re-experienced in a lesser way in every successful revival: and each
genuine restoration of the life of Spirit, whether its declared aim be
social or religious, has a certain revivalistic character. We must
therefore keep an eye on these principles of discipleship and contagion,
as likely to govern any future spiritualization of our own social life;
looking for the beginnings of true reconstruction, not to the general
dissemination of suitable doctrines, but to the living burning influence
of an ardent soul. And I may add here, as the corollary of this
conclusion, first that the evoking and fostering of such ardour is in
itself a piece of social service of the highest value, and next that it
makes every individual socially responsible for the due sharing of even
the small measure of ardour, certitude or power he or she has received.
We are to be conductors of the Divine energy; not to insulate it. There
is of course nothing new in all this: but there is nothing new
fundamentally in the spiritual life, save in St. Augustine's sense of
the eternal youth and freshness of all beauty.[151] The only novelty
which we can safely introduce will be in the terms in which we describe
it; the perpetual new exhibition of it within the time-world, the fresh
and various applications which we can give to its abiding laws, in the
special circumstances and opportunities of our own day.
But the influence of the crowd-compeller, the leader, whether in the
crude form of the revivalist or in the more penetrating and enduring
form of the creative mystic or religious founder, the loyalty and
imitation of the disciple, the corporate and generalized enthusiasm of
the group can only be the first educative phase in any veritable
incarnation of Spirit upon earth. Each member of the herd is now
committed to the fullest personal living-out of the new life he has
received. Only in so far as the first stage of suggestion and imitation
is carried over to the next stage of personal actualization, can we say
that there is any real promotion of spiritual _life_: any hope that this
life will work a true renovation of the group into which it has been
inserted and achieve the social phase.
If, then, it does achieve the social phase what stages may we expect it
to pass through, and by what special characters will it be graced?
Let us look back for a moment at some of our conclusions about the
individual life. We said that this life, if fully lived, exhibited the
four characters of work and contemplation, self-discipline and service:
deepening and incarnating within its own various this-world experience
its other-world apprehensions of Eternity, of God. Its temper should
thus be both social and ascetic. It should be doubly based, on humility
and on given power. Now the social order--more exactly, the social
organism--in which Spirit is really to triumph, can only be built up of
individuals who do with a greater or less perfection and intensity
exhibit these characters, some upon independent levels of creative
freedom, some on those of discipleship: for here all men are not equal,
and it is humbug to pretend that they are. This social order, being so
built of regenerate units, would be dominated by these same implicits of
the regenerate consciousness; and would tend to solve in their light the
special problems of community life. And this unity of aim would really
make of it one body; the body of a fully socialized _and_ fully
spiritualized humanity, which perhaps we might without presumption
describe as indeed the son of God.
The life of such a social organism, its growth, its cycle of corporate
behaviour, would be strung on that same fourfold cord which combined the
desires and deeds of the regenerate self into a series: namely,
Penitence, Surrender, Recollection, and Work. It would be actuated first
by a real social repentance. That is, by a turning from that constant
capitulation to its past, to animal and savage impulse, the power of
which our generation at least knows only too well; and by the
complementary effort to unify vigorous instinctive action and social
conscience. I think every one can find for themselves some sphere,
national, racial, industrial, financial, in which social penitence could
work; and the constant corporate fall-back into sin, which we now
disguise as human nature, or sometimes--even more insincerely--as
economic and political necessity, might be faced and called by its true
name. Such a social penitence--such a corporate realization of the mess
that we have made of things--is as much a direct movement of the Spirit,
and as great an essential of regeneration, as any individual movement of
the broken and contrite heart.
Could a quick social conscience, aware of obligations to Reality which
do not end with making this world a comfortable place--though we have
not even managed that for the majority of men--feel quite at ease, say,
after an unflinching survey of our present system of State punishment?
Or after reading the unvarnished record of our dealings with the problem
of Indian immigration into Africa? Or after considering the inner nature
of international diplomacy and finance? Or even, to come nearer home,
after a stroll through Hoxton: the sort of place, it is true, which we
have not exactly made on purpose but which has made itself because we
have not, as a community, exercised our undoubted powers of choice and
action in an intelligent and loving way. Can we justify the peculiar
characteristics of Hoxton: congratulate ourselves on the amount of
light, air and beauty which its inhabitants enjoy, the sort of children
that are reared in it, as the best we can do towards furthering the
racial aim? It is a monument of stupidity no less than of meanness. Yet
the conception of God which the whole religious experience of growing
man presses on us, suggests that both intelligence and love ought to
characterize His ideal for human life. Look then at these, and all the
other things of the same kind. Look at our attitude towards
prostitution, at the drink traffic, at the ugliness and injustice of the
many institutions which we allow to endure. Look at them in the
Universal Spirit; and then consider, whether a searching corporate
repentance is not really the inevitable preliminary of a social and
spiritual advance. All these things have happened because we have as a
body consistently fallen below our best possible, lacked courage to
incarnate our vision in the political sphere. Instead, we have, acted on
the crowd level, swayed by unsublimated instincts of acquisition,
disguised lust, self-preservation, self-assertion, and ignoble fear: and
such a fall-back is the very essence of social sin.
We have made many plans and elevations; but we have not really tried to
build Jerusalem either in our own hearts or in "England's pleasant
land." Blake thought that the preliminary of such a building up of the
harmonious social order must be the building up or harmonizing of men,
of each man; and when this essential work was really done, Heaven's
"Countenance Divine" would suddenly declare itself "among the dark
Satanic mills."[152] What was wrong with man, and ultimately therefore
with society, was the cleavage between his "Spectre" or energetic
intelligence, and "Emanation" or loving imagination. Divided, they only
tormented one another. United, they were the material of divine
humanity. Now the complementary affirmative movement which shall balance
and complete true social penitence will be just such a unification and
dedication of society's best energies and noblest ideals, now commonly
separated. The Spectre is attending to economics: the Emanation is
dreaming of Utopia. We want to see them united, for from this union
alone will come the social aspect for surrender. That is to say, a
single-minded, unselfish yielding to those good social impulses which we
all feel from time to time, and might take more seriously did, we
realize them as the impulsions of holy and creative Spirit pressing us
towards novelty, giving us our chance; our small actualization of the
universal tendency to the Divine. As it is, we do feel a little
uncomfortable when these stirrings reach us; but commonly console
ourselves with the thought that their realization is at present outside
the sphere of practical politics. Yet the obligation of response to
those stirrings is laid on all who feel them; and unless some will first
make this venture of faith, our possible future will never be achieved.
Christ was born among those who _expected_ the Kingdom of God. The
favouring atmosphere of His childhood is suggested by these words. It is
our business to prepare, so far as we may, a favourable atmosphere and
environment for the children who will make the future: and this
environment is not anything mysterious, it is simply ourselves. The men
and women who are now coming to maturity, still supple to experience and
capable of enthusiastic and disinterested choice--that is, of surrender
in the noblest sense--will have great opportunities of influencing those
who are younger than themselves. The torch is being offered to them; and
it is of vital importance to the unborn future that they should grasp
and hand it on, without worrying about whether their fingers are going
to be burnt. If they do grasp it, they may prove to be the bringers in
of a new world, a fresh and vigorous social order, which is based upon
true values, controlled by a spiritual conception of life; a world in
which this factor is as freely acknowledged by all normal persons, as is
the movement of the earth round the sun.
I do not speak here of fantastic dreams about Utopias, or of the
coloured pictures of the apocalyptic imagination; but of a concrete
genuine possibility, at which clear-sighted persons have hinted again
and again. Consider our racial past. Look at the Piltdown skull:
reconstruct the person or creature whose brain that skull contained, and
actualize the directions in which his imperious instincts, his vaguely
conscious will and desire, were pressing into life. They too were
expressions of Creative Spirit; and there is perfect continuity between
his vital impulse and our own. Now, consider one of the better
achievements of civilization; say the life of a University, with its
devotion to disinterested learning, its conservation of old beauty and
quest of new truth. Even if we take its lowest common measure, the
transfiguration of desire is considerable. Yet in the things of the
Spirit we must surely acknowledge ourselves still to be primitive men;
and no one can say that it yet appears what we shall be. All really
depends on the direction in which human society decides to push into
experience, the surrender which it makes to the impulsion of the Spirit;
how its tendency to novelty is employed, the sort of complex habits
which are formed by it, as more and more crude social instinct is lifted
up into conscious intention, and given the precision of thought.
In our regenerate society, then, if we ever get it, the balanced moods
of Repentance of our racial past and Surrender to our spiritual calling,
the pull-forward of the Spirit of Life even in its most austere
difficult demands, will control us; as being the socialized extensions
of these same attitudes of the individual soul. And they will press the
community to those same balanced expressions of its instinct for
reality, which completed the individual life: that is to say, to
Recollection and Work. In the furnishing of a frame for the regular
social exercise of recollection--the gathering in of the corporate mind
and its direction to eternal values, the abiding foundations of
existence; the consideration of all its problems in silence and peace;
the dramatic and sacramental expression of its unity and of its
dependence on the higher powers of life--in all this, the institutional
religion of the future will perhaps find its true sphere of action, and
take its rightful place in the socialized life of the Spirit.
Finally, the work which is done by a community of which the inner life
is controlled by these three factors will be the concrete expression of
these factors in the time-world; and will perpetuate and hand on all
that is noble, stable and reasonable in human discovery and tradition,
whether in the sphere of conduct, of thought, of creation, of manual
labour, or the control of nature, whilst remaining supple towards the
demands and gifts of novelty. New value will be given to craftsmanship
and a sense of dedication--now almost unknown--to those who direct it.
Consider the effect of this attitude on worker, trader, designer,
employer: how many questions would then answer themselves, how many sore
places would be healed.
It is not necessary, in order to take sides with this possible new
order and work for it, that we should commit ourselves to any one party
or scheme of social reform. Still less is it necessary to suppose such
reform the only field in which the active and social side of the
spiritual life is to be lived. Repentance, surrender, recollection and
industry can do their transfiguring work in art, science, craftsmanship,
scholarship, and play: making all these things more representative of
reality, nearer our own best possible, and so more vivid and worth
while. If Tauler was right, and all kinds of skill are gifts of the Holy
Ghost--a proposition which no thorough-going theist can refuse--then
will not a reference back on the part of the worker to that fontal
source of power make for humility and perfection in all work? Personally
I am not at all afraid to recognize a spiritual element in all good
craftsmanship, in the delighted and diligent creation of the fine
potter, smith or carpenter, in the well-tended garden and beehive, the
perfectly adjusted home; for do not all these help the explication of
the one Spirit of Life in the diversity of His gifts?
The full life of the Spirit must be more rich and various in its
expression than any life that we have yet known, and find place for
every worthy and delightful activity. It does not in the least mean a
bloodless goodness; a refusal of fun and everlasting fuss about uplift.
But it does mean looking at and judging each problem in a particular
light, and acting on that judgment without fear. Were this principle
established, and society poised on this centre, reforms would follow its
application almost automatically; specific evils would retreat. New
knowledge of beauty would reveal the ugliness of many satisfactions
which we now offer to ourselves, and new love the defective character of
many of our social relations. Certain things would therefore leave off
happening, would go; because the direction of desire had changed. I do
not wish to particularize, for this only means blurring the issue by
putting forward one's own pet reforms. But I cannot help pointing out
that we shall never get spiritual values out of a society harried and
tormented by economic pressure, or men and women whose whole attention
is given up to the daily task of keeping alive. This is not a political
statement: it is a plain fact that we must face. Though the courageous
lives of the poor, their patient endurance of insecurity may reveal a
nobility that shames us, it still remains true that these lives do not
represent the most favourable conditions of the soul. It is not poverty
that matters; but strain and the presence of anxiety and fear, the
impossibility of detachment. Therefore this oppression at least would
have to be lightened, before the social conscience could be at ease.
Moreover as society advances along this way, every--even the most
subtle--kind of cruelty and exploitation of self-advantage obtained to
the detriment of other individuals, must tend to be eliminated; because
here the drag-back of the past will be more and more completely
conquered, its instincts fully sublimated, and no one will care to do
those things any more. Bringing new feelings and more real concepts to
our contact with our environment, we shall, in accordance with the law
of apperception, see this environment in a different way; and so obtain
from it a fresh series of experiences. The scale of pain and pleasure
will be altered. We shall feel a searching responsibility about the way
in which our money is made, and about any disadvantages to others which
our amusements or comforts may involve.
Here, perhaps, it is well to register a protest against the curious but
prevalent notion that any such concentrated effort for the
spiritualization of society must tend to work itself out in the
direction of a maudlin humanitarianism, a soft and sentimental reading
of life. This idea merely advertises once more the fact that we still
have a very mean and imperfect conception of God, and have made the
mistake of setting up a water-tight bulkhead; between His revelation, in
nature and His discovery in the life of prayer. It shows a failure to
appreciate the stern, heroic aspect of Reality; the element of austerity
in all genuine religion, the distinction between love and
sentimentalism, the rightful place of risk, effort, even suffering, in
all full achievement and all joy. If we are surrendered in love to the
purposes of the Spirit, we are committed to the bringing out of the
best possible in life; and this is a hard business, involving a quite
definite social struggle with evil and atavism, in which some one is
likely to be hurt. But surely that manly spirit of adventure which has
driven men to the North Pole and the desert, and made them battle with
delight against apparently impossible odds, can here find its
appropriate sublimation?
If anyone who has followed these arguments, and now desires to bring
them from idea into practice, asks: "What next?" the answer simply
is--Begin. Begin with ourselves; and if possible, do not begin in
solitude. "The basal principles of all collective life," says McDougall,
"are sympathetic contagion, mass suggestion, imitation":[153] and again
and again the history of spiritual experience illustrates this law, that
its propagation is most often by way of discipleship and the corporate
life, not by the intensive culture of purely solitary effort. It is for
those who believe in the spiritual life to take full advantage now of
this social suggestibility of man; though without any detraction from
the prime importance of the personal spiritual life. Therefore, join up
with somebody, find fellowship; whether it be in a church or society, or
among a few like-minded friends. Draw together for mutual support, and
face those imperatives of prayer and work which we have seen to be the
condition of the fullest living-out of our existence. Fix and keep a
reasonably balanced daily rule. Accept leadership where you find
it--give it, if you feel the impulse and the strength. Do not wait for
some grand opportunity, and whilst you are waiting stiffen in the wrong
shape. The great opportunity may not be for us, but for the generation
whose path we now prepare: and we do our best towards such preparation,
if we begin in a small and humble way the incorporation of our hopes and
desires as for instance Wesley and the Oxford Methodists did. They
sought merely to put their own deeply felt ideas into action quite
simply and without fuss; and we know how far the resulting impulse
spread. The Bab movement in the East, the Salvation Army at home, show
us this principle still operative; what a "little flock" dominated by a
suitable herd-leader and swayed by love and adoration can do--and these,
like Christianity itself, began as small and inconspicuous groups. It
may be that our hope for the future depends on the formation of such
groups--hives of the Spirit--in which the worker of every grade, the
thinker, the artist, might each have their place: obtaining from
incorporation the herd-advantages of mutual protection and unity of aim,
and forming nuclei to which others could adhere.
Such a small group--and I am now thinking of something quite practical,
say to begin with a study-circle, or a company of like-minded friends
with a definite rule of life--may not seem to the outward eye very
impressive. Regarded as a unit, it will even tend to be inferior to its
best members: but it will be superior to the weakest, and with its
leader will possess a dynamic character and reproductive power which he
could never have exhibited alone. It should form a compact organization,
both fervent and business-like; and might take as its ideal a
combination of the characteristic temper of the contemplative order,
with that of active and intelligent Christianity as seen in the best
type of social settlement. This double character of inwardness and
practicality seems to me to be essential to its success; and
incorporation will certainly help it to be maintained. The rule should
be simple and unostentatious, and need indeed be little more than the
"heavenly rule" of faith, hope, and charity. This will involve first the
realization of man's true life within a spiritual world-order, his utter
dependence upon its realities and powers of communion with them; next
his infinite possibilities of recovery and advancement; last his duty of
love to all other selves and things. This triple law would be applied
without shirking to every problem of existence; and the corporate spirit
would be encouraged by meetings, by associated prayer, and specially I
hope by the practice of corporate silence. Such a group would never
permit the intrusion of the controversial element, but would be based on
mutual trust; and the fact that all the members shared substantially the
same view of human life, strove though in differing ways for the same
ideals, were filled by the same enthusiasms, would allow the problems
and experiences of the Spirit to be accepted as real, and discussed with
frankness and simplicity. Thus oases of prayer and clear thinking might
be created in our social wilderness, gradually developing such power and
group-consciousness as we see in really living religious bodies. The
group would probably make some definite piece of social work, or some
definite question, specially its own. Seeking to judge the problem this
presented in the Universal Spirit, it would work towards a solution,
using for this purpose both heart and head. It would strive in regard to
the special province chosen and solution reached to make its weight
felt, either locally or nationally, in a way the individual could never
hope to do; and might reasonably hope that its conclusions and its
actions would exceed in balance and sanity those which any one of the
members could have achieved alone.
I think that these groups would develop their own discipline, not borrow
its details from the past: for they would soon find that some drill was
necessary to them, and that luxury, idleness, self-indulgence and
indifference to the common-good were in conflict with the inner spirit
of the herd. They would inevitably come to practise that sane
asceticism, not incompatible with gaiety of heart, which consists in
concentration on the real, and quiet avoidance of the attractive sham.
Plainness and simplicity do help the spiritual life, and these are more
easy and wholesome when practised in common than when they are displayed
by individuals in defiance of the social order that surrounds them. The
differences of temperament and of spiritual level in the group members
would prevent monotony; and insure that variety of reaction to the life
of the Spirit which we so much wish to preserve. Those whose chief gift
was for action would thus be directly supported by those natural
contemplatives who might, if they remained in solitude, find it
difficult to make their special gift serve their fellows as it must.
Group-consciousness would cause the spreading and equalization of that
spiritual sensitiveness which is, as a matter of fact, very unequally
distributed amongst men. And in the backing up of the predominantly
active workers by the organized prayerful will of the group, all the
real values of intercession would be obtained: for this has really
nothing to do with trying to persuade God to do specific acts, it is a
particular way of exerting love, and thus of reaching and using
spiritual power.
This incorporation, as I see it, would be made for the express purpose
of getting driving force with which to act directly upon life. For
spirituality, as we have seen all along, must not be a lovely fluid
notion or a merely self-regarding education; but an education for
action, for the insertion of eternal values into the time-world, in
conformity with the incarnational philosophy which justifies it. Such
action--such Insertion--depends on constant recourse to the sources of
spiritual power. At present we tend to starve our possible centres of
regeneration, or let them starve themselves, by our encouragement of the
active at the expense of the contemplative life; and till this is
mended, we shall get nothing really done. Forgetting St. Teresa's
warning, that to give our Lord a perfect service, Martha and Mary must
combine,[154] we represent the service of man as being itself an
attention to God; and thus drain our best workers of their energies, and
leave them no leisure for taking in Fresh supplies. Often they are
wearied and confused by the multiplicity in which they must struggle;
and they are not taught and encouraged to seek the healing experience of
unity. Hence even our noblest teachers often show painful signs of
spiritual exhaustion, and tend to relapse into the formal repetition of
a message which was once a burning fire.
The continued force of any regenerative movement depends above all else
on continued vivid contact with the Divine order, for the problems of
the reformer are only really understood and seen in true proportion in
its light. Such contact is not always easy: it is a form of work. After
a time the weary and discouraged will need the support of discipline if
they are to do it. Therefore definite role of silence and
withdrawal--perhaps an extension of that system of periodical retreats
which is one of the most hopeful features of contemporary religious
life--is essential to any group-scheme for the general and social
furtherance of the spiritual life. It is not to be denied for a moment,
that countless good men and women who love the world in the divine and
not in the self-regarding sense, are busy all their lives long in
forwarding the purposes of the Spirit: which is acting through them, as
truly as through the conscious prophets and regenerators of the race.
But, to return for a moment to psychological language, whilst the Divine
impulsion remains for us below the threshold, it is not doing all that
it could for us nor we all that we could do for it; for we are not
completely unified. We can by appropriate education bring up that
imperative yet dim impulsion to conscious realization, and wittingly
dedicate to its uses our heart, mind and will; and such realization in
its most perfect form appears to be the psychological equivalent of the
state which is described by spiritual writers, in their own special
language, as "union with God."
I have been at some pains to avoid the use of this special language of
the mystics; but now perhaps we may remind ourselves that, by the
declaration of all who have achieved it, the mature spiritual life is
such a condition of completed harmony--such a theopathetic state.
Therefore here to-day, in the worst confusions of our social scramble,
no less that in the Indian forest or the mediæval cloister, man's really
religious method and self-expression must be harmonious with a
life-process of which this is the recognized if distant goal: and in all
the work of restatement, this abiding objective must be kept in view.
Such union, such full identification with the Divine purpose, must be a
social as well as an individual expression of full life. It cannot be
satisfied by the mere picking out of crumbs of perfection from the
welter, but must mean in the end that the real interests of society are
indentical with the interests of Creative Spirit, in so far as these are
felt and known by man; the interests, that is, of a love that is energy
and an energy that is love. Towards this identification, the willed
tendency of each truly awakened individual must steadfastly be set; and
also the corporate desire of each group, as expressed in its prayer and
work. For the whole secret of life lies in directed desire.
A wide-spreading love to all in common, says Ruysbroeck in a celebrated
passage, is the authentic mark of a truly spiritual man.[155] In this
phrase is concealed the link between the social and personal aspects of
the spiritual life. It means that our passional nature with its cravings
and ardours, instead of making self-centred whirlpools, flows out in
streams of charity and power towards all life. And we observe too that
the Ninth Perfection of the Buddhist is such a state of active charity.
"In his loving, sympathizing, joyful and steadfast mind he will
recognize himself in all things, and will shed warmth and light on the
world in all directions out of his great, deep, unbounded heart."[156]
Let this, then, be the teleological objective on which the will and the
desire of individual and group are set: and let us ask what it involves,
and how it is achieved. It involves all the ardour, tenderness and
idealism of the lover, spent not on one chosen object but on all living
things. Thus it means an immense widening of the arc of human sympathy;
and this it is not possible to do properly, unless we have found the
centre of the circle first. The glaring defect of current religion--I
mean the vigorous kind, not the kind that is responsible for empty
churches--is that it spends so much time in running round the arc, and
rather takes the centre for granted. We see a great deal of love in
generous-minded people, but also a good many gaps in it which reference
to the centre might help us to find and to mend. Some Christian people
seem to have a difficulty about loving reactionaries, and some about
loving revolutionaries. And in institutional religion there are people
of real ardour, called by those beautiful names Catholic and
Evangelical, who do not seem able to see each other in the light of this
wide-spreading love. Yet they would meet at the centre. And it is at the
centre that the real life of the Spirit aims first; thence flowing out
to the circumference--even to its most harsh, dark, difficult and
rugged limits--in unbroken streams of generous love.
Such love is creative. It does not flow along the easy paths, spending
itself on the attractive. It cuts new channels, goes where it is needed,
and has as its special vocation--a vocation identical with that of the
great artist--the "loving of the unlovely into lovableness." Thus does
it participate according to its measure in the work of Divine
incarnation. This does not mean a maudlin optimism, or any other kind of
sentimentality; for as we delve more deeply into life, we always leave
sentimentality behind. But it does mean a love which is based on a deep
understanding of man's slow struggles and of the unequal movements of
life, and is expressed in both arduous and highly skillful actions. It
means taking the grimy, degraded, misshapen, and trying to get them
right; because we feel that essentially they can be right. And further,
of course, it means getting behind them to the conditions that control
their wrongness; and getting these right if we can. Consider what human
society would be if each of its members--not merely occasional
philanthropists, idealists or saints, but financiers, politicians,
traders, employers, employed--had this quality of spreading a creative
love: if the whole impulse of life in every man and woman were towards
such a harmony, first with God, and then with all other things and
souls. There is nothing unnatural in this conception. It only means that
our vital energy would flow in its real channel at last. Where then
would be our most heart-searching social problems? The social order then
would really be an order; tallying with St. Augustine's definition of a
virtuous life as the ordering of love.
What about the master and the worker in such a possibly regenerated
social order? Consider alone the immense release of energy for work
needing to be done, if the civil wars of civilized man could cease and
be replaced by that other mental fight, for the upbuilding of Jerusalem:
how the impulse of Creative Spirit, surely working in humanity, would
find the way made clear. Would not this, at last, actualize the Pauline
dream, of each single citizen as a member of the Body of Christ? It is
because we are not thus attuned to life, and surrendered to it, that our
social confusion arises; the conflict of impulse within society simply
mirrors the conflict of impulse within each individual mind.
We know that some of the greatest movements of history, veritable
transformations of the group-mind, can be traced back to a tiny
beginning in the faithful spiritual experience and response of some one
man, his contact with the centre which started the ripples of creative
love. If, then, we could elevate such universalized individuals into the
position of herd-leaders, spread their secret, persuade society first to
imitate them, and then to share their point of view, the real and sane,
because love-impelled social revolution might begin. It will begin, when
more and ever more people find themselves unable to participate in, or
reap advantage from, the things which conflict with love: when tender
emotion in man is so universalized, that it controls the instincts of
acquisitiveness and of self-assertion. There are already for each of us
some things in which we cannot participate, because they conflict too
flagrantly with some aspect of our love, either for truth, or for
justice, or for humanity, or for God; and these things each individual,
according to his own level of realization, is bound to oppose without
compromise. Most of us have enough widespreading love to be--for
instance--quite free from temptation to be cruel, at any rate directly,
to children or to animals. I say nothing about the indirect tortures
which our sloth and insensitiveness still permit. Were these first
flickers made ardent, and did they control all our reactions to
life--and there is nothing abnormal, no break in continuity involved in
this, only a reasonable growth--then, new paths of social discharge
would have been made for-our chief desires and impulses; and along these
they would tend more and more to flow freely and easily, establishing
new social-habits, unhampered by solicitations from our savage past. To
us already, on the whole, these solicitations are less insistent than
they were to the men of earlier centuries. We see their gradual defeat
in slave emancipation, factory acts, increased religious tolerance,
every movement towards social justice, every increase of the arc over
which our obligations to other men obtain. They must now disguise
themselves as patriotic or economic necessities, if we are to listen to
them: as, in the Freudian dream, our hidden unworthy wishes slip through
into consciousness in a symbolic form. But when their energy has been
fully sublimated, the social action will no longer be a conflict but a
harmony. Then we shall live the life of Spirit; and from this life will
flow all love-inspired reform.
Yet we are, above all, to avoid the conclusion that the spiritual life,
in its social expression, shall necessarily push us towards mere change;
that novelty contains everything, and stability nothing, of the will of
the Spirit for the race. Surely our aim shall be this: that religious
sensitiveness shall spread, as our discovery of religion in the universe
spreads, so that at last every man's reaction to the whole of experience
shall be entinctured with Reality, coloured by this dominant
feeling-tone. Spirit would then work from within outwards, and all life
personal and social, mental and physical, would be moulded by its
inspiring power. And in looking here for our best hope of development,
we remain safely within history; and do not strive for any desperate
pulling down or false simplification of our complex existence, such as
has wrecked many attempts to spiritualize society in the past.
Consider the way by which we have come. We found in man an instinct for
a spiritual Reality. A single, concrete, objective Fact, transcending
yet informing his universe, compels his adoration, and is apperceived by
him in three main ways. First, as the very Being, Heart and Meaning of
that universe, the universal of all universals, next as a Presence
including and exceeding the best that personality can mean to him, last
as an indwelling and energizing Life. We saw in history the persistent
emergence of a human type so fully aware of this Reality as to subdue to
its interests all the activities of life; ever seeking to incarnate its
abiding values in the world of time. And further, psychology suggested
to us, even in its tentative new findings, its exploration of our
strange mental deeps, reason for holding such surrender to the purposes
of the Spirit to represent the condition of man's fullest psychic
health, and access to his real sources of power. We found in the
universal existence of religious institutions further evidence of this
profound human need of spirituality. We saw there the often sharp and
sky-piercing intensity of the individual aptitude for Reality enveloped,
tempered and made wholesome by the social influences of the cultus and
the group: made too, available for the community by the symbolisms that
cultus had preserved. So that gradually the life of the Spirit emerged
for us as something most actual, not archaic: a perennial possibility of
newness, of regeneration, a widening of our span of pain and joy. A
human fact, completing and most closely linked with those other human
facts, the vocation to service, to beauty, to truth. A fact, then,
which must control our view of personal self-discipline, of education,
and of social effort: since it refers to the abiding Reality which alone
gives all these their meaning and worth, and which man, consciously or
unconsciously, must pursue.
And last, if we ask as a summing up of the whole matter: _Why_ man is
thus to seek the Eternal, through, behind and within the ever-fleeting?
The answer is that he cannot, as a matter of fact, help doing it sooner
or later: for his heart is never at rest, till it finds itself there.
But he often wastes a great deal of time before he realizes this. And
perhaps we may find the reason why man--each man--is thus pressed
towards some measure of union with Reality, in the fact that his
conscious will thus only becomes an agent of the veritable purposes of
life: of that Power which, in and through mankind, conserves and slowly
presses towards realization the noblest aspirations of each soul. This
power and push we may call if we like in the language of realism the
tendency of our space-time universe towards deity; or in the language of
religion, the working of the Holy Spirit. And since, so far as we know,
it is only in man that life becomes self-conscious, and ever more and
more self-conscious, with the deepening and widening of his love and his
thought; so it is only in man that it can dedicate the will and desire
which are life's central qualities to the furtherance of this Divine
creative aim.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 149: "The Mirror of Eternal Salvation," Cap. 7.]
[Footnote 150: A good general discussion in Tansley: "The New Psychology
and its Relation to Life," Caps. 19, 20.]
[Footnote 151: Aug. Conf., Bk. X, Cap. 27.]
[Footnote 152: Blake; "Jerusalem."]
[Footnote 153: "Social Psychology," Cap. i.]
[Footnote 154: "The Interior Castle": Sleuth Habitation, Cap. IV.]
[Footnote 155: "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage," Bk. II, Cap.
44.]
[Footnote 156: Warren: "Buddhism in Translations," p. 28.]
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INDEX
Abreaction, 109
Abu Said, 16
Adolescence, 240 seq.
Alexander, S. 26
Angela of Foligno, Blessed, 99, 130
Apperception, 179, 284
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 26, 58, 200
Asceticism, 69, 89, 288
Augustine, St., 8, 13, 27, 60, 198, 202, 208, 270, 273, 295
Autistic thought, 112, 117, seq.
Auto Suggestion _see_ Suggestion
Baudouin, C., 144, 173
Benedict, St. 48, 64, seq., 68, 210
Benedictine Order, 52, 61, 64, seq.
Bernard, St. 52
Bhakti Marga, 18, 21
Bible-reading, 212
Blake, W., 11, 33, 46, 71, 277
Boehme, Jacob, 4, 33, 55, 70, 84, 86, 89, 118, 150, seq., 198, 201,
204, 244
Bonaventura, St., 146
Booth, General, 54, 59, 63, 96
Bosanquet, Bernard 6
Brahmo Samaj, 155
Brothers of Common Life, 52
Buddhism, 72, 182, 258, 292
Butler, Dom C., 65, 169
Caird, Edward, 246
Catherine of Genoa, St., 55, 67, 70, 71
Catherine of Siena, St., 68, 71, 87, 128
Christianity, Primitive, 56, 164
Church, 155, seq.
essentials of, 164, seq., 171
future, 188, 281
gifts of, 161
limitations, 170
Cloud of Unknowing, The, 87, 96, 104, seq., 110, 123, 143, 145, 146,
147, 151, 248
Complex, 108, seq.
Conflict, Psychic, 81, 88, 100, 103, 216, seq.
Consciousness, 116, seq.
group, 162, seq., 288, seq.
spiritual, 219, 225
Contemplation, 17, 121, seq., 138, seq., 212, 219 in children, 260
Conversion, 68, 75, 89, 93, 103, 265
Croce, Benedetto, 41, 43
Cultus, 171, seq.
Dante, 9
Delatte, Abbot, 65
Dionysius, the Areopagite, 9, 141
Discipleship, 58, 271, seq.
Donne, John, 16, 46
Eckhart, Master, 9, 142
Education, 102, seq., 177 seq.
factors of, 231, seq.
Spencer on, 234
Spiritual, 179, 206, 228, seq., 243, seq., 251, 264
dangers of, 250, seq., 262
Emotion, Religious, 18, 99, 145, 250, 263
Eternal Life, 3, 48, 195, 271
Everard, John, 35, 40
Fox, George, 8, 45, 59, 62, 67, 96, 109, 155, 215, 270, 273
Francis of Assisi, St., 47, 54, 59, 61, 63, 67, 270, 273
Friends of God, 63, 271
Fry, Elizabeth, 55, 63, 210
Gardner, Edmund, 87
God, Experience of, 7 seq., 74, 127, 214, 238, seq., 252, 275, 298
personality of, 9, seq., 17 seq.
Grace, 138, seq., 206, 211
Groot, Gerard, 68
Groups, 61, 271, 285, seq.
Guyon, Madame, 143
Habit, 85, 90, 102, 172
Hadfield, J.A., 100
Haldane, Viscount, 28
Hayward, F.H., 259
Hinduism, 18, 21, 45, 51, 155, 182
History and spiritual life, 38, seq., 212
in education, 256, seq.
Höffding, H., 24, 212
Hügel, Baron, F. von, 2, 29, 52, 70, 125, 209
on spiritual life, 195, seq.
Humility, 109, 217, 275, 282
Hymns, 148, 173, seq.
Ignatius, Loyola, St., 61, 68, 95
Instinct, 76, 78, seq., 90, seq., 102, 263
herd, 272
in children, 249
Intercession, 289
Introversion, 121
Isaiah, 12
Jacopone da Todi, 12, 55, 68, 90, 93, 107, 131
James, William, 157
Jerome, St., 154
Jesus Christ, 17, 40, 47, 51, 56, 59, 61, 156, 182, 198, 202, 268,
273, 279
Joan of Arc, St., 95
"John Inglesant", 61
John, St., 107, 244
John of the Cross, St., 128, 208
Julian of Norwich, 20, 87, 135, 144
Kabir, 5, 11, 70, 155, 198
Lawrence, Brother, 55
Law, William, 27, 90, 91
Liturgy, _see_ Cultus
Livingstone, W.P., 96
Love, 90, 97, 104, 211, 244, seq., 292, seq.
defined, 200, seq.
Lucie, Christine, 14
Mass, The, 177
McDougall, W., 163, 285
McGovern, W.M., 72
Mechthild of Magdeburg, St., 89, 129
Memory, 179, seq.
Methodists, 15, 53, 286
Mind, analysis of, 76, seq.
foreconscious, 117, seq.
instinctive, 89, seq., 137, seq.
primitive, 82, 99, 104, 181, seq.
rational, 100, seq.
unconscious, 114, seq., 141, seq., 230, 264
Motive, 84, 109
Mystical Experience, 99, 107, 113
Nanak, 155
Nicholson, Reynold, 11, 16, 18, 51, 70
Pascal, 137
Patmore, Coventry, 119
Paul, St., 13, 52, 55, 63, 68, 81, 83, 95, 136, 210, 244, 269
Penn, William, 36, 125, 137
Plotinus, 2, 5, 11, 18, 29, 37, 77, 201, 205
Pratt, J.B., 20, 149, 157
Prayer 52, 108, 113, 120, seq., 199, 204, seq., 211, 253, 265, seq.
Childrens', 229, 243
corporate, 169, 286
distractions in, 126, 149
education in, 102, 248
of quiet, 124, 141
Sadhu on, 209
short act, 144
and suggestion 138, seq.
vocal, 144
and work, 253
Psyche, The, 77, seq., 103, 116, 230
Purgation, 69, 76, 90, 108, seq., 218
Quakers, 63, 164, 174, 258
Ramakrishna, 149
Recollection, 123, seq., 139, 208, 219, seq.
corporate, 281
Regeneration, 15, 89, 94
corporate, 271, seq., 293, seq.
Religious ceremonies, 173, seq., 188
education, 179, seq.
institutions, 154, seq., 281
magic 185, seq.
orders, 60
Repentance, 108, seq., 218, 269
social, 275, seq.
Reverie, 117, 122, seq.
Richard of St. Victor, 55, 58
Rolle, Richard, 41, seq., 67
Rosary, 144
Russell, Bertrand, 102, 179
Ruysbroeck, 17, 17, 51, 54, seq., 106, 120, seq., 126, 142, 199, 212,
261, 270, 292
Sacrifice, 185
Sadhu, Sundar, Singh, 68, 130, 209
Saints, 41, 257
Salvation, 76, 89, seq.
Salvation Army, 48, 91, 260, 286
Semon, R., 179
Sin, 76, 81, 85, seq., 109, 149, 218
corporate, 276
Sins, Seven Deadly, 93
Slessor, Mary, 54, seq., 96
Social reform, 282, seq., 296
service, 267, seq.
Spencer, Herbert, 234
Spirit of Power, 13, 52, 62, 222, 290
Spiritual Life
in adolescence, 247, seq.
characters of, 22, seq., 32, 43, 54, 58, 64, 76, 96, seq.,
158, seq., 192, seq., 221, seq., 261, 269, 274, seq., 283, 292, 298
contagious, 56, seq., 72, 169, 261, 273, 285, seq., 295
corporate, 58, 153, seq., 168, 250, 254, 275, seq., 285, seq.
dangers of 99, seq., 263
development of, 67, seq., 108, 213, seq.
and education, 228, seq.
and history, 38, seq., 159, seq., 212
and institutions 158, seq.
personal, 191, seq., 250, seq., 256, 268, 274
and prayer, 204, seq.
and, psychology, 76, seq., 195, seq.
and reading, 211
social, aspect of, 266, seq.
and work, 222, 253, 256, 282
Spiritual Type, 51, 192, seq., 226
Stigmata, 134
Streeter, B.H., 47, 130
Sublimation, 91, 96, seq., 110, 201. 297
Sufis, 11, 16, 18, 51, 59, 70, 155, 258
Suggestion, 75, 103, 132, seq., 167
and faith, 137
laws of, 141, seq.
in worship, 148, 173, seq.
Surrender, 220, 299
Symbols, 127, seq., 173, seq., 180, seq.
Tagore, Maharerhi Devendranath, 13, 14, 51, 67, 213
Tansley, C., 272
Tauler, 257, 282
Teresa, St, 47, 54, 61, 69, 71, 88, 95, 123, 142, 150, 202, 212, 290
Theologia, Germanica, 211, 222
Thérèse de l'Enfant, Jésus, Vénérable, 137, 148
Thomas à Kempis, 48, 83, 128, 139, 198, 212
Trinity, Doctrine of, 14
Trotter, W.F., 168
Unamuno, Don M. de, 10, 85
Unification, 98, seq., 110, 195, 198, 221, 227, 278
Union with God, 67, 72, 204, 291, 299
Upton, T., 10
Varendonck, J., 117
Vincent de Paul, St. 55
Virtues, Evangelical, 94
Visions, 129, seq.
Vocation, 220, 225, 294, 300
Wesley, John, 53, 55, 62, 71, 210, 270
Work, 222, 253, 282
Worship, 175, 255, 260