Christianity and Progress Part 8

"Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they."

Such is the exultant outlook of a Christian believer on a progressive world. If, however, one is to have this exultant outlook, he must deeply believe in the living G.o.d and in the guidance of his Spirit.

What irreligion means at this point is not fully understood by most unbelieving folk because most unbelievers do not think through to a conclusion the implications of their own skepticism. We may well be thankful even in the name of religion for a few people like Bertrand Russell. He is not only irreligious but he is intelligently irreligious, and, what is more, he possesses the courage to say frankly and fully what irreligion really means:

"That Man is the product of causes which have no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built." [1] Such is the outlook on human life of a frank and thoroughgoing irreligion, and there is nothing exhilarating about it. All progress possible in such a setting is a good deal like a horse-race staged in a theatre, where the horses do indeed run furiously, but where we all know well that they are not getting anywhere. There is a moving floor beneath them, and it is only the shifting of the scenery that makes them seem to go. Is human history like that? Is progress an illusion? Is it all going to end as Bertrand Russell says? Those who believe in the living G.o.d are certain of the contrary, for stability amid change is the gift of a progressive, religious faith.

II

It must be evident, however, to any one acquainted with popular ideas of G.o.d that if in a progressive world we thus are to maintain a vital confidence in the spiritual nature of creative reality and so rejoice in the guidance of the Spirit amid change, we must win through in our thinking to a very much greater conception of G.o.d than that to which popular Christianity has been accustomed. Few pa.s.sages in Scripture better deserve a preacher's attention than G.o.d's accusation against his people in the 50th Psalm: "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself." The universal applicability of this charge is evident to any one who knows the history of man's religious thought. If in the beginning G.o.d did make man in his own image, man has been busy ever since making G.o.d in his image, and the deplorable consequences are everywhere to be seen. From idolaters, who bow down before wooden images of the divine in human form, to ourselves, praying to a magnified man throned somewhere in the skies, man has persistently run G.o.d into his own mold. To be sure, this tendency of man to think of G.o.d as altogether such a one as ourselves is nothing to be surprised at. Even when we deal with our human fellows, we read ourselves into our understandings of them. A contemporary observer tells us that whenever a portrait of Gladstone appeared in French papers he was made to look like a Frenchman, and that when he was represented in j.a.panese papers his countenance had an unmistakably j.a.panese cast.

If this habitual tendency to read ourselves into other people is evident even when we deal with human personalities, whom we can know well, how can it be absent from man's thought of the eternal? A man needs only to go out on a starry night with the revelations of modern astronomy in his mind and to consider the one who made all this and whose power sustains it, to see how utterly beyond our adequate comprehension he must be. As men in old tales used to take diffused superhumans, the genii, and by magic word bring them down into a stoppered bottle where they could be held in manageable form, so man has taken the vastness of G.o.d and run it into a human symbol.

This persistent anthropomorphism is revealed in our religious ceremonies. Within Christianity itself are systems of priestcraft where the individual believer has no glad, free access to his Father's presence, but where his approach must be mediated by a priestly ritual, his forgiveness a.s.sured by a priestly declaration, his salvation sealed by a priestly sacrament. This idea that G.o.d must be approached by stated ceremonies came directly from thinking of G.o.d in terms of a human monarch. No common man could walk carelessly into the presence of an old-time king. There were proprieties to be observed. There were courtiers who knew the proper approach to royalty, through whom the common folk would better send pet.i.tions up and from whom they would better look for favour. So G.o.d was pictured as a human monarch with his throne, his scepter, his ministering attendants. Here on earth the priests were those courtiers who knew the effectual way of reaching him, by whom we would best send up our prayers, through whom we would best look for our salvation. Nordau is not exaggerating when he says: "When we have studied the sacrificial rites, the incantations, prayers, hymns, and ceremonies of religion, we have as complete a picture of the relations between our ancestors and their chiefs as if we had seen them with our own eyes." [2]

Our anthropomorphism, however, reaches its most dangerous form in our inward imaginations of G.o.d's character. How the pot has called the kettle black! Man has read his vanities into G.o.d, until he has supposed that singing anthems to G.o.d's praise might flatter him as it would flatter us. Man has read his cruelties into G.o.d, and what in moments of vindictiveness and wrath we would like to do our enemies we have supposed Eternal G.o.d would do to his. Man has read his religious partisanship into G.o.d; he who holds Orion and the Pleiades in his leash, the Almighty and Everlasting G.o.d, before whom in the beginning the morning stars sang together, has been conceived as though he were a Baptist or a Methodist, a Presbyterian or an Anglican. Man has read his racial pride into G.o.d; nations have thought themselves his chosen people above all his other children because they seemed so to themselves. The centuries are sick with a G.o.d made in man's image, and all the time the real G.o.d has been saying, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself."

The unhappy prevalence of this mental idolatry is one of the chief causes for the loss of religious faith among the younger generation.

They have grown up in our homes and churches with their imaginations dwelling on a G.o.d made in man's image, and now through education they have moved out into a universe so much too big for that little G.o.d of theirs either to have made in the first place or to handle now that they find it hard to believe in him. Astronomers tell us that there are a hundred million luminous stars in our sky, and dark stars in unknown mult.i.tudes; that these stars range from a million to ten million miles in diameter; that some of them are so vast that were they brought as close to us as our sun is they would fill the entire horizon; and that these systems are scattered through the stellar s.p.a.ces at distances so incredible that, were some hardy discoverer to seek our planet in the midst of them, it would be like looking for a needle lost somewhere on the western prairies. The consequence is inevitable: a vast progressive universe plus an inadequate G.o.d means that in many minds faith in G.o.d goes to pieces.

III

One of the profoundest needs of the Church, therefore, in this new and growing world, is the achievement of such worthy ways of thinking about G.o.d and presenting him as will make the very idea of him a help to faith and not a stumbling-block to the faithful. In the attainment of that purpose we need for one thing to approach the thought of G.o.d from an angle which to popular Christianity is largely unfamiliar, although it is not unfamiliar in the historic tradition of the Church. Too exclusively have we clung to the mental categories and the resultant phraseology which have grown up around the idea of G.o.d as an individual like ourselves. The reasons for the prevalence of this individualized conception of deity are obvious. First, as we have seen, the growth of the idea of G.o.d in Hebrew-Christian thought moved out from a very clearly visualized figure on a mountain-top to those expanded and spiritualized forms which glorified the later stages of the Biblical development; and, second, every one of us in his personal religious experience and thought recapitulates the same process, starting as a child with G.o.d conceived in very human terms and moving out to expanded and sublimated forms of that childish conception. Whether, then, we consider the source of our idea of G.o.d in the Biblical tradition or in our own private experience, we see that it is rooted in and springs up out of a very human conception of him, and that our characteristic words about him, att.i.tudes toward him, and imaginations of him, are a.s.sociated with these childlike origins. Popular Christianity, therefore, approaches G.o.d with the regulative idea of a human individual in its mind, and, while popular Christianity would insist that G.o.d is much more than that, it still starts with that, and the enterprise of stretching the conception is only relatively successful.

Even when it is successful the result must be a G.o.d who is achieved by stretching out a man.

In this situation the only help for many is, for the time being, to leave this endeavour to approach G.o.d by way of an expanded and sublimated human individual and to approach G.o.d, instead, by way of the Creative Power from which this amazing universe and all that is within it have arisen. Man's deepest question concerns the nature of the Creative Power from which all things and persons have come. In creation are we dealing with the kind of power which in ordinary life we recognize as physical, or with the kind which we recognize as spiritual? With these two sorts of power we actually deal and, so far as we can see, the ultimate reality which has expressed itself in them must be akin to the one or to the other or to both. _He who is convinced that the Creative Power from which all things have come is spiritual believes in G.o.d_. I have seen that simple statement lift the burden of doubt from minds utterly perplexed and usher befogged spirits out into the liberty of the glory of the children of G.o.d. For they did not believe that the Creative Power was dynamic dirt, going it blind; they did believe that the Creative Power was akin to what we know as spirit, but so accustomed were they to the Church's narrower anthropomorphism that they did not suppose that this approach was a legitimate avenue for the soul's faith in G.o.d.

Nevertheless, it is a legitimate avenue and in the history of the Church many are the souls that have traveled it. The basis for all mature conceptions of G.o.d lies here: that the Power from whom all life proceeds wells up in two forms. One is physical; we can see it, touch it, weigh it, a.n.a.lyze and measure it. The other is spiritual; it is character, conscience, intelligence, purpose, love; we cannot see it, nor touch it, nor weigh it, nor a.n.a.lyze it. We ourselves did not make either of these two expressions of life. They came up together out of the Creative Reality from which we came. When a man thinks of the Power from which all life proceeds, he must say at least this: that when it wells up in us it wells up in two forms and one of them is spirit. How, then, when we think of that Power, can we leave spirit out? At the heart of the eternal is the fountain of that spiritual life which in myself I know.

This thought of G.o.d does not start, then, with a magnified man in the heavens; this thought of G.o.d starts with the universe itself vibrant with life, tingling with energy, where, when scientists try to a.n.a.lyze matter, they have to trace it back from molecules to atoms, from atoms to electrons, and from electrons to that vague spirituelle thing which they call a "strain in the ether," a universe where there is manifestly no such thing as dead matter, but where everything is alive. When one thinks of the Power that made this, that sustains this, that flows like blood through the veins of this, one cannot easily think that physicalness is enough to predicate concerning him. If the physical adequately could have revealed that Power, there never would have been anything but the physical to reveal him. The fact that spiritual life is here is evidence that it takes spiritual life fully to display the truth about creation's reality. As an old mystic put it: "G.o.d sleeps in the stone, he dreams in the animal, he wakes in man!"

It was this approach to G.o.d which saved the best spiritual life of the nineteenth century. For in the eighteenth century Christianity came nearer to being driven out of business than ever in her history before.

She had believed in a carpenter G.o.d who had made the world and occasionally tinkered with it in events which men called miracles. But new knowledge made that carpenter G.o.d impossible. Area after area where he had been supposed to operate was closed to him by the discovery of natural law until at last even comets were seen to be law-abiding and he was escorted clean to the edge of the universe and bowed out altogether. n.o.body who has not read the contemporary literature of the eighteenth century can know what dryness of soul resulted.

Man, however, cannot live without G.o.d. Our fathers had to have G.o.d back again. But if G.o.d were to come back again he could not return as an occasional tinkerer; he had to come as the life in all that lives, the indwelling presence throughout his creation, whose ways of working are the laws, so that he penetrates and informs them all. No absentee landlord could be welcomed back, but if G.o.d came as the resident soul of all creation, men could comprehend that. And he did come back that way. His return is the glory of the nineteenth century. In the best visions of the century's prophets that glory shines.

MRS. BROWNING:

"Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with G.o.d: But only he who sees, takes off his shoes."

TENNYSON:

"Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet-- Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."

COLERIDGE:

"Glory to Thee, Father of Earth and Heaven!

All conscious presence of the Universe!

Nature's vast ever-acting Energy!"

WORDSWORTH:

"a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts, And rolls through all things."

CARLYLE:

"Then sawest thou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of G.o.d; that through every star, through every gra.s.s-blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present G.o.d still beams. But Nature, which is the Time-vesture of G.o.d, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish."

Moreover, this idea of G.o.d as the Creative Power conceived in spiritual terms need not lose any of the intimate meanings which have inhered in more personal thoughts of him and which are expressed in the Bible's names for him: Father, Mother, Bridegroom, Husband, Friend. There is indeed this danger in the approach which we have been describing, that we may conceive G.o.d as so dispersed everywhere that we cannot find him anywhere and that at last, so diffused, he will lose the practical value on account of which we want him. For we do desire a G.o.d who is like ourselves--enough like ourselves so that he can understand us and care for us and enter into our human problems. We do want a human side to G.o.d. A man who had seen in Henry Drummond the most beautiful exhibition of G.o.d's Spirit that he had ever experienced said that after Henry Drummond died he always prayed up to G.o.d by way of Drummond. We make our most vital approaches to G.o.d in that way and we always have, from the time we prayed to G.o.d through our fathers and mothers until now, when we find G.o.d in Christ. We want in G.o.d a personality that can answer ours, and we can have it without belittling in the least his greatness.

I know a man who says that one of the turning points of his spiritual experience came on a day when for the first time it dawned on him that he never had seen his mother. Now, his mother was the major molding influence in his life. He could have said about her what Longfellow said in a letter to his mother, written when he was twenty-one. "For me," wrote Longfellow, "a line from my mother is more efficacious than all the homilies preached in Lent; and I find more incitement to virtue in merely looking at your handwriting than in a whole volume of ethics and moral discourses." So this man would have felt about the pervasive influence of his mother. Then it dawned on him one day that he never had seen her. To be sure, he had seen the bodily instrument by which she had been able somehow to express herself through look and word and gesture, but his mother herself, her thoughts, her consciousness, her love, her spirit, he never had seen and he never would see. She was the realest force in his life, but she was invisible. When they talked together they signalled to each other out of the unseen where they dwelt. They both were as invisible as G.o.d. Moreover, while his mother was only a human, personal spirit, there was a kind of omnipresence in her so far as he was concerned, and he loved her and she loved him everywhere, though he never had seen her and never could. If spiritual life even in its human form can take on such meanings, we need not think of G.o.d as an expanded individual in order to love him, be loved by him, and company with him as an unseen friend. Let a man once begin with G.o.d as the universal spiritual Presence and then go on to see the divine quality of that Presence revealed in Christ, and there is no limit to the deepening and heightening of his estimation of G.o.d's character, except the limits of his own moral imagination.

IV

With many minds the difficulty of achieving an idea of G.o.d adequate for our new universe will not be met by any such intellectual shift of emphasis as we have suggested. Not anthropomorphic theology so much as ecclesiasticism is the major burden on their thinking about deity. Two conceptions of the Church are in conflict to-day in modern Protestantism, and one of the most crucial problems of America's religious life in this next generation is the decision as to which of these two ideas of the Church shall triumph. We may call one the exclusive and the other the inclusive conception of the Church. The exclusive conception of the Church lies along lines like these: that we are the true Church; that we have the true doctrines and the true practices as no other Church possesses them; that we are const.i.tuted as a Church just because we have these uniquely true opinions and practices; that all we in the Church agree about these opinions and that when we joined the Church we gave allegiance to them; that n.o.body has any business to belong to our Church unless he agrees with us; that if there are people outside the Church who disagree, they ought to be kept outside and if there are people in the Church who come to disagree, they ought to be put outside. That is the exclusive idea of the Church, and there are many who need no further description of it for they were brought up in it and all their youthful religious life was surrounded by its rigid sectarianism.

Over against this conception is the inclusive idea of the Church, which runs along lines like these: that the Christian Church ought to be the organizing center for all the Christian life of a community; that a Church is not based upon theological uniformity but upon devotion to the Lord Jesus, to the life with G.o.d and man for which he stood, and to the work which he gave us to do; that wherever there are people who have that spiritual devotion, who possess that love, who want more of it, who desire to work and worship with those of kindred Christian aspirations, they belong inside the family of the Christian Church.

The inclusive idea of the Church looks out upon our American communities and sees there, with all their sin, spiritual life unexpressed and unorganized, good-will and aspiration and moral power unharnessed and going to waste, and it longs to cry so that the whole community can hear it. Come, all men of Christian good-will, let us work together for the Lord of all good life! That is the inclusive idea of the Church. It desires to be the point of incandescence where, regardless of denominationalism or theology, the Christian life of the community bursts into flame.

As between these two conceptions there hardly can be any question that the first idea so far has prevailed. Our endlessly split and shivered Protestantism bears sufficient witness to the influence of the exclusive idea of the Church. The disastrous consequences of this in many realms are evident, and one result lies directly in our argument's path. An exclusive Church narrows the idea of G.o.d. Almost inevitably G.o.d comes to be conceived as the head of the exclusive Church, the origin of its uniquely true doctrine, the director of its uniquely correct practices, so that the activities of G.o.d outside the Church grow dim, and more and more he is conceived as operating through his favourite organization as nowhere else in all the universe. In particular the idea grows easily in the soil of an exclusive Church that G.o.d is not operative except in people who recognize him and that the world outside such conscious recognition is largely empty of his activity and barren of his grace. G.o.d tends, in such thinking, to become cooped up in the Church, among the people who consciously have acknowledged him. What wonder that mult.i.tudes of our youth, waking up to the facts about our vast and growing universe, conclude that it is too big to be managed by the tribal G.o.d of a Protestant sect!

The achievement of a worthy idea of G.o.d involves, therefore, the ability to discover G.o.d in all life, outside the Church as well as within, and in people who do not believe in him nor recognize him as well as in those who do. Let us consider for a moment the principle which is here involved. Many forces and persons serve us when we do not recognize them and do not know the truth about them. This experience of being ministered to by persons whom we do not know goes back even to the maternal care that nourished us before we were born.

No mother waits to be recognized before she serves her child. We are tempted to think of persons as ministering to us only when the service is consciously received and acknowledged but, as a matter of fact, service continually comes to us from sources we are unaware of and do not think about.

"Unnumbered comforts to my soul Thy tender care bestowed, Before my infant heart conceived From whom those comforts flowed."

This principle applies to mankind's relationship with the physical universe. Through many generations mankind utterly misconceived it.

They thought the earth was flat, the heavens a little way above; yet, for all that, the sun warmed them and the rain refreshed them and the stars guided their wandering boats. The physical universe did not wait until men knew all the truth about it before being useful to men and at last, when the truth came and the glory of this vast and mobile cosmos dawned on mankind, men discovered the facts about forces which, though unknown and unacknowledged, long had served them.

This same principle applies also to man's relationship with social inst.i.tutions and social securities that have sustained us from our infancy. If a boy knows that there is a Const.i.tution of the United States, he does not think about it. Then maturity comes and he begins vividly to understand the sacrifices which our forefathers underwent in building up the inst.i.tutions that have nourished us. He recognizes forces and factors of which he had been unconscious but whose value, long unacknowledged, he now gratefully can estimate.

This same principle also applies to our unconscious indebtedness to people who have helped us but whom we have not known. This is a far finer world because of souls who have been here through whom G.o.d has shined like the sun through eastern windows, but we can go on year after year absorbing unconsciously the influence of these spirits without ever knowing them. I lived for twelve years in a community to which in its early days a young minister had come, and where for forty years he stood as the central influence in the town's life. He brought it up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. As was said of Joseph in Potiphar's prison, "Whatsoever they did there, he was the doer of it." The height of his mind, the unselfishness of his spirit, the liberality of his thought, made all the people gladly acclaim him as the foremost citizen of the town. There is a quality in the town's life yet which never would have been there had it not been for him.

Sometimes yet his spirit must brood above that community which for forty years he cherished and must say to people whom he never knew, but who are being blessed by the benedictory influence of his life, what Jehovah said to Cyrus the Persian, "I girded thee, though thou hast not known me."

So, from mult.i.tudinous sources services flow in upon us that we do not recognize. It should be impossible then to think that G.o.d never touches men until men welcome him. Some people seem to suppose that G.o.d ministers to men, saves them, transforms them, raises them up and liberates them only when they confessedly receive him. That cannot be true of the G.o.d of the New Testament. He is too magnanimous for that.

Jesus says a man is unworthy of his discipleship when he serves only the friends who are responsive, that we must serve the hostile and ungrateful, too. Can it be that G.o.d is less good than Jesus said we ought to be? We in the churches have drawn our little lines too tight.

We have been tempted to divide mankind into two cla.s.ses, the white and the black: in the Church the white, the saved, who recognize G.o.d; outside, the black, the unsaved, the unG.o.dly who do not recognize him.