Faith's Intellectual Difficulties
DAILY READINGS
Most people will readily grant that such a sense of personal
fellowship with God as the last week's study presented is obviously
desirable. Every one who has experienced such filial life with God
will bear witness to its incomparable blessing. Said Tennyson, "I
should be sorely afraid to live my life without God's presence, but to
feel he is by my side just now as much as you are, that is the very
joy of my heart." But many who would admit the desirability of the
experience are troubled about the reasonableness of the beliefs that
underly it. They want intellectual assurance about their faith. Let us
in the daily readings present certain considerations which a mind so
perplexed should take into account.
Fifth Week, First Day
We should let no one deny our right to bring religious belief to the
test of reasonableness. Glanvill was right when in the seventeenth
century he said, "There is not anything I know which hath done more
mischief to Religion than the disparaging of Reason." In the New
Testament Paul says:
=Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.--I Thess. 5:21.=
Peter says:
=Yea, and for this very cause adding on your part all diligence, in
your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge.--II Pet. 1:5.=
This might be paraphrased to read, Faith should be _worked out_ into
character and _thought through_ into knowledge. As for Jesus:
=One of the scribes came, and heard them questioning together, and
knowing that he had answered them well, asked him, What commandment
is the first of all? Jesus answered, The first is, Hear, O Israel;
The Lord our God, the Lord is one: and thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,
and with all thy strength.--Mark 12:28-30.=
In many a life which has neglected these admonitions Lowell's words
have proved true: "Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from
thought." In our resolute endeavor to think through the mystery of
life, however, and to find a reasonable basis for faith, we need to
remember that _the very desire to know is an indication of the
reality which we seek_. The dim intuition that the world with all
its diverse powers was in some sense a unity, preceded by ages the
statement of nature's uniformity which modern science knows; and man's
tireless desire to reach a reasonable statement of the unity was an
intimation in advance that unity was there. So men do not believe in
God because they have proved him; they rather strive endlessly to
prove him because they cannot help being sure that he must be there.
This in itself is an intimation about reality which no thoughtful man
will lightly set aside. Tennyson rightly describes the reason for
man's quest after proof about God:
"If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep,
I heard a voice 'believe no more'
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd 'I have felt.'"
_Eternal Father, Quest of ages, long sought, oft doubted or forsook;
can it be that Thou art known to us, the Law within our minds, the
Life of every breath we draw, the Love that yearneth in our hearts?
Art Thou the Spirit who oft hast striven with us, and whom we greatly
feared, lest yielding to His strong embrace we should become more
than we dared to be?_
_An impulse toward forgiveness has sometimes stirred within us, we
have felt moved to show mercy, the sacrificial life has touched our
aspiration; but we were unprepared to pay the price. Was this
Thyself, and have we turned from Thee? Something like this we must
have done, so barren, joyless and so dead has life become. Canst Thou
not visit us again?_
_We hush our thoughts to silence, we school our spirits in sincerity,
and here we wait. O may we not feel once more the light upon our
straining eyes, the tides of life rise again within our waiting
hearts?_
_We never looked to meet Thee in the stress of thought, the toil of
life, or in the call of duty; we only knew that somehow life had lost
for us all meaning, dignity, and beauty. How then shall we turn back
again and see with eyes that fear has filmed? How can we be born
again, now grown so old in fatal habit?_
_If we could see this life of ours lived out in Thee, its common days
exalted, its circumstances made a throne, its bitterness,
disappointment, and failure all redeemed, then our hearts might stir
again, and these trembling hands lay hold on life for evermore.
Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Fifth Week, Second Day
Not only is man's tireless quest for assurance about God an intimation
that God must be here to be sought after; but _the spiritual nature of
man which insists on the quest is itself a revelation that God
actually is here_. Some men say that our spiritual life is the result
of evolution, and they suppose that by this magic word they have
explained it. But what comes out of a process of growth was somehow
latent in the Original Beginning from which the growth started.
Palm-trees do not grow from acorns; only oaks evolve from acorns and
for the sufficient reason that oaks are somehow _involved in acorns_
to start with. So a universe with spiritual life in it naturally
presupposes an Original with spiritual life in It. Whatever evolves
must first of all have been involved. The very fact that the seeker
after God has a spiritual life, which is restless and unsatisfied
without faith in the Eternal Spirit, is one of the clearest
indications that, whatever else may be said about the source of life,
it must be spiritual. The Nile for ages was a mystery; it flowed
through Egypt--a blessed necessity to the land, enriching the soil,
and sustaining the people--but nobody knew its source. Long before
Victoria Nyanza was discovered, however, thinkers were sure that a
great lake must be the explanation of the stream; and when at last
they found the sources of the Nile, the lake was even greater than
anyone had dreamed. So is man's spirit a revelation of a spiritual
origin even before that origin is clearly known. As the Bible puts it:
=Now he that wrought us for this very thing is God, who gave unto us
the earnest of the Spirit.--II Cor. 5:5.=
_O God! mysterious and Infinite, Thou art the first and Thou the
last: as our weeks pass away and our age rises or declines, we still
return to Thee who ever art the same. We seek Thee as the sole
abiding light amid the shadows of perishable things. O Thou most
ancient God! to whom the heavens are but of yesterday, and the life
of worlds but as the shooting star, there is no number of Thy days
and mercies; and what can we do, O Lord, but throw ourselves on Thee
who failest not, and from whom our pathway is not hid? With solemn
and open heart we would meet Thee here. Cover not Thyself with a
cloud, most High, but may our prayer pass through._
_O Thou our constant Witness and our awful Judge! When we remember
our thoughtless lives, our low desires, our impatient temper, our
ungoverned wills, we know that Thou hast left us without excuse. For
Thou hast not made us blind, O Lord, as the creatures that have no
sin; nor hast Thou spared the light of holy guidance. Thy still small
voice of warning whispers through our deepest conscience; and Thine
open Word hath dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and called us
to the feet of Christ to choose the better part. We are not our own,
and are ashamed to have lived unto ourselves. Thou hast formed us for
Thy service, and we must hide our face that we have shrunk from the
glorious hardships of our task, and slumbered on our holy watch. Our
daily work has not been wrought as in Thy sight; and we have not made
the outgoings of the morning and the evening to praise Thee. The
trials of our patience we have received as earthly pains of nature,
not as the heavenly discipline of faith; and the fulness of Thy
bounties has come to us as dead comfort, not as the quickening touch
of Thy everlasting love. O our true and only God! we have lived in a
bondage of the world that bringeth no content; and the passions we
serve are as strange idols that cannot deliver. Awake, awake, O Arm
of the Lord! and burst our bonds in sunder; and help the spirit that
struggles within us to turn unto Thee with a pure heart, and serve
Thee in newness of spirit. Amen._--James Martineau.
Fifth Week, Third Day
Many stumble at the very beginning of their quest for God, because
they are sure that finite mind can never know the Infinite. The Bible
itself asserts that God is in one sense unknowable.
=Touching the Almighty, we cannot find him out.--Job 37:23.=
=Man cannot find out the work that God hath done from the beginning
even to the end.--Eccl. 3:11.=
=O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of
God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing
out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his
counsellor?--Rom. 11:33, 34.=
But in the same sense in which God is unknowable, all the most
important realities with which we deal are also beyond our
comprehension. We do not know what electricity is, what matter is,
what life is. Ether is utterly beyond the reach of our definitions,
and an English scientist calls it "unknown, impalpable, the necessary
condition of scientific thought." As for the constituent elements of
the material world, we are told that atoms are so infinitesimally
minute as to be indivisible, and yet that an "electron ranges about in
the atom as a mouse might in a cathedral." The plain fact is that in
any realm, human knowledge soon runs off into an unknown region where
it deals with invisible realities, which it cannot define, but on
which life is based. While therefore we do not know what electricity,
ether, electrons, and life itself are, we do know them well _in
their relationship with our needs_. So we may know God. Deep beyond
deep in him will be past our fathoming, but what God means in his
relationships with our lives we may know gloriously.
_O Thou who transcendest all thought of Thee as the heavens are
higher than the earth; we acknowledge that we cannot search Thee out
to perfection, but we thank Thee that Thou, the Invisible, comest to
us in the things that are seen; that Thy exceeding glory is shadowed
in the flower that blooms for a day, in the light that fades; that
Thine infinite love has been incarnate in lowly human life; and that
Thy presence surrounds all our ignorance, Thy holiness our sin, Thy
peace our unrest._
_Give us that lowly heart which is the only temple that can contain
the infinite. Save us from the presumption that prides itself on a
knowledge which is not ours, and from the hypocrisy and carelessness
which professes an ignorance which Thy manifestation has made for
ever impossible. Save us from calling ourselves by a name that Thou
alone canst wear, and from despising the image of Thyself Thou hast
formed us to bear, and grant that knowledge of Thee revealed in Jesus
Christ which is our eternal life. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Fifth Week, Fourth Day
The assurance of God may come in part from looking outward at his
creation. This universe seems superficially to be material, but really
it is _saturated with the presence of mind_. So a city's streets,
buildings, bridges, subways, and railroads might appear to careless
thought grossly material; but the fact is that in their origin they
all are _mental_. They are not simply iron and steel and stone; they
are thought, plan, purpose materialized and made visible. The basic
fact about them is that mind shaped them and permeates every use to
which they are put. The most important and decisive force in their
origination was not anything that can be seen, but the invisible
thought that dreamed them and moulded them. So when one looks at
creation he finds something more than matter; he finds order, law,
uniformity; his mind is at home in tracing regularities, discovering
laws, and perceiving purposes. Creation is not grossly material; it is
saturated with the evidence of mind. Lord Kelvin, the chemist, walking
in the country with Liebig, his fellow-scientist, asked his companion
if he believed that the grass and flowers grew by mere chemical
forces; and Liebig answered, "No, no more than I could believe that
the books of botany describing them could grow by mere chemical
forces."
=Lift up your eyes on high, and see who hath created these, that
bringeth out their host by number; he calleth them all by name; by
the greatness of his might, and for that he is strong in power, not
one is lacking.=
=Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from
Jehovah, and the justice due to me is passed away from my God? Hast
thou not known? hast thou not heard? The everlasting God, Jehovah,
the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary;
there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the
faint; and to him that hath no might he increaseth strength. Even the
youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly
fall: but they that wait for Jehovah shall renew their strength; they
shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be
weary; they shall walk, and not faint.--Isa. 40:26-31.=
_O Thou Infinite Perfection, who art the soul of all things that are
... we thank Thee for the world of matter whereon we live, wherewith
our hands are occupied, and whereby our bodies are builded up and
filled with food and furnished with all things needful to enjoy. We
thank Thee for the calmness of Night, which folds Thy children in her
arms, and rockest them into peaceful sleep, and when we wake we thank
Thee that we are still with Thee. We bless Thee for the heavens over
our head, arched with loveliness, and starred with beauty, speaking
in the poetry of nature the psalm of life which the spheres chant
before Thee to every listening soul._
_We thank Thee for this greater and nobler world of spirit wherein we
live, whereof we are, whereby we are strengthened, upheld, and
blessed. We thank Thee for the wondrous powers which Thou hast given
to man, that Thou hast created him for so great an estate, that thou
hast enriched him with such noble faculties of mind and conscience
and heart and soul, capable of such continual increase of growth and
income of inspiration from Thyself. We thank Thee for the wise mind,
for the just conscience, for the loving heart, and the soul which
knows Thee as Thou art, and enters into communion with Thy spirit,
rejoicing in its blessing from day to day. Amen._--Theodore Parker.
Fifth Week, Fifth Day
The vital assurance of faith always comes, not so much from observing
the outer world, as from appreciating the meaning of man's inner life.
Man knows that he is something more than a physical machine. Theorists
may say that our minds are only a series of molecular changes in the
brain; but man turns to ask: _Who is it that is watching these
molecular changes? The very fact that we can discuss them, is proof
that we are something more than they are and of another order._
Leslie Stephen was an agnostic, but at the thought of man as merely a
physical machine he grew impatient. "I knock down a man and an image,"
he said, "and both fall down because both are material. But when the
man gets up and knocks me down, the result is not explicable by any
merely mechanical action." Man denies his own inward consciousness of
self when he refuses to acknowledge the mental and spiritual part of
him as the thing he really is. Man may have a body, but he surely is a
soul. And when man lets this highest part of him speak its own
characteristic word, he always hears a message like this: I am spirit;
to grow into great character is the one worthy end of my existence;
but how came I to be spirit with spiritual purpose unless my Creator
is of like quality? and how can I believe that my existence and my
purpose are not a cruel joke unless I am begotten by a Spiritual Life
that will sustain my strength and crown my effort? To believe that
man's soul is a foundling, laid on the doorstep of a merely physical
universe, crying in vain for any father who begot him or any mother
who conceived him, is to make our highest life a liar. Therefore man
at his best has always believed in God.
=For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of
God. For ye received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but
ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The
Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children
of God.--Rom. 8:14-16.=
_O Thou whom no name can tell, whom all our thoughts cannot fully
comprehend, we rejoice in all Thy goodness.... We thank Thee for our
body, this handful of dust so curiously and wonderfully framed
together. We bless Thee for this sparkle of Thy fire that we call our
soul, which enchants the dust into thoughtful human life, and blesses
us with so rich a gift. We thank Thee for the varied powers Thou hast
given us here on earth. We bless Thee for the far-reaching mind,
which puts all things underneath our feet, rides on the winds and the
waters, and tames the lightning into useful service.... We thank Thee
for this conscience, whereby face to face we commune with Thine
everlasting justice. We thank Thee for the strength of will which can
overpower the weakness of mortal flesh, face danger and endure
hardship, and in all things acquit us like men...._
_We thank Thee for this religious sense, whereby we know Thee, and,
amid a world of things that perish, lay fast hold on Thyself, who
alone art steadfast, without beginning of days or end of years,
forever and forever still the same. We thank Thee that amid all the
darkness of time, amid joys that deceive us and pleasures that cheat,
amid the transgressions we commit, we can still lift up our hands to
Thee, and draw near Thee with our heart, and Thou blessest us still
with more than a father's or a mother's never-ending love.
Amen._--Theodore Parker.
Fifth Week, Sixth Day
One ground of assurance concerning faith is the way a sincere
fellowship with God affects life. In a delicious passage of his
autobiography, Benjamin Franklin says, "I was scarce fifteen, when,
after doubting by turns of several points, as I found them disputed in
the different books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself.
Some books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be the
substance of sermons preached at Boyle's Lectures. It happened that
they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by
them; for the arguments of the Deists which were quoted to be refuted,
appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short I soon
became a thorough Deist. My arguments perverted some others,
particularly Collins and Ralph; but, each of them having afterwards
wrong'd me greatly without the least compunction, and recollecting
Keith's conduct towards me (who was another free thinker), and my own
towards Vernon and Miss Read, which at times gave me great trouble, I
began to suspect that this doctrine, tho' it might be true, was not
very useful." Many men, not yet able to see clearly the issue of
conflicting arguments, are practically convinced in favor of faith by
the relative effects on life of faith and unbelief. When one carries
this thought out until he imagines a world where no one any more
believes in God, he feels even more emphatically the negative results
of unbelief. As Sir James Stephen said, "We cannot judge of the
effects of Atheism from the conduct of persons who have been educated
as believers in God, and in the midst of a nation which believes in
God. If we should ever see a generation of men to whom the word God
has no meaning at all, we should get a light on the subject which
might be lurid enough." A practical working conviction is often gained
in religion, as in every other realm, not by argument, but by acting
on a principle until it verifies itself by its results, or, as in
Benjamin Franklin's case, by trying a negation until one is driven
from it by its consequences.
=Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but
inwardly are ravening wolves. By their fruits ye shall know them. Do
men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good
tree bringeth forth good fruit; but the corrupt tree bringeth forth
evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a
corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not
forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Therefore by
their fruits ye shall know them.--Matt. 7:15-20.=
_O God, who remainest the same though all else fades, who changest
not with our changing moods, who leavest us not when we leave Thee;
we thank Thee that when we lose faith in Thee, soon or late we come
to faith in something that leads us back again with firmer trust and
more sincerity. Even if we wander into the far country we take
ourselves with us; ourselves who are set towards Thee as rivers to
the sea. If we turn to foolishness, our hearts grow faint and weary,
our path is set with thorns, the night overtakes us, and we find we
have strayed from light and life._
_Grant to us clearer vision of the light which knows no shade of
turning, that we stray not in folly away; incline our hearts to love
the truth alone, so that we miss Thee not at last; give us to realise
of what spirit we are, so that we cleave ever to Thee, who alone can
give us rest and joy. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Fifth Week, Seventh Day
When all is said and done in the matter of intellectual assurance,
many are confused by the seeming lack of finality in the result. After
all these ages of debate, they say, see all the innumerable opinions
of jarring sects about religious truth! Evidently there is no
satisfying conclusion obtainable at all! But look at the innumerable
schools of medicine--shall one on their account decide that health is
a fruitless study? Consider the infinite variety of taste in
food--shall we say that therefore hunger and its satisfaction is a
futile question to discuss? Rather, the very variety of the answers in
man's quest reveals the importance of the quest itself. Of course
proof of God lacks the finality of a scientific demonstration, and
this is true _because it moves in a realm so much more important than
anything that science touches_. Exactness and finality are possible
only in the least important realms. One can measure and analyze and
describe to a minute nicety a table which a carpenter has made, but
when one turns to the carpenter himself and endeavors to analyze his
motives, weigh his thoughts, estimate his quality, and prove his
purposes, one drops minute nicety at once. The carpenter is not to be
put into a column of figures and added with mathematical precision as
his table is. The farther up one moves in the scale the less precise
and undeniable do his conclusions become. So science is exact just
because it deals with measurable things; but religion, by as much as
its realm is more important, can less easily pack its conclusions into
neat parcels finally tied up and sealed. A man who will not believe
anything which is not precisely demonstrable must eliminate from his
life everything except what yardsticks can measure and scales can
weigh. Let no man ever give up the fight for faith because he does not
seem at once to be reaching an answer which he can neatly formulate.
Let him remember Tolstoi, writing on his birthday: "I am twenty-four,
and I have not done a thing yet. But I feel that not in vain have I
been struggling for nearly eight years against doubt and temptation.
For what am I destined? This only the future will disclose."
=Hear, O Jehovah, when I cry with my voice:
Have mercy also upon me, and answer me.
When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee,
Thy face, Jehovah, will I seek.
Hide not thy face from me;
Put not thy servant away in anger:
Thou hast been my help;
Cast me not off, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation.
When my father and my mother forsake me,
Then Jehovah will take me up.
Teach me thy way, O Jehovah;
And lead me in a plain path,
Because of mine enemies.
Deliver me not over unto the will of mine adversaries:
For false witnesses are risen up against me,
And such as breathe out cruelty.
I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of Jehovah
In the land of the living.
Wait for Jehovah:
Be strong, and let thy heart take courage;
Yea, wait thou for Jehovah.=
=--Psalm 27:7-14.=
_Deliver us, our Father, from all those mists which do arise from the
low places where we dwell, which rise up and hide the sun, and the
stars even, and Thee. Deliver us from the narrowness and the poverty
of our conceptions. Deliver us from the despotism of our senses. And
grant unto us this morning, the effusion of Thy Spirit, which shall
bring us into the realm of spiritual things, so that we may, by the
use of all that which is divine in us, rise into the sphere of Thy
thought, into the realm where Thou dwellest, and whither have trooped
from the ages the spirits of just men now made perfect. Grant, we
pray Thee, that we may not look with time-eyes upon eternal things,
measuring and dwarfing with our imperfectness the fitness and beauty
of things heavenly. So teach us to come into Thy presence and to rise
by sympathy into Thy way of thinking and feeling, that so much as we
can discern of the invisible may come to us aright. Amen._--Henry
Ward Beecher.
COMMENT FOR THE WEEK
I
While it is true that in many cases the apparent unreasonableness of
Christian faith springs from the underlying unreality of Christian
life, this is not always a sufficient diagnosis of doubt. Horace G.
Hutchinson, the English golfer, who spent much of his life in
agnosticism and has now come over into Christian faith, thus
interprets the spirit of his long unbelief: "All the while I had the
keenest consciousness of the comfort that one would gain could he but
believe in the truth of the Christian promises. Surely that must
always be the agnostic's mood.... It is not that they wilfully reject
the appeal to the heart; their will is eager to respond to it. But man
has his gift of reason; it cannot be that he is not intended to use
it. Least of all can it be part of the great design that he should
suspend its use in regard to the most important subject to which his
thought can be directed."
Such sincere intellectual difficulties with faith must be met with
intellectual arguments and not with moral accusations. Plenty of folk
of elevated character and admirable lives grant, sometimes
impatiently, that the Christian faith is beautiful--but is it
_so_? Is not its solacing power a deceptive sleight of hand, by
which our pleasing fancies and desires are made to look like truth? So
a mirage is beautiful to weary travelers, but their temporary comfort
rests on fallacy. McTaggart summed up one of the most wide-spread and
masterful desires of this generation when he said, "What people want
is a religion they can believe to be true."
As one sets himself to meet faith's intellectual difficulties, the
attitude in which he is to approach the problem is all-important.
Samuel M. Crothers tells us that a young man once left with him a
manuscript for criticism, and remarked in passing, "It is only a
little bit of my work, and it will not take you long to look it over.
In fact it is only the first chapter in which I explain the Universe."
When one outgrows this cocksure presumption of youth and gains a
graver and more seasoned mind, he leaves behind the attempt to pierce
to creation's last secret. He sees that we can no more neatly and
finally demonstrate God than we can demonstrate any of life's
important faiths.
Moreover proof of God, as a theorem in philosophy, is not a deep human
need. Men often have supposed that they had such demonstration, but
human experience was little affected by the fact. The exhaustless
source of mankind's desire for assurance about God is not theoretical
curiosity but vital need, and until a man feels the need, sees how
urgently man's highest life reaches out toward God, he never will make
much of any arguments. Browning's bishop asks his friend:
"Like you this Christianity or not?
It may be false, but will you wish it true?
Has it your vote to be so if it can?"
Until a man gives an affirmative answer to that inquiry, until he
possesses a life that itself suggests God and wants him, he is not
likely to arrive anywhere by argument alone.
This is not the case with Christianity only. We cannot prove with
theoretical finality that monogamy is the form of family life to which
the universe is best adapted. But mankind, trying many experiments
with family life, has found in the monogamous family values unique and
indispensable. It is because men feel the value of such a love-bond,
that they begin to argue for it. And their argument, when one sees
deeply into it, is framed after this fashion: We know the _worth_
of this family-life of faithful lovers. We want monogamy and we
propose to have it. We do not pretend that our faith in monogamy, as
the form of marriage best fitted to this universe, is capable of exact
demonstration; but we do see arguments of great weight in favor of it
and we do not see any convincing arguments against it. We are
persuaded that our faith has reasonable right of way; and we propose
to go on believing in monogamy and practicing it and combating its
enemies, until we prove our case in the only way such cases ever can
be finally proved, by the issue of the matter in the end.
So men come into the sort of personal and social life that Jesus
represents. Apart from any theories, they value the life itself--its
ideals of character, friendship, service, trust. If honesty allows,
they propose to live that life. When a man has gone far enough in
Christian experience, so that he comes up to his intellectual
difficulties by such a road, he is likely to profit by a consideration
of the reasons in favor of faith. He is in the attitude of saying: I
have found great living in Christ. No argument for the Christian
experience can be quite so convincing as the Christian experience
itself. I am bound to have that life if I honestly can, and I will
search to see whether there is any insuperable intellectual difficulty
in the way of it.
II
One of the initial perplexities of faith concerns the sort of
intellectual assurance which we have a right to expect. In a
laboratory of physics, the investigator gathers facts, makes
inductions as to their laws, and then verifies his findings. He uses a
simplicity of procedure and gains a finality of result that makes all
other knowledge seem relatively insecure. To be sure, the scientist
may seek long for his truth and make many ineffectual guesses that
prove false, but, in the end, he reaches a conclusion so demonstrable
that every man of wit enough to investigate the subject must agree
that it is so. How the Christian wishes for such certainty concerning
God!
Before, however, any one surrenders confidence in God, because
confessedly the affirmations of religious faith cannot be established
by such methods as a physicist employs, there is ample reason for
delay. We are certain that heat expands and cold contracts, and we can
prove the fact and state its laws. But are we not also sure that it is
wrong to lie and right to tell the truth? This conviction about
truthfulness at least equals in theoretical certainty and in practical
right to determine conduct, our confidence in heat's expanding power.
This conviction about truthfulness does actually sway life more than
does any single scientific truth that one can name. Let us then set
ourselves to prove our moral confidence by such methods as the
physical laboratory can supply--with yard sticks, and Troy weight
scales, and test tubes, and meters! At once it is evident that if we
are to hold only such truth as is amenable to the demonstration of a
laboratory, we must bid farewell to every _moral conviction_ that
hitherto has influenced our lives. God, banished because the physicist
cannot prove him, will have good company in exile!
Moreover, all our _esthetic convictions_ will have to share that
banishment. We know that some things are beautiful. The consensus of
the race's judgment has not so much agreed to accept the new astronomy
as it has agreed to think sunrise glorious and snow-capped mountains
wonderful. Take from our lives our judgments on beauty, so that we may
call no music marvelous, no poetry inspiring, no scenery sublime, and
some of the most intimate and assured convictions we possess will have
to go. A man who has seen the Matterhorn at dawn, when the first shaft
of light reaches its rocky pinnacle and streams down in glory over the
glaciers that cape its shoulders, will not disbelieve the splendor of
the scene, though all the world beside unanimously should cry that it
is not beautiful. But prove it by the methods of a laboratory? When
the geologist has analyzed all the mountain's rocks, the chemist all
its minerals; when the astronomer has traced the earth's orbit that
brings on the dawn, and the physicist has counted and tabulated the
rays of light that make the colors, our conviction of the scene's
beauty will be as little explained or proved as is our confidence in
God. It becomes clear that some convictions which we both do and must
hold are not amenable to the sort of proof which a scientific
laboratory furnishes.
Moreover, if we will have no truth beyond the reach of a physicist's
demonstration, all our _convictions in the realm of personal
relationship_ will have to go. We _know_ that friendship-love is the
crown of every human fellowship. Father and son, mother and daughter,
brother and sister, wife and husband--these relationships are in
themselves bare branches wanting the foliage and fruit of friendship.
Of no truth is man at his best more sure than he is that "Life is just
our chance o' the price of learning love." But no laboratory ever can
deal with such a truth, much less establish it. For this is the
neglected insight, for the want of which our religious confidence is
needlessly unstable: _Every realm of reality has its own appropriate
kind of proof, and a method of proof available in one realm is seldom,
if ever, usable in another._ That truthfulness is right is in a way
provable, but methods proper to the moral realm must be allowed; that
the Matterhorn is sublime is in a sense provable, but by methods which
the esthetic realm permits; that love is the crown of life can be
soundly established, but one must employ a method appropriate to
personal relationships. If, obsessed by the procedure of a laboratory
as the solitary path to knowledge, one will have no convictions which
cannot meet its tests, then in good logic there must be a great
emigration from his soul. All his convictions about morals and
beauty, all his convictions about personal friendships and about God
must leave together. He will have a depopulated spirit. No man could
live on such terms for a single hour. The most essential and valuable
equipment of our souls is in convictions which the demonstrations of a
physicist can as little reach as an inch worm, clambering up the
Himalayas, can measure the distance to the sun.
III
A man to whom the Christian life has come to be preeminently valuable,
and who is asking whether it is intellectually justifiable, is set
free, by such considerations as we just have noted, to seek assurance
where religious assurance may properly be found. For one thing, he may
find help by _trying out the creed of no-God_. Many a man is a
wavering believer, makes little excursions into doubt and returns
hesitant and unhappy, because he never has dared to see his doubts
through to their logical conclusion and to face the world with God
eliminated.
One may sense the general atmosphere of the world, under the no-God
hypothesis, by saying, _In all this universe there is no mind
essentially greater than mine._ The import of such a statement
grows weightier the more one ponders it. All human minds are
infinitesimal in knowledge; endless realities must lie beyond our
reach; "our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea." Yet human
knowledge is all that anywhere exists, if the no-God hypothesis is
true. There is no knower who knows more, and the infinite reality
beyond our grasp is not known by any mind at all. No one ever thought
it or will think it through eternity. Then, let a man add, _In all
this universe there is no goodness essentially greater than mine._
Human goodness is pitiably partial; it is but prophecy of what
goodness ought to mean; "Man is a dwarf of himself," as Emerson said.
But human goodness is all that anywhere exists, if the no-God
hypothesis is true. There never will be any better goodness anywhere,
and when the earth comes to its end in a solar catastrophe, there will
be no goodness left at all. Certainly the hypothesis of no-God raises
more questions than it easily can quell.
Indeed the Christian, long accused by unbelieving friends of gross
credulity because he holds his creed, may well leave his defense and
"go over the top" in an offensive charge. If it is a question of
holding creeds, unbelief is a creed as certainly as belief is; it
says, I believe that there is no God or that God cannot be known. If
it is a question of credulity, the Christian suspects that of all the
different kinds of credulousness which the world has seen, nothing
ever has surpassed the capacity of modern sceptics to accept
impossible beliefs. He who says, I believe that there is no God, nor
anything which that name might reasonably connote, is saying, I
believe that the fundamental reality everywhere is physical. Long ages
ago atoms, electrons, "mobile cosmic ethers" began their mysterious
organization, whose present issue is planetary orbits, rocks, organic
life, and, highest point of all, the brain of man. Man's mind is but
the moving shadow cast by the activity of brain. Man's character is
the subtle fragrance of his nerves. Everywhere, if the no-God
hypothesis be true, spirit is a _result_, physical energy the _cause_.
Some startling corollaries follow such a view. _No man can be blamed
for anything._ Molecular action in the brain is responsible alike
for saints and sinners, and we are as powerless to change our quality
of character or action as a planet is to change its course. Judas and
Jesus, Festus and Paul, the Belgian lads and the Prussian officers who
mutilated them, the raper and the raped--why blame the one or praise
the other when all characters alike are ground from a physical
machine, whose action is predetermined by the push of universal energy
behind? One man even says that to condemn an immoral deed is like
Xerxes whipping the Hellespont--punishment visited on physical
necessity which is not to blame.
The second corollary is not less startling: _every man thinks as he
does because of molecular action in the brain_. A Christian believes
in God because his molecules maneuver so, and his opponent is an
atheist because his molecules maneuver otherwise, and all convictions
of truth, however well debated and reasoned out, are fundamentally the
work of atoms, not of mind. What we call intellect as little causes
anything as steam from a kettle causes the boiling out of which it
comes. Some brains boil Socialism, some do not; some brains boil
Episcopalianism and some Christian Science. A determinist and a
believer in freewill differ as do oaks and elm trees, for physical
reasons only, and folk are Catholic in southern Europe--so we are
informed--because their skulls are narrow, and in northern Europe
Protestants because their skulls are broad. Truth is a nickname for a
neurosis. The standing marvel is that on some matters like the
multiplication table our brains boil so unanimously.
A third corollary still remains: _we have no creative power of mind
and will_. All that is and is to be was wound up in primeval
matter, and now in our thoughts and actions is ticking like a clock.
"All of our philosophy," says Huxley, "all our poetry, all our
science, and all our art--Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael--are
potential in the fires of the sun." That is to say, Plato had nothing
to do with _creating_ his philosophy, nor Shakespeare with
writing plays--they were empty megaphones and the real voice is the
physical machine from which all things come. Professor Bowne of Boston
University, after the publication of his "Metaphysics," received from
a physicist a protest against his emphasis on the reality of mind. The
professor of physics insisted that the only fundamental reality was
physical and that mind is always a result of brain's activity and
never a cause of anything. To this Professor Bowne replied that
according to the writer's own theory, as he understood it, the letter
of protest was the result of certain physical forces issuing in
nervous excitations that made scratches on paper, and that the
writer's mind had nothing effectual to do with its composition. This,
said Professor Bowne, might be a plausible explanation of the letter,
but he was unwilling to apply it to the universe. What wonder that the
physicist acknowledged to a friend that the retort nettled him, for he
did not see just how to answer it?
IV
One's discontent with this reduction of our lives to physical
causation is increased when he studies the _mental process by which
men reach it_. It is as if a man should perceive in the works of
Shakespeare insight and beauty, pathos and laughter, despair and hope,
and should set himself to explain all these as the function of the
type. How plausibly he could do it! If one takes Shakespeare's
sentences full of spiritual meaning he can readily resolve them into
twenty-six constituent letters of the alphabet, and these into certain
hooks and dashes, and these into arithmetical points diffused in
space. Starting with such abstract points, let one suppose that some
fortunate day they arranged themselves into hooks and dashes, and
these into letters of the alphabet, and these by fortuitous concourse
came together into sentences. Reading them we think we see deep
spiritual meaning, but they are all the work of type; the fundamental
reality is arithmetical points diffused in space. Such is the process
by which a man reduces the mental and moral life of man back to its
physical basis; then breaks up the physical basis into atoms; then,
starting with these abstractions, builds up again the whole world
which he just has analyzed, and thinks he has explained the infinitely
significant spiritual life of man. Not for a long time will we accept
such a method of explaining the works of Shakespeare! Nor can man
contentedly be made to follow so inconsequential a process of thought
as that by which the mind and character of Jesus are reduced to a
maneuver of molecules.
The attractiveness of this explanation of the universe as a huge
physical machine is easily understood. It presents a simple picture,
readily grasped. It packs the whole explanation of the world into a
neat parcel, portable by any mind. In the days of monarchy the
government of the universe was pictured in terms of an absolute
sovereign; in feudal times the divine economy was pictured as a
gigantic feudalism; we always use a dominant factor in the life of man
to help us picture the eternal. So in the age whose builder and maker
is machinery we easily portray the universe as a huge machine. The
process is simple and natural, but to suppose that it is adequate is
preposterous. Lord Kelvin, the chemist, knew thoroughly the
mechanistic idea of the world. He felt the fascination of it, for he
said at Johns Hopkins University, "I never satisfy myself until I make
a mechanical model of a thing. If I can make a mechanical model I can
understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way
through, I cannot understand." But Lord Kelvin knew better than to
suppose that this figure comprehended all of reality. "The atheistic
idea," said he, "is so nonsensical, that I do not know how to put it
into words."
The rejection of the no-God hypothesis does not necessarily imply that
a man becomes fully Christian in his thought of deity. There are
way-stations between no-God and Jesus' Father. _But it does mean that
to him reality must be fundamentally spiritual, not physical._ What
other hypothesis possibly can fit the facts? For consider the view of
a growing universe which we see from the outlook that modern science
furnishes. Out of a primeval chaos where physical forces snarled at
each other in unrelieved antagonism, where no man had yet arisen to
love truth and serve righteousness, something has brought us to a
time, when for all our evil, there are mothers and music and the
laughter of children at play, men who love honor and for service' sake
lay down their lives, and homes in every obscure street where
fortitude and sacrifice are splendidly exhibited. Out of a chaos,
where a contemporary observer, could there have been one, would have
seen no slightest promise of spirit, something has brought us to the
Ten Commandments, and the Sermon on the Mount, to great character and
growing achievements in social righteousness, to lofty thoughts of the
Divine and hopes of life eternal. _Something has been at work here
besides matter. No explanation of all this will do, without God._
V
Another source of confirmation for the man who, valuing Christian
experience, seeks assurance that it is intellectually justifiable, is
to be found in the effect of Christian faith on life itself. The
nautical tables can be proved by an astronomer in his observatory; but
if they are given to a sailor and he beats about the seas with them in
safety, finding that they make adventurous voyages practicable, that
also would be important witness to their truth. So the Christian ideas
of life have not been kept by studious recluses to ponder over and
weave philosophies about; they have been down in the market place, men
have been practically trying them for generations, and _they make
great living_.
The ultimate ground of practical assurance about anything is that we
have tried it and that it works. A man may have experience that other
persons exist, may draw the inference that friendly relations with
them are not impossible, but only when he launches out and verifies
his thought in an adventure will he really be convinced of
friendship's glory. In no other way has final assurance about God come
home to man. They who have lived as though God _were_ have been
convinced that he _is_; they who have willed to do his will have
known.
That religious faith does justify itself in life is a fact to which
mankind's experience amply testifies. Men have come to God, not as
chemists to bread curious to analyze it; they have come as hungry men,
needing to eat if they would live. And they have found life glorified
by faith in him. The difference between religion and irreligion here
is plain. _How seldom one finds enthusiastic unbelievers!_ When all
that is fine spirited and resolute in agnostic literature is duly
weighed and credited, the pessimistic undertone is always heard.
Leslie Stephen thus summarizes life--"There is a deep sadness in the
world. Turn and twist the thought as you may there is no escape.
Optimism would be soothing if it were possible; in fact, it is
impossible, and therefore a constant mockery." No gospel burns in the
unbeliever's mind, urgent for utterance; he has no inspiring outlooks
to offer, no glad tidings to declare. The more intelligent he is the
more plainly he sees this. With Clifford he laments that "the spring
sun shines out of an empty heaven to light up a soulless earth" and
feels "with utter loneliness that the Great Companion is dead"; with
Romanes he frankly states, "So far as the ruination of individual
happiness is concerned, no one can have a more lively conception than
myself of the possibly disastrous tendency of my work." An unbeliever
whose admirable life raised the question as to the philosophy by which
he guided it, gave this summary of his creed, "I am making the best of
a bad mess." Unbelievers do not spontaneously utter in song the glory
of a creed like this, and when they do write poetry, it is of a sort
that music will not fit--
"The world rolls round forever like a mill,
It grinds out death and life and good and ill,
It has no purpose, heart, or mind or will."
When from poetry one turns to philosophy, he can see good reasons why
hymnals and unbelief should be uncongenial. There is little to make
life worth while in a creed which holds as Haeckel does that morality
in man, like the tail of a monkey or the shell of a tortoise, is
purely a physiological effect, and that man himself is "an affair of
chance; the froth and fume at the wave-top of a sterile ocean of
matter." Shall the practical unserviceableness of such an idea for the
purpose of life, awaken no suspicion as to its truth?
Upon the other hand, suppose that by some strange chance the
principles of Jesus should over night take possession of mankind. Even
as it is, when one starts his thought with the Stone Age, the progress
of mankind has obviously been immense. From universal cannibalism
after a battle, to massacre without cannibalism marked one great
advance; from massacre of all prisoners taken in war to enslavement of
them marked another; and when slavery ceased being a philanthropic
improvement, as it was at first, and became a sin and shame, humanity
took another long step forward. With all our present barbarity, a far
look backwards shows a clear ascent. As for the influence of Jesus,
Lecky, the historian, tells us that "The simple record of three short
years of Christ's active life has done more to regenerate and soften
mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the
exhortations of moralists." What if this process were brought to its
fulfilment between sunset and dawn, and the new day came with every
one sure of God's fatherhood and life eternal, of the law of love and
the supremacy of character and with everyone living as though these
were true? Whatever intellectual perplexities of belief a man may
have, he knows that such a world would be divinely great. No war, no
evil lust, no covetous selfishness, no drunkenness! Mankind, relieved
of ancient burdens which have ruined character and crushed endeavor,
confident of faiths that give life infinite horizons and deathless
hopes, in cooperative international fraternity would be making the
earth a decent home for God to rear his children in. One finds it hard
to believe that ideas which, incarnate in life, would so redeem the
world are false.
As to the effect of the Christian affirmations on individual
character, we do not need to picture an imagined future. A Character
has been here who has lived them out. A jury of philosophers might
analyze the wood-work and the metals of an organ, and guess from form
and material what it is, but we still should need for our assurance a
musician. When he sweeps the keys in harmony we _know_ that it is an
organ. So when the philosophers have debated the pros and cons of
argument concerning faith, Jesus _plays_ the Gospel. His life is the
Christian affirmations done into character. When religious faith, at
its best, is incarnate in a Man, this is the consequence. And
multitudes of folk, living out the implications of the faith, have
found the likeness of the Master growing in them. Weighty confirmation
of the Gospel's _truth_ arrives when its meaning is translated into
life; the world will not soon reject the New Testament in this
edition--bound in a Man.
To one in perplexity about belief, this proper question therefore
rises: What do we think about the Christlike character? Is it not life
at its sublimest elevation? But to acknowledge that and yet to deny
the central faiths by which such life is lived is to say that those
ideas which, incarnate, make living great are false, and those ideas
which leave life meager of motive and bereft of hope are true. No one
lives on such a basis in any other realm. We always mistrust the
validity of any idea which works poorly or not at all. And so far from
being a practical makeshift, this "negative pragmatism" is a true
principle of knowledge. Says Professor Hocking, of Harvard, "If a
theory has no consequences, or bad ones; if it makes no difference to
men, or else undesirable differences; if it lowers the capacity of men
to meet the stress of existence, or diminishes the worth to them of
what existence they have; such a theory is somehow false, and we have
no peace until it is remedied." The last word against irreligion is
that it makes life unlivable; the last word for faith is that it makes
life glorious.
VI
One who is facing intellectual difficulties in the way of faith may
well consider that the very Christian life for whose possession he is
seeking justification is itself an argument of the first importance.
This life grew up in the universe; it is one expression of the
universe; and it is hard to think that it does not reveal a nature
kindred to itself in the source from which it came.
Mankind has always experienced a relationship with the Unseen which
has seemed like communion of soul with Soul. When a psychologist like
Professor James, of Harvard, reduces to its most general terms this
religious Fact which has been practically universal in the race, he
puts it thus: "Man becomes conscious that this higher part (his
spiritual life) is coterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same
quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which
he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of
and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the
wreck." No experience of man is more common in occurrence, more
tremendous in result than this. From the mystics whose vivid sense of
God canceled their consciousness that anything else was real, to plain
folk who in the strength of the divine alliance have lived ordinary
lives with extraordinary spirit, mankind as a whole has known that the
best in man is in contact with a MORE.
One does not need to be of a mystical temperament, given to raptures,
to know what this means. Let him consider his own experience of love
and duty, how he is bound by them to his ideals and woven into a
community of personal life not only with his friends but with all
humanity, until this spiritual life of his becomes the most august and
commanding power he knows. When in our bodies we so discern a physical
nature, whose laws and necessities we did not create, and whose power
binds us into a community of need and labor with our fellows, our
conclusion is confident. This experience is the basis of our assurance
that a _physical universe is really here_. When, likewise in our
inner selves we find a spiritual life, which man did not create, in
obedience to which alone is safety, and peace, and power, what shall
we conclude? That there is a _spiritual universe_ as plainly
evidenced in man's soul as the physical universe is in the body! And
when we note the attributes of this Spiritual Order, how it demands
righteousness, rebukes sin, welcomes obedience and holds out ideals of
endless possibility, it is plain that we are talking about something
close of kin to God. As in summer we beat out through some familiar
bay, naming the headlands as we sail, until if we go far enough, we
cannot prevent our eyes from looking out across the unbounded sea, so
if a man moves out through his own familiar spiritual life far enough,
he comes to the Spiritual Order which is God. Man has not drifted into
his religion by accident or fallen on it merely as superstition; he
has moved out from his inner life to affirm a Spiritual Order as
inevitably as he has moved out from his bodily experiences to affirm a
physical universe.
When from this general experience we turn to the specific experiences
of religion, which prayer and worship represent, the testimony of the
race is confident. Men have not all these ages been lifting up their
souls to an unreality from which no response has come. The artesian
well of transforming influence in human souls has not flowed from
Nowhere. Some, indeed, hearing confidence in God founded on the
individual experiences of man, derisively cry "Nonsense!" But if one
were to prove that the Sistine Madonna is beautiful, he would have to
offer his experience in evidence. "I went to Dresden," he might say,
"up into the room where the Madonna hangs ... and it _is_ beautiful. I
saw it." Met with derision by a doubter, as though his experience were
no proof at all, how shall he proceed? "I am not the only one," he
might continue, "who has perceived its beauty. All these centuries the
folk best qualified to judge have gone up into that room and have come
down again, sure that Raphael's work is beautiful." Is anyone in a
position to deride that? So through all ages men and women, from
lowest savages to the race's spiritual kings and queens, have gone up
to the Divine, and, at their best, from experiences of prayer,
worship, forgiven sins, transfigured lives, have come down sure that
Reality is there. _One may not call nonsense the most universal and
influential experience of the human race!_
The force of this fact is more clearly seen when one considers that
man has grown up in this universe, gradually developing his powers and
functions as responses to his environment. If he has eyes, so the
biologists assure us, it is because the light waves played upon the
skin and eyes came out in answer; if he has ears it is because the air
waves were there first and ears came out to hear. Man never yet,
according to the evolutionist, has developed any power save as a
reality called it into being. There would be no fins if there were no
water, no wings if there were no air, no legs if there were no land.
Always the developing organism has been trying to "catch up with its
environment." Yet some would tell us that man's noblest power of all
has developed in a vacuum. They would say that his capacity to deal
with a Spiritual World, to believe in God, and in prayer to experience
fellowship with him, has all grown up with no Reality to call it into
being. If so, it stands alone in man's experience, the only function
of his life that grew without an originating Fact to call it forth. It
does not seem reasonable to think that. The evidence of man's
experience is overwhelmingly in favor of a Reality to which his spirit
has been trying to answer. Said Max Müller, "To the philosopher the
existence of God may seem to rest on a syllogism; in the eyes of the
historian it rests on the whole evolution of human thought."