And first let me speak of its membership. We have now repeatedly
defined the test of such membership. The invisible church is the
spiritual brotherhood of the loyal. Only a searcher of hearts can
quite certainly know who are the really loyal. We can be sure
regarding the nature of loyalty. That loyalty itself should come to
men's consciousness in the most various forms and degrees, and clouded
by the most tragic misunderstandings, the narrow form of human
consciousness, and the blindness and variety of human passion, make
necessary.
If one is loyal to a narrow and evil cause, as the robber or the
pirate may be loyal to his band or to his ship, a conscious effort to
serve the unity of the whole spiritual world may seem at first sight
to be excluded by the nature of the loyalty in question. But what
makes a cause evil, and unworthy of loyal {283} service, is the fact
that its service is destructive of the causes of other men, so that
the evil cause preys upon the loyalty of the spiritual brethren of
those who serve it, and so that thereby the servants of this cause do
actual wrong to mankind. But this very fact may not be understood by
the individual robber or pirate. He may be devoted with all his heart
and soul and mind and strength to the best cause that he knows. He may
therefore sincerely conceive that the master of life authorises his
cause. In that case, and so far as this belief is sincere, the robber
or pirate may be a genuinely religious man.
Does this statement seem to you an absurd quibble? Then look over the
past history of mankind. Some at least of the Crusaders were genuinely
religious. That we all readily admit. But they were obviously, for the
most part, robbers and murderers, and sometimes pirates, of what we
should now think the least religious type if they were to-day sailing
the Mediterranean or devastating the lands. Read in "Hakluyt's
Voyages" the accounts of the spirit in which the English explorers and
warriors of the Elizabethan age accomplished their great work. In
these accounts a genuinely religious type of patriotism and of
Christianity often expresses itself side by side with a reckless
hatred of the Spaniard and a ferocity which tolerates the most obvious
expressions of mere natural greed. These heroes of the beginnings of
the British Empire often hardly knew whether they were rather the
adventurous {284} merchants, or the loyal warriors for England, or the
defenders of the Christian faith, or simply pirates. In fact they were
all these things at once. Consider the Scottish clans as they were up
to the eighteenth century. The spirit that they fostered has since
found magnificent expression in the loyalty of the Scottish people and
in its later and far-reaching service of some of the noblest causes
that men know. Yet these clans loved cattle-thieving and tortured
their enemies. When did they begin to be really patriots and servants
of mankind? When did they begin to be truly and heartily religious?
Who of us can tell?
Greed and blindness are natural to man. His form of consciousness
renders him unable, in many cases, to realise their unreasonableness,
even when he has already come into sincerely spiritual relations with
the cause of all the loyal. What we _can_ know is that greed and
blindness are never of themselves religious, and that the way of
salvation is the way of loyalty. But I know not what degrees of greedy
blindness are consistent with an actual membership in the invisible
church, as I have just defined its membership. When I meet, however,
with the manifestations of the spirit of universal loyalty, whether in
clansman, or in crusader, or in Elizabethan and piratical English
defender of his country's faith, or in the Spaniard whom he hated, I
hope that I may be able to use, not the greed or the passions of these
people, but their {285} religious prowess, their free surrender of
themselves to their cause, as a source of insight.
Membership in the invisible church is therefore not to be determined
by mere conventions, but by the inward spirit of the faithful, as
expressed in their loyal life according to their lights. Yet of those
who seem to us most clearly to belong to the service of the spirit, it
is easy to enumerate certain very potent groups, to whose devotion we
all owe an unspeakably great debt. The sages, the poets, the prophets,
whose insight we consulted in our opening lecture, and have used
throughout these discourses, form such groups. It is indifferent to us
to what clime or land or tongue or visible religious body they
belonged or to-day belong. They have sincerely served the cause of the
spirit. They are to us constant sources of religious insight. Even the
cynics and the rebels, whom we cited in our opening lecture, have
been, in many individual cases, devoutly religious souls who simply
could not see the light as they consciously needed to see it, and who
loyally refused to lie for convention's sake. Such have often served
the cause of the spirit with a fervour that you ill understand so long
as their words merely shock you. They often seem as if they were
hostile to the unity of the spirit. But, in many cases, it is the
narrowness of our nature, the chaos of our unspiritual passions, the
barren formalism of our conventions that they assail. And such
assaults turn our eyes upward to the unity of {286} the spirit from
whence alone consolation and escape may come. Indirectly, therefore,
such souls are often the misunderstood prophets of new ways of
salvation for men. When they are loyal, when their very hardness is
due to their resolute truthfulness, they are often amongst the most
effective friends of a deeper religious life.
A notable criterion whereby, quite apart from mere conventions, you
may try the spirits that pretend or appear to be religious, and may
discern the members of the invisible church from those who are not
members, is the criterion of the prophet Amos: "Woe unto them that are
at ease in Zion." This, as I said earlier, is one of the favourite
tests applied by moralists for distinguishing those who serve from
those who merely enjoy. That it is also a religious test, and _why_ it
is a religious test, our acquaintance with the spirit of loyalty has
shown us. Religion, when triumphant, includes, indeed, the experience
of inward peace; but the peace which is not won through strenuous
loyal service is deceitful and corrupting. It is the conquest over and
through tribulation which saves. Whoever conceives religion merely as
a comfortable release from sorrows, as an agreeable banishment of
cares, as a simple escape from pain, knows not what evil is, or what
our human nature is, or what our need of salvation means, or what the
will of the master of life demands. Therefore, a visible church that
appears simply in the form of a cure for worry, or a {287} preventive
of trouble, seems to me to be lacking in a full sense of what loyalty
is. Worry is indeed, in itself, not a religious exercise. But it is
often an effective preliminary, and is sometimes, according to the
vicissitudes of natural temper, a relatively harmless accompaniment,
to a deeply religious life. Certainly the mere absence of worry, the
mere attainment of a sensuous tranquillity, is no criterion of
membership in the invisible church. Better a cynic or a rebel against
conventional religious forms, or a pessimist, or a worrying soul, if
only such a being is strenuously loyal according to his lights, than
one to whom religion means simply a tranquil adoration without
loyalty. But, of course, many of the tranquil are also loyal. When
this is true we can only rejoice in their attainments.
If we look for other examples still of types of spirituality which
seem to imply membership in the invisible church, I myself know of few
better instances of the genuinely religious spirit than those which
are presented to us, in recent times, by the more devoted servants of
the cause of any one of the advancing natural sciences. And such
instances are peculiarly instructive, because many great men of
science, as a result of their personal temperament and training, are
little interested in the forms of the visible church, and very
frequently are loath to admit that their calling has religious
bearings. But when the matter is rightly viewed, one sees that the
great scientific investigator is not only profoundly {288} loyal, but
serves a cause which, at the present time, probably does more to unify
every sort of wholesome human activity, to bind in one all the higher
interests of humanity, to bring men of various lands and races close
together in spirit than does any other one special cause that modern
men serve. The cause of any serious scientific investigator is, from
my point of view, a superhuman cause, for precisely the reasons which
I have already explained to you.
The individual scientific worker, uninterested as he usually is in
metaphysics, and unconcerned as he often is about the relation of his
task to the interests of the visible church, knows indeed that with
all his heart, and soul, and mind, and strength he serves a cause that
he conceives to be worthy. He knows, also, that this cause is
beneficent, and that it plays a great part in the directing of human
activities, whether because his science already has practical
applications, or because the knowledge of nature is in itself an
elevating and enlarging influence for mankind. The scientific
investigator knows also that, while his individual experience is the
source to which he personally looks for new observations of facts, his
private observations contribute to science only in so far as other
investigators can verify his results. Hence his whole scientific life
consists in submitting all his most prized discoveries to the rigid
test of an estimate that belongs to no individual human experience,
but that is, or that through loyal efforts tends to become, the common
possession {289} of the organised experience of all the workers in his
field. So far the devoted investigator goes in his own consciousness
as to his work.
Beyond this point, in estimating his ideals and his value, he
sometimes seems not to wish to go, either because he is unreflective
or because he is modest. But when we remember that the unity of human
experience, in the light of which scientific results are tested, and
to whose growth and enrichment the scientific worker is devoted, is
indeed a superhuman reality of the type that we have now discussed;
when we also recall the profound values which the scientific ideal has
for all departments of human life in our day; when, further, we see
how resolutely the true investigator gives his all to contribute to
what is really the unity of the spirit, we may well wonder who is in
essence more heartily religious than the completely devoted scientific
investigator--such a man, for instance, as was Faraday.
When I have the fortune to hear of really great scientific workers who
are as ready to die for their science (if an experiment or an
observation requires risk) as to live for it through years of worldly
privation and of rigid surrender of private interests to truth, and
when I then by chance also hear that some of them were called, or
perhaps even called themselves, irreligious men, I confess that I
think of the little girl who walked by Wordsworth's side on the beach
at Calais. The poet estimated her {290} variety of religious
experience in words that I feel moved to apply to the ardently loyal
hero of science:
"Thou dwellest in Abraham's bosom all the year,
And worship'st at the temple's inmost shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not."
There also exists a somewhat threadbare verse of the poet Young which
tells us how "the undevout astronomer is mad." I should prefer to say
that the really loyal scientific man who imagines himself undevout is
not indeed mad at all, but, like Wordsworth's young companion at
Calais, unobservant of himself and of the wondrous and beautiful love
that inspires him. For he is, indeed, inspired by a love for something
much more divine than is that august assemblage of mechanical and
physical phenomena called the starry heavens. The soul of his work is
the service of the unity of the spirit in one of its most exalted
forms.
That all who, belonging to any body of the visible church, are
seriously loyal to the divine according to their lights, are members
also of the invisible church, needs, after what I have said, no
further explanation.
But if, surveying this multitude that no man can number from every
kindred, and tribe, and nation, and tongue, you say that entrance to
the invisible church is guarded by barriers that seem to you not high
enough or strong enough, I reply that this membership is indeed tested
by the severest of rules. {291} Do you serve with all your heart, and
soul, and mind, and strength a cause that is superhuman and that is
indeed divine? This is the question which all have to answer who are
to enter this the most spiritual of all human brotherhoods.