A third peril associated with the idea of progress is quite as
widespread as the other two and in some ways more insidious. The idea
is prevalent that progress involves the constant supersession of the
old by the new so that we, who have appeared thus late in human history
and are therefore the heirs "of all the ages, in the foremost files of
time," may at once assume our superiority to the ancients. The modern
man, living in a world supposedly progressing from early crude
conditions toward perfection, has shifted the golden age from the past
to the future, and in so doing has placed himself in much closer
proximity to it than his ancestors were. The world is getting
better--such is the common assumption which is naturally associated
with the idea of progress. As one enthusiastic sponsor of this
proposition puts it:
"Go back ten years, and there was no airship; fifteen years, and there
was no wireless telegraphy; twenty-five years, and there was no
automobile; forty years, and there was no telephone, and no electric
light; sixty years, and there was no photograph, and no sewing machine;
seventy-five years, no telegraph; one hundred years, no railway and no
steamship; one hundred and twenty-five years, no steam engine; two
hundred years, no post-office; three hundred years, no newspaper; five
hundred years, no printing press; one thousand years, no compass, and
ships could not go out of sight of land; two thousand years, no writing
paper, but parchments of skin and tablets of wax and clay. Go back far
enough and there were no plows, no tools, no iron, no cloth; people ate
acorns and roots and lived in caves and went naked or clothed
themselves in the skins of wild beasts." [1]
Such is the picture of human history upon this planet which occupies
the modern mind, and one implication often drawn is that we have
outgrown the ancients and that they might well learn from us and not we
from them.
Christians, however, center their allegiance around ideas and
personalities which are, from the modern standpoint, very old indeed.
The truths that were wrought out in the developing life and faith of
the Hebrew-Christian people are still the regulative Christian truths,
and the personality who crowned the whole development is still the
Christians' Lord. They are challenged, however, to maintain this in a
progressive world. Men do not think of harking back to ancient
Palestine nineteen centuries ago for their business methods, their
educational systems, their scientific opinions, or anything else in
ordinary life whatever. Then why go back to ancient Palestine for the
chief exemplar of the spiritual life? This is a familiar modern
question which springs directly from popular interpretations of
progress.
"Dim tracts of time divide
Those golden days from me;
Thy voice comes strange o'er years of change;
How can I follow Thee?
"Comes faint and far Thy voice
From vales of Galilee;
Thy vision fades in ancient shades;
How should we follow Thee?" [2]
Behind this familiar mood lies one of the most significant changes that
has ever passed over the human mind. The medieval age was tempted to
look backward for its knowledge of everything. Philosophy was to be
found in Aristotle, science in Pliny and his like. It was the ancients
who were wise; it was the ancients who had understood nature and had
known God. The farther back you went the nearer you came to the
venerable and the authoritative. As, therefore, in every other realm
folk looked back for knowledge, so it was most natural that they should
look back for their religion, too. To find philosophy in Aristotle and
to find spiritual life in Christ required not even the turning of the
head. In all realms the age in its search for knowledge was facing
backwards. It was a significant hour in the history of human thought
when that attitude began to give way. The scandal caused by Alessandro
Tassoni's attacks on Homer and Aristotle in the early seventeenth
century resounded through Europe. He advanced the new and astonishing
idea that, so far from having degenerated since ancient times, the race
had advanced and that the moderns were better than their sires. This
new idea prevailed as belief in progress grew. It met, however, with
violent opposition, and the remnants of that old controversy are still
to be found in volumes like George Hakewill's five hundred page folio
published in 1627 on "the common errour touching Nature's perpetuall
and universall decay." [3] But from the seventeenth century on the
idea gained swift ascendency that the human race, like an individual,
is growing up, that humanity is becoming wiser with the years, that we
can know more than Aristotle and Pliny, that we should look, not back
to the ancients, but rather to ourselves and to our offspring, for the
real wisdom which maturity achieves. Once what was old seemed wise and
established; what was new seemed extempore and insecure: now what is
old seems outgrown; what is new seems probable and convincing. Such is
the natural and prevalent attitude in a world where the idea of
progress is in control. Nor can the applications of this idea to the
realm of religion be evaded. If we would not turn back to Palestine
nineteen centuries ago for anything else, why should we turn back to
find there the Master of our spiritual life? In a word, our modern
belief in progress, popularly interpreted, leads multitudes of people
to listen with itching ears for every new thing, while they condescend
to all that is old in religion, and in particular conclude that, while
Jesus lived a wonderful life for his own day, that was a long time ago
and surely we must be outgrowing him.
That this attitude is critically perilous to the integrity of the
Christian movement will at once be obvious to any one whose own
spiritual experience is centered in Christ. From the beginning until
now the faith of Christian people has been primarily directed, not to a
set of abstract principles, nor to a set of creedal definitions, but to
a Person. Christians have been people believing in Jesus Christ. This
abiding element has put unity into Christian history. The stream of
Christian thought and progress has never been twice the same, yet for
all that it has been a continuous stream and not an aimless, sprawling
flood, and this unity and consistency have existed for one reason
chiefly: the influence of the personality of Jesus. Folk may have been
Romanists or Protestants, ritualists or Quakers, reactionaries or
progressives, but still they have believed in Jesus. His personality
has been the sun around which even in their differences they have swung
like planets in varying orbits. Take the personality of Jesus out of
Christian history and what you have left is chaos.
Moreover, it is the personality of Jesus that has been the source of
Christianity's transforming influence on character. Ask whence has
come that power over the spirits of men which we recognize as
Christianity at its mightiest and best, and the origin must be sought,
not primarily in our theologies or rubrics or churches, but in the
character and spirit of Jesus. He himself is the central productive
source of power in Christianity. We have come so to take this for
granted that we do not half appreciate the wonder of it. This
personality, who so has mastered men, was born sixty generations ago in
a small village in an outlying Roman province, and until he was thirty
years of age he lived and worked as a carpenter among his fellow
townsfolk, attracting no wide consideration. Then for three years or
less he poured out his life in courageous teaching and sacrificial
service, amid the growing hatred and hostility of his countrymen, until
he was put to death by crucifixion "because he stirred up the people."
Anatole France, in one of his stories, represents Pilate in his later
years as trying to remember the trial and death of Jesus and being
barely able to recall it. That incident had been so much a part of the
day's work in governing a province like Judea that it had all but
escaped his recollection. Such a representation of the case is not
improbable. It is easy so to tell the story of Jesus' life as to make
his continued influence seem incredible. None would have supposed that
nineteen centuries after his death, Lecky, the historian of European
morals, would say, "The simple record of three short years of active
life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the
disquisitions of philosophers, and all the exhortations of moralists."
[4] None would have thought that sixty generations after he was gone,
Montefiori, a Jew, putting his finger on the source of Christianity's
power, would light upon the phrase "For the sake of Jesus," and would
cry: "Of what fine lives and deaths has not this motive been the spring
and the sustainment!" [5] None would have thought that so long after
Calvary seemed to end forever the power of Jesus, one of the race's
greatest men, David Livingstone, engaged in one of the race's most
courageous enterprises, breaking his way into the untraveled jungles of
Africa, would sing as he went, for so his journal says he did,
"Jesus, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills my breast"?
Take the personality of the Master out of Christian history and we have
robbed it of its central moral power.
Moreover, the personality of Jesus has always been the standard of
reformation when Christianity has become recreant or laggard or
corrupt. A man named John Wilkes started a political movement in
England in the eighteenth century, and around him sprang up a party who
called themselves Wilkites. These followers of Wilkes, however, went
to extremes so wild and perilous that poor John Wilkes himself had to
explain to everybody that, as for him, he was not a Wilkite. This
lapse of a movement from the original intention of its founder is
familiar in history and nowhere is it more clearly illustrated than in
Christianity. The Master, watching Western Christendom today, with all
our hatred, bitterness, war, would have to say, If this is
Christianity, then I am not a Christian. The Master, wandering through
our cathedrals with their masses, waxen images and votive gifts, or
through our Protestant churches with their fine-spun speculations
insisted on as necessary to belief if one is to be a child of grace,
would have to say, If this is Christianity, then I am not a Christian.
Indeed, just this sort of service the Master always has been rendering
his movement; he is the perennial rebuke of all that is degenerate and
false in Christianity. Whenever reform has come, whenever real
Christianity has sprung up again through the false and superficial, the
movement has been associated with somebody's rediscovery of Jesus
Christ. Saint Francis of Assisi rediscovered him, and made a spot of
spiritual beauty at the heart of the medieval age. John Wesley
rediscovered him and his compassion for the outcast, and led the Church
into a new day of evangelism and philanthropy. William Carey
rediscovered him and his unbounded care for men, and blazed the trail
for a new era of expansive Christianity. And if today many of us are
deeply in earnest about the application of Christian principles to the
social life of men, it is because we have rediscovered him and the
spirit of his Good Samaritan. In an old myth, Antaeus, the child of
Earth, could be overcome when he was lifted from contact with the
ground but, whenever he touched again the earth from which he sprang,
his old power came back once more. Such is Christianity's relation
with Jesus Christ. If, therefore, the idea of progress involves the
modern man's condescension to the Master as the outgrown seer of an
ancient day, the idea of progress has given Christianity an incurable
wound.
Before we surrender to such a popular interpretation of the meaning of
progress, we may well discriminate between two aspects of human life in
one of which we plainly have progressed, but in the other of which
progress is not so evident. In the Coliseum in ancient Rome centuries
ago, a group of Christians waited in the arena to be devoured by the
lions, and eighty thousand spectators watched their vigil. Those
Christians were plain folk--"not many mighty, not many noble"--and
every one of them could have escaped that brutal fate if he had been
willing to burn a little incense to the Emperor. Turn now to
ourselves, eighteen hundred years afterwards. We have had a long time
to outgrow the character and fidelity of those first Christians; do we
think that we have done so? As we imagine ourselves in their places,
are we ready with any glibness to talk about progress in character?
Those first Christians never had ridden in a trolley car; they never
had seen a subway; they never had been to a moving picture show; they
never had talked over a telephone. There are innumerable ways in which
we have progressed far beyond them. But character, fidelity, loyalty
to conscience and to God--are we sure of progress there?
To hear some people talk, one would suppose that progress is simply a
matter of chronology. That one man or generation comes in time after
another is taken as sufficient evidence that the latter has of course
superseded the earlier. Do we mean that because Tennyson came after
Shelly he is therefore the greater poet? What has chronology to do
with spiritual quality and creativeness, which always must rise from
within, out of the abysmal depths of personality? Professor Gilbert
Murray, thinking primarily in a realm outside religion altogether,
chastises this cheap and superficial claim of advance in spiritual life:
"As to Progress, it is no doubt a real fact. To many of us it is a
truth that lies somewhere near the roots of our religion. But it is
never a straight march forward; it is never a result that happens of
its own accord. It is only a name for the mass of accumulated human
effort, successful here, baffled there, misdirected and driven astray
in a third region, but on the whole and in the main producing some
cumulative result. I believe this difficulty about Progress, this fear
that in studying the great teachers of the past we are in some sense
wantonly sitting at the feet of savages, causes real trouble of mind to
many keen students. The full answer to it would take us beyond the
limits of this paper and beyond my own range of knowledge. But the
main lines of the answer seem to me clear. There are in life two
elements, one transitory and progressive, the other comparatively if
not absolutely non-progressive and eternal, and the soul of man is
chiefly concerned with the second. Try to compare our inventions, our
material civilization, our stores of accumulated knowledge, with those
of the age of Aeschylus or Aristotle or St. Francis, and the comparison
is absurd. Our superiority is beyond question and beyond measure. But
compare any chosen poet of our age with Aeschylus, any philosopher with
Aristotle, any saintly preacher with St. Francis, and the result is
totally different. I do not wish to argue that we have fallen below
the standard of those past ages; but it is clear that we are not
definitely above them. The things of the spirit depend on will, on
effort, on aspiration, on the quality of the individual soul, and not
on discoveries and material advances which can be accumulated and added
up." [6]
Let any Christian preacher test out this matter and discover for
himself its truth. We are preachers of the Gospel in the twentieth
century. St. Francis of Assisi was a preacher of the Gospel in the
thirteenth century. We know many things which St. Francis and his
generation never could have known but, when we step back through that
outward change into the spirit of St. Francis himself, we must take the
shoes from off our feet, for the place whereon we stand is holy ground.
We may not talk in such an hour about progress in Christian character
in terms of chronology, for a modern minister might well pray to touch
the garment's hem of such a spirit as St. Francis had! When, then, one
speaks of outgrowing Jesus, one would do well to get a better reason
than simply the fact that he was born nineteen centuries ago. The
truth is that humanity has been upon this planet hundreds of thousands
of years, while our known history reaches back, and that very dimly,
through only some four or five thousand. In that known time there has
certainly been no biological development in man that any scientist has
yet discerned. Even the brain of man in the ice age was apparently as
large as ours. Moreover, within that period of history well known to
us, we can see many ups and downs of spiritual life, mountain peaks of
achievement in literature and art and religion, with deep valleys
intervening, but we cannot be sure that the mountain peaks now are
higher than they used to be. The art of the two centuries culminating
about 1530 represents a glorious flowering of creative genius, but it
was succeeded by over three centuries of descent to the abominations of
ugliness which the late eighteenth century produced. We have climbed
up a little since then, but not within distant reach of those lovers
and makers of beauty from whose hearts and hands the Gothic cathedrals
came. Progress in history has lain in the power of man to remember and
so to accumulate for general use the discoveries, both material and
ethical, of many individuals; it has lain in man's increasing
information about the universe, in his increasing mastery over external
nature, and in the growing integration of his social life; it has not
lain in the production of creative personalities appearing in the
course of history with ever greater sublimity of spirit and grasp of
intellect. Where is there a mind on earth today like Plato's? Where
is there a spirit today like Paul's?
The past invites us still to look back for revelations in the realm of
creative personality. Some things have been done in history, like the
sculptures of Phidias, that never have been done so well since and that
perhaps never will be done so well again. As for the Bible, we may
well look back to that. There is no book to compare with it in the
realm of religion. Most of the books we read are like the rainwater
that fell last night, a superficial matter, soon running off. But the
Bible is a whole sea--the accumulated spiritual gains of ages--and to
know it and to love it, to go down beside it and dip into it, to feel
its vast expanse, the currents that run through it, and the tides that
lift it, is one of the choicest and most rewarding spiritual privileges
that we enjoy. As for Jesus, it is difficult to see what this
twentieth century can mean by supposing that it has outgrown him. It
has outgrown countless elements in his generation and many forms of
thought which he shared with his generation, but it never will outgrow
his spirit, his faith in God, his principles of life: "Our Father who
art in heaven, Hallowed by thy name;" "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength,
and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself;" "It is not the
will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of these little ones
should perish;" "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples,
if ye have love one to another;" "If any man would be first, he shall
be last of all, and servant of all;" "All things therefore whatsoever
ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them;"
"Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you;" "Thy will be
done, as in heaven, so on earth." Take principles like these, set them
afire in a flaming life the like of which has never come to earth, and
we have in Jesus a revelation of the spiritual world which is not going
to be outgrown. Still for the Christian he is Saviour and Lord, and
across the centuries in his face shines the light of the knowledge of
the glory of God.