Christianity and Progress Part 3

One wonders why the preachers do not feel this more and so recover their consciousness of an indispensable mission. One wonders that the churches can be so timid and dull and negative, that our sermons can be so pallid and inconsequential. One wonders why in the pulpit we have so many flutes and so few trumpets. For here is a world with the acc.u.mulating energies of the new science in its hands, living in the purlieus of h.e.l.l because it cannot gain spiritual mastery over the very power in which it glories. Here is a world which must build its civilization on spiritual bases or else collapse into abysmal ruin and which cannot achieve the task though all the motives of self-preservation cry out to have it done, because men lack the very elements of faith and character which it is the business of religion to supply.

VI

We have said that when science has given us all its facts we still need a spiritual interpretation of the facts; that when science has put all its energies into our hands we still need spiritual mastery over their use. Let us say in conclusion that, when science has given us all its power, we still need another kind of power which it is not the business of science to supply. Long ago somebody who knew the inner meaning of religion wrote:

"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside still waters.

He restoreth my soul."

That last phrase sums up one of the deepest needs of human life. We are in constant want of spiritual repair; we are lost without a fresh influx of inward power; we desperately need to have our souls restored.

A young British soldier once came in from the trenches where his aggressive powers had been in full employ and, having heard one of the finest concert companies that London could send out, he wrote in a letter to his family: "I have just come down from the trenches, and have been listening to one of the best concerts I ever attended. It makes one feel that perhaps there is a good G.o.d after all." The two aspects of life which that soldier discovered in himself all men possess. One takes us to life's trenches; the other throws us back on some revelation of grace and beauty that we may be sure of G.o.d. With one we seek aggressively to master life; with the other we seek receptively to be inspired. Every normal man needs these two kinds of influence: one to send him informed and alert to his tasks, the other to float his soul off its sandbars on the rising tide of spiritual rea.s.surance and power. Every normal man needs two att.i.tudes: one when he goes into action determined to do his work and to do it well, and the other when he subdues his spirit to receptivity and with the Psalmist cries,

"My soul, wait thou in silence for G.o.d only; For my expectation is from him."

When science has given us all the power it can, we still need another kind of power which science cannot give.

Whatever else the scientific control of life may have accomplished, it has not saved mankind from the old and devastating problems of trouble and sin. So far as individual experience of these is concerned, there is little discernable difference between two thousand years before Christ and two thousand years afterward. Still disasters fall upon our lives, sometimes as swift in their a.s.sault as wild beasts leaping from an unsuspected ambush. Still troubles come, long drawn out and wearying, like the monotonous dripping of water with which old torturers used to drive their victims mad. Still sins bring shame to the conscience and tragic consequence to the life, and tiresome work, losing the buoyancy of its first inspiration, drags itself out into purposeless effort and bores us with its futility. Folk now, as much as ever in all history, need to have their souls restored. The scientific control of life, however, is not adequate for that.

Electricity and subways and motor cars do not restore the soul; and to know that there are millions upon millions of solar systems, like our own, scattered through s.p.a.ce does not restore the soul; and to delve in the sea or to fly in the air or to fling our words through the ether does not restore the soul. The need of religion is perennial and would be though our scientific control over life were extended infinitely beyond our present hope, for the innermost ministry of religion to human life is the restoration of the soul.

In this fact lies the failure of that type of naturalism which endeavours to keep religion as a subjective experience and denies the reality of an objective G.o.d. If we are not already familiar with this attempted subst.i.tution we soon shall be, for our young people are being taught it in many a cla.s.sroom now. One of the basic principles of this new teaching is belief in the spiritual life but, when one inquires where the spiritual life is, he discovers that it is altogether within ourselves--there is no original, creative and abiding Spiritual Life from whom we come, by whom we are sustained, in whom we live. Rather, as flowers reveal in their fragrance a beauty which is not in the earth where they grow nor in the roots on which they depend, so our spiritual life is the mysterious refinement of the material out of which we are constructed, and it has nothing to correspond with it in the source from which we sprang. Nevertheless, the new naturalism exalts this spiritual life within us, calls it our crown and glory, bids us cultivate and diffuse it, says about it nearly everything a Christian says except that it is a revelation of eternal reality. Moreover, it is difficult to differentiate from this outspoken group of professed naturalists another group of humanists who do retain the idea of G.o.d, but merely as the sum total of man's idealistic life. "G.o.d," says one exponent, "is the farthest outreach of our human ideals." That is to say, our spiritual lives created G.o.d, not G.o.d our spiritual lives.

G.o.d, as one enthusiastic devotee of this new cult has put it, is a sort of Uncle Sam, the pooling of the idealistic imaginations of mult.i.tudes.

Of course he does not exist, yet in a sense he is real; he is the projection of our loyalties, affections, hopes.

It should go without saying that this idea of G.o.d has about as much intellectual validity as belief in Santa Claus and is even more sentimental, in that it is a deliberate attempt to disguise in pleasant and familiar terms a fundamentally materialistic interpretation of reality. The vital failure of this spiritualized naturalism, however, lies in the inability of its Uncle Sam to meet the deepest needs on account of which men at their best have been religious. This deified projection of our ideals we made up ourselves and so we cannot really pray to him; he does not objectively exist and so has no unifying meaning which puts purposefulness into creation and hope ahead of it; he does not care for any one or anything and so we may not trust him; and neither in sin can he forgive, cleanse, restore, empower, nor in sorrow comfort and sustain. A G.o.d who functions so poorly is not much of a G.o.d. Once more, therefore, one wonders why in a generation when, not less, but more, because of all our scientific mastery the souls of men are starved and tired, the Church is not captured by a new sense of mission. It is precisely in a day when the active and pugnacious energies of men are most involved in the conquest of the world that the spirit becomes most worn for lack of sustenance. To be a.s.sured of the nearness and reality and availability of the spiritual world is a matter of life and death to mult.i.tudes of folk to-day. There could hardly be a more alluring time in which to make the Holy Spirit real to the world. For the supreme moral a.s.set in any man's life is not his aggressiveness nor his pugnacity, but his capacity to be inspired--to be inspired by great books, great music, by love and friendship; to be inspired by great faiths, great hopes, great ideals; to be inspired supremely by the Spirit of G.o.d. For so we are lifted until the things we tried to see and could not we now can see because of the alt.i.tude at which we stand, and the things we tried to do and could not we now can do because of the fellowship in which we live. To one a.s.serting the adequacy of the scientific control of life, therefore, the Christian's third answer is clear: man's deepest need is spiritual power, and spiritual power comes out of the soul's deep fellowships with the living G.o.d.

Such, then, is the abiding need of religion in a scientific age. To be scientifically minded is one of the supreme achievements of mankind.

To love truth, as science loves it, to seek truth tirelessly, as science seeks it, to reveal the latent resources of the universe in hope that men will use them for good and not for evil, as science does, is one of the chief glories of our race. When, however, we have taken everything that science gives, it is not enough for life. When we have facts, we still need a spiritual interpretation of facts; when we have all the scientific forces that we can get our hands upon, we still need spiritual mastery over their use; and, beyond all the power that science gives, we need that inward power which comes from spiritual fellowships alone. Religion is indispensable. To build human life upon another basis is to erect civilization upon sand, where the rain descends and the floods come and the winds blow and beat upon the house and it falls and great is the fall thereof.

[1] Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Vol. II, p. 16.

[2] Quoted in the Hibbert Journal, Vol. III, January 1905, p. 296.

[3] Psalm 19:1.

[4] Ernst Haeckel: The Wonders of Life, p. 413.

[5] Arthur Schopenhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Zweiter Band, Kapital 46, Von der Nichtigkeit und dem Leiden des Lebens, p. 669.

LECTURE III

THE GOSPEL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

I

Our last lecture started with the proposition that the dominant influence in the intellectual and practical activity of the modern age is man's scientific mastery over life. This present lecture considers one of the consequences of this primary fact: namely, the humanitarian desire to take advantage of this scientific control of life so to change social conditions that mankind may be relieved from crushing handicaps which now oppress it. For the growth of scientific knowledge and control has been coincident with a growth of humanitarian sentiment. This movement for human relief and social reform, in the midst of which we live, is one of the chief influences of our time. It has claimed the allegiance of many of the n.o.blest folk among us. Its idealism, its call to sacrifice, the concreteness of the tasks which it undertakes and of the gains which it achieves, have attracted alike the fine spirits and the practical abilities of our generation. What att.i.tude shall the Christian Church take toward this challenging endeavour to save society? How shall she regard this pa.s.sionate belief in the possibility of social betterment and this enthusiastic determination to achieve it? The question is one of crucial importance and the Church is far from united on its answer. Some Christians claim the whole movement as the child of the Church, born of her spirit and expressing her central purpose; others disclaim the whole movement as evil and teach that the world must grow increasingly worse until some divine cataclysm shall bring its hopeless corruption to an end; others treat the movement as useful but of minor import, while they try to save men by belief in dogmatic creeds or by carefully engineered emotional experiences. Meanwhile, no words can exaggerate the fidelity, the vigour, the hopefulness, and the elevated spirit with which many of our best young men and women throw themselves into this campaign for better conditions of living. Surely, the intelligent portion of the Church would better think as clearly as possible about a matter of such crucial import.

At first sight, the devotee of social Christianity is inclined impatiently to brush aside as mere ignorant bigotry on the Church's part all cautious suspicion of the social movement. But there is one real difficulty which the thoughtful Christian must perceive when he compares the characteristic approach to the human problem made by the social campaign, on the one side, and by religion, on the other. Much of the modern social movement seems to proceed upon the supposition that we can save mankind by the manipulation of outward circ.u.mstance.

There are societies to change everything that can be changed and, because the most obvious and easy subjects of transformation are the external arrangements of human life, men set themselves first and chiefly to change those. We are always trying to improve the play by shifting the scenery. But no person of insight ever believed that the manipulation of circ.u.mstance alone can solve man's problems. Said Emerson, "No change of circ.u.mstances can repair a defect of character."

Said Herbert Spencer, "No philosopher's stone of a const.i.tution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts." Said James Anthony Froude, "Human improvement is from within outwards." Said Carlyle, "Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of."

Said Mrs. Browning:

"It takes a soul, To move a body: it takes a high-souled man To move the ma.s.ses even to a cleaner stye: ..... Ah, your Fouriers failed, Because not poets enough to understand That life develops from within."

Now, religion's characteristic approach to the human problem is represented by this conviction that "life develops from within." So far from expecting to save mankind by the manipulation of outward circ.u.mstance, it habitually has treated outward circ.u.mstance as of inferior moment in comparison with the inner att.i.tudes and resources of the spirit. Economic affluence, for example, has not seemed to Christianity in any of its historic forms indispensable to man's well-being; rather, economic affluence has been regarded as a danger to be escaped or else to be resolutely handled as one would handle fire--useful if well managed but desperately perilous if uncontrolled.

Nor can it be said that Christianity has consistently maintained this att.i.tude without having in actual experience much ground for holding it. The possession of economic comfort has never yet guaranteed a decent life, much less a spiritually satisfactory one. The morals of Fifth Avenue are not such that it can look down on Third Avenue, nor is it possible anywhere to discern gradation of character on the basis of relative economic standing. It is undoubtedly true that folks and families often have their moral stamina weakened and their personalities debauched by sinking into discouraging poverty, but it is an open question whether more folks and families have not lost their souls by rising into wealth. Still, after all these centuries, the "rich fool," with his overflowing barns and his soul that sought to feed itself on corn, is a familiar figure; still it is as easy for a camel to go through a needle's eye as for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. When, therefore, the Christian, approaching the human problem, not from without in, but from within out, runs upon this modern social movement endeavouring to save mankind by the manipulation of outward circ.u.mstance, his cautious and qualified consent may be neither so ignorant nor so unreasonable as it at first appears.

As an example of manipulated circ.u.mstance in which we are asked to trust, consider the new international arrangements upon which the world leans so heavily for its hopes of peace. Surely, he would be a poor Christian who did not rejoice in every reasonable expectation which new forms of co-operative organization can fulfil. But he would be a thoughtless Christian, too, if he did not see that all good forms of international organization are trellises to give the vines of human relationship a fairer chance to grow; but if the vines themselves maintain their old acid quality, bringing out of their own inward nature from roots of bitterness grapes that set the people's teeth on edge, then no external trellises will solve the problem. It is this Christian approach to life, from within out, which causes the common misunderstanding between the social movement and the Church. The first thinks mainly of the importance of the trellis; the second thinks chiefly about the quality of the vine.

The more deep and transforming a man's own religious experience has been, the more he will insist upon the importance of this inward approach. Here is a man who has had a profound evangelical experience.

He has gone down into the valley of the shadow with a deep sense of spiritual need; he has found in Christ a Saviour who has lifted him up into spiritual freedom and victory; he has gone out to live with a sense of unpayable indebtedness to him. He has had, in a word, a typical religious experience at its best with three elements at the heart of it: a great need, a great salvation, a great grat.i.tude. When such a man considers the modern social movement, however beautiful its spirit or admirable its concrete gains, it seems to him superficial if it presents itself as a panacea. It does not go deep enough to reach the soul's real problems. The continual misunderstanding between the Church and the social movement has, then, this explanation: the characteristic approach of the Christian Gospel to the human problem is from within out; the characteristic approach of much of the modern social movement is from without in.

II

If, therefore, the Christian Gospel is going to be true to itself, it must carefully preserve amid the pressure of our modern social enthusiasms certain fundamental emphases which are characteristic of its genius. It must stress the possibility and the necessity of the inward transformation of the lives of men. We know now that a th.o.r.n.y cactus does not have to stay a th.o.r.n.y cactus; Burbank can change it.

We know that a crab-apple tree does not have to stay a crab-apple tree; it can be grafted and become an astrakhan. We know that a malarial swamp does not have to stay a malarial swamp; it can be drained and become a health resort. We know that a desert does not have to stay a desert; it can be irrigated and become a garden. But while all these possibilities of transformation are opening up in the world outside of us, the most important in the series concerns the world within us. The primary question is whether human nature is thus transformable, so that men can be turned about, hating what formerly they loved and loving what once they hated. Said Tolstoy, whose early life had been confessedly vile: "Five years ago faith came to me; I believed in the doctrine of Jesus, and my whole life underwent a sudden transformation.

What I had once wished for I wished for no longer, and I began to desire what I had never desired before. What had once appeared to me right now became wrong, and the wrong of the past I beheld as right."

[1]

So indispensable to the welfare of the world is this experience, that we Christians need to break loose from our too narrow conceptions of it and to set it in a large horizon. We have been too often tempted to make of conversion a routine emotional experience. Even Jonathan Edwards was worried about himself in this regard. He wrote once in his diary: "The chief thing that now makes me in any measure question my good estate is my not having experienced conversion in those particular steps wherein the people of New England, and anciently the dissenters of old England, used to experience it." Poor Jonathan! How many have been so distraught! But the supreme folly of any man's spiritual life is to try thus to run himself into the mold of any other man's experience. There is no regular routine in spiritual transformation.

Some men come in on a high tide of feeling, like Billy Bray, the drunken miner, who, released from his debasing slavery and reborn into a vigorous life, cried, "If they were to put me into a barrel I would shout glory out through the bunghole! Praise the Lord!" Some men come in like Bushnell, the New England scholar and preacher, who, when he was an unbelieving tutor at Yale, fell on his knees in the quiet of his study and said, "O G.o.d, I believe there is an eternal difference between right and wrong and I hereby give myself up to do the right and to refrain from the wrong." Some men break up into the new life suddenly like the Oxford graduate who, having lived a dissolute life until six years after his graduation from the university in 1880, picked up in his room one day Drummond's "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," and, lo! the light broke suddenly--"I rejoiced there and then in a conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in less than twenty-four hours." Some come slowly, like old John Livingstone, who said, "I do not remember any particular time of conversion, or that I was much cast down or lift up." Spiritual transformation is infinitely various because it is so infinitely vital; but behind all the special forms of experience stands the colossal fact that men can be transformed by the Spirit of G.o.d.

That this experience of inward enlightenment and transformation should ever be neglected or minimized or forgotten or crowded out is the more strange because one keeps running on it outside religion as well as within. John Keats, when eighteen years old, was handed one day a copy of Spenser's poems. He never had known before what his life was meant to be. He found out that day. Like a voice from heaven his call came in the stately measures of Spenser's glorious verse. He knew that he was meant to be a poet. Upon this master fact that men can be inwardly transformed Christ laid his hand and put it at the very center of his gospel. All through the New Testament there is a throb of joy which, traced back, brings one to the a.s.surance that no man need stay the way he is. Among the gladdest, solemnest words in the records of our race are such pa.s.sages in the New Testament as this: Fornicators, adulterers, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revelers, extortioners, such were some of you; but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our G.o.d. One cannot find in the New Testament anything stiff and stilted about this experience. Paul's change came suddenly; Peter's came slowly. They did not even have, as we have come to have, a settled word to describe the experience. Ask James what it is and, practical-minded man that he is, he calls it _conversion_--being turned around. Ask Peter what it is and, as he looks back upon his old benighted condition, he cries that it is like _coming out of the darkness into a marvelous light_. Ask Paul what it is and, with his love of superlative figures, he cries that it is like _being dead and being raised again with a great resurrection_. Ask John what it is and, with his mystical spirit, he says that it is _being born again_.

See the variety that comes from vitality--no stiff methods, no stiff routine of experience, but throbbing through the whole book the good news of an illuminating, liberating, transforming experience that can make men new!

It is the more strange that this central element in the Christian Gospel should be neglected in the interests of social reformation because it is so indispensable to social reformation. Wherever a new social hope allures the efforts of forward-looking men, there is one argument against the hope which always rises. You cannot do that--men say--human nature is against it; human nature has always acted another way; you cannot change human nature; your hope is folly. As one listens to such skepticism he sees that men mean by human nature a static, unalterable thing, huge, inert, changeless, a dull ma.s.s that resists all transformation. The very man who says that may be an engineer. He may be speaking in the next breath with high enthusiasm about a desert in Arizona where they are bringing down the water from the hills and where in a few years there will be no desert, but orange groves stretching as far as the eye can reach, and eucalyptus trees making long avenues of shade, and roses running wild, as plenteous as goldenrod in a New England field. But while about physical nature he is as hopeful of possible change as a prophet, for human nature he thinks nothing can be done.

From the Christian point of view this idea of human nature is utterly false. So far from being stiff and set, human nature is the most plastic, the most changeable thing with which we deal. It can be brutalized beneath the brutes; it can rise into companionship with angels. Our primitive forefathers, as our fairy tales still reveal, believed that men and women could be changed into anything--into trees, rocks, wolves, bears, kings and fairy sprites. One of the most prominent professors of sociology in America recently said that these stories are a poetic portraiture of something which eternally is true.

Men can be transformed. That is a basic fact, and it is one of the central emphases of the Christian Gospel. Of all days in which that emphasis should be remembered, the chiefest is the day when men are thinking about social reformation.

III

It is only a clear recognition of the crucial importance of man's inward transformation which can prepare us for a proper appreciation of the social movement's meaning. For one point of contact between religion's approach to the human problem from within out and reformation's approach from without in lies here: to change social environments which oppress and dwarf and defile the lives of men is one way of giving the transforming Spirit a fair chance to reach and redeem them. All too slowly does the truth lay hold upon the Church that our very personalities themselves are social products, that we are born out of society and live in it and are molded by it, that without society we should not be human at all, and that the influences which play upon our lives, whether redeeming or degrading, are socially mediated. A man who says that he believes in the ineffable value of human personalities and who professes to desire their transformation and yet who has no desire to give them better homes, better cities, better family relationships, better health, better economic resources, better recreations, better books and better schools, is either an ignoramus who does not see what these things mean in the growth of souls, or else an unconscious hypocrite who does not really care so much about the souls of men as he says he does.

An illuminating ill.u.s.tration of this fact is to be seen in the expanding ideals of missionary work. When the missionaries first went to the ends of the earth they went to save souls one by one. They went out generally with a distinctly, often narrowly, individualistic motive. They were trying to gather into the ark a few redeemed spirits out of the wreck of a perishing world; they were not thinking primarily of building a kingdom of social righteousness in the earth. Consider, then, the fascinating story of the way the missionaries, whatever may have been the motives with which they started, have become social reformers. If the missionaries were to take the Gospel to the people, they had to get to the people. So they became the explorers of the world. It was the missionaries who opened up Asia and Africa. Was there ever a more stirring story of adventure than is given us in the life of David Livingstone? Then when the missionaries had reached the people to give them the Gospel, they had to give them the Bible. So they became the philologists and translators of the world. They built the lexicons and grammars. They translated the Bible into more than a hundred languages on the continent of Africa alone. Carey and his followers did the same for over a score of languages in India. The Bible to-day is available in over six hundred living languages.

Everywhere this prodigious literary labour has been breaking down the barriers of speech and thought between the peoples. If ever we do get a decent internationalism, how much of it will rest back upon this pioneer spade work of the missionaries, digging through the barricades of language that separate the minds of men! When, then, the missionaries had books to give the people, the people had to learn to read. So the missionaries became educators, and wherever you find the church you find the school. But what is the use of educating people who do not understand how to be sanitary, who live in filth and disease and die needlessly, and how can you take away old superst.i.tions and not put new science in their places, or deprive the people of witch doctors without offering them subst.i.tutes? So the missionaries became physicians, and one of the most beneficent enterprises that history records is medical missions. What is the use, however, of helping people to get well when their economic condition is such, their standards of life so low, that they continue to fall sick again in spite of you? So the missionaries are becoming industrial reformers, agriculturalists, chemists, physicists, engineers, rebuilding wherever they can the economic life and comfort of their people. The missionary cause itself has been compelled, whether it would or not, to grow socially-minded. As Dan Crawford says about the work in Africa: "Here, then, is Africa's challenge to its Missionaries. Will they allow a whole continent to live like beasts in such hovels, millions of negroes cribbed, cabined, and confined in dens of disease? No doubt it is our diurnal duty to preach that the soul of all improvement is the improvement of the soul. But G.o.d's equilateral triangle of body, soul, and spirit must never be ignored. Is not the body wholly _ensouled_, and is not the soul wholly _embodied_? . . . In other words, in Africa the only true fulfilling of your heavenly calling is the doing of earthly things in a heavenly manner." [2]

Indeed, if any one is tempted to espouse a narrowly individualistic gospel of regeneration, let him go to the Far East and take note of Buddhism. Buddhism in wide areas of its life is doing precisely what the individualists recommend. It is a religion of personal comfort and redemption. It is not mastered by a vigorous hope of social reformation. In many ways it is extraordinarily like medieval Christianity. Consider this definition of his religion that was given by one Buddhist teacher: "Religion," he said, "is a device to bring peace of mind in the midst of conditions as they are." Conditions as they are--settle down in them; be comfortable about them; do not try to change them; let no prayer for the Kingdom of G.o.d on earth disturb them; and there seek for yourselves "peace of mind in the midst of conditions as they are." And the Buddhist teacher added, "My religion is pure religion." But is there any such thing as really caring about the souls of men and not caring about social habits, moral conditions, popular recreations, economic handicaps that in every way affect them?

Of all deplorable and degenerate conceptions of religion can anything be worse than to think of it as a "device to bring peace of mind in the midst of conditions as they are?" Yet one finds plenty of Church members in America whose idea of the "simple Gospel" comes perilously near that Buddhist's idea of "pure religion."

The utter futility of endeavouring to care about the inward transformation of men's lives while not caring about their social environment is evident when one thinks of our international relationships and their recurrent issue in war. War surely cannot be thought of any longer as a school for virtue. We used to think it was.