Religious Perplexities Part 3

Such a religion as I have been trying to describe will be found in Christianity--yes, and in other religions also. Far be it from me to set up an exclusive claim for Christianity at this point. Anyone who does that goes a long way towards forfeiting his t.i.tle to be called a Christian. Let each of us look for truth where it is most accessible and where it speaks the language he best understands. For most of us here Christianity has this advantage. It gives the sharpest point to the challenge of life as we know life.

Christianity is the simplest and most difficult religion in the world, best adapted therefore for strong races, endowed with deep but silent affections, and with the plain-dealing mind whose conversation is "Yea, yea and nay, nay." But here let me utter a word of warning.

There is an outcry in these days for a Christianity shorn of its complications, and reduced to its simplest and most intelligible form.

It is a thing greatly to be desired. I have been pleading for it in what has gone before. But let n.o.body suppose that, when Christianity has been reduced to its simplest and most intelligible form, it will be found an easy religion to put into practice. It will be found immensely more difficult than before. Only there will be this further difference. Whereas the old difficulties, those that came from presenting Christianity in complicated forms, merely irritated and confused us and caused us to waste ourselves upon irrelevance, the new ones, the difficulties of simple Christianity, meet us on a far higher level, introduce us to essentials, and give us a battle to fight that is really worth fighting. That is an enormous difference, but not in the direction of making simple Christianity easier than the other kind.

It has been said that Christianity reduced to its simplest and most intelligible form needs only two words to express it--"Follow me." It has been said, also, that if all Christian men for the next twenty years would give up the attempt to _explain_ Christ and devote their attention to _following_ him, at the end of that time they would know more about the person of Christ than they had ever known before, and they would have put Christianity in a posture to conquer the world. I accept all that. But before we claim that our problem is solved, let us think for a moment what "following Christ" really means, and to what it commits us, when we make it the keyword of simple Christianity.

Whoever sets out to follow Christ will have to follow him a long way and to follow him into some dark places. The path we have to follow is a narrow one. It runs all the time on the edge of a precipitous mystery, sometimes taking you up to the sunlit heights and the Mount of Transfiguration, and sometimes taking you down into the fires of suffering and into the shadows of death. Following Christ means that when you find these dizzy things before you, these dark things in your path, you go through them and not round them. Have you a good head?

Have you a stout heart? Are you loyal to the leader in front? Easy enough while the road runs by the shining sh.o.r.es of the Lake of Galilee, but not so easy when it turns into the Garden of Gethsemane and becomes the Via Dolorosa.

There are those who think they have followed Christ when they have obeyed the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, loved their neighbour as themselves and done unto others as they would that others should do to them. To follow as far as that is to go a long way, much longer indeed than most of us can claim to have gone. But to stop _there_ is to stop in the middle, to miss the end of the journey, to come short of the point of arrival, where the key lies to the meaning and value of all that has gone before. We are too apt to rest in the thought that to follow Christ is merely to follow a teacher or a reformer, so that enough has been done when we have repeated his doctrine of Fatherhood and brotherhood, voted for his precepts, and practised as much of them as we can, or perhaps only as much as we find convenient. Let there be no mistake as to the inadequacy of all that, whether presented in a simple form or any other. To follow Christ is to follow a victor in life's battle, a conqueror over suffering and death, through the completeness of his loyalty to the Great Companion. Hence the power which makes his teaching live; hence the driving force which makes his Gospel effective for the regeneration of society.

You see, then, what is involved. Unless we can follow him through the point where his victory was won, all the rest will not amount to very much. We must follow him to the _end_ if we are to be his disciples.

It is said of his first followers that when they came to this last lap of the journey, when the road before them took that critical turn which led through the Garden of Gethsemane, and became a Via Dolorosa, they all forsook him and fled. Do not some of our modernized versions of Christianity show a similar weakness, a similar reluctance to grasp the nettle, a similar tendency to stop short in their following of Christ precisely at the critical point? They forsake him and flee--flee for their lives!--This it is that makes simple Christianity so difficult; so difficult but so splendid, so infinitely worth achievement.

There was a phase in the ministry of Jesus, a comparatively untroubled one, when he went about among men in a temper of radiant optimism, declaring his confidence in the Divine Companion, a confidence so complete that all anxiety for the morrow was banished and the soul freed for a life of the utmost generosity and beneficence. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Nothing too bad to be incurable; nothing too good to be hoped for; nothing too high to be attempted; nothing so precious that we cannot afford to give it away. Yes, even that! For there is that within the hero which is so rich that he can afford to give his very life away, and be none the poorer, but the richer; a strange discovery, made by many a brave lad during the recent war, as he prepared himself to "go over the top," and thought of his mother or of his beloved.

Then came another phase, such as we too must meet sooner or later, when his mission had to be fulfilled not by saying these things, not by saying anything, but by doing and bearing up to the limit of courage and endurance. The silence of Jesus in the presence of Pilate is the silence of one for whom the day of speech is over and the day of battle begun, the ultimatum delivered, and the trumpet sounding the attack.

Where are his followers now? They have all run away, as verbal Christianity always runs away when it comes to the critical point.

Fugitives from the crisis, every man of them! And what of that radiant optimism that broke out by the sh.o.r.es of the Galilean Lake? Well, it came near to breaking-point, as near as it could without actually giving way. But it held! It carried him through! The infinite Friendliness did not forsake him in his extremity, as his followers had done. At one point he thought it had forsaken him, but it had not.

For its nature is to be as true to the loyal soul as any loyal soul can be to it; waiting to attest its presence wherever the courage exists to make the experiment of trusting it. All prayers to it sum themselves up into one, which when it comes from the heart makes other prayers almost unnecessary--"Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit." _In tuas ma.n.u.s, Domine, meam animam commisi_.

So far, then, as I am able to understand these high matters, there is no such thing for any of us as getting rid of religious perplexity.

But there is such a thing as exchanging the perplexities which depress and weaken our nature for those which exalt and strengthen it. This world is ill adapted to the fearful and the unbelieving; but most exquisitely adapted to the loyal, the loving and the brave. To poltroonery of one kind or another the Spirit makes no concessions; it wears the face of a hard master to all pusillanimous demands. To its own children it is not only gracious but faithful. It gives them commissions bearing the sign manual of G.o.d; shares their perplexities; goes with them into their battles; stands by them in their time of need; interprets their bright hours to a tenfold brightness; and changes the mystery of their pain from an unfathomable darkness to an unfathomable light.

Behind the battle of the Creeds lies the battle of life--a much more serious affair. Wherever the seriousness of the greater battle is deeply felt the acrimony of the lesser is mitigated. The two battles are not unconnected, but let us take them in their right order.

Churches and sects which begin by fighting for their creeds are apt to end by fighting for their own importance--which is contrary to the spirit of the Christian religion and to the express command of Christ.

Are there not some among us who think that the way to establish their own creed is to destroy the creeds of their neighbours? But is that so? Does the flourishing of my form of Christianity depend on the languishing of yours? I say it does not! The more your form prospers the better for mine. Christianity is big enough to find room for both of us. The more devout you are in holding and practising what you believe the more you help me in being faithful to what I profess.

There is only one way in which the truth or falsity of any creed can be demonstrated--that is, by trying whether we can live up to it and observing what happens. What is needed, therefore, first of all, is not that we should destroy our neighbour's creed, but that we should help him to live up to it by living up to our own. I know of no other way in which the union of Christendom can be brought about.

[1] For doubts on this point see the last chapter of _Our Social Heritage_, by Professor Graham Wallas.

[2] I refer to the fact that for the last twenty years I have been Editor of the _Hibbert Journal_.

THE END

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