DISORGANIZATION: THE CHURCH
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW OF RELIGION—THE NEED OF SOCIAL
STRUCTURE—CREEDS—WHY SYMBOLS TEND TO BECOME FORMAL—TRAITS OF A GOOD
SYSTEM OF SYMBOLS—CONTEMPORARY NEED OF RELIGION—NEWER TENDENCIES IN
THE CHURCH.
In religion, too, our day is one of confusion in institutions and
falling back upon human nature. The most notable books of the day
in this field are, first of all, studies in religious psychology.
Perceiving that the question has come to be one of the very being
and function of religion, they ignore the discussion of particular
doctrines, polities or sacraments, and seek a foundation in the nature
of the human mind.
I do not wish to follow these researches in detail: their general
outcome is reassuring. They seem to show that religion is a need
of human nature, centring, perhaps, in the craving to make life
seem rational and good. As thought it is belief regarding the power
underlying life and our relation to it; our conceptions of God and of
other divine agents serving as symbols—changing like other symbols with
the general state of thought—of this hidden reality. As feeling it is a
various body of passion and sentiment associated with this belief; such
as the sense of sin and of reconciliation; dread, awe, reverence, love
and faith. And religious action is such as expresses, in one way or
another, this sort of thought and feeling.
Like all our higher life, religion lives only by communication and
influence. Its sentiments are planted in instinct, but the soil in
which they grow is some sort of fostering community life. Higher
thought—call it intellectual, spiritual, or what you will—does not
come to us by any short and easy road, its nature being to require
preparation and outlay, to be the difficult and culminating product of
human growth. And this is quite as much a growth of the social order
as of individuals, for the individual cut off from that scaffolding of
suggestion that the aspiration of the race has gradually prepared for
him is sure to be lawless and sensual: his spiritual impulse can hardly
be more than a futile unrest, just as the untaught impulse of speech in
a deaf person produces only inarticulate cries. Much has been said of
natural religion; but if this means a religion achieved _de novo_ by
the individual mind, there is no such thing, all religion and religious
sentiment being more or less distinctly traditional.
We find, then, that the religious life always rests upon a somewhat
elaborate social structure—not necessarily a church, but something
which does in fact what the church aims to do. The higher sentiments
now possible to us are subtly evoked and nourished by language,
music, ritual and other time-wrought symbols. And even more obviously
are ideas—of God and of the larger being, of religious observance,
government and duty—matters of communal and secular growth.
The root problem of the church—as, in a sense, of all organization—is
to get the use of the symbol without the abuse. We cannot hold
our minds to the higher life without a form of thought; and forms
of thought come by traditions and usages which are apt to enchain
the spirit. “Woe unto thee thou stream of human custom”; cries St.
Augustine, “Who shall stay thy course? How long shall it be before thou
art dried up? How long wilt thou carry down the sons of Eve into that
huge and formidable ocean, which even those who are embarked on the
Tree can scarce pass over?”[162]
The iconoclastic fervor against formalism that usefully breaks out from
time to time should not make us imagine that religion can dispense with
institutions. There is in religious thought at present much of a kind
of anarchism which, in the justifiable revolt against the pretensions
of authority, is inclined to overlook the importance of tradition and
structure. Perhaps we may cite Emerson as an anarchist of this sort; he
saw the necessity of institutions, but was inclined by temperament and
experience to distrust them, and to dwell almost wholly upon freedom.
Is it not the fact, however, that the progress of religion has been
less in the perception of new truth than in bringing it home to the
many by organization? There is perhaps little in religious thought that
was not adequately expressed by occasional thinkers millenniums ago;
the gain has been in working this thought into the corporate life. The
great religions—Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism—are
nothing if not systems; that is to say, although based on primary needs
of human nature, their very being as widespread religions consists in
a social structure, adapted to the changing state of society, through
which these needs are met and fostered. Thus the appeal of Christianity
to the human mind may be said to have rested, in all periods, partly
on the symbolic power of a personality—so idealized and interpreted
as to be in effect a system as well as a man—and partly on a changing
but always elaborate structure of doctrines, ritual, polity, preaching
and the like. Take away these symbols and there is nothing distinctive
left. And if the whole is to go on, the system of symbols, again
renewed, must go on, too. No more in religion than in any other phase
of life can we have an inside without an outside, essence without form.
The existing creeds, formulated in a previous state of thought,
have lost that relative truth they once had and are now, for most
of us, not creeds at all, since they are incredible; but creeds
of some sort we must have. A creed may, perhaps, be defined as a
settled way of thinking about matters which are beyond the reach of
positive knowledge, but which the mind must and will think of in some
way—notably, of course, about the larger life and our relation to it.
For the majority, who are not metaphysicians, it is mere waste and
distraction to struggle unaided with these problems; we need a chart
in this sea, a practicable form of thought to live by. That competent
men should devise such forms of thought, consistent with the state of
knowledge, and that other symbols should grow up about them, is as
natural and useful as any other kind of invention. We need to believe,
and we shall believe what we can. John Addington Symonds declared
that “health of soul results from possessing a creed,” and his own
sufferings in trying to make one out of the scattered materials of his
time are typical of those of a great number of sensitive minds, many of
whom have been harassed into despair and degradation.[163] Without some
regular and common service of the ideal, something in the way of prayer
and worship, pessimism and selfishness are almost sure to encroach upon
us.
Those who teach truth in its mere abstractness can never take much
hold of the general mind, and success awaits a teaching which is
intellectually sound (that is, consistent with the clearer thought of
the day), and at the same time able, by a wealth of fit symbols, to
make itself at home in all sorts of plain minds. And it is just this
that is apt to be destructively wanting in a time of intellectual and
social change.
Why is it that the symbol encroaches and persists beyond its function?
Evidently just because it is external, capable of imitation and
repetition without fresh thought and life, so that all that is inert
and mechanical clings to it. All dull and sensual persons, all dull
and sensual moods in any person, see the form and not the substance.
The spirit, the idea, the sentiment, is plainly enough the reality
_when one is awake to see it_, but how easily we lose our hold upon
it and come to think that the real is the tangible. The symbol is
always at command: we can always attend church, go to mass, recite
prayers, contribute money, and the like; but kindness, hope, reverence,
humility, courage, have no string attached to them; they come and go
as the spirit moves; there is no insurance on them. Just as in the
schools we teach facts and formulas rather than meanings, because the
former can be received by all and readily tested, so religion becomes
external in seeking to become universal.
It is perhaps hardly necessary to recall the application of this to
Christianity. Jesus himself had no system: he felt and taught the
human sentiments that underly religion and the conduct that expresses
them. The Sermon on the Mount appears paradoxical only to sluggish,
sensual, formal states of mind and the institutions that embody them.
In our times of clearer insight it is good sense and good psychology,
expressing that enlargement of the individual to embrace the life of
others which takes place at such times. This natural Christianity,
however, is insecure in the best people, and most of us have only a
fleeting experience of it; so the teachers who wished to make a popular
system, valid for all sorts of persons and moods, were led to vulgarize
it by grounding it on miracles and mystic authority and enforcing it by
sensual rewards and punishments.
The perennial truth of what Christ taught comes precisely from the fact
that it was not a system, but an intuition and expression of higher
sentiments the need of which is a central and enduring element in our
best experience. It is this that has made it possible, in every age, to
go back to his life and words and find them still alive and potent, fit
to vitalize renewed systems. The system makers did well, too, but their
work was transient.
A good system of symbols is one which, on the whole, stands to the
group or to the individual for a higher life: merit in this matter
being relative to the particular state of mind that the symbol is to
serve. It is quite true that—
“Each age must worship its own thought of God,
More or less earthy, clarifying still
With subsidence continuous of the dregs.”[164]
Crude men must have crude symbols—even “rod or candy for child-minded
men”[165]—but these should be educational, leading up from lower forms
of thought to higher. A system that keeps men in sensualism when they
are capable of rising above it, or in dogmatism when they are ready to
think, is as bad as one that does not reach their minds at all.
At the present time all finality in religious formulas is discredited
philosophically by the idea of evolution and of the consequent
relativity of all higher truth, while, practically, free discussion
has so accustomed people to conflicting views that the exclusive and
intolerant advocacy of dogma is scarcely possible to the intelligent.
It is true, of course, that philosophical breadth and free discussion
have flourished before, only to be swept under by the forces making
for authority; but they were never so rooted in general conditions—of
communication and personal freedom—as they are now. It seems fairly
certain that the formulas of religion will henceforward be held with at
least a subconsciousness of their provisional character.
The creeds of the future are likely, also, to be simple. In all
institutions there is nowadays a tendency to exchange formulas for
principles, as being more flexible and so more enduring. The nearer
you can get to universal human nature without abandoning concreteness
the better. There is coming to be a clearer distinction of functions
between metaphysics and worship, which may enable each to be enjoyed to
the utmost without being unnecessarily mixed with the other.
The less intellectual a religious symbol is the better, because it
less confines the mind. Personality is the best symbol of all; and
after that music, art, poetry, festivity and ceremony are more enduring
and less perilous symbols than formulas of belief. Sentiments change
like ideas, but not so much and not so evidently; and the essential
exercises of religion for the mass of men are those which awaken higher
sentiment, especially those good works, in which, chiefly, the founder
of Christianity and his real followers have expressed their religious
impulse. These also are symbols, and the most potent and least illusive
of all.
It is indeed a general truth that sentiment is nearer to the core of
life than definable thought. As the rim of a wheel whirls about its
centre, so ideas and institutions whirl about the pivotal sentiments
of human nature. To define a thing is to institutionize it, to draw
it forth from the pregnant obscurity of the soul and show just how
it appears in the transient color of our particular way of thinking.
Definitions are, in their nature, short-lived.
We need religion, probably, as much as any age can have needed it. The
prevalent confusion, “the tumult of the time disconsolate,” is felt
in every mind not wholly inert as a greater or less distraction of
thought, feeling and will; and we need to be taught how to live with
joy and calm in the presence of inevitable perplexities. A certain
natural phlegm is a great advantage in these days, and better still, if
we could get it, would be religious assurance. Never was it more urgent
or more difficult to justify the ways of God to men. Our material
betterment is a great thing, and our comparative freedom a greater, but
these rather increase than diminish the need of a higher discipline in
the mind that is to use them profitably: the more opportunities the
more problems. Social betterment is like the advance of science in that
each achievement opens up new requirements. There is no prospect that
the world will ever satisfy us, and the structure of life is forever
incomplete without something to satisfy the need of the spirit for
ideas and sentiments that transcend and reconcile all particular aims
whatsoever. Mediæval religion is too unworldly, no doubt, for our use,
but all real religion has its unworldly side, and Thomas à Kempis and
the rest were right in holding that no sort of tangible achievement can
long assuage the human soul.
Still more evident is the need of religion in the form of “social
salvation,” of the moral awakening and leadership of the public mind.
Society is in want of this, and the agency that supplies the want will
have the power that goes with function—if not the church, then some
secular and perhaps hostile agency, like socialism, which is already a
rival to the church for the allegiance of the religious spirit.
Perhaps, also, there was never an age in which there was more
vital, hopeful religious aspiration and endeavor than the
present—notwithstanding that so many are astray. It is, of course, a
great advantage of the decline of forms that what survives is the more
likely to be real. The church is being transformed in the persons of
its younger and more adaptive members, and the outcome can be nothing
else than a gradual readjustment of the tradition to the real spiritual
needs of the time. It is notable that the severest critics of the
institution are reformers within its own body, and their zeal overlooks
nothing in the way of apathy or decadence.
As a matter of historical comparison the irreligion of our time is
often exaggerated. Any reader of history may perceive that formalism,
materialism and infidelity have flourished in all epochs, and as
regards America we are assured by Mr. Bryce that Christianity
influences conduct more here than in any other modern country, and
far more than in the so-called ages of faith.[166] In fact it is just
because this age is Christian in its aspirations that we hear so much
of the inadequacy of the church. People are taking religion seriously
and demanding true function in its instruments.
The church is possibly moving toward a differentiated unity, in which
the common element will be mainly sentiment—such sentiments as justice,
kindness, liberty and service. These are sufficient for good-will and
coöperation, and leave room for all the differentiation of ideas and
methods that the diversity of life requires.
With whatever faults the church is one of the great achievements of
civilization. Like the body of science or our system of transportation
and manufacture, it is the cumulative outcome of human invention and
endeavor, and is probably in no more danger of perishing than these
are. If certain parts of it break up we shall no doubt find that their
sound materials are incorporated into new structures.
FOOTNOTES:
[162] Confessions, book i, chap. 16.
[163] See his life by H. F. Brown, _passim_.
[164] J. R. Lowell, The Cathedral.
[165] _Ibid._
[166] The American Commonwealth, chap. 80.