VI

The answer to this question involves, I think, two considerations,

both of them exemplified by the various views here in question, both

of them familiar, both of them easily misinterpreted. The first is the

very consideration upon which our popular teachers of salvation

through love most insist. We ourselves came upon that consideration at

the close of our first lecture. Man is, indeed, a being who cannot be

saved alone, however much solitude may help him, at times, toward

insight. For he is bound to his brethren by spiritual links that

cannot be broken. The second consideration is this: So long as man

views his fellow-man _merely_ as fellow-man, he only complicates his

problem, for both he and his fellow equally need salvation. Their

plight is common; their very need of salvation chains them together in

the prison of human sorrow. If, to adapt the symbolism of ancient

stories to our case, the angel of love is to appear in their prison,

is to loosen their chains, is to open the doors, it must be, in some

wise, as an angel, not as a merely human presence, that love must

appear.

Perhaps the best way to indicate wherein lies the {66} strength and

the weakness, the irresistible authority and the pathetic limitation

of our social experience as a religious guide, and the best way also

to indicate its true relations to the religious experience of the

human individual, is to remind ourselves of a very few familiar cases

in which an individual finds that his own way toward salvation, if any

such way is to exist for him at all, lies through his social world, so

that he cannot be saved without the help of his fellows.

Our first instance shall be an extreme one, in which the sense of need

is intense and the longing for salvation acute, but where there is

little or no hope of finding the way, although one knows that if the

way could be found it would bring one into touch with a new type of

human companionship. We all know how the sense of guilt may take the

form of a feeling of overwhelming loneliness. Now the sense of guilt,

if deep and pervasive and passionate, involves at least a dim

recognition that there is some central aim of life and that one has

come hopelessly short of that aim. I may regret a blunder, and yet

have no hint that there is any unified and supreme ideal of life. For

a blunder is a special affair involving the missing of some particular

aim. I may even bitterly repent a fault, and still think of that fault

as a refusal to pursue some one separate moral purpose--a violation of

this or of that maxim of conduct. But the true sense of guilt in its

greater manifestation involves a confession that the {67} whole self

is somehow tainted, the whole life, for the time being, wrecked. But

the bankruptcy of the self implies that there is one highest purpose

which gives the self its value; the sense of total failure is itself a

revelation of the value of what was lost. Hence the highly idealising

tendency of the great experiences of moral suffering. They lead us to

think not of this or of that special good, but of salvation and

perdition in their general bearing upon life. The depth of the despair

shows the grandeur of what has been missed; and it is therefore not

surprising that experiences of this sort have been, for so many, the

beginnings of religious insight. To believe that one is cut off from

salvation may be the very crisis that in the end saves.

Now some of those who feel this overmastering might of their guilt lay

most stress upon their assurance that God has condemned them. And

religious tradition has of course emphasised this way of stating the

case. But it is perfectly natural, and is surely a humane experience,

to feel the sense of guilt primarily in the form of a belief that one

is an outcast from human sympathy and is hopelessly alone. The more

abnormal types of the sense of guilt, in nervous patients, frequently

exemplify this terror of the lonely soul, this inner grief over the

homelessness of the remorseful outcast. But actual guilt may be

present with or without the more abnormal nervous conditions just

mentioned, and, when present, may bring home to the rueful mind {68}

the despair of the awakened but forsaken sinner, and may bring it in

the form of the feeling of guilty solitude.

A well-known expression of such a mood you find in Kipling's lyric of

the "Poor little sheep that have gone astray." In these verses the

outcast sons of good families, the "gentlemen-rankers," dwell together

in an agonised companionship of common loneliness. Their guilt and

their lost homes are for them inseparably associated.

Or again: Beneath all the fantastic imagery of Coleridge's "Ancient

Mariner," the poet uses a perfectly recognisable type of the sense of

guilt as the means to make his tale of wonders seem, despite all its

impossibilities, human and even plausible. The incidents are the

miracles of a magic dream; but the human nature depicted is as real as

is the torment of any guilty conscience. Somehow--no matter how, or

under how arbitrary conditions--the hero has committed a crime

without precisely intending it to be a crime. His tale is one of a

young man's adventurous insolence. His deed has all the too familiar

characters of the typical sins of wayward youth. And that is why the

gay young wedding guest must hear his tale. He--the mariner--in his

own youth, had consciously meant to be only a little wanton and cruel.

He awakened, as many a light-minded youth later awakes, to find that,

as a fact, he had somehow struck at the very centre of life, at the

heart of love, at the laws that bind the {69} world together, at the

spirit of the universe. When one thus awakes, he sees that nature and

God are against him. But, worst of all, he has become a curse to his

fellows; and in turn they curse him; and then they leave him alone

with the nightmare life in death of utter solitude. To his mind there

are no living men. He sees about him only "the curse in a dead man's

eye." What life he can still see is no longer, to his morbid eyes,

really human:

"The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie;

And a thousand, thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I."

The Ancient Mariner's escape from the horrors of this despair, the

beginnings of his salvation, date from the first movings of love in

his heart toward all living beings. His salvation is won when, at the

end, he finds God along with the goodly company at the kirk. In brief,

the curse of his guilt is to be "alone on a wide, wide sea." His

salvation comes in preaching love and companionship, and in uniting

himself hereby to the God who loves all things both great and small.

Now one does not often think of the "Ancient Mariner" as a poem of

religious experience; but apart from its brilliant play with natural

magic, its human charm actually depends upon this well-founded

picture of the loneliness of guilt and of the escape through loving

union with one's kind. And {70} the poet deliberately gives to this

picture the form and the sense of a religious process of salvation.

If you turn from the dreamy product of Coleridge's youthful fancy to

the opposite pole of modern literature, you find an instance of almost

the same motives at the basis of that most impressive romance of the

Russian Dostoieffsky: "Crime and Punishment." Dostoieffsky had himself

lived long in what he called "The House of the Dead," in Siberia,

before he learned how to write this masterpiece. He had been forced to

sojourn amongst the guilty of the most various grades. He had come to

universalise their experiences and to struggle himself with one form

of the problem of salvation. Those who, like Dante, have looked upon

hell, sometimes have, indeed, wonders to tell us. Dostoieffsky

condenses the whole problem of salvation from guilt in this picture of

an individual. Raskolnikow, the hero, after his thoughtfully conceived

crime, and after his laborious effort at self-justification, finds

himself the prey of a simply overwhelming sense that he walks alone

amongst men, and that, in the crowded streets of the city, he is as

one dead amongst spectres. There is nowhere, I think, a more

persuasive picture of the loneliness of great guilt. Raskolnikow could

not be more the victim of supernatural forces if he were Coleridge's

Ancient Mariner. Like the Ancient Mariner, Raskolnikow in the end

finds the way to salvation through love--the love which the martyred

Sonia teaches him--herself, {71} as our Russian most persuasively

pictures her, at once outcast and saint. The author uses religious

conceptions which are both ancient and, in his use of them,

unconventional. But the central one of these is the familiar

conception that salvation involves a reconciliation both with the

social and with the divine order, a reconciliation through love and

suffering--an escape from the wilderness of lonely guilt to the realm

where men can understand one another.

In such elemental ways the process of salvation can be made to appear

as essentially a social process, just because its opposite, perdition,

seems to mean banishment from amongst men.

Another group of cases presents to us the same need for human

companionship as a means to salvation, but presents it in the winning

guise of salvation beginning through love, without the main stress

being laid upon the previous despair. In such cases the despair may be

mentioned but at once relieved. The religion of friendship and of love

is a familiar human experience. James, in his fear of debasing

religion by romantic or by grosser associations, unjustly neglects it

in his study of "varieties." In fact, to seem to find the divine in

the person of your idealised friend or beloved is a perfectly normal

way of beginning your acquaintance with the means of grace. You meet,

you love, and--you seem to be finding God. Or, to use our present

interpretation of what reveals the {72} divine, love seems to furnish

you with a vision of a perfect life, to give you a total survey of the

sense of your own life, and to begin to show you how to triumph. If

there be any divine life, you say, this is my vision of its beauty and

its harmony. So the divine appears in one of Browning's later lyrics:

"Such a starved bank of moss.

Till, that May morn.

Blue ran the flash across;

Violets were born!

"Sky--what a scowl of cloud

Till, near and far,

Ray on ray split the shroud

Splendid! a star!

"World--how it walled about

Life with disgrace,

Till God's own smile came out;

That was thy face!"

In the sonnets of Shakespeare this religion of friendship has found

some of its most perfect expressions.

"Haply I think of thee, and then my state.

Like to the lark's, at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate."

And again, in Mrs. Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese," the

religion of love not only uses speech intensely personal, fond,

intimate, but also, {73} and deliberately, accompanies all this with

words derived from reflective metaphysics, or from theology, and

intended to express the miracle that the nearest movings of affection

are also a revelation of the highest powers of the spiritual world.

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being, and Ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath.

Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death."

Surely one could not better express, than this sonnet does, the

naturalness of the religious motive--the mystery of the religious

object.

And finally, turning from these cases to those which are social in the

larger sense, every patriotic song which deifies one's country, every

other form of the religion of patriotism, exemplifies the experience

of the devoted lover of his country by teaching that it is "man's

perdition to be safe" in case his social world calls for the sacrifice

of his life, and that salvation comes through service.

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James is indeed wrong then to neglect the social roads that lead

toward the experience of what one takes to be divine. There is no love

so simple-minded that, if it be true love, the way of salvation may

not seem to be opened through it to the lover.

But observe that, as we review these instances, they show us how the

social world wherein they bid us seek our salvation is a world whose

very essence is transformed by love and by its vision into something

that seems to the lover mystical, superhuman, and more than our

literal and commonplace social life directly exemplifies. Those who

have failed to find in their actual social life such inspirations may,

indeed, have to look, as the typical mystics have generally done,

elsewhere, for their vision of the divine, than in so much of the

social world as they know. And such will, indeed, seek their vision of

salvation in solitude. When they tell us of their experience, they may

well remind the social enthusiast, as well as the lover, that the

religion of love is no religion at all, unless it conceives its human

object not only as this creature, or as this collection of needy men

and women, but as a hint, or revelation, or incarnation of a divine

process--of a process which is not only human but superhuman, and

which can never be comprehended in the "mart and the crowded street"

unless by the soul that is either mystical enough to meet God also "in

the bush," or rationally enlightened enough to know that human {75}

life is indeed a revelation of something that is also superhuman.

I conclude, then, for the moment, thus: Social experience seems to lie

on the way to salvation. Normally the way to salvation, if there be

any such way, must lead through social experience. But when our social

experience shows us any such way upward it does so, if it truly does

so, because human social life is the hint, the likeness, or the

incarnation of a life that lies beyond and above our present human

existence. For human society as it now is, in this world of care, is a

chaos of needs; and the whole social order groans and travails

together in pain until now, longing for salvation. It can be saved, as

the individual can be saved, only in case there is some way that leads

upward, through all our turmoil and our social bickerings, to a realm

where that vision of unity and self-possession which our clearest

moments bring to us becomes not merely vision, but fulfilment, where

love finds its own, and where the power of the spirit triumphs. Of

such a realm the lovers dream and the religions tell. Let us appeal to

a further source of insight. Concerning the realities that we need,

let us next consult our Reason.

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