Painted Windows Part 17

Something is wrong with the Church. It is impious to think that heaven interposed in the affairs of humanity to produce that ridiculous mouse, the modern curate. No teacher in the history of the world ever occupied a lower place in the respect of men. So deep is the pit into which the modern minister has fallen that no one attempts to get him out. He is abandoned by the world. He figures with the starving children of Russia in appeals to the charitable an object of pity. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed, but the shepherd also looks up from his pit of poverty and neglect, as hungry as the sheep, hungry for the bare necessities of animal life.

This is surely a tragic position for a preacher of good news, and a teacher sent from G.o.d.

If the Christian would know how far his Church has fallen from power, let him reflect that, even after the sorrow and desolation of a world conflict, there is no atmosphere in Europe rendering the savagery of submarine warfare unthinkable--utterly unthinkable to the conscience of mankind.

Mr. Balfour and Lord Lee make a proposal to end this devilish warfare; the French oppose; newspapers open a crusade, here against France, there against Great Britain; the vital interests of humanity are at stake; the door will either be opened to disarmament or closed against peace for another fifty years; and Christ is silent--the Church does not lift even three fingers to bless the cause of peace.

Why is the Church so powerless? Why is it she has so fatally lost the attention of mankind?

Is it not because she has nothing to give, nothing to teach? Morals are older than Christianity, and sacramental religions as well. Men feel that they cannot understand the immense paraphernalia of religion and its unnatural atmosphere of high mystery; it is so tremendous a fuss about so very small a result. If G.o.d is in the Church, why doesn't He do more for it, and so more for the world? The revenues of religion are still enormous. What do they accomplish?

Men who think in this way are not enemies of religion, any more than the Jews who came to Jesus were enemies of Judaism. They deserve the respect of the Church. Indeed, it is in finding an answer to their challenge that the Church is most likely to find a solution to her own problem.

But that answer will never be found if the Church seeks for it only in her doc.u.ments. There is another place in which she must look for the truth of Christ, a truth as completely overlooked by the modernist as by the traditionalist: it is in the movements of the soul, in the world of living men.

I believe that there are more evidences for the existence of Christ in the modern world than in the whole lexicon of theology. I believe it is more possible to discern His features and to feel the breath of His lips by confronting the discoveries of modern science than by turning back the leaves of religious history to the first blurred pages of the Christian tradition. I believe, indeed, that it is now wholly impossible for any man to comprehend the Light which shone upon human darkness nearly two thousand years ago without bringing the doc.u.ments of the Church to the light which is shining across the world at this present hour from the torch of science.

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?"

For twenty years I have followed this clue to the meaning of Christ and the nature of His message. I have seen Darwinism, the very foundation of modern materialism, break up like thin ice and melt away from the view of philosophy. I have seen evolution betray one of its greatest secrets to the soul of man--an immanent teleology, an invisible _direction_ towards deeper consciousness, an intelligent _movement_ towards greater understanding. And I have seen the demonstration by science that this visible and tangible world in its final a.n.a.lysis is both invisible and intangible--a phantasm of the senses.

I may be allowed perhaps to recall the incident which first set me to follow this clue.

One day, when he was deep in his studies of Radiant Matter, Sir William Crookes touched a little table which stood between our two chairs, and said to me, "We shall announce to the world in a year or two, perhaps sooner, that the atoms of which this table is composed are made up of tiny charges of electricity, and we shall prove that each one of those tiny electrons, relative to its size, is farther away from its nearest neighbour than our earth from the nearest star."

I have lived to see this prophecy fulfilled, though its implications are not yet understood.

The Church does not yet realise that physical science, hitherto regarded as the enemy of religion and the mocker of philosophy, presents us now with the world of the transcendentalists, the world of the metaphysicians, the world of religious seers--a world which is real and visible only to our limited senses, but a world which disappears from all vision and definition directly we bring to its investigation those ingenious instruments of science which act as extensions of our senses.

Every schoolboy is now aware that a door is solid only to his eyes and touch; that with the aid of X-rays it becomes transparent, the light pa.s.sing through it as water pa.s.ses through network, revealing what is on the other side. Every schoolboy also knows that his own body can be so photographed as to reveal its skeleton.

But the Church has yet to learn from M. Bergson the alphabet of this new knowledge, namely, that our senses and our reason are what they are because of a long evolution in _action_--not in pure thought. We have got our sight by looking for prey or for enemies, and our hearing by listening for the movement of prey or of enemies. Our reason, too, is fashioned out of a long heredity of action, that is to say an immemorial discipline in an existence purely animal. So powerful is the influence of this heredity, so real seems to us a physical world which is not real, so infallible seem to us the senses by which we fail to live successfully even as animals, that, as Christ said, a man must be born again before he can enter the Kingdom of G.o.d--that is to say, before he can behold and inhabit Reality.

At the head of this chapter I have set a quotation from a leading article in _The Times_ on the recent lectures of M. Coue. It is now eighteen years ago, treading in the footsteps of Frederic Myers, that I discussed with some of the chief medical hypnotists in London and Paris the phenomena of mental suggestion. It was known then that auto-suggestion is a force of tremendous power. It was stated then that "an immense hope is dawning on the world," but not then, not even now, is it realised that this awkward term of "auto-suggestion" is merely a synonym for the more beautiful and ancient words, meditation and prayer.

We know now that a man can radically change his character, can uproot the toughest habits of a lifetime, by telling himself that his will is master in his house of life[9]. And we think that we have made this discovery, forgetting that Shakespeare said "The love of heaven makes us heavenly," and that Christ said, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled," and "All things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive," or, as Mark has it, "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them," and "According to your faith be it unto you."

[Footnote 9: At Nancy even a lesion has been cured by suggestion.]

With our present knowledge of the universe and of the human mind, it is at last possible for us to perceive in the confused records of the New Testament the nature of Christ's teaching. He loved the world for its beauty, but He penetrated its delusions and breathed the air of its only reality. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth ... but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven ... for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth." "He that hath ears to hear let him hear."

His world was always the world of thought. The actual deed of sin was merely a physical consequence; the cause was spiritual: it was an evil thought; to harbour an evil thought is to commit the sin. He looked into the hearts of men, into their thoughts, and there only He found their reality. All else was transitory. All else would see corruption and die.

The flesh profiteth nothing. But the thought of a man--that is to say the region now being explored by the psycho-a.n.a.lyst, the psycho-therapeutist, and the psycho I know not what else--this was the one region in which Jesus moved, the region in which He proclaimed his transvaluation of values, a region of which He was so complete a master that He could heal delusion at a word and disorder by a touch.

One does not perhaps wholly realise, until one has read the muddied works of modern psychology, how sublime was the soul of Jesus. It might be possible to infer His divinity from the simplicity of the language and the white purity of the thought with which He expressed truths of the profoundest significance even in regions where so many fall into unhealthiness. "No man can serve two masters"--is not that the teaching of the modern hypnotist in dealing with "a divided self"? "Set your affections on things above"--is not that the counsel of the sane psycho-a.n.a.lyst in treating a diseased mind? "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you"--is not this the message of M. Coue, the teaching of auto-suggestion?--that teaching which makes us say at last that "an immense hope is dawning on the world."

And, in sober truth, we may indeed believe that this immense hope is dawning on the world; the hope that mankind may recognise in Jesus, Who called Himself the Light of the World, the world's great Teacher of Reality.

Here we approach that unifying principle which was the object of our quest in setting out to explore the chaos of opinion in the modern Church.

Is it not possible that the Church might see the trivial unimportance of all those matters which at present dismember her, if she saw the supreme importance of Christ as a Teacher? Might she not come to behold a glory in that Teaching greater even than that which she has so heroically but so unavailingly endeavoured to make the world behold in the crucified Sacrifice and Propitiation for its sins?

Is there not here the opportunity of an evangel, the dawning of an immense hope on the world?

But let the Church ask herself, before she abandons her labour of expounding doctrines concerning the Person of Christ, whether she is quite clear as to the teaching of Jesus. "Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven."

Read St. Mark, the earliest, the least corrupted, of the narratives. It is a declaration of a new power in human life, and a record of its achievements. It is this, and nothing else. The one great word of that gospel is Faith--not faith in a formula or an inst.i.tution, but faith in the absolute supremacy of spirit. Faith in spirit means power--power over circ.u.mstance, power over matter, power over the heredity of our animal origin. Jesus not only sets men free from the prison-house of material delusion, as Plato and others sought to do; He teaches them the way in which alone they can exercise spiritual dominion.

There were two things to which He set no limits: one, the love of G.o.d, and the other, the power of Faith.

Let all the schools in the Church revise their definition of the word _faith_, and unity will come of itself. Faith, as Jesus employed that term, meant _making use of belief_--belief that the spiritual alone is the real. Faith is the action of the soul. It is the working of a power. It is mastery of life.

Let the Church realise that Jesus taught this power of the soul. Let her begin to exercise her own spiritual powers. And then let her understand that she is in the world to teach men, to lead the advance of evolution, to educate humanity in the use of its highest powers.

A knowledge of the sense in which Jesus employed the word Faith is the clue to the recovery of Christian influence.

This is the suggestion which I venture to submit to the Church, at a moment in history when the harsh and brutal spirit of materialism is crushing all faith out of the soul and leaving the body no tenant but its appet.i.tes.

I do not think any observant man can deny that the whole "suggestion" of the modern world is of an evil nature, that is to say, of a nature which fastens upon the mind the delusions of the senses, making it believe that what it sees is reality, persuading it that the gratification of those senses is the end and object of existence. The wages of this suggestion is death--the death of the soul.

How far the world is gone from sanity, and how clearly science endorses Christ's teaching, may be seen in the modern craze for unhealthy excitement, and in the medical condemnation of that morbid pa.s.sion. A well-known doctor in London, Sir Bruce Bruce-Porter, has lately condemned Grand Guignol as intensifying the emotion of fear or anxiety--"Take no heed"--and has declared anger, or any violence of feeling, to be a danger--"Love your enemies"--pointing out that "the experiment of inoculating a guinea-pig with the perspiration taken from the forehead of a man in a violent temper has resulted in the death of the guinea-pig with all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning."

Science is the one voice that condemns in these days the self-destroying madness of a world set on seeking to live habitually in the lower life.

Sometimes journalism may light a candle of reason in our darkness, as when _The Times_ recently pointed out in a leading article that the half-humorous interest of the world in the murderer Landru had its rise in a profound instinct of the human spirit, namely, that horror must be laughed at if it is not to be feared--to fear it is to be overwhelmed by it. This instinct is "an unconscious refusal to believe in the ultimate reality of evil; it is the predecessor of the scientific spirit which says that evil is something to be overcome by understanding it."

Out of such a lethargy as that which now holds her captive, I do not think the Church can be roused except by the trumpets of war. Let her, then, consider whether there is not here, in this world of false values, of low ambitions, of mean pleasures, of dark materialism, and of perilous superst.i.tions, a world to be fought, as the doctors fight it, and the best kind of newspapers, if only for the sake of posterity, a world against which it is good to oppose oneself--the Children of Light against the Children of Darkness.

What is the good news of Christianity if it is not the news that "the spiritual alone is the real," that there is freedom for human life and mastery for the human soul, that faith in the spiritual is power over the material? Even in the tentative form which M. Bergson uses to reveal the reality of the spiritual world there is such joy that one of his interpreters can exclaim:

Here we are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm secrecy of the darkness which ushers our trembling being into birth. Distinctions fail us. Words are useless now. We hear the wells of consciousness at their mysterious task like an invisible shiver of running water through the mossy shades of the caves. I dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon myself to the delight of being a pulsing reality. I no longer know whether I see scents, breathe sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do I think? The question has no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my complete self, each of my att.i.tudes, each of my changes. It is not my sight which is indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is I who have resumed contact with pure reality, whose essential movement admits no form of number.

How much greater the joy of him who knows that Reality is G.o.d, and that G.o.d is Father.

The open secret flashes on the brain, As if one almost guessed it, almost knew Whence we have sailed and voyage whereunto.

Let us suppose that the whole Church of Christ was engaged in teaching men this high mystery, this open secret, that all such great a.s.sociations as the Christian Students' Movement, the Adult Sunday School Movement, the World a.s.sociation for Adult Education, and all the numerous Missionary Societies throughout the whole earth--let us suppose that the entire Church of Christ was at work in the world teaching Christ's teaching, _educating_ men, bringing it home to the heart and mind of humanity that "life is mental travel," that it is in our thoughts we live and by our thoughts we are shaped, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of G.o.d, that all terrestrial values are radically false, that to hunger and thirst after anything is to get it, that the power of "the dominant wish" is our fate, that in love alone can we live to the full stature of our destiny, that the Kingdom of G.o.d is within us, that the engine of faith has not yet been exerted by the whole human race in concert, that conquests await us in the spiritual world before which all the conquests of the material world will pale into insignificance, that we are spirits finding our way out of the darkness of an animal ancestry into the Light of an immortal inheritance as children of G.o.d; let us suppose that this, and not dogma was the Voice of the Church; must we not say that by such teaching the whole world would eventually be rescued from our present chaos and in the fulness of time be born again into the knowledge of spiritual reality?

I believe it is only when a man realises that in its final a.n.a.lysis the whole universe is invisible, and ceases to think of himself as an animal and becomes profoundly sensible of himself as a spirit, and a spirit in communion with a spiritual reality closer than hands and feet, that it is possible for him to fulfil the two great commandments on which hang all the Law and the Prophets. And without that fulfilment there must always be chaos.

If the Church will not teach the world, modern science will inspire philosophy to take up anew the teaching of Plato, and the world will go forward into the light, but with no creative love in its soul to save it from itself. "If therefore," said Christ, "the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness."