Are any sorts of people shut off as if by inherent necessity from God?
This is, so to speak, one of the standing questions of theology; it
reappears with slight changes of form at every period of religious
interest, it is for example the chief issue between the Arminian and the
Calvinist. From its very opening proposition modern religion sweeps past
and far ahead of the old Arminian teachings of Wesleyans and Methodists,
in its insistence upon the entirely finite nature of God. Arminians seem
merely to have insisted that God has conditioned himself, and by his
own free act left men free to accept or reject salvation. To the realist
type of mind--here as always I use “realist” in its proper sense as
the opposite of nominalist--to the old-fashioned, over-exact and
over-accentuating type of mind, such ways of thinking seem vague
and unsatisfying. Just as it distresses the more downright kind of
intelligence with a feeling of disloyalty to admit that God is not
Almighty, so it troubles the same sort of intelligence to hear that
there is no clear line to be drawn between the saved and the lost.
Realists like an exclusive flavour in their faith. Moreover, it is a
natural weakness of humanity to be forced into extreme positions by
argument. It is probable, as I have already suggested, that the absolute
attributes of God were forced upon Christianity under the stresses
of propaganda, and it is probable that the theory of a super-human
obstinancy beyond salvation arose out of the irritations natural to
theological debate. It is but a step from the realisation that there are
people absolutely unable or absolutely unwilling to see God as we see
him, to the conviction that they are therefore shut off from God by an
invincible soul blindness.
It is very easy to believe that other people are essentially damned.
Beyond the little world of our sympathies and comprehension there are
those who seem inaccessible to God by any means within our experience.
They are people answering to the “hard-hearted,” to the “stiff-necked
generation” of the Hebrew prophets. They betray and even confess
to standards that seem hopelessly base to us. They show themselves
incapable of any disinterested enthusiasm for beauty or truth or
goodness. They are altogether remote from intelligent sacrifice. To
every test they betray vileness of texture; they are mean, cold, wicked.
There are people who seem to cheat with a private self-approval, who are
ever ready to do harsh and cruel things, whose use for social feeling
is the malignant boycott, and for prosperity, monopolisation and
humiliating display; who seize upon religion and turn it into
persecution, and upon beauty to torment it on the altars of some joyless
vice. We cannot do with such souls; we have no use for them, and it is
very easy indeed to step from that persuasion to the belief that God has
no use for them.
And besides these base people there are the stupid people and the people
with minds so poor in texture that they cannot even grasp the few broad
and simple ideas that seem necessary to the salvation we experience, who
lapse helplessly into fetishistic and fearful conceptions of God,
and are apparently quite incapable of distinguishing between what is
practically and what is spiritually good.
It is an easy thing to conclude that the only way to God is our way to
God, that he is the privilege of a finer and better sort to which we
of course belong; that he is no more the God of the card-sharper or the
pickpocket or the “smart” woman or the loan-monger or the village
oaf than he is of the swine in the sty. But are we justified in
thus limiting God to the measure of our moral and intellectual
understandings? Because some people seem to me steadfastly and
consistently base or hopelessly and incurably dull and confused, does
it follow that there are not phases, albeit I have never chanced to see
them, of exaltation in the one case and illumination in the other? And
may I not be a little restricting my perception of Good? While I have
been ready enough to pronounce this or that person as being, so far as
I was concerned, thoroughly damnable or utterly dull, I find a curious
reluctance to admit the general proposition which is necessary for
these instances. It is possible that the difference between Arminian and
Calvinist is a difference of essential intellectual temperament rather
than of theoretical conviction. I am temperamentally Arminian as I am
temperamentally Nominalist. I feel that it must be in the nature of God
to attempt all souls. There must be accessibilities I can only suspect,
and accessibilities of which I know nothing.
Yet here is a consideration pointing rather the other way. If you think,
as you must think, that you yourself can be lost to God and damned, then
I cannot see how you can avoid thinking that other people can be damned.
But that is not to believe that there are people damned at the outset by
their moral and intellectual insufficiency; that is not to make out that
there is a class of essential and incurable spiritual defectives. The
religious life preceded clear religious understanding and extends far
beyond its range.
In my own case I perceive that in spite of the value I attach to true
belief, the reality of religion is not an intellectual thing. The
essential religious fact is in another than the mental sphere. I am
passionately anxious to have the idea of God clear in my own mind, and
to make my beliefs plain and clear to other people, and particularly
to other people who may seem to be feeling with me; I do perceive that
error is evil if only because a faith based on confused conceptions
and partial understandings may suffer irreparable injury through the
collapse of its substratum of ideas. I doubt if faith can be complete
and enduring if it is not secured by the definite knowledge of the true
God. Yet I have also to admit that I find the form of my own religious
emotion paralleled by people with whom I have no intellectual sympathy
and no agreement in phrase or formula at all.
There is for example this practical identity of religious feeling and
this discrepancy of interpretation between such an inquirer as myself
and a convert of the Salvation Army. Here, clothing itself in phrases
and images of barbaric sacrifice, of slaughtered lambs and fountains of
precious blood, a most repulsive and incomprehensible idiom to me, and
expressing itself by shouts, clangour, trumpeting, gesticulations, and
rhythmic pacings that stun and dismay my nerves, I find, the same object
sought, release from self, and the same end, the end of identification
with the immortal, successfully if perhaps rather insecurely achieved.
I see God indubitably present in these excitements, and I see
personalities I could easily have misjudged as too base or too dense for
spiritual understandings, lit by the manifest reflection of divinity.
One may be led into the absurdest underestimates of religious
possibilities if one estimates people only coldly and in the light of
everyday life. There is a sub-intellectual religious life which, very
conceivably, when its utmost range can be examined, excludes nothing
human from religious cooperation, which will use any words to its tune,
which takes its phrasing ready-made from the world about it, as it takes
the street for its temple, and yet which may be at its inner point in
the directest contact with God. Religion may suffer from aphasia and
still be religion; it may utter misleading or nonsensical words and yet
intend and convey the truth. The methods of the Salvation Army are older
than doctrinal Christianity, and may long survive it. Men and women may
still chant of Beulah Land and cry out in the ecstasy of salvation; the
tambourine, that modern revival of the thrilling Alexandrine sistrum,
may still stir dull nerves to a first apprehension of powers and a call
beyond the immediate material compulsion of life, when the creeds of
Christianity are as dead as the lore of the Druids.
The emancipation of mankind from obsolete theories and formularies may
be accompanied by great tides of moral and emotional release among types
and strata that by the standards of a trained and explicit intellectual,
may seem spiritually hopeless. It is not necessary to imagine the whole
world critical and lucid in order to imagine the whole world unified in
religious sentiment, comprehending the same phrases and coming together
regardless of class and race and quality, in the worship and service
of the true God. The coming kingship of God if it is to be more than
hieratic tyranny must have this universality of appeal. As the head
grows clear the body will turn in the right direction. To the mass of
men modern religion says, “This is the God it has always been in your
nature to apprehend.”