When, therefore, any one asserts the adequacy of the scientific
approach to life, one answer stands ready to our hand: science deals
primarily with facts and their laws, not with their spiritual
interpretations. To put the same truth in another way, science deals
with one specially abstracted aspect of the facts; it drains them of
their qualitative elements and, reducing them to their quantitative
elements, it proceeds to weigh and measure them and state their laws.
It moves in the realm of actualities and not in the realm of values.
One science, for example, takes a gorgeous sunset and reduces it to the
constituent ether waves that cause the colour. What it says about the
sunset is true, but it is not the whole truth. Ask anybody who has
ever seen the sun riding like a golden galleon down the western sea!
Another science takes a boy and reduces him to his Bertillon
measurements and at the top of the statistics writes his name, "John
Smith." That is the truth about John Smith, but it is not the whole
truth. Ask his mother and see! Another science takes our varied and
vibrant mental life and reduces it to its physical basis and states its
laws. That is the truth about our mental life, but it is not the whole
truth. What is more, it is not that part of the truth by which men
really live. For men live by love and joy and hope and faith and
spiritual insight. When these things vanish life is
"a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
When a man takes that quantitative aspect of reality, which is the
special province of natural science, as though it were the whole of
reality, he finds himself in a world where the physical forces are in
control. We, ourselves, according to this aspect of life, are the
product of physical forces--marionettes, dancing awhile because
physical forces are pulling on the strings. In a word, when a man
takes that quantitative aspect of reality, which natural science
presents, as though it were the whole of reality, he becomes a
materialistic fatalist, and on that basis we cannot permanently build
either personal character or a stable civilization. It is not
difficult, then, to see one vital significance of Jesus Christ: he has
given us the most glorious interpretation of life's meaning that the
sons of men have ever had. The fatherhood of God, the friendship of
the Spirit, the sovereignty of righteousness, the law of love, the
glory of service, the coming of the Kingdom, the eternal hope--there
never was an interpretation of life to compare with that. If life
often looks as though his interpretation were too good to be true, we
need not be surprised. Few things in the universe _are_ as
superficially they _look_. The earth looks flat and, as long as we
gaze on it, it never will look any other way, but it is spherical for
all that. The earth looks stationary and if we live to be as old as
Methuselah we never will see it move, but it is moving--seventy-five
times faster than a cannon ball! The sun looks as though it rose in
the east and set in the west, and we never can make it look any other
way, but it does not rise nor set at all. So far as this earth is
concerned, the sun is standing still enough. We look as though we
walked with our heads up and our feet down, and we never can make
ourselves look otherwise, but someone finding a safe stance outside
this whirling sphere would see us half the time walking with our heads
down and our feet up. Few things are ever the way they look, and the
end of all scientific research, as of all spiritual insight, is to get
behind the way things look to the way things are. Walter Pater has a
rememberable phrase, "the hiddenness of perfect things." One meaning,
therefore, which Christ has for Christians lies in the realm of
spiritual interpretation. He has done for us there what Copernicus and
Galileo did in astronomy: he has moved us out from our flat earth into
his meaningful universe, full of moral worth and hope. He has become
to us in this, our inner need, what the luminous phrase of the Book of
Job describes, "An interpreter, one among a thousand." And in spite of
all our immediate expectancy, born out of our scientific control of
life, mankind never needed that service more than now.
V
There is a second proposition to which we should attend as we endeavour
to define the need for religion with reference to the scientific
mastery of life. Consider why so often men are tempted to suppose that
science is adequate for human purposes. Is it not because science
supplies men with power? Steam, electricity, petroleum, radium--with
what progressive mastery over the latent resources of the universe does
science move from one area of energy to another, until in the
imagination of recent generations she has seemed to stand saying: all
power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. With such power to
bestow, is she not our rightful mistress? But who that has walked with
discerning eyes through these last few years can any longer be beguiled
by that fallacious vision? Look at what we are doing with this new
power that science has given us! The business to which steel and steam
and electricity, explosives and poisons have recently been put does not
indicate that humanity's problem is solved when new power is put into
our hands. Even the power of wide-spread communication can so be used
that a war which began in Serajevo will end with lads from Kamchatka
and Bombay blasted to pieces by the same shell on a French battlefield.
Even the power of modern finance can be so used that nations will
exhaust the credit of generations yet unborn in waging war. How some
folk keep their cheap and easy optimism about humanity's use of its new
energies is a mystery. We have come pretty near to ruining ourselves
with them already. If we do not achieve more spiritual control over
them than we have yet exhibited we will ruin ourselves with them
altogether. Once more in history a whole civilization will commit
suicide like Saul falling on his own sword.
The scientific control of life, by itself, creates more problems than
it solves. The problem of international disarmament, for example, has
been forced on us by the fear of that perdition to the suburbs of which
our race has manifestly come through the misuse of scientific
knowledge. Humanity is disturbed about itself because it has
discovered that it is in possession of power enough to wreck the world.
Never before did mankind have so much energy to handle. Multitudes of
people, dubious as to whether disarmament is practical, are driven like
shuttles back and forth between that doubt, upon the one side, and the
certainty, upon the other, that armament is even less practical. The
statisticians have been at work upon this last war and their figures,
like the measurements of the astronomers, grow to a size so colossal
that the tentacles of our imaginations slip off them when we try to
grasp their size. The direct costs of this last war, which left us
with more and harder difficulties than we had at the beginning, were
about $186,000,000,000. Is that practical? At the beginning of 1922
almost all the nations in Europe, although by taxation they were
breaking their people's financial backs, were spending far more than
their income, and in the United States, far and away the richest nation
on the planet, we faced an enormous deficit. Is that practical? In
this situation, with millions of people unemployed, with starvation
rampant, with social revolution stirring in every country--not because
people are bad, not because they impatiently love violence, but because
they cannot stand forever the social strain and economic consequence of
war--what were we doing? We were launching battleships which cost
$42,000,000 to build, which cost $2,000,000 a year to maintain and
which, in a few years, would be towed out to sea to be used as an
experimental target to try out some new armour-piercing shell. I
wonder if our children's children will look back on that spectacle and
call it practical. In 1912 the naval expenses of this country were
about $136,000,000. In 1921 our naval expenses were about
$641,000,000--approximately five times greater in nine years. So over
all the earth war preparations were pyramiding with an ever
accelerating momentum. And because any man can see that we must stop
sometime, we have been trying desperately to stop now; to turn our
backs upon this mad endeavour to build civilization upon a
materialistic basis, bulwarked by physical force; to turn our faces
toward spiritual forces, fair play, reasonable conference, good-will,
service and co-operation.
Yet how hard it is to make the change effective! Long ages ago in the
primeval jungle, the dogs' ancestors used to turn around three times in
the thicket before they lay down, that they might make a comfortable
spot to nestle in, and now your highbred Pekingese will turn around
three times upon his silken cushion although there is no earthly reason
why he should. So difficult is it to breed beasts and men out of their
inveterate habits. So hard is it going to be to make men give up the
idea that force is a secure foundation for international relationships.
Yet somehow that change must be made. They are having trouble with the
housing problem in Tokyo and the reason is simple. Tokyo is built on
earthquake ground and it is insecure. You cannot put great houses on
unstable foundations. One story, two stories, three stories--that is
about as high as they dare go. But in New York City one sees the
skyscrapers reaching up their sixty stories into the air. The
explanation is not difficult: Manhattan Island is solid rock. If you
are going to build great structures you must have great foundations.
And civilization is a vast and complicated structure. We cannot build
it on physical force. That is too shaky. We must build it upon
spiritual foundations.
There are those who suppose that this can be done by progress through
the scientific control of life, and who treat religion as a negligible
element. Such folk forget that while a cat will lap her milk
contentedly from a saucer made of Wedgwood or china, porcelain or
earthenware, and will feel no curiosity about the nature of the
receptacle from which she drinks, human beings are not animals who thus
can take their food and ask no questions about the universe in which it
is served to them. We want to know about life's origin and meaning and
destiny. We cannot keep our questions at home. We cannot stop
thinking. If this universe is fundamentally physical, if the only
spark of spiritual life which it ever knew is the fitful flame of our
own unsteady souls, if it came from dust and to dust will return,
leaving behind no recollection of the human labour, sacrifice and
aspiration which for a little time it unconsciously enshrined, that
outlook makes an incalculable difference to our present lives. For
then our very minds themselves, which have developed here by accident
upon this wandering island in the skies, represent the only kind of
mind there is, and what we do not know never was thought about or cared
for or purposed by anyone, and we, alone in knowing, are ourselves
unknown.
The consequence of this sort of thinking, which is the essence of
irreligion, is to be seen on every side of us in folk who, having thus
lost all confidence in God and the reality of the spiritual world,
still try to labour for the good of men. They have kept one part of
Christianity, its ideals of character and service; they have lost the
other part, which assures them about God. In a word, they are trying
to build an idealistic and serviceable life upon a godless basis. Now,
the difficulty with this attitude toward life lies here: it demands a
quality of spirit for which it cannot supply the motive. It demands
social hope, confidence, enthusiasm and sacrifice, and all the while it
cuts their nerves. It tells men that the universe is fundamentally a
moral desert, that it never was intended even to have an oasis of
civilization in it, that if we make one grow it will be by dint of our
own effort against the deadset of the universe's apathy, that if, by
our toil, an oasis is achieved, it will have precarious tenure in such
alien and inhospitable soil, and that in the end it will disappear
before the onslaught of the cosmic forces; yet in the same breath it
tells men to work for that oasis with hope, confidence, joy and
enthusiastic sacrifice. This is a world view which asks of men a
valorous and expensive service for which it cannot supply the driving
power. Yet many of our universities are presenting just that outlook
upon life to our young men and women. The youth are being urged to
fight courageously and sacrificially for righteousness upon the earth,
and at the same time they are presented with a view of the background
and destiny of human life similar to that which Schopenhauer expressed:
"Truly optimism cuts so sorry a figure in this theatre of sin,
suffering, and death that we should have to regard it as a piece of
sarcasm, if Hume had not explained its origin--insincere flattery of
God in the arrogant expectation of gain." [5]
What this generation, which so disparages religion and like the ancient
Sadducee calls its good right arm its god, will ultimately discover is
that the fight for righteousness in character and in society is a long
and arduous campaign. The Bible says that a thousand years in God's
sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the
night. It certainly seems that way. It is a long and roundabout
journey to the Promised Land. Generations die and fall by the way.
The road is white with the bones of pilgrims who attained not the
promises but saw them and greeted them from afar. Some Giordano Bruno,
who gives himself to the achievement of mankind's high aims, is burned
at the stake; centuries pass and on the very spot where he was martyred
a monument is built with this inscription on it: "Raised to Giordano
Bruno by the generation which he foresaw." This is exhilarating when
the story is finished, but in the meantime it is hard work being
Giordano Bruno and sacrificially labouring for a cause which you care
enough for and believe enough in and are sure enough about so that you
will die for it. When such faith and hope and sacrifice are demanded
one cannot get them by exhortation, by waving a wand of words to
conjure his enthusiasm up. Nothing will do but a world-view adequate
to supply motives for the service it demands. Nothing will do but
religion.
One wonders why the preachers do not feel this more and so recover
their consciousness of an indispensable mission. One wonders that the
churches can be so timid and dull and negative, that our sermons can be
so pallid and inconsequential. One wonders why in the pulpit we have
so many flutes and so few trumpets. For here is a world with the
accumulating energies of the new science in its hands, living in the
purlieus of hell because it cannot gain spiritual mastery over the very
power in which it glories. Here is a world which must build its
civilization on spiritual bases or else collapse into abysmal ruin and
which cannot achieve the task though all the motives of
self-preservation cry out to have it done, because men lack the very
elements of faith and character which it is the business of religion to
supply.