Modern religion bases its knowledge of God and its account of God
entirely upon experience. It has encountered God. It does not argue
about God; it relates. It relates without any of those wrappings of awe
and reverence that fold so necessarily about imposture, it relates as
one tells of a friend and his assistance, of a happy adventure, of a
beautiful thing found and picked up by the wayside.
So far as its psychological phases go the new account of personal
salvation tallies very closely with the account of “conversion” as it
is given by other religions. It has little to tell that is not already
familiar to the reader of William James’s “Varieties of Religious
Experience.” It describes an initial state of distress with the
aimlessness and cruelties of life, and particularly with the futility of
the individual life, a state of helpless self-disgust, of inability to
form any satisfactory plan of living. This is the common prelude known
to many sorts of Christian as “conviction of sin”; it is, at any rate, a
conviction of hopeless confusion. . . . Then in some way the idea of
God comes into the distressed mind, at first simply as an idea, without
substance or belief. It is read about or it is remembered; it is
expounded by some teacher or some happy convert. In the case of all
those of the new faith with whose personal experience I have any
intimacy, the idea of God has remained for some time simply as an idea
floating about in a mind still dissatisfied. God is not believed in,
but it is realised that if there were such a being he would supply the
needed consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would knit
together the scattered effort of life, his immortality would take
the sting from death. Under this realisation the idea is pursued and
elaborated. For a time there is a curious resistance to the suggestion
that God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably by such phrases
as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness, as the Collective
Mind.
I believe that this resistance in so many contemporary minds to the idea
of God as a person is due very largely to the enormous prejudice against
divine personality created by the absurdities of the Christian teaching
and the habitual monopoly of the Christian idea. The picture of Christ
as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself before minds unaccustomed to the
idea that they are lambs. The cross in the twilight bars the way. It is
a novelty and an enormous relief to such people to realise that one may
think of God without being committed to think of either the Father, the
Son, or the Holy Ghost, or of all of them at once. That freedom had not
seemed possible to them. They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the
idea that the Christian God is the only thinkable God. They had heard so
much about that God and so little of any other. With that release their
minds become, as it were, nascent and ready for the coming of God.
Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God comes. This
cardinal experience is an undoubting, immediate sense of God. It is the
attainment of an absolute certainty that one is not alone in oneself.
It is as if one was touched at every point by a being akin to oneself,
sympathetic, beyond measure wiser, steadfast and pure in aim. It is
completer and more intimate, but it is like standing side by side with
and touching someone that we love very dearly and trust completely. It
is as if this being bridged a thousand misunderstandings and brought us
into fellowship with a great multitude of other people. . . .
“Closer he is than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”
The moment may come while we are alone in the darkness, under the stars,
or while we walk by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit and muse.
It may come upon the sinking ship or in the tumult of the battle. There
is no saying when it may not come to us. . . . But after it has come
our lives are changed, God is with us and there is no more doubt of
God. Thereafter one goes about the world like one who was lonely and has
found a lover, like one who was perplexed and has found a solution.
One is assured that there is a Power that fights with us against the
confusion and evil within us and without. There comes into the heart an
essential and enduring happiness and courage.
There is but one God, there is but one true religious experience, but
under a multitude of names, under veils and darknesses, God has in this
manner come into countless lives. There is scarcely a faith, however
mean and preposterous, that has not been a way to holiness. God who is
himself finite, who himself struggles in his great effort from strength
to strength, has no spite against error. Far beyond halfway he hastens
to meet the purblind. But God is against the darkness in their eyes. The
faith which is returning to men girds at veils and shadows, and would
see God plainly. It has little respect for mysteries. It rends the veil
of the temple in rags and tatters. It has no superstitious fear of
this huge friendliness, of this great brother and leader of our little
beings. To find God is but the beginning of wisdom, because then for all
our days we have to learn his purpose with us and to live our lives with
him.