We have said that when science has given us all its facts we still need
a spiritual interpretation of the facts; that when science has put all
its energies into our hands we still need spiritual mastery over their
use. Let us say in conclusion that, when science has given us all its
power, we still need another kind of power which it is not the business
of science to supply. Long ago somebody who knew the inner meaning of
religion wrote:
"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside still waters.
He restoreth my soul."
That last phrase sums up one of the deepest needs of human life. We
are in constant want of spiritual repair; we are lost without a fresh
influx of inward power; we desperately need to have our souls restored.
A young British soldier once came in from the trenches where his
aggressive powers had been in full employ and, having heard one of the
finest concert companies that London could send out, he wrote in a
letter to his family: "I have just come down from the trenches, and
have been listening to one of the best concerts I ever attended. It
makes one feel that perhaps there is a good God after all." The two
aspects of life which that soldier discovered in himself all men
possess. One takes us to life's trenches; the other throws us back on
some revelation of grace and beauty that we may be sure of God. With
one we seek aggressively to master life; with the other we seek
receptively to be inspired. Every normal man needs these two kinds of
influence: one to send him informed and alert to his tasks, the other
to float his soul off its sandbars on the rising tide of spiritual
reassurance and power. Every normal man needs two attitudes: one when
he goes into action determined to do his work and to do it well, and
the other when he subdues his spirit to receptivity and with the
Psalmist cries,
"My soul, wait thou in silence for God only;
For my expectation is from him."
When science has given us all the power it can, we still need another
kind of power which science cannot give.
Whatever else the scientific control of life may have accomplished, it
has not saved mankind from the old and devastating problems of trouble
and sin. So far as individual experience of these is concerned, there
is little discernable difference between two thousand years before
Christ and two thousand years afterward. Still disasters fall upon our
lives, sometimes as swift in their assault as wild beasts leaping from
an unsuspected ambush. Still troubles come, long drawn out and
wearying, like the monotonous dripping of water with which old
torturers used to drive their victims mad. Still sins bring shame to
the conscience and tragic consequence to the life, and tiresome work,
losing the buoyancy of its first inspiration, drags itself out into
purposeless effort and bores us with its futility. Folk now, as much
as ever in all history, need to have their souls restored. The
scientific control of life, however, is not adequate for that.
Electricity and subways and motor cars do not restore the soul; and to
know that there are millions upon millions of solar systems, like our
own, scattered through space does not restore the soul; and to delve in
the sea or to fly in the air or to fling our words through the ether
does not restore the soul. The need of religion is perennial and would
be though our scientific control over life were extended infinitely
beyond our present hope, for the innermost ministry of religion to
human life is the restoration of the soul.
In this fact lies the failure of that type of naturalism which
endeavours to keep religion as a subjective experience and denies the
reality of an objective God. If we are not already familiar with this
attempted substitution we soon shall be, for our young people are being
taught it in many a classroom now. One of the basic principles of this
new teaching is belief in the spiritual life but, when one inquires
where the spiritual life is, he discovers that it is altogether within
ourselves--there is no original, creative and abiding Spiritual Life
from whom we come, by whom we are sustained, in whom we live. Rather,
as flowers reveal in their fragrance a beauty which is not in the earth
where they grow nor in the roots on which they depend, so our spiritual
life is the mysterious refinement of the material out of which we are
constructed, and it has nothing to correspond with it in the source
from which we sprang. Nevertheless, the new naturalism exalts this
spiritual life within us, calls it our crown and glory, bids us
cultivate and diffuse it, says about it nearly everything a Christian
says except that it is a revelation of eternal reality. Moreover, it
is difficult to differentiate from this outspoken group of professed
naturalists another group of humanists who do retain the idea of God,
but merely as the sum total of man's idealistic life. "God," says one
exponent, "is the farthest outreach of our human ideals." That is to
say, our spiritual lives created God, not God our spiritual lives.
God, as one enthusiastic devotee of this new cult has put it, is a sort
of Uncle Sam, the pooling of the idealistic imaginations of multitudes.
Of course he does not exist, yet in a sense he is real; he is the
projection of our loyalties, affections, hopes.
It should go without saying that this idea of God has about as much
intellectual validity as belief in Santa Claus and is even more
sentimental, in that it is a deliberate attempt to disguise in pleasant
and familiar terms a fundamentally materialistic interpretation of
reality. The vital failure of this spiritualized naturalism, however,
lies in the inability of its Uncle Sam to meet the deepest needs on
account of which men at their best have been religious. This deified
projection of our ideals we made up ourselves and so we cannot really
pray to him; he does not objectively exist and so has no unifying
meaning which puts purposefulness into creation and hope ahead of it;
he does not care for any one or anything and so we may not trust him;
and neither in sin can he forgive, cleanse, restore, empower, nor in
sorrow comfort and sustain. A god who functions so poorly is not much
of a god. Once more, therefore, one wonders why in a generation when,
not less, but more, because of all our scientific mastery the souls of
men are starved and tired, the Church is not captured by a new sense of
mission. It is precisely in a day when the active and pugnacious
energies of men are most involved in the conquest of the world that the
spirit becomes most worn for lack of sustenance. To be assured of the
nearness and reality and availability of the spiritual world is a
matter of life and death to multitudes of folk to-day. There could
hardly be a more alluring time in which to make the Holy Spirit real to
the world. For the supreme moral asset in any man's life is not his
aggressiveness nor his pugnacity, but his capacity to be inspired--to
be inspired by great books, great music, by love and friendship; to be
inspired by great faiths, great hopes, great ideals; to be inspired
supremely by the Spirit of God. For so we are lifted until the things
we tried to see and could not we now can see because of the altitude at
which we stand, and the things we tried to do and could not we now can
do because of the fellowship in which we live. To one asserting the
adequacy of the scientific control of life, therefore, the Christian's
third answer is clear: man's deepest need is spiritual power, and
spiritual power comes out of the soul's deep fellowships with the
living God.
Such, then, is the abiding need of religion in a scientific age. To be
scientifically minded is one of the supreme achievements of mankind.
To love truth, as science loves it, to seek truth tirelessly, as
science seeks it, to reveal the latent resources of the universe in
hope that men will use them for good and not for evil, as science does,
is one of the chief glories of our race. When, however, we have taken
everything that science gives, it is not enough for life. When we have
facts, we still need a spiritual interpretation of facts; when we have
all the scientific forces that we can get our hands upon, we still need
spiritual mastery over their use; and, beyond all the power that
science gives, we need that inward power which comes from spiritual
fellowships alone. Religion is indispensable. To build human life
upon another basis is to erect civilization upon sand, where the rain
descends and the floods come and the winds blow and beat upon the house
and it falls and great is the fall thereof.
[1] Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology
in Christendom, Vol. II, p. 16.
[2] Quoted in the Hibbert Journal, Vol. III, January 1905, p. 296.
[3] Psalm 19:1.
[4] Ernst Haeckel: The Wonders of Life, p. 413.
[5] Arthur Schopenhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Zweiter
Band, Kapital 46, Von der Nichtigkeit und dem Leiden des Lebens, p. 669.