If, therefore, the Christian Gospel is going to be true to itself, it
must carefully preserve amid the pressure of our modern social
enthusiasms certain fundamental emphases which are characteristic of
its genius. It must stress the possibility and the necessity of the
inward transformation of the lives of men. We know now that a thorny
cactus does not have to stay a thorny cactus; Burbank can change it.
We know that a crab-apple tree does not have to stay a crab-apple tree;
it can be grafted and become an astrakhan. We know that a malarial
swamp does not have to stay a malarial swamp; it can be drained and
become a health resort. We know that a desert does not have to stay a
desert; it can be irrigated and become a garden. But while all these
possibilities of transformation are opening up in the world outside of
us, the most important in the series concerns the world within us. The
primary question is whether human nature is thus transformable, so that
men can be turned about, hating what formerly they loved and loving
what once they hated. Said Tolstoy, whose early life had been
confessedly vile: "Five years ago faith came to me; I believed in the
doctrine of Jesus, and my whole life underwent a sudden transformation.
What I had once wished for I wished for no longer, and I began to
desire what I had never desired before. What had once appeared to me
right now became wrong, and the wrong of the past I beheld as right."
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So indispensable to the welfare of the world is this experience, that
we Christians need to break loose from our too narrow conceptions of it
and to set it in a large horizon. We have been too often tempted to
make of conversion a routine emotional experience. Even Jonathan
Edwards was worried about himself in this regard. He wrote once in his
diary: "The chief thing that now makes me in any measure question my
good estate is my not having experienced conversion in those particular
steps wherein the people of New England, and anciently the dissenters
of old England, used to experience it." Poor Jonathan! How many have
been so distraught! But the supreme folly of any man's spiritual life
is to try thus to run himself into the mold of any other man's
experience. There is no regular routine in spiritual transformation.
Some men come in on a high tide of feeling, like Billy Bray, the
drunken miner, who, released from his debasing slavery and reborn into
a vigorous life, cried, "If they were to put me into a barrel I would
shout glory out through the bunghole! Praise the Lord!" Some men come
in like Bushnell, the New England scholar and preacher, who, when he
was an unbelieving tutor at Yale, fell on his knees in the quiet of his
study and said, "O God, I believe there is an eternal difference
between right and wrong and I hereby give myself up to do the right and
to refrain from the wrong." Some men break up into the new life
suddenly like the Oxford graduate who, having lived a dissolute life
until six years after his graduation from the university in 1880,
picked up in his room one day Drummond's "Natural Law in the Spiritual
World," and, lo! the light broke suddenly--"I rejoiced there and then
in a conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in
less than twenty-four hours." Some come slowly, like old John
Livingstone, who said, "I do not remember any particular time of
conversion, or that I was much cast down or lift up." Spiritual
transformation is infinitely various because it is so infinitely vital;
but behind all the special forms of experience stands the colossal fact
that men can be transformed by the Spirit of God.
That this experience of inward enlightenment and transformation should
ever be neglected or minimized or forgotten or crowded out is the more
strange because one keeps running on it outside religion as well as
within. John Keats, when eighteen years old, was handed one day a copy
of Spenser's poems. He never had known before what his life was meant
to be. He found out that day. Like a voice from heaven his call came
in the stately measures of Spenser's glorious verse. He knew that he
was meant to be a poet. Upon this master fact that men can be inwardly
transformed Christ laid his hand and put it at the very center of his
gospel. All through the New Testament there is a throb of joy which,
traced back, brings one to the assurance that no man need stay the way
he is. Among the gladdest, solemnest words in the records of our race
are such passages in the New Testament as this: Fornicators,
adulterers, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revelers, extortioners, such
were some of you; but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye
were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit
of our God. One cannot find in the New Testament anything stiff and
stilted about this experience. Paul's change came suddenly; Peter's
came slowly. They did not even have, as we have come to have, a
settled word to describe the experience. Ask James what it is and,
practical-minded man that he is, he calls it _conversion_--being turned
around. Ask Peter what it is and, as he looks back upon his old
benighted condition, he cries that it is like _coming out of the
darkness into a marvelous light_. Ask Paul what it is and, with his
love of superlative figures, he cries that it is like _being dead and
being raised again with a great resurrection_. Ask John what it is
and, with his mystical spirit, he says that it is _being born again_.
See the variety that comes from vitality--no stiff methods, no stiff
routine of experience, but throbbing through the whole book the good
news of an illuminating, liberating, transforming experience that can
make men new!
It is the more strange that this central element in the Christian
Gospel should be neglected in the interests of social reformation
because it is so indispensable to social reformation. Wherever a new
social hope allures the efforts of forward-looking men, there is one
argument against the hope which always rises. You cannot do that--men
say--human nature is against it; human nature has always acted another
way; you cannot change human nature; your hope is folly. As one
listens to such skepticism he sees that men mean by human nature a
static, unalterable thing, huge, inert, changeless, a dull mass that
resists all transformation. The very man who says that may be an
engineer. He may be speaking in the next breath with high enthusiasm
about a desert in Arizona where they are bringing down the water from
the hills and where in a few years there will be no desert, but orange
groves stretching as far as the eye can reach, and eucalyptus trees
making long avenues of shade, and roses running wild, as plenteous as
goldenrod in a New England field. But while about physical nature he
is as hopeful of possible change as a prophet, for human nature he
thinks nothing can be done.
From the Christian point of view this idea of human nature is utterly
false. So far from being stiff and set, human nature is the most
plastic, the most changeable thing with which we deal. It can be
brutalized beneath the brutes; it can rise into companionship with
angels. Our primitive forefathers, as our fairy tales still reveal,
believed that men and women could be changed into anything--into trees,
rocks, wolves, bears, kings and fairy sprites. One of the most
prominent professors of sociology in America recently said that these
stories are a poetic portraiture of something which eternally is true.
Men can be transformed. That is a basic fact, and it is one of the
central emphases of the Christian Gospel. Of all days in which that
emphasis should be remembered, the chiefest is the day when men are
thinking about social reformation.