CHAPTER III

PRAYER 89

Introduction

“We are always gathered around the Divine Centre of our being; and,

indeed, if we could withdraw from it, our being would at once be

dissolved away, and we should cease to exist at all. But, near as it

is to us, often we do not direct our eyes to it. When, however, we do

so direct our gaze, we attain to the end of our desires and to the

rest of our souls, and our song is no more a discord, but, circling

round our Centre, we pour forth a divinely inspired chorale. And in

the choral dance we behold the source of our life, the fountain of our

intelligence, the primal good, _the root of the soul_.”

_Plotinus, Ennead VI._

INTRODUCTION.

There is a famous myth in Plato’s Symposium told to explain the origin

of love. This myth says that primitive man was round, and had four

hands and four feet, and one head with two faces looking opposite ways.

He could walk on his legs if he liked, but he also could roll over and

over with great speed if he wished to go anywhere very fast.

Because of their fleetness and skill these “Round people” were

dangerous rivals in power to Zeus himself and he adopted the plan of

weakening them by cutting each one of them in two. In remembrance of

the original undivided state each half, ever since unsatisfied and

alone, seeks eagerly for the other half. Each human being is thus a

half--a tally--and love is the longing to be united. The two halves

are seeking to be joined again in the original whole. Such in briefest

compass is the myth.

But as the dialogue advances love is traced to a higher source. It is

discovered to be a passion for the eternal, a passion which rises in

the soul at the sight of an object which suggests the eternal, from

which the soul has come into the temporal. The soul is alien here and

its chief joy in the midst of the shows of sense is joy at the sight of

something which reminds it of its old divine home. Thus, again, Plato

tells us that love has its birth in the division of what was once a

whole. We yearn for that from which we have come.

“Though inland far we be

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

That brought us hither.”

We may ignorantly stop at some mid-way good and miss the homeward path,

but our real search, our master passion, is for that divine Other to

whom we belong. So at last Plato poetizes.

We have discovered through other lips, what he could not tell us, that

the search is a double search. We have learned that the Divine Other

whom we seek is also seeking us. The myth, told at the beginning, is

more suggestive than it seemed. It may perhaps do for a parable of the

finite and the Infinite, the soul and its Father. May they not once

have been in union? May not our birth in time be a drawing away into

individuality from the Divine whole? And then may not the goal of the

entire drama of personal life be the restoration of that union on a

higher spiritual level? May it not be, that we are never again to fuse

the skirts of self and merge into a union of oblivion, but rather that

we are to rise to a love-union in which His will becomes our will--a

union of conscious co-operation? So at any rate I believe. But this

little book is not a book of speculation. It is not written to urge

some fond belief.

We have learned, I say, that life reveals a double search. Man’s search

for God is as plain a fact as his search for food. He has, beyond

question, blundered at it and frequently missed the trail, but that

man in all lands and in all times has maintained some kind of search

for an invisible Companion is a momentous fact.

The other half of the story is, I think, still more momentous. It

is full of pathos and tragedy, but laden with the prophecy of final

triumph. I have tried to tell again this story, surely an old, old

story, but always needing to be retold in the current language and

the prevailing conceptions of the time. The main feature of this book

is its insistence on the facts of experience. Its terms are not those

of theology, but those of life, or if I have used theological words I

have endeavored to re-vitalize them. I shall assume that my readers are

familiar with the idea of the _conjunct life_ which I have expounded

at length in a former book.[1] It is now well known that “isolated”

personality is impossible. He who is to enjoy the rights and privileges

of personality must be conjunct with others. He must be an organic

member in a social group, and share himself with his fellows, while at

the same time he receives contributions from them. This principle of

the conjunct life reaches beyond the finite social fellowship in which

a man forms and expresses his personality. God and man are conjunct.

The ground for this position will not be gone over here. It has been

sufficiently presented elsewhere.

I believe, however, that no psychological discovery has ever thrown so

much light upon the meaning of atonement and prayer as this fact of the

conjunct life does, and I hope that many others may come to feel the

freshness and reality of these deepest religious truths as I have felt

them.

In touching these two subjects we are touching the very pillars of

religion. If atonement--God’s search for us--and prayer--our search for

Him--are not real, then religion has no permanent ground of reality.

But there can be no question that our age has witnessed a serious

weakening of faith in both these central aspects of religion. The

doctrine of the atonement does not grip men as it did once, and there

are persons all about us who are perplexed about the place and efficacy

of prayer. It is no frivolous questioning. It is not the result of

a lazy attitude of mind. It is stern and serious. There is only one

way to change this condition. We must make men feel again the reality

of the atonement and the reality of prayer. That is the task which

lies before those of us who believe. The day for dogmatic assertion

is past. It rolls off most minds now as water rolls from oiled silk.

The truths which march with power are the truths which are verified

by, and buttressed with, facts. We must, then, learn how to carry the

laboratory method into our religious teaching and ground our message in

actual reality.

This slender book is an attempt to approach these two

subjects--atonement and prayer--in this spirit and by this method. We

can never get the telescope or microscope turned upon the objects of

spiritual experience and we cannot use the mathematical method which

has worked such wonders in the physical realm. There will always be

some who cannot _see_ the evidence. But it is worth while to show that

these two pillars of religion do rest--not on air--but on experience

which can be verified and tested; that they rest in fact on the

elemental basis of life, upon which we live our common social life

together.

I trust it will help some to find the trail, and that it will convince

some perplexed, though honest, readers that however their own quest has

fared there is another search beside their own,--the quest of a Divine

Companion who spares no pain or cost to bring us all into a fellowship

with Him.

_Haverford, Pennsylvania,

New Year_ 1906.

The Historical and the Inward Christ

“All who since Jesus have come into union with God have come into

union with God _through Him_. And thus it is confirmed in every way

that, even to the end of time, all wise and intelligent men must

bow themselves reverently before this Jesus of Nazareth; and that

the more wise, intelligent and noble they themselves are, the more

humbly will they recognize the exceeding nobleness of this great and

glorious manifestation of the Divine Life.”

_Fichte’s “Way Toward the Blessed Life,” p. 391._

“Christ is the Eternal Humanity in the life of the Infinite.”

_George A. Gordon’s “The Christ of Today,” p. 136._

“The word of God is continually born anew in the hearts of holy men.”

_Epistle to Diognetus, A. D. 125._

THE HISTORICAL AND THE INWARD CHRIST.

There was once a widespread fear that exact methods of historical

research would deprive us of that luminous divine Figure toward whom

the world had reverently turned its face for more than eighteen

centuries. Some suspected that our records of His life were crowded

with myth and legend, others believed that the singular story which

had so profoundly touched the world’s heart was the creation of highly

wrought enthusiastic disciples. To-day, after more than half a century

of critical sifting and acute probing, this luminous Life is more

firmly established as the central fact of history than ever before.

“That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows

Or decomposes but to recompose

Becomes my universe which loves and knows.”

It is not my purpose at present to retell the story, or to point out

how much criticism has left unshaken. I want rather to show how the

historical Christ, as a revelation of God, fits into a cosmic system of

evolution and how He is related to the Spirit that witnesses with our

spirits and is the inward life of the Saints of all ages and lands.

I shall not use the language or the methods of theology. I shall feel

my way along the great arteries of human experience and try to throw

light and suggestion rather than to establish some final and complete

dogma. To begin at once with the problem before us, how shall we think

of Christ? Was He man? Was He God? Was He some miraculous union of two

essentially unrelated natures? Here are the questions which have split

the Christian world up into camps and which have busied schoolmen in

all the centuries.

The difficulty in almost all the theological discussions on the

subject has been that they started with God and man isolated,

separated, unrelated. No true revelation of such a God ever could be

made through a human life, for divinity and humanity on this theory

are conceived as two totally diverse natures. Modern psychology and

recent studies of social life have made us familiar with a deeper

view of human personality and have prepared for a more adequate study

of Divine personality than was possible when the historic creeds were

formulated. We know that God and man are _conjunct_ and that neither

can be separated absolutely from the other. There never has been any

doubt of man’s need of God, but we now know that God also needs us and

that our lives are mutually organic. Every clew which leads us to God

shows Him to us as a spiritual and social Being--in no sense solitary

and self-sufficient. Our own self-consciousness, our own ideals, our

passion for the unrealized, imply and involve more than an impersonal

energy at the heart of things. There must be a spiritual matrix for

this living, throbbing, growing social organism in which personal

life is formed. Our own experience carries in itself the implication

of a genuinely spiritual Person at the heart of the universe of whom

we all partake. The spiritual history of the race has forever settled

this elemental fact, at least for all who feel the full significance of

life. It is not an assumption, it is not a mere belief--it is involved

in all we feel and know and are. But a spiritual, personal Being must

reveal Himself. An unmanifested God--unknown and unknowable--is no God

at all. He would be abstract and unreal. The least human person who

poured his life out into those about him--who loved and suffered for

the sake of another--would be a higher being than an infinite God shut

up in the closed circle of His own self life. It is a law as old as

the morning star that one must lose himself to find himself, must give

to get, must go forth bearing precious seed in order to come again with

sheaves of harvest. The moment it is settled that there is a divine

Person as the ultimate reality of the universe, it is also settled

that He will reveal Himself, that He will put His Life into manifold

manifestations and that He will find His joy in “working all things up

to better,” to use Clement’s phrase.

So long as the processes of evolution were confined to the plant

and brute there could be no revelation of anything but force; or at

most there could be only dawnings of anything higher. The forms of

life which won in the struggle and survived were manifestations of

power--they hardly implied anything more. The tough spine and the

strong jaw and the sharp claw were all that mattered. Everything that

appeared was pushed into existence by a force from behind. There was no

sign or hint of freedom, or of life formed under the sway of a vision

or an ideal. Things moved “for a million aeons through the vast, waste

dawn” toward a goal, but the goal was never in sight and it played no

part in the process.

John Fiske has, somewhere, denied the truth of the proverb that “nature

abhors leaps,” and he has given a beautiful illustration from the

cutting of a cone. If you pass a plane parallel to the base of a cone

you cut a circle. If you tilt the plane slightly the curve becomes an

ellipse. The ellipse grows more eccentric as the tilting increases and

finally without any warning your plane cuts a parabola whose sides

curve off into infinity and never touch ends again. Some such mighty

leap appears in the process of evolution. Up to a certain point life

evolved by forces working _a tergo_.[2] There is a slight tilt in the

system and a being appears capable of selecting a goal for himself and

of acting to attain it, a being who could live in some degree for a

world as it ought to be.[3]

This is what in America we call “the great divide”--the watershed which

determines the streams of a continent. As soon as there was a being

who could select ideals and live for conscious ends a new kind of

evolution began. The other side of “the divide,” evolution had been

physical,--body, and body function had been the goal. This side “the

divide,” it was spiritual and social, and the goal was the evolution of

the man within man. The things which mattered now were love, sacrifice,

service, goodwill rather than “tooth and claw.” Before, nature’s goal

had been along the line of least resistance. Now, the line of march set

straight against instinct and along the line of greatest resistance.

There could be advance on this side “the divide,” only as the ideal

became clearer and its sway more coercive.

Ever since man was man he has transcended the actual and lived by

vision, which means, I think, that finite and infinite are not sundered

and that we always partake of more than just ourselves. Beyond the edge

of what we are there is always dawning a farther possibility--that

which we ought to be--the _a fronte_ compulsion.[4] This is one of

God’s ways of revealing Himself. It is a man’s chief glory--the glory

of the imperfect.

“Growth came when, looking your last on them all

You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day

And cried with a start--what if we so small

Be greater and grander the while than they?

Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature?

In both, of such lower types are we

Precisely because of our wider nature;

For time, theirs--ours, for eternity.

Today’s brief passion limits their range;

It seethes with the morrow for us and more.

They are perfect--how else? They shall never change.

We are faulty--why not? We have time in store.”[5]

This slow unveiling of the ideal, of the goal, is, I believe, the

divine method of making man, and it makes us feel at once how nearer

than near God is and how all the way on and up He is in the very tissue

and fabric of our lives--no foreign creator who moulded us out of clay

and left us to run, or to run down, like a clock.

For centuries man won his slender spiritual victories, cultivated his

rugged virtues, sloughed off some marks of ape and tiger and formed

habits of altruism under the influence of ideals which the highest

personal types of the race revealed. These types of men were focus

points, manifesting in some feeble measure the ultimate reality and

casting out hints of the line of march. Sometimes they were conscious

that they were organs of a larger Life which used them, sometimes they

were girded, like Cyrus, for a divine mission, though they knew not

Him whom they served. Thus the unbroken revelation of the infinite was

slowly made, as the age could bear it--“God spake at sundry times and

in divers manners.”

Strangely enough the loftiest men of the pre-Christian period were

always vaguely or dimly forecasting a diviner life than any ordinary

type of man revealed. The human heart was always groping for an

unveiling of God which would set the race to living on a new level.

This longing rose among the Hebrews to a steady passion which burned

brighter as the clouds in their national sky grew blacker. There was

a Christ ideal centuries before Christ actually came in the flesh,

though this ideal was always deeply tinged and colored by the age which

gave it birth. But even so, it lighted the sky of the future and gave

many a man heart and hope through long periods of dreary pessimism.

When lo, a tilting of the plane, and the ellipse becomes a parabola

with infinite stretch of curve!

“In fullness of time God sent forth His Son.” How shall we think

of Jesus that is called the Christ? Speaking first in the terms of

evolution, _I_ think of Him as the type and goal of the race--the

new Adam, the spiritual norm and pattern, the Son of Man who is a

revelation of what man at his height and full stature is meant to

be; and this is the way Paul thought of Him: “Till _we all_ come in

the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto

a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of

Christ.” Eph. IV, 13. “Whom he did foreknow, he did predestinate to be

conformed to the image of his Son that _He_ might be the first born

among many brethren.” Rom. VIII, 29. “The expectation of the whole

creation is waiting for the manifestation of sons of God.” Rom. VIII,

19.

The actual fact is that this Life has, profoundly or remotely, touched

every personal life in Europe for a thousand years and has been the

goal and standard for all aspiring souls. He is the pattern in the

mount, the _a fronte_ force which has drawn the individual and the race

steadily up to their higher destiny. On the spiritual side of “the

great divide” the goal is in sight and the goal is an efficient factor

in the process of the evolution of the man within man.

But this pattern-aspect of the Christ life is only one aspect, and we

must not raise it out of due balance and perspective. _Christ is God

humanly revealed._ As soon as we realize that personality is always

a revelation of the ultimate reality of the universe there are no

metaphysical difficulties in the way of an actual incarnation of God.

It is rather what one would expect. There is no other conceivable way

in which God could be revealed to man. If He is a personal being; if

He is love and tenderness and sympathy, and not mere force, only a

Person can show Him. And if we are not kindred in nature, if we have

not something in common, in a word if we are not _conjunct_, then it

is hard to see how any revelation of Him could be made which would mean

anything to us. But if we are _conjunct_, as our own self-consciousness

implies, then an incarnation, a complete manifestation in Personality,

or as Paul puts it, “in the face of Jesus Christ,” is merely the crown

and pinnacle of the whole divine process.

If we are wise we shall not bother ourselves too much over the

metaphysical puzzles which the schoolmen have formulated. We no longer

have the puzzle which was so urgent with them, how two natures,

pole-wide apart, could be united in one Person, for we now know that

divinity and humanity are not pole-wide apart. There is something human

in God and something divine in man and they belong together.

We shall not, again, be over-anxious about the question of nativity.

Note the grandeur and the simplicity of Paul’s text about it: “God sent

forth His Son born of a woman,” and there he stops with no attempt

to furnish details. John is equally lofty: “The Word became flesh

and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory.” There is no appeal to

curiosity. There is no syllable about the _how_. Two synoptic gospels

have given us a simple story of the nativity which has profoundly

impressed men in all ages and which will always appeal to the deepest

instincts in us. But the _method_ of Christ’s coming, embodied in these

two accounts, must not be forced. The devout soul must be free, as both

Paul and John were free, to leave the _how_ wrapped in mystery. That

He came out of our humanity we shall always believe. That He came

down out of the highest divinity we shall equally believe. That He was

a babe and increased in wisdom, that He learned as He grew, that He

was tempted and learned through temptation, are all necessary steps,

for there is no other path to spiritual Personality and He must have

been “made perfect through sufferings,” or He could not have been the

Captain of salvation.

Speculations and dogmas have taken men’s thoughts away from verifiable

facts. Here was a life which settled forever that the ultimate reality

is Love. He brought into focus, or rather He wove into the living

tissue of a personal life, the qualities of character which belong to

an infinitely good being and with quiet simplicity He said, “If you

see me you see the Father.”

I have spoken, perhaps, as though the revelation of the human goal,

and the unveiling of the divine Character were two different things.

Christ does both, but both are one. If you bring a diamond into the

light you occasion a double revelation. There is a revelation of the

glorious beauty of the jewel. While it lay in the dark you never

knew its possibilities. It was easily mistaken for a piece of glass.

Now it flashes and burns and reveals itself because it has found the

element for which it was meant. But there is also at the same time a

revelation of the mystery of light. You discover now new wonders and

new glories in light itself. Most objects absorb part of its rays and

imperfectly transmit it to the eye. Here is an object which tells you

its real nature. Now you see it as it is. So Christ shows us at once

man and God. In a definite historic setting and in the limitations of

a concrete personal life, Christ has unveiled the divine nature and

taught us to say “Father” and He has, in doing that, showed us the goal

and type of human life. The Son of God and the Son of Man is one person.

Now comes our second question how shall we think of the inward, the

spiritual, the eternal Christ? The first interpreters, notably Paul and

John, early in their experience, came to think of Christ as a cosmic

Being. They read the universe in the light of His revelation and soon

used His name to name the entire manifestation of God: “In Him,” says

Paul, “all things consist.” “All things were made by Him,” says John,

“and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life

and the life was the light of men.” John 1, 2, 3. It was through Him

that they first learned that God is Spirit, it was through Him that

their own spiritual life was heightened and that they became conscious

of a Spirit surging into their own souls and they connected this whole

wider manifestation of God with Him. They were right too in doing

so. Christ’s revelation of God had produced such spiritual effects

upon them that they could now find Him within themselves, for God’s

spiritual presence in us is always proportioned to our capacity to have

Him there. And then, too, they were now for the first time able to

interpret that which they felt within themselves. If they found God,

it was because they had found Christ.

But they were right in a deeper sense. If we think of the historical

Christ, as I have tried to set forth, as the manifestation of the

Divine and the human in a single personal Life then wherever man

finds God humanly revealed he properly names the revelation with the

historic name. The historic incarnation was no final event. It was

the supreme instance of God and man in a single life--the _type_ of

continuous Divine-human fellowship. God’s human revelation of Himself

is not limited to a single date. As Athanasius so boldly said: He

became man that we might become divine. Christ is the prophesy of _a

new humanity_--a humanity penetrated with the life and power of God

and this continued personal manifestation of God through men is Christ

inwardly and spiritually revealed.

It is a primary truth of Christianity that God reaches man directly. No

person is insulated. As ocean floods the inlets, as sunlight environs

the plant, so God enfolds and enwreathes the finite spirit. There is

this difference, however, inlet and plant are penetrated whether they

will or not. Sea and sunshine crowd themselves in _a tergo_. Not so

with God. He can be received only through appreciation and conscious

appropriation. He comes only through doors that are _purposely_ opened

for Him. A man may live as near God as the bubble is to the ocean and

yet not find Him. He may be “closer than breathing, nearer than hands

or feet,” and still be missed. Historical Christianity is dry and

formal when it lacks the immediate and inward response to our Great

Companion; but our spirits are trained to know Him, to appreciate

Him, by the mediation of historical revelation. A person’s spiritual

life is always dwarfed when cut apart from history. Mysticism is

empty unless it is enriched by outward and historical revelation. The

supreme education of the soul comes through an intimate acquaintance

with Jesus Christ of history. One who wished to feel the power of

beauty would go to some supreme master of color and form who could

exhibit them on canvas and not merely lecture about them. One who

desired to feel the power of harmony would go, not to the boy with

his harmonica, but to the Beethovens or Mozarts of the race who have

revealed what an instrument and a human hand can do. So he who wishes

to realize and practice the presence of God must inform himself at the

source and fount, must come face to face with Him who was the highest

human revelation of God. No one of us can interpret his own longings

or purposes until he reads them off in the light of some loftier

type of personality. That person understands himself best who grows

intimate in fellowship with some noble character. And any man who

wishes to discover the meaning of the inward voice and to interpret the

divine breathings which come to human souls needs to be informed and

illuminated by the supreme revelation of the ages.

With perfect fitness, then, we speak of the inward Presence as the

spiritual Christ. It is the continuation of the same revelation which

was made under the “Syrian blue.”

The procession of the Holy Ghost is a continuous revelation and

exhibition of Christ within men. Whether we use the expression Holy

Spirit or Christ within or spiritual Christ, we mean God _operating

upon human spirits and consciously witnessed and appreciated in them_.

“The Lord is the Spirit,” cries Paul when, with unveiled face, he

discovers that he is being transformed into His image from glory to

glory. “Joined to the Lord in one Spirit,” is another testimony of the

same sort.

Unfortunately the doctrine of the Christ within--“the real

presence”--has generally been held vaguely, and it has easily run

into error and even fanaticism. The most common error has come from

the prevalent view that when the Spirit--the inward Christ--comes in,

the man goes out. It has been supposed that the finite is suppressed

and the infinite supplants it and operates instead of it. This view

is not only contrary to Scripture, but also contrary to psychological

possibility. What really happens is that the human spirit through

its awakened appreciation appropriates into its own life the divine

Life which was always near and was always meant for it. The true

view has been well put by August Sabatier[6]: “It is not enough to

represent the Spirit of God as coming to the help of man’s spirit,

supplying strength which he lacks, an associate or juxtaposed force,

a supernatural auxiliary. Paul’s thought has no room for such a moral

and psychological dualism, although popular language easily permits it.

His thought is quite otherwise profound. There is no simple addition

of divine power and human power in the Christian life. The Spirit

of God identifies itself with the human me into which it enters and

_whose life it becomes_. If we may so speak, it is individualized in

the new moral personality which it creates. A sort of metamorphosis,

a transubstantiation, if the word may be permitted, takes place in

the human being. Having been carnal it has become spiritual. A ‘new

man’ arises from the old man by the creative act of the spirit of God.

Paul calls Christians [Greek: pneumatikoi], properly speaking, ‘the

inspired.’ They are moved and guided by the Spirit of God. The spirit

dwells in them as an immanent virtue, whose fruits are organically

developed as those of the flesh. Supernatural gifts become natural, or

rather, at this mystical height, the antithesis created by scholastic

rationalism becomes meaningless and is obliterated.” That is precisely

my view and if I had not found it here so well said I should have put

the same idea into my own words. There are no known limits to the

possible translation of the Spirit of God--the Eternal Christ--into

human personality. There are all degrees and varieties of it as there

are all degrees and varieties of physical life. One stands looking at

a century-old oak tree and he wonders how this marvelous thing ever

rose out of the dead earth where its roots are. As a matter of fact it

did not. A tree is largely transformed sunlight. There is from first to

last an earth element to be sure, but the tree is forever drawing upon

the streams of sunlight which flood it and it builds the intangible

light energy into leaf and blossom and fibre until there stands the

old monarch, actually living on sunshine! But the little daisy at its

feet, modest and delicate, is equally consolidated sunshine, though it

pushes its face hardly six inches from the soil in which it was born.

So one spirit differs from another spirit in glory. Some have but

feebly drawn upon the Spiritual Light out of which strong lives are

builded, others have raised the unveiled face to the supreme Light and

have translated it into a life of spiritual beauty and moral fibre.

Thus the revelation of God in the flesh goes on from age to age. The

Christ-life propagates itself like all life-types--the last Adam proves

to be a life-giving spirit. He is the first born among many brethren.

The actual re-creation, the genuine identification of self with Christ

may go on until a man may even say--“Christ lives in me;” “I bear in my

body the marks of the Lord Jesus;” “It has pleased God to reveal His

Son in me.”

“See if, for every finger of thy hands,

There be not found, that day the world shall end

Hundreds of souls, each holding by Christ’s word,

That He will grow incorporate with all,

With me as Pamphylax, with him as John,

Groom for each bride! Can a mere man do this?

Yet Christ saith, this He lived and died to do.

Call Christ, then, the illimitable God.”

I DO.

The Atonement

“Merely to repeat His words is not to continue His work; we must

reproduce His life, passion and death. He desires to live again in

each one of His disciples in order that He may continue to suffer, to

bestow Himself, and to labor in and through them towards the redemption

of humanity, until all prodigal and lost children be found and brought

back to their Father’s house. Thus it is that, instead of being removed

far from human history, the life and death of Christ once more take

their place in history, setting forth the law that governs it, and, by

ceaselessly increasing the power of redemptive sacrifice, transform and

govern it, and direct it towards its divine end.”

_Auguste Sabatier, “The Atonement,” p. 134._

THE ATONEMENT.

It is a bold and hazardous task to say anything on this subject and

I must tread with bare, hushed feet, for it is a holy realm which we

are essaying to enter. It must be understood from the first that I am

not going to thresh over a heap of theological straw. I am not going

into that realm of abstract metaphysics where one can always prove

any thesis one may happen to assume at the start. I shall keep close

to human experience. The pillars of our faith must be planted, not on

some artificial construction of logic, but deep down in the actual

experience of Life. There are external principles of the spiritual

Life which are as irresistible and compelling as the laws of physics

or the propositions of Euclid. The task of the religious teacher is to

discover and proclaim these elemental truths, but we always find it so

much easier to fall back on dogma and theories which have been spun out

of men’s heads! In the Gospels and in Paul’s letters the laboratory

method prevails--the writers ground their assertions on experienced

facts, they tell what they have found and verified, and they always ask

their readers to put their truths to the test of a personal experience

like their own. Our modern method must be a return to this inward

laboratory method.

No one can carefully study the theories of the atonement which

have prevailed at the various epochs of Christian history without

discovering that there has been in them a very large mixture of

paganism. They have been deeply colored by mythology and by the crude

ideas of primitive sacrifice. They start, not with the idea of God

which Christ has revealed, but with a capricious sovereign, angry at

sorely tempted, sinning man, and forgiving only after a sacrifice has

satisfied Him. They treat sin not as a fact of experience, but as the

result of an ancestral fall, which piled up an infinite debt against

the race. They all move in the realm of law rather than in the domain

of personality. They are all, more or less, vitiated by abstract and

mathematical reasoning, while sin and salvation are always affairs of

the inward life, and are of all things personal and concrete. The first

step to a coercive conception of the atonement is to get out of the

realm of legal phrases into the region of personality.

Sin is no abstract dogma. It is not a debt which somebody can pay

and so wash off the slate. Sin is a fact within our lives. It is a

condition of heart and will. There is no sin apart from a sinner.

Wherever sin exists there is a conscious deviation from a standard--a

sag of the nature, and it produces an effect upon the entire

personality. The person who sins disobeys a sense of right. He falls

below his vision of the good. He sees a path, but he does not walk in

it. He hears a voice, but he says “no” instead of “yes.” He is aware of

a higher self which makes its appeal, but he lets the lower have the

reins. There is no description of sin anywhere to compare with the

powerful narrative out of the actual life of the Apostle Paul, found in

Romans VII: 9-25. The thing which moves us as we read it is the picture

here drawn of our own state. A lower nature dominates us and spoils our

life. “What I would I do not; what I would not that I do.”

The most solemn fact of sin is its accumulation of consequences in the

life of the person. Each sin tends to produce a _set_ of the nature. It

weaves a mesh of habit. It makes toward a dominion, or as Paul calls

it, a _law of sin_ in the man--“Wretched Man,” who sees a shining

possible life, but stays below, chained to a body of sin. Sin, real

sin, and not the fictitious abstraction which figures in theories, is

a condition of personal will and action much more than a debt to be

paid or forgiven. The problem is far deeper. The only possible remedy

here is to get a new man, a transformation of personality. Relief

from _penalty_ will not stead. Forgiveness is not enough. Relief

from _penalty_, forgiveness alone, might spoil us, and make us think

too lightly of our own sin. No, it is not a judicial relief which

our panting, sin-defeated hearts cry out for. We want more than the

knowledge that the past is covered and will not count on the books

against us. We want blackness replaced by whiteness, we want weakness

replaced by power, we want to experience a new set of our innermost

nature which will make us more than conquerors. We seek deliverance not

from penalty and debt--but deliverance from the life of sin into a

life of holy will.

There is still another aspect to sin which must be considered before

we can fully appreciate the way of salvation which the Gospel reveals.

Sin not only spoils the sinner’s life and drags him into slavery. It

separates him from God. It opens a chasm between him and his heavenly

Father, or to vary the figure it casts a shadow on God’s face. God

seems far away and stern. The sense of warmth and tenderness vanishes.

The sinner can see God only through the veil of his sins. This is a

universal experience. The same thing happens in our relations with

men. As soon as we have injured a person, treated him unfairly, played

him false, a chasm opens between our life and his. We transfer our

changed attitude to him. We dislike to meet him. We have no comfort in

his presence. We interpret all his actions through the shadow which

our deed has created. Our sense of wrong-doing makes us afraid of the

person wronged.

The conduct of little children offers a good illustration of this

subjective effect of sin, because in them one catches the attitude at

its primitive stage before reflection colors it. Some little child has

disobeyed his father and discovers, perhaps for the first time, that

he has “something inside which he cannot do what he wants to with,” as

a little boy said. When he begins to think of meeting his father he

grows uncomfortable. It is not punishment he is afraid of, he has no

anticipation of that. He is conscious of wrong doing and it has made

a chasm between himself and his father. He reads his father’s attitude

now in the shadow of his deed. He has no joy or confidence in meeting

him. Something strange has come between them.

What does the little fellow do? He instinctively feels the need of some

sacrifice. He must soften his father by giving him something. He breaks

open his bank and brings his father his pennies, or he brings in his

hand the most precious plaything he owns, and acts out his troubled

inward condition. He wants the gap closed and he feels that it will

cost something to get it closed.[7] That is human nature. That feeling

is deep-rooted in man wherever he is found. He is conscious that sin

separates and he feels that something costly and precious is required

to close the chasm. Sacrifice is one of the deepest and most permanent

facts of the budding spiritual life. Its origin is far back in history.

The tattered papyrus, the fragment of baked clay, the pictorial

inscription of the most primitive sort, all bear witness to this

immemorial custom. It is as old as smiling or weeping, as hard to trace

to a beginning as loving or hating. It is bound up with man’s sense of

guilt, and was born when conscience was born. Dark and fantastic are

many of the chapters of the long story of man’s efforts to square the

account. Priests have seized upon this instinctive tendency and have

twisted it into abnormal shapes, but they did not create it--it is

elemental. The idea of an angry God who must be appeased and satisfied

was born with this consciousness of guilt, it is a natural product of

the shadow of human sin.[8] The historic theories of the atonement,

inherited from the Roman church, were all formulated under the sway of

this idea.

The two fundamental aspects of sin, then, are (1) its inward moral

effect upon the soul, its enslaving power over the sinner, and (2)

its tendency to open a chasm between God and man, to make God appear

full of wrath. How does Christ meet this human situation? What is the

heart of the Gospel? First of all, Christ reverses the entire pagan

attitude. He reveals God as a Father whose very inherent nature is

love and tenderness and forgiveness. In place of a sovereign demanding

justice, He shows an infinite Lover. We must either give up the parable

of the Prodigal Son, or accept this view of God. But this parable fits

the entire Gospel. John was only uttering what Jesus Christ taught by

every act of His life and what He exhibited supremely on His cross,

when He said “God is Love.” To surrender this truth, and to start with

the assumption of a God who must be appeased, or reconciled or changed

in attitude is to surrender the heart of the Gospel, and to weave the

shining threads of our message of salvation in with the black threads

of a pagan warp. He who came to show us the Father, has unmistakably

showed Him full of love, not only for the saint, for the actual son;

but also for the sinner, the potential son. Either God _is_ Love, or we

must conclude that Christ has not revealed Him as He is.

But the great difficulty is that so many fail to see what Divine Love

and human sin involve when they come together. It has superficially

been assumed that if God is a loving Father He will lightly overlook

sin and cannot be hard upon the sinner. They catch at a soft view of

sin and patch up a rose water theory of its cure. This soft view has

appealed to those who like an easy religion, and it has often driven

the evangelical Christian to an opposite extreme, which finds no

support in the Gospel. To arrive at a deeper view we must go back to

Christ and go down into the deeps of love as we know it in actual human

life.

True love is never weak and thin, and unconcerned about the character

of the beloved. The father does not “lay aside” his love when he

punishes his erring boy, and keeps him impressed with the reality of

moral distinctions. It is the father’s intense love which wields

the rod. All true corrections and chastisements flow out of love.

Even Dante knew this, when he wrote on the door of Hell, “Love was my

maker.” It is an ignorant and mushy love that cannot rise above kisses

and sugar plums, and it is extremely superficial to set up a schism

between love and justice.

But that is not all. Love always involves vicarious suffering. Love

is an organic principle. It carries with it the necessity of sharing

life with other persons, and in a world of imperfect persons, it means

not only sharing gains and triumphs, it means, too, sharing losses and

defeats. No man can sin in a sin-tight compartment. Suffer for his

own sin the sinner assuredly will. But he does not stop there. Many

innocent persons will suffer for it, too. This is one of the tragic

aspects of life which has baffled many a lone sufferer like Job. Those

who are nearest and closest to the sufferer will suffer most, but his

sin has endless possibilities of causing suffering upon persons far

remote in time and space. That ancient figure of the ripples from the

little pebble, which sends rings to the farthest shores of the sea,

is not overdrawn. Not one of us can estimate the havoc of his sin, or

forecast the trail of suffering which it will leave behind it. So long

as life remains organic there will be vicarious suffering.

But that is only one side of life. Holiness also involves a like

suffering. There are no holiness-tight compartments. No man can be holy

unto himself. Just as far as he has any rag of holiness he must share

it--he must feel himself a debtor to others who lack--he must take up

the task of making others holy. _That costs something._

You cannot command or compel people into holiness, you cannot increase

their spiritual stature one cubit by any kind of force or compulsion.

You can do it only by sharing your life with them, by making them feel

your goodness, by your love and sacrifice for them. When a martyr

dies for some truth, men suddenly discover for the first time how

much it is worth and they eagerly pursue it over all obstacles. In

spiritual things we always make our appeal to the _cost_ of the truth

or the principle. Think of the blood which has been shed for freedom

of conscience! Remember what a price has been paid in blood for the

principle of democracy! Thus we speak of all the privileges of life.

They are ours because somebody has felt that they were worth the cost,

because somebody has died that we might freely have them. It is the

tragedy of human life that we must suffer through the sin of others,

and we must suffer also if we would carry goodness or holiness into

other lives. Every bit of goodness which ever prevails anywhere in this

world has cost somebody something.

This principle of vicarious suffering is no late arrival; it appears

at every scale of life, heightening as we go up--becoming less blind

and more voluntary. It was a central truth of Christ’s revelation that

this principle does not stop with man; it goes on up to the top of the

spiritual scale. It finds its complete and final expression in God

Himself. God’s life and our lives are bound together, as a vine with

branches, as a body with members. _So corporate_ are we that no one

can give a cup of cold water to the least person in the world without

giving it to Him! But He is perfect and we are imperfect, He is holy

and we sin. If the wayward boy, who wastes his life, pains the heart

of his mother whose life is wrapped up in him, can we fling our lives

away and not make our Heavenly Father suffer? The cross is the answer.

He has undertaken to make Sons of God out of such creatures as we are,

to take us out of the pit and the miry clay, to put spiritual songs in

our mouths and write His own name on our foreheads, will that cost Him

nothing? Again, the cross is the answer.

Here we discover--it is the main miracle of the Gospel--that the

original movement to bridge the chasm comes from the Divine side.

What man hoped to do, but could not, with his bleating lamb and timid

dove, God Himself has done. He has reached across the chasm, taking

on Himself the sacrifice and cost, to show the sinner that the only

obstruction to peace and reconciliation is in the sinner himself. “This

is love, not that we loved Him, but that He loved us,” and this is

sacrifice, not that we give our bulls and goats to please Him, but that

He gives Himself to draw us.

Browning puts it all in a line:

“Thou needs must love me who have died for thee.”

This is the key to Paul’s great message which won the Roman Empire.

It was not a new philosophy. It was the irresistible appeal to love,

exhibited in Christ crucified. “He loved me and gave Himself for

me;” “We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” “I am

persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,

nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor

depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from

the _love of God_, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Sacrificing

love, the Divine Heart suffering over sin, God Himself taking up the

infinite burden and cost of raising men like us into sons of God like

Himself; this is the revelation in the face of Jesus Christ. The heart

that can stand _that_ untouched can stand anything.

The power unto salvation, the dynamic of the Gospel is in the cross,

which exhibits in temporal setting the eternal fact, that God suffers

over sin, that He takes upon Himself the cost of winning sons to glory

and that His love reaches out to the most sin-scarred wanderer, who

clutches the swine husks in his lean hands.

But the appeal of love and sacrifice is not the whole of the truth

which this word atonement covers. We have been seeing, in some feeble

way, how God in Christ enters into human life, identifies Himself with

us, and reveals the _energy of Grace_. But we cannot stop with “what

has been done for us without us.” Sin, as has been already said, is

an affair of personal choice--it is a condition of inward life. It is

not an abstract entity, in a metaphysical realm. It is the attitude

of heart and will in a living, throbbing person who cannot get free

from the lower nature in himself. So too with Salvation. It cannot be

a _transaction_ in some realm foreign to the individual himself. It is

not a plan, or scheme. It is an actual deliverance, a new creation.

It is nothing short of a redeemed inward nature. Such a change cannot

be wrought without the man himself. It cannot come by _a tergo_

compulsion. It must be by a positive winning of the will. A dynamic

faith in the man must cooperate with that energy from God. Something

comes down from above, but something must also go up from below. Paul,

who has given the most vital interpretation of both sides of the truth

of redemption--the objective and the subjective--that has ever been

expressed, uses the word “faith” to name the human part of the process.

Faith, in Paul’s sense of it, means an identification of ourselves

with Christ, by which we re-live His life. As He identified Himself

with sinning humanity, so, by the attraction of his love, we identify

ourselves with His victorious Life. We go down into death with Him--a

death to sin and the old self--and we rise with Him into newness of

life, to live henceforth unto Him who loved us.

There is no easy road out of a nature of sin into a holy nature. It

is vain to try and patch up a scheme which will relieve us of our

share of the tragedy of sin--or to put it another way, the travail

for the birth of the sons of God. The Redeemer suffers, but He does

not suffer in our stead--He suffers in our behalf, [[Greek: hyper]

not [Greek: anti]]. He makes His appeal of love to us to share His

life as He shares ours. It is Paul’s goal--a flying goal, surely--“to

know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His

sufferings, being made conformable unto His death.” The boldest word

which comes from his pen was: “I rejoice in my sufferings _on your

behalf_; and fill up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ

_in my flesh_, for His body’s sake, which is the Church.” (Col. 1, 24.)

It is not repeating His words that saves us, it is reliving His life,

co-dying, and co-rising with Him, and entering with a radiant joy,

caught from His face, into the common task of redeeming a world of sin

to a kingdom of love and holiness.

In that great book of spiritual symbolism--the Book of

Revelation--those who overcome are builded, as pillars, into the Temple

of God, and He writes His new name upon them. The new name is Redeemer.

Those who have come up through great tribulation and have washed their

robes in the blood of the Lamb are builded in as a permanent part of

the Temple, where God reveals Himself, and they share with Him in the

great redeeming work of the ages.

Whatever it has meant in the past, in the ages when the races were

sloughing off their paganism, in the future the atonement must be

vital and dynamic. It must be put in language which grips the heart,

convinces the mind, and carries the will. It will name for us the

Divine-human travail for a redeemed humanity. It will cease to signify

a way by which God was appeased and it will come to express, as it

did in the apostolic days, the identification of God with us in the

person of Christ, and the identification, by the power of His love, of

ourselves with Him. We shall pass from the terms which were inherited

from magic and ancient sacerdotal rites and we shall use instead the

language of our riper experience. We shall abandon illustrations

drawn from law courts and judicial decisions and we shall rise to

conceptions which fit the actual facts of inward, personal experience

where higher and lower natures contend for the mastery. The drama will

not be in some foreign realm, apart from human consciousness, it will

rise in our thought into the supreme drama of history--the tragedy

of the spiritual universe--the battle of holiness with sin--the blood

and tears which tell the cost of sin and create in response a passion

for the Divine Lover who is our Father. It will stop at no fictitious

righteousness which is counted unto us, as though it were ours. We

shall demand an actual redemption of the entire self which has become

righteous, because it lives, in Christ’s power, the life which He lived.

We shall learn to tell the story in such a way that the cross will

not seem to be brought in, as an afterthought, to repair the damage

wrought by an unforeseen catastrophe. It will stand as the consummation

of an elemental spiritual movement and it will be organic with the

entire process of the making of men. With charm and power, Ruskin has

told how the black dirt that soils the city pavement is composed of

four elements which make, when they follow the law of their nature,

the sapphire, the opal, the diamond and the dew drop. The glory and

splendor do not appear in the black dirt, but the possibilities are

there. When the law of the nature of these elements has full sweep

the glory comes out. Man was not meant for a sinner, and to live a

dark, chaotic life. There are far other possibilities in him. He is a

potential child of God. The full nature has broken forth in one life

and men beheld its glory. “To as many as receive Him, to them gives

He power to become the sons of God.”

Prayer

By prayer, I do not mean any bodily exercise of the outward man; but

_the going forth of the spirit of Life towards the Fountain of Life,

for fullness and satisfaction: The natural tendency of the poor,

rent, derived spirit, towards the Fountain of Spirits_.

_Isaac Penington._

“I, that still pray at morning and at eve,

Loving those roots that feed us from the past,

And prizing more than Plato things I learned

At that best Academe, a mother’s knee,

Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed,

Thrice, stirred below my conscious self, have felt

That perfect disenthralment which is God.”

_Lowell’s “Cathedral.”_

“The aim of prayer is to attain to the habit of goodness, so as no

longer merely to have the things that are good, but rather to be

good.”

_Clement of Alexandria._

PRAYER.

We come now to the human search for a divine fellowship and

companionship. Its complete history would be the whole story of

religion. In this little book I shall speak only of certain definite

human ways of seeking fellowship with God, namely, of prayer.

Prayer is an extraordinary act. The eyes close, the face lights up,

the body is moved with feeling, and (it may be in the presence of

a multitude) the person praying talks in perfect confidence with

somebody, invisible and intangible, and who articulates no single word

of response. It is astonishing. And yet it is a human custom as old as

marriage, as ancient as grave-making, older than any city on the globe.

There is no human activity which so stubbornly resists being reduced

to a bread and butter basis. Men have tried to explain the origin of

prayer by the straits of physical hunger, but it will no more fit into

utilitarian systems than joy over beauty will. It is an elemental and

unique attitude of the soul and it will not be “explained” until we

fathom the origin of the soul itself!

But is not the advance of science making prayer impossible? In

unscientific ages the universe presented no rigid order. It was easy to

believe that the ordinary course of material processes might be altered

or reversed. The world was conceived as full of invisible beings who

could affect the course of events at will, while above all, there was

a Being who might interfere with things at any moment, in any way.

Our world to-day is not so conceived. Our universe is organized and

linked. Every event is _caused_. Caprice is banished. There is no such

thing in the physical world as an uncaused event. If we met a person

who told us that he had seen a train of cars drawn along with no

couplings and held together by the mutual affection of the passengers

in the different cars we should know that he was an escaped lunatic

and we should go on pinning our faith to couplings as before. Even the

weather is no more capricious than the course of a planet in space.

Every change of wind and the course of every flying cloud is determined

by previous conditions. Complex these combinations of circumstances

certainly are, but if the weather man could get data enough he could

foretell the storm, the rain, the drought exactly as well as the

astronomer can foretell the eclipse. There is no little demon, there

is no tall, bright angel, who holds back the shower or who pushes the

cloud before him; no being, good or bad, who will capriciously alter

the march of molecules because it suits our fancy to ask that the chain

of causes be interrupted. What is true of the weather is true in every

physical realm. Our universe has no caprice in it. Every thing is

linked, and the forked lightning never consults our preferences, nor

do cyclones travel exclusively where bad men live. As of old the rain

falls on just and unjust alike, on saint and sinner. The knowledge of

this iron situation has had a desolating effect upon many minds. The

heavens have become as brass and the earth bars of iron. To ask for the

interruption of the march of atoms seems to the scientific thinker the

absurdest of delusions and all fanes of prayer appear fruitless. Others

resort to the faith that there are “gaps” in the causal system and that

in these unorganized regions--the domains so far unexplored--there are

realms for miracle and divine wonder. The supernatural, on this theory

is to be found out beyond the region of the “natural,” and forcing

itself through the “gaps.” Those of this faith are filled with dread

as they see the so called “gaps” closing, somewhat as the pious Greek

dreaded to see Olympus climbed.

There are still others who evade the difficulty by holding that God

has made the universe, is the Author of its “laws,” is Omnipotent and

therefore can change them at Will, or can admit exceptions in their

operation. This view is well illustrated in the faith of George Müller,

who writes: “When I lose such a thing as a key, I ask the Lord to

direct me to it, and I look for an answer; when a person with whom I

have made an appointment does not come, according to the fixed time,

and I begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to

hasten him to me, and I look for an answer; when I do not understand

a passage of the word of God, I lift up my heart to the Lord that He

would be pleased by His Holy Spirit to instruct me, and I expect to be

taught.”

This view takes us back once more into a world of caprice. It

introduces a world in which almost anything may happen. We can no

longer calculate upon anything with assurance. Even our _speed_, as we

walk, is regulated by the capricious wish of our friends. But that is

not all, it is a low, crude view of God--a Being off above the world

who makes “laws” like a modern legislator and again changes them to

meet a new situation, who is after all only a bigger man in the sky

busily moving and shifting the scenes of the time-drama as requests

reach him.

None of these positions is tenable. The first is not, for prayer is a

necessity to full life, and the other two are not, because they do not

fairly face the facts which are forced upon those who accept scientific

methods of search and of thought. This physical universe is a stubborn

affair. It is not loose and adjustable, and worked, for our private

convenience, by wires or strings at a central station. It is a world

of order, a realm of discipline. It is our business to discover a

possible line of march in the world _as it is_, to find how to triumph

over obstacles and difficulty, if we meet them--not to resort to “shun

pikes” or cries for “exception in our particular case.”

The real difficulty is that our generation has been conceiving of

prayer on too low a plane. Faith is not endangered by the advance of

science. It is endangered by the stagnation of religious conceptions.

If religion halts at some primitive level and science marches on to

new conquests of course there will be difficulty. But let us not

fetter science, let us rather _promote_ religion. We need to rise to a

truer view of God and to a loftier idea of prayer. It is another case

of “leveling up.” On the higher religious plane no collision between

prayer and science will be found. There will be no sealing of the lips

in the presence of the discovery that all is law.

The prayer which science _has_ affected is the spurious kind of prayer,

which can be reduced to a utilitarian, “bread and butter,” basis. Most

enlightened persons now are shocked to hear “patriotic” ministers

asking God to direct the bullets of their country’s army so as to kill

their enemies in battle, and we all hesitate to use prayer for the

attainment of low, selfish ends, but we need to cleanse our sight

still farther and rise above the conception of prayer as an easy means

to a desired end.

It is a fact that there are _valid prayer effects_ and there is plenty

of experimental evidence to prove the _energy of prayer_. It is

literally true that “more things are wrought by prayer than this world

dreams of.” There are no assignable bounds to the effects upon mind and

body of the prayer of living faith. Some of those particular cases of

George Müller’s are quite within the range of experience. The prayer

for the lost key may well produce a heightened energy of consciousness

which pushes open a door into a deeper stratum of memory, and the man

rises from his knees and goes to the spot where the key was put. So

too with the passage of Scripture. No doubt many a man has come back

from his closet where the turmoil of life was hushed and where all

the inward currents set toward God, many of us I say, come back with

a new energy and with cleared vision and we can grasp what before

eluded us, we can see farther into the spiritual meaning of any of

God’s revelations. There is perhaps never a sweep of the soul out into

the wider regions of the spiritual world which does not heighten the

powers of the person who experiences it. Profound changes in physical

condition, almost as profound as the stigmata of St. Francis, have in

our own times followed the prayer of faith and many of us in our daily

problems and perplexities have seen the light break through, as we

prayed, and shine out, like a search light, on some plain path of duty

or of service. There is unmistakable evidence of incoming energy from

beyond the margin of what we usually call “ourselves.”

We have not to do with a God who is “off there” above the sky, who

can deal with us only through “the violation of physical law.” We

have instead a God “in whom we live and move and are,” whose Being

opens into ours, and ours into His, who is the very Life of our lives,

the matrix of our personality; and there is no separation between us

unless we make it ourselves. No man, scientist or layman, knows where

the curve is to be drawn about the personal “self.” No man can say

with authority that the circulation of Divine currents into the soul’s

inward life is impossible. On the contrary, Energy does come in. In

our highest moments we find ourselves in contact with wider spiritual

Life than belongs to our normal _me_.

But true prayer is something higher. It is immediate spiritual

fellowship. Even if science could demonstrate that prayer could never

effect any kind of utilitarian results, still prayer on its loftier

side would remain untouched, and persons of spiritual reach would go

on praying as before. If we could say nothing more we could at least

affirm that prayer, like faith, is itself the victory. The seeking is

the finding. The wrestling is the blessing. It is no more a means to

something else than love is. It is an end in itself. It is its own

excuse for being. It is a kind of first fruit of the mystical nature of

personality. The edge of the self is always touching a circle of life

beyond itself to which it responds. The human heart is sensitive to God

as the retina is to light waves. The soul possesses a native yearning

for intercourse and companionship which takes it to God as naturally

as the home instinct of the pigeon takes it to the place of its birth.

There is in every normal soul a spontaneous outreach, a free play of

spirit which gives it onward yearning of unstilled desire.

It is no mere subjective instinct--no blind outreach. If it met no

response, no answer, it would soon be weeded out of the race. It would

shrivel like the functionless organ. We could not long continue to pray

in faith if we lost the assurance that there is a Person who cares,

and who actually corresponds with us. Prayer has stood the test of

experience. In fact the very desire to pray is in itself prophetic of

a heavenly Friend. A subjective need always carries an implication of

an objective stimulus which has provoked the need. There is no hunger,

as Fiske has well shown, for anything not tasted, there is no search

for anything which is not in the environment, for the environment has

always produced the appetite. So this native need of the soul rose out

of the divine origin of the soul, and it has steadily verified itself

as a safe guide to reality.

What is at first a vague life-activity and spontaneous outreach of

inward energy--a feeling after companionship--remains in many persons

vague to the end. But in others it frequently rises to a definite

consciousness of a personal Presence and there comes back into

the soul a compelling evidence of a real Other Self who meets all

the Soul’s need. For such persons prayer is the way to fullness of

life. It is as natural as breathing. It is as normal an operation as

appreciation of beauty, or the pursuit of truth. The soul is made

that way, and as long as men are made with mystical deeps within,

unsatisfied with the finite and incomplete, they will pray and be

refreshed.

Vague and formless, in some degree, communion would always be, I think,

apart from the personal manifestation of God in Jesus Christ. As soon

as God is known as Father, as soon as we turn to Him as identical in

being with our own humanity, as suffering with us and loving us even

in our imperfection, this communion grows defined and becomes _actual

social fellowship_ which is prayer at its best. Paul’s great prayers of

fellowship rise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God

whom we know, because He has been humanly revealed in a way that fits

our life. We turn to Him as the completeness and reality of all we want

to be, the other Self whom we have always sought. The vague impulse to

reach beyond our isolated and solitary self gives place to an actual

experience of relationship with a personal Friend and Companion and

this experience may become, and often does become, the loftiest and

most joyous activity of life. The soul is never at its best until it

enjoys God, and prays out of sheer love. Nobody who has learned to

pray in this deeper way and whose prayer is a prayer of communion and

fellowship, wants logical argument for the existence of God. Such a

want implies a fall from a higher to a lower level. It is like a demand

for a proof of the beauty one feels, or an evidence of love other than

the evidence of its experience.

Prayer will always rise or fall with the quality of one’s faith, like

the mercury in the tube which feels at once the change of pressure in

the atmosphere. It is only out of _live faith_ that a living prayer

springs. When a man’s praying sinks into words, words, words, it means

that he is trying to get along with a dead conception of God. The

circuit no longer closes. He cannot heighten his prayer by raising his

voice. What he needs is a new revelation of the reality of God. He

needs to have the fresh sap of living faith in God push off the dead

leaves of an outgrown belief, so that once more prayer shall break

forth as naturally as buds in spring.

The conception of God as a lonely Sovereign, complete in Himself and

infinitely separated from us “poor worms of the dust,” grasshoppers

chirping our brief hour in the sun, is in the main a dead notion.

Prayer to such a God would not be easy with our modern ideas of the

universe. It would be as difficult to believe in its efficiency as it

would be to believe in the miracle of transubstantiation in bread and

wine. But that whole conception is being supplanted by a _live faith_

in an Infinite Person who is corporate with our lives, from whom we

have sprung, in whom we live, as far as we spiritually do live, who

needs us as we need him, and who is sharing with us the travail and

the tragedy as well as the glory and the joy of bringing forth sons of

God.

In such a kingdom--an organic fellowship of interrelated

persons--prayer is as normal an activity as gravitation is in a world

of matter. Personal spirits experience spiritual gravitation, soul

reaches after soul, hearts draw toward each other. We are no longer

in the net of blind fate, in the realm of impersonal force, we are in

a love-system where the aspiration of one member heightens the entire

group, and the need of one--even the least--draws upon the resources of

the whole--even the Infinite. We are in actual Divine-human fellowship.

The only obstacle to effectual praying, in this world of spiritual

fellowship, would be individual selfishness. To want to get just for

one’s own self, to ask for something which brings loss and injury to

others, would be to sever one’s self from the source of blessings, and

to lose not only the thing sought but to lose, as well, one’s very self.

This principle is true anywhere, even in ordinary human friendship.

It is true too, in art and in music. The artist may not force some

personal caprice into his creation. He must make himself the organ of a

universal reality which is beautiful not simply for this man or that,

but for man as man. If there is, as I believe, an _inner kingdom of

spirit_, a kingdom of love and fellowship, then it is a fact that a

tiny being like one of us can impress and influence the Divine Heart,

and we can make our personal contribution to the Will of the universe,

but we can do it only by wanting what everybody can share and by

seeking blessings which have a universal implication.

So far as prayer is real fellowship, it gives as well as receives.

The person who wants to receive God must first bring himself. If He

misses us, we miss Him. He is Spirit, and consequently He is found only

through true and genuine spiritual activity. In this correspondence of

fellowship there is no more “violation of natural =law=” than there

is in love wherever it appears. Love is itself the principle of the

spiritual universe, as gravitation is of the physical; and as in the

gravitate system the earth rises to meet the ball of the child, without

_breaking any law_, so God comes to meet and to heighten the life of

anyone who stretches up toward Him in appreciation, and there is joy

above as well as below.

All that I have said, and much more, gets vivid illustration in the

“Lord’s prayer,” which Christians have taken as a model form, though

they have not always penetrated its spirit. It is in every line a

prayer of fellowship and co-operation. It is a perfect illustration

of the social nature of prayer. The co-operation and fellowship are

not here confined, and they never are except in the lower stages, to

the inward communion of an individual and his God. There is no _I_ or

_me_ or _mine_ in the whole prayer. The person who prays spiritually

is enmeshed in a _living group_ and the reality of his vital union

with persons like himself clarifies his vision of that deeper Reality

to whom he prays. Divine Fatherhood and human brotherhood are born

together. To say Father to God involves saying “brother” to one’s

fellows, and the ground swell of either relationship naturally carries

the other with it, for no one can largely realize the significance of

brotherly love without going to Him in whom love is completed.

“Hallowed be thy name” is often taken in a very feeble sense to

mean “keep us from using thy name in vain,” or it is thought of as

synonymous with the easy and meaningless platitude, “Let thy name

be holy.” It is in reality a heart-cry for a full appreciation of

the meaning of the Divine name, i. e., the Divine character. It is

an uprising of the soul to an apprehension of the holiness of God

and the fullness of His life that the soul may return to its tasks

with a sense of infinite resources and under the sway of a vision of

the true ideal. This Lord’s prayer begins with a word of intimate

relationship and social union--“Our Father.” It then goes out beyond

the familiar boundaries of experience to feel the infinite sweep of

God’s completeness and perfectness and to become penetrated with solemn

awe and reverence which fit such companionship,--“Our Father of the

holy name.”

This is the prelude. The true melody of prayer, if I may say so, begins

with the positive facing of the task of life:--“Thy kingdom come, Thy

will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Here again we have the

loftiest Fellowship. The person who prays this way is linked with God

in one mighty spiritual whole. The last vestige of atomic selfishness

is washed out. There are those who say these words of prayer with

folded hands and closed eyes, and then expect the desired kingdom

to come by miracle; they suppose that if the request is made often

enough a millennium age will drop out of the skies. Ah, no! If God is

Spirit and man is meant to be spiritual, such a millennium is a sheer

impossibility. This prayer involves the most strenuous life that ever

was lived. To pray seriously for the coming of the kingdom of heaven

means to contribute to its coming. It _has_ come in any life which is

completely under the sway of the holy Will and which is consecrated to

the task of making that holy Will prevail in society. It is no “far

off Divine event.” It is always coming.

“For an ye heard a music, like enow

They are building still, seeing the city is built

To music, therefore never built at all

And therefore built forever.”

In a plain word, it is the total task of humanity through the ages. It

is the embodiment in a temporal order of the eternal purpose. It is the

weaving in concrete figure and color of the Divine pattern. It is the

slow and somewhat painful work of making an actual Divine society out

of this rather stubborn and unpromising potential material. But it is

our main business, and this prayer is the girding of the loins for the

sublime task of helping God make His world.

“Man as yet is being made, and e’er the crowning age of ages,

Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape?

All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade,

Prophet eyes may catch a glory, slowly gaining on the shade,

Till the people all are one and all their voices blend in a choric

Hallelujah to the Maker, ‘It is finished; man is made.’”

Fellow laborers with God in truth we are. Prayer ends in labor and

labor ends in prayer. But it is not a cry for miracle. It is an inward

effort at co-operation.

There is a beautiful mingling of the great and the little, the cosmic

and the personal. The universal sweep of Divine ends does not

swallow up, or miss, the needs of the concrete individual. While the

spiritual universe is building, men must have daily bread and they must

constantly face the actual present with its routine and monotony. Here

again prayer is no miraculous method of turning stones into bread.

It is no easy substitute for toil. It is the joyous insight that in

the avenues of daily toil, God and man are co-operating and that in

very truth the bread for the day is as much God given as it is won

by the sweat of brow. The recently discovered “saying of Jesus” best

interprets this prayer. “Wherever any man raises a stone or splits

wood, there am I.” He consecrates honest toil.

Next we come to the profound word which shows how completely our lives

are bound together in organic union, above and below: “Forgive us as

we forgive.” What a solemn thing to say. Dare we pray it! And yet few

words have ever so truly revealed the nature of prayer. It is, one

sees, no easy, lazy way to blessings. Once more, it is co-operation.

Forgiveness is not a gift which can fall upon us from the skies, in

return for a capricious request. The blessing depends on us as much as

it does on God. A cold, hard, unforgiving heart can no more be forgiven

than a lazy, slipshod student can have knowledge given to him. Like all

spiritual things, forgiveness can come only when there is a person who

appreciates its worth and meaning. The deep cry for forgiveness must

rise out of a forgiving spirit. It is always more than a transaction,

an event. It is an inward condition of the personal life, and the soul

that feels what it means to love and forgive is so bound into the whole

divine order that love and forgiveness come in as naturally as light

goes through the open casement, or the tide into an inlet.

The next word is surely to be thought of as a human cry: “Take us not

into testing.” It is the natural shrinking of the tender, sensitive

soul, and it is the right attitude. Most of us know by hard experience

that trial, proving, testing, yes, even actual temptation, have a

marvelous ministry. No saint is made in the level plain, where the

waters are still and the pastures green.

“Never on custom’s oilëd grooves

The world to a higher level moves,

But grates and grinds with friction hard

On granite boulder and flinty shard.

The heart must bleed before it feels,

The pool be troubled before it heals.”

All this we know. We know that the stem battle makes the veteran. But

this prayer is the childlike cry, the shrinking fear, which are always

safer than the bold dash, the impetuous plunge. It is the utterance of

an instinctive wish to keep where safety lies, and, humanly speaking,

it is right, though, in a world whose highest fruit is character,

we may expect that bitter cups and hard baptisms will be a part of

our experience. Like all that has gone before, it is an effort at

co-operation. It is a sincere aspiration for green pastures and still

waters joined with a readiness to be fed at the table in presence of

the enemy, if need be, readiness for the perilous edge of conflict, for

“high strife and glorious hazard.”

Last of all there rises the cry for deliverance from the power of

evil. Once more we realize that this is not an occasion for magical

interference, no call for a fiery dart out of the sky to pierce a black

demon who is pushing us into sin. The drama is an inward one and the

enemy, called of many names, is a part of our own self. Each soul has

its own struggle with the immemorial tug of brute inheritance--the sag

of lower nature.

“When the fight begins within himself,

A man’s worth something. God stoops o’er his head,

Satan looks up between his feet--both tug--

He’s left, himself, i’ the middle: The soul wakes

And grows.”

But here supremely appears our principle of co-operation. Prayer for

deliverance from evil cannot end on the lips. There is no conquest of

the flesh, no killing out of ape and tiger, until we ourselves catch at

God’s skirts and rise to live for the Spirit and by the Spirit. There

is no deliverance till the soul says, “I will be free” and God and man

tug on the same side. Wherever any citadel of evil is battered God and

man are there together. God finds a human organ and man draws on the

inexhaustible resources of God.

Prayer, whether it be the lisp of a little child, or the wrestling

of some great soul in desperate contest with the coils of habit or

the evil customs of his generation is a testimony to a divine-human

fellowship. In hours of crisis the soul feels for its Companion, by

a natural gravitation, as the brook feels for the ocean. In times of

joy and strength, it reaches out to its source of Life, as the plant

does to the sun. And when it has learned the language of spiritual

communion and knows its Father, praying refreshes it as the greeting

of a friend refreshes one in a foreign land. We ought not to expect

that prayer, of the true and lofty sort, could be attained by easy

steps. It involves appreciation of God and co-operation with Him. One

comes not to it in a day. Even human friendship is a great attainment.

It calls for sacrifice of private wishes and for adjustment to the

purposes of another life. One cannot be an artist or a musician without

patient labor to make oneself an organ of the reality which he fain

would express. He must bring himself by slow stages to a height of

appreciation. Prayer is the highest human function. It is the utterance

of an infinite friendship, the expression of our appreciation of that

complete and perfect Person whom our soul has found. “Lord, teach us

how to pray.”

_The United States a Christian Nation._

BY

HON. DAVID J. BREWER,

_Associate Justice of the Supreme Court United States_.

_Haverford College Library Lectures, 1905._

In this book the Distinguished Christian Jurist has discussed three

important topics:

_First._ “THE UNITED STATES A CHRISTIAN NATION,” in which he shows

why our Republic should be so classified, basing his argument upon

the Decisions of the Supreme Court, Colonial Charters, Constitution

of the United States, and National and State Legislation.

_Second._ “OUR DUTY AS CITIZENS.” A strong plea for Business Honesty

and Integrity, for Liberty and the Rights of Man, for Education, for

Peace and Temperance.

_Third._ “THE PROMISE AND POSSIBILITIES OF THE FUTURE.” An earnest

and eloquent exhortation to the young men of America to temper their

devotion to country with fidelity to the teachings of the Gospel.

_Issued October 1, 1905._

12mo. 100 pp. Price, postpaid, $1.00.

THE JOHN C. WINSTON CO.

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SOCIAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD

Studies In Human and Divine Inter-Relationship

BY

RUFUS M. JONES, A.M., LITT. D.

_Professor of Philosophy in Haverford College, Pa._

This is a fresh interpretation of the deepest problems of life.

It discusses the most interesting phases of recent psychological

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meaning of Personality. He is at home in modern psychology and tells

it effectively for his purpose in freedom from technicalities.”--_The

Outlook._

“The author has written the twelve chapters of this book dealing

with such subjects as The Meaning of Personality, The Realization of

Persons, The Sub-Conscious Life, The Inner Light, etc., etc., with an

aim to show through Psychology, as Drummond showed through Biology,

that life can be unified from top to bottom.”--_Christian Work and the

Evangelist._

“The author bears a unique equipment for the task, having studied

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_12mo. 272 pages. Extra Vellum Cloth, Gilt Top, Uncut Edges. Price

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_A History_

OF

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BY

ALLEN C. THOMAS, A.M.

HAVERFORD COLLEGE

AND

RICHARD H. THOMAS, M.D.

BALTIMORE, MD.

NEW AND REVISED EDITION, 1905

Brought down to date and including valuable statistics and information

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Social Law in the Spiritual World,” Philadelphia, 1904.

[2] The term _a tergo_ causation means that what happens is produced

entirely by the push or the pull of forces. There is an exact

equation--the antecedent _determines_ the consequent.

[3] It is not true, of course, that there is an absolute “break” in the

upward processes of life. Even in the lower forms of life there are

hints of higher possibilities. There is an elemental struggle for the

life of others which has in it the potentiality of love and sacrifice.

But there is no “sign” on the lower levels--before self-consciousness

dawned--of any capacity for an ideal, or of _any power to develop by

the forecast and vision of the goal_.

[4] The term _a fronte_ compulsion means the compelling power of an

ideal which influences by an attraction from in front.

[5] Browning’s “Old Pictures in Florence.”

[6] Sabatier, “Religions of Authority,” p. 307.

[7] I am aware that this feature of child life will seem to some of my

readers to be overdrawn. Some Mothers say that no such tendency was

observed in their own children. That is quite likely. All children do

not express their subtle and complex emotions in the same way. I do not

mean to imply that every child _expresses_ a need of sacrifice when he

does wrong. But careful observers of children have frequently noted the

facts which I have emphasized in the text, and I have often met them in

my own experience with children.

[8] It has been shown by Robertson Smith and others that the Hebrews

thought of sacrifice not as a gift to appease Jehovah but as a sharing

of a common meal with him. Such a lofty view of sacrifice is surely

not primitive. When sacrifice had come to be thought of, as of a

common meal, it had already been purified and transformed by centuries

of development and the heightening presupposes a series of unnamed

prophets before the list of great revealers whose names we know.

In the earliest stages religion is only very slightly ethical. The

moralization of religion is one of the most tremendous facts of human

history.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.