The Meaning of Faith Part 18

Some hope arises when we observe that this experience which so perplexes us is fully acknowledged in the Bible. The popular supposition is that when one opens the Scripture he finds himself in a world of constant and triumphant faith. No low moods and doubts can here obscure the trust of men; here G.o.d is always real, saints sing in prison or dying see their Lord enthroned in heaven. When one, however, really knows the Bible, it obviously is no serene record of untroubled faith. It is turbulent with moods and doubt.

Here, to be sure, is the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, on Immortality, but here too is another cry, burdened with all the doubt man ever felt about eternal life, "That which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; and man hath no preeminence above the beasts" (Eccl. 3:19). The Scripture has many exultant pa.s.sages on divine faithfulness, but Jeremiah's bitter prayer is not excluded: "Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? Wilt thou indeed be unto me as a deceitful brook, as waters that fail?" (Jer. 15:18). The confident texts on prayer are often quoted, but there are cries of another sort: Job's complaint, "Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him" (Job 23:8); Habakkuk's bitterness, "O Jehovah, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear?

I cry unto thee of violence and thou wilt not save" (Hab. 1:2). The Bible is no book of tranquil faith. From the time when Gideon, in a mood like that of mult.i.tudes today, cried, "Oh, my Lord, if Jehovah is with us, why then is all this befallen us?" (Judges 6:13) to the complaint of the slain saints in the Apocalypse, "How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood" (Rev.

6:10), the Bible is acquainted with doubt. It knows the searching, perplexing, terrifying questions that in all ages vex men's souls. If the Psalmist, in an exultant mood, sang, "Jehovah is my shepherd," he also cried, "Jehovah, why casteth thou off my soul? Why hidest thou thy face from me?" (Psalm 88:14).

No aspect of the Scripture could bring it more warmly into touch with man's experience than this confession of fluctuating moods. At least in this the Bible is our book. Great heights are there, that we know something of. Psalmists sing in adoration, prophets are sure of G.o.d and of his coming victory; apostles pledge in sacrifice the certainty of their belief, and the Master on Transfiguration Mountain prays until his countenance is radiant. And depths are there, that modern men know well. Saints cry out against unanswered prayer and cannot understand how such an evil, wretched world is ruled by a good G.o.d; in their bitter griefs they complain that G.o.d has cast them off, and utterly forgotten and, dismayed, doubt even that a man's death differs from a dog's. This is our book. For the faith of many of us, however we insist that we are Christians, is not tranquil, steady, and serene.

It is moody, occasional, spasmodic, with hours of great a.s.surance, and other hours when confidence sags and trust is insecure.

II

Faith so generally is discussed as though it were a creed, accepted once for all and thereafter statically held, that the influence of our moods on faith is not often reckoned with. But the moods of faith are the very pith and marrow of our actual experience. When a Christian congregation recite together their creedal affirmation, "I believe in G.o.d," it _sounds_ as though they all maintained a solid, constant faith. But when in imagination, one breaks up the congregation and interprets from his knowledge of men's lives what the faith of the individuals actually means, he sees that they believe in G.o.d not evenly and constantly, but more or less, sometimes very much, sometimes not confidently at all. Our faith in G.o.d is not a static matter such as the recitation of a creed suggests. Some things we do believe in steadily. That two plus two make four, that the summed angles of a triangle make two right angles--of such things we are unwaveringly sure. No moods can shake our confidence; no griefs confuse us, no moral failures quench our certainty. Though the heavens fall, two and two make four! But our faith in G.o.d belongs in another realm. It is a vital experience. It involves the whole man, with his chameleon moods, his glowing insights, his exalted hours, and his dejected days when life flows sluggishly and no great thing seems real.

This experience of variable moods in faith does not belong especially to feeble folk, whose ups and downs in their life with G.o.d would ill.u.s.trate their whole irresolute and flimsy living. The great believers sometimes know best this tidal rise and fall of confidence.

Elijah one day, with absolute belief in G.o.d, defied the hosts of Baal and the next, in desolate reaction, wanted to die. Luther put it with his rugged candor, "Sometimes I believe and sometimes I doubt." John Knox, at liberty to preach, "dings the pulpit into blads" in his confident utterance; but the same Knox recalled that, in the galleys, his soul knew "anger, wrath, and indignation which it conceived against G.o.d, calling all his promises in doubt." The Master himself was not a stranger to this experience. He believed in G.o.d with unwavering a.s.surance, as one believes in the shining of the sun. But the fact that the sun perpetually shines did not imply that every day was a sunshiny day for him. The clouds came pouring up out of his dark horizons and hid the sun. "Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say?" (John 12:27). And once the fog drove in, so dense and dark that one would think there never had been any sun at all. "My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46).

This experience of fluctuating moods is too familiar to be denied, too influential to be neglected. There can be no use in hiding it from candid thought behind the recitation of a creedal formula. There may be great use in searching out its meaning. For there are ways in which this common experience, at first vexatious and disquieting, may supply solid ground for Christian confidence.

III

In dealing with these variant moods of faith we are not left without an instrument. We have _the sense of value_. We discern not only the _existence_ of things, but their _worth_ as well. When, therefore, a man has recognized his moods as facts, he has not said all that he can say about them. Upon no objects of experience can the sense of value be used with so much certainty as upon our moods. _We know our best hours when they come._ The lapidary, with unerring skill, learns to distinguish a real diamond from a false, but his knowledge is external and contingent, compared with the inward and authoritative certainty with which we know our best hours from our worst. Our great moods carry with them the authentic marks of their superiority.

Experience readily confirms this truth. We all have, for example, _cynical and sordid moods_. At such times, only the appet.i.tes of physical life seem much to matter; only the things that minister to common comfort greatly count. When Sydney Smith, the English cleric, writes, "I feel an ungovernable interest in my horses, my pigs, and my plants. But I am forced and always was forced to task myself up to an interest in any higher objects," most of us can understand his mood.

We grow obtuse at times to all that in our better moods had thrilled us most. Nature suffers in our eyes; great books seem dull; causes that once we served with zest lose interest, and personal relationships grow pale and tame, From such mere dullness we easily drift down to cynicism. Music once had stirred the depths, but now our spirits tally with the scoffer's jest, "What are you crying about with your Wagner and your Brahms? It is only horsehair sc.r.a.ping on catgut." Man's most holy things may lose their grandeur and become a b.u.t.t of ridicule.

When the mood of Aristophanes is on, we too may hoist serious Socrates among the clouds, and set him talking moonshine while the cynical look on and laugh. The spirit that "sits in the seat of the scornful" is an ancient malady.

But every man is thoroughly aware that these are not his best moods.

From such depleted att.i.tudes we come to worthier hours; _real life_ arrives again. Nature and art become imperatively beautiful; moral causes seem worth sacrifice, and before man's highest life, revealed in character, ideal, and faith, we stand in reverence. These are our great hours, when spiritual values take the throne, when all else dons livery to serve them, and we find it easy to believe in G.o.d.

Again, we have _crushed and rebellious moods_. We may have been Christians for many years; yet when disaster, long delayed, at last descends, and our dreams are wrecked, we _do_ rebel. Complaint rises hot within us. Joseph Parker, preacher at the City Temple, London, at the age of sixty-eight could write that he had never had a doubt.

Neither the goodness of G.o.d nor the divinity of Christ, nor anything essential to his Christian faith had he ever questioned. But within a year an experience had fallen of which he wrote: "In that dark hour I became almost an atheist. For G.o.d had set his foot upon my prayers and treated my pet.i.tions with contempt. If I had seen a dog in such agony as mine, I would have pitied and helped the dumb beast; yet G.o.d spat upon me and cast me out as an offense--out into the waste wilderness and the night black and starless." No new philosophy had so shaken the faith of this long unquestioning believer. But his wife had died and he was in a heartbroken mood that all his arguments, so often used on others, could not penetrate. He believed in G.o.d as one believes in the sun when he has lived six months in the polar night and has not seen it.

These heartbroken moods, however, are not our best. Out of rebellious grief we lift our eyes in time to see how other men have borne their sorrows off and built them into character. We see great lives shine out from suffering, like Rembrandt's radiant faces from dark backgrounds. We see that all the virtues which we most admire--constancy, patience, fort.i.tude--are impossible without stern settings, and that in time of trouble they find their aptest opportunity, their n.o.blest chance. We rise into a new mood, grow resolute not to be crushed, but, as though there were moral purpose in man's trials, to be hallowed, deepened, purified. The meaning of Samuel Rutherford's old saying dawns upon us, "When I am in the cellar of affliction, I reach out my hand for the king's wine." And folk, seeing us, it may be, take heart and are a.s.sured that G.o.d is real, since he can make a man bear off his trial like that and grow the finer for it. These are our great hours too, when the rains descend, and the winds blow, and the floods come, and beat upon our house, and it is founded on a rock!

Once more, we have hours of _discouragement about the world_. The more we have cared for moral causes and invested life in their advancement, the more we are desolate when they seem to fail. Some rising tide in which we trusted turns to ebb again, injustice wins its victories, the people listen to demagogues and not to statesmen, social causes essential to human weal are balked, wars come and undo the hopes of centuries. Who does not sometimes fall into the Slough of Despond?

Cavour, disheartened about Italy, went to his room to kill himself.

John Knox, dismayed about Scotland, in a pathetic prayer ent.i.tled, "John Knox with deliberate mind to his G.o.d," wrote, "Now, Lord put an end to my misery." We generally think of Luther in that intrepid hour when he faced Charles V at Worms; but he had times as well when he was sick with disappointment. "Old, decrepit, lazy, worn out, cold, and now one-eyed," so runs a letter, "I write, my Jacob, I who hoped there might at length be granted to me, already dead, a well-earned rest."

During the Great War, this mood of discouragement has grown familiar.

Many can understand what Robert Louis Stevenson meant when he wrote, of the Franco-Prussian war, "In that year, cannon were roaring for days together on French battlefields, and I would sit in my isle (I call it mine after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and the pain of men's wounds, and the weariness of their marching.... It was something so distressing, so instant, that I lay in the heather on the top of the island, with my face hid, kicking my heels for agony."

But these dismayed hours are not our best. As Bunyan put it, even Giant Despair has fainting fits on sunshiny days. In moods of clearer insight we perceive out of how many Egypts, through how many round-about wilderness journeys, G.o.d has led his people to how many Promised Lands. The Exodus was not a failure, although the Hebrews, disheartened, thought it was and even Moses had his dubious hours; the mission of Israel did not come to an ign.o.ble end in the Exile, although mult.i.tudes gave up their faith because of it and only prophets dared believe the hopeful truth. The crucifixion did not mean the Gospel's end, as the disciples thought, nor did Paul, imprisoned, lose his ministry. _Nothing in history is more a.s.sured than this, that only men of faith have known the truth._ And in hours of vision when this fact shines clear we rise to be our better selves again. What a clear ascent the race has made when wide horizons are taken into view! What endless possibilities must lie ahead! What ample reasons we possess to thrust despair aside, and to go out to play our part in the forward movement of the plan of G.o.d!

"Dreamer of dreams? we take the taunt with gladness, Knowing that G.o.d beyond the years you see, Has wrought the dreams that count with you for madness Into the texture of the world to be."

These are our better hours.

IV

Such sordid, cynical, crushed, rebellious, and discouraged moods we suffer, but we have hours of insight, too, when we are at our best.

And as we face this ebb and flow of confidence, which at the first vexatiously perplexed our faith, an arresting truth is clear. The creed of irreligion, to which men are tempted to resign their minds, is simply the _intellectual formulation of what is implied in our less n.o.ble hours_. Take what man's cynical, sordid, crushed, rebellious, and discouraged moods imply, and set it in a formal statement of life's meaning, and the result is the creed of irreligion. But take man's best hours, when the highest seems the realest, when even sorrows cannot crush his soul, and when the world is still the battlefield of G.o.d for men, and formulate what these hours imply, and the result is the central affirmations of religious faith. Even Renan is sure that "man is most religious in his best moments." Of this high interpretation our variant moods are susceptible, that _we know our best hours when they come, and the faith implied in them is essential Christianity_. As Browning sings it:

"Faith is my waking life: One sleeps, indeed, and dreams at intervals, We know, but waking's the main point with us."

This fact which we so have come upon is a powerful consideration in favor of religion's truth. _Are we to trust for our guidance the testimony of our worse or better hours?_ We have low moods; so, too, we have cellars in our houses. But we do not _live_ there; we live upstairs! It is not unnatural to have irreligious moods. There may be hours when the eternal Energy from which this universe has come seems to be playing solitaire for fun. It shuffles the stars and planets to see what may chance from their combinations, and careless of the consequence, from everlasting to everlasting it shuffles and plays, and shuffles and plays again. But these are not our best hours. We may have moods when the universe seems to us, as Carlyle's figure pictures it, "as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein, I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured," but we are inwardly ashamed of times like that. Man comes to this brutal universe of irreligion by way of his ign.o.ble moods.

When he lifts up his soul in his great hours of love, of insight, and of devotion, life never looks to him as irreligion pictures it; it never has so looked to him and it never will!

In his best hours man always suspects that the Eternal must be akin to what is best in us, that our ideals are born from above, have there their source and destiny, that the Eternal Purpose reigns and yet shall justify the struggle of the ages, and that in anyone who is the best we know, we see most clearly what the Eternal is and means. That goodness is deeper than evil, that spirit is more than flesh, that life is lord of death, that love is the source of all--such convictions come naturally to us when we are at our best. When one examines such affirmations, he perceives that Christianity in its essential faiths is the expression of our finest hours. This is the source whence Christianity has come; it is man's best become articulate. Some used to say that Christian faith had been foisted on mankind by priests. Christian faith has no more artificially been foisted upon human life than the full blown rose is foisted on the bud. Christianity springs up out of man's best life; it is the utterance of his transcendent moods; _it is man believing in the validity of his own n.o.blest days_.

Christianity, therefore, at its heart can never fail. Its theologies may come and go, its inst.i.tutions rise and fall, its rituals have their dawn, their zenith, and their decline, but one persistent force goes on and will go on. _The Gospel is saying to man what man at his best is saying to himself._ Christ has a tremendous ally in human life--our n.o.blest hours. They are all upon his side. What _he_ says, _they_ rise to cry "Amen" to. When we are most truly ourselves we are nearest to him. Antagonistic philosophies, therefore, may spring up to a.s.sail the Gospel's influence, and seem to triumph, and fall at last and be forgotten. Still Christ will go on speaking.

Nothing can tear him from his spiritual influence over men. _In every generation he has man's n.o.blest hours for his ally._

V

In the fact to which our study of man's variant moods has brought us we have not only a confirming consideration in favor of religion's truth, but an _explanation of some people's unbelief_. They live habitually in their low moods; they inhabit spiritual cellars. We are accustomed to say that some friend would be saved from his ign.o.ble att.i.tudes by a vital religious faith; but it is also true that his persistent clinging to ign.o.ble att.i.tudes may be the factor that makes religious faith impossible. According to d.i.c.kens's "Tale of Two Cities" a prisoner in the Bastille, who had lived in a cell and cobbled shoes for many years, became so enamored of the narrow walls, the darkness, the task's monotony, that, when liberated, he built a cell at the center of his English home, and on days when the skies were clear and birds were singing, the tap of his cobbler's hammer in the dark could still be heard. So men, by an habitual residence in imprisoning moods, render themselves incapable of loving the wide horizons, the great faiths and hopes of religion. They do not merely make excursions of transient emotion into morose hours and, like men that find that the road is running into malarial swamps, turn swiftly to the hills. They dwell in their moroseness; they _choose_ it, and often obstinately resist deliverance.

The common moods that thus incapacitate the soul for faith are easily seen in any man's experience. There are _sullen_ tempers when we are churlish and want so to be. There are _stupid_ tempers, when our soul is too negligent to care, too dull to ask for what only aspiring minds can crave or find. There are _bored_ moods when we feel about all life what Malachi's people felt about worship, "Behold, what a weariness is it!" (Mal. 1:13); _rebellious_ moods when, like Jonah, deprived of a comfort he desired, we cry, "I do well to be angry, even unto death"

(Jonah 4:9); _suspicious_ moods, when we mistrust everyone, and even of some righteous Job hear Satan's insinuating sneer, "Does Job fear G.o.d for nought?" (Job 1:9). No man is altogether strange to _frivolous_ hours, when those thoughts are lost which must be handled seriously if at all, and _wilful_ hours, when some private desire a.s.sumes the center of the stage and angrily resents another voice than his. To say that one who habitually harbors such moods cannot know G.o.d is only a portion of the truth; such a man cannot know anything worth knowing. He can know neither fine friends nor great books; he cannot appreciate beautiful music or sublime scenery; he is lost to the deepest loves of family and to every n.o.ble enthusiasm for human help.

Athwart the knowledge of these most gracious and necessary things stand our obtuse, ign.o.ble moods. The sullen, stupid, bored, rebellious, suspicious, frivolous, or wilful tempers, made into a spiritual residence, are the most deadly prison of the soul. Of course one who dwells there has no confidence in G.o.d. Lord Shaftesbury, the English philanthropist, made too sweeping a statement about this, but one can see the basis for his judgment: "Nothing beside ill-humor, either natural or forced, can bring a man to think seriously that the world is governed by any devilish or malicious power. I very much question whether anything beside ill-humor can be the cause of atheism." At least one may be sure that where ill-humor habitually reigns, vital faith in G.o.d is made impossible.

After full acknowledgment, therefore, of the momentous intellectual problems of belief, we must add that there is a _moral qualification for faith in G.o.d_. So great a matter is not achieved by any sort of person, with any kind of habitual moods and tempers. There are views which cellar windows do not afford; one must have balconies to see them. When Jesus said that the pure in heart are blessed because they see G.o.d, he was not thinking merely, perhaps not chiefly, of s.e.xual impurity as hindering vision. He was pleading for a heart cleansed of all such perverse, morose, and wayward moods as shut the blinds on the soul's windows. He knew that men could not easily escape the sense of G.o.d's reality if they kept their vision clear. On elevated days we naturally think of Spirit as real, and see ourselves as expressions of spiritual purpose, our lives as servants of a spiritual cause. When one habitually dwells in these finer moods, he cannot tolerate a world where his Best is a transient accident. _He must have G.o.d, for faith in G.o.d is the supreme a.s.sertion of the reality and eternity of man's Best._ Any man who habitually lives in his finest moods will not easily escape the penetrating sense of G.o.d's reality.

VI

The certainty with which we tend to be most deeply religious in our best hours is clear when we consider that a man does practically believe in the things which he counts of highest worth. Lotze, the philosopher, even says that "Faith _is_ the feeling that is appreciative of value." It is conceivable that one might be so const.i.tuted that without any sense of value he could study facts, as a deaf man might observe a symphony. The sound-waves such a man could mechanically measure; he could a.n.a.lyze the motions of the players and note the reactions of the crowd, but he would hear no music. He would not suffuse the whole performance with his musical appreciations; he would neither like it nor condemn. Man might be so const.i.tuted as to face facts without feeling, but he is not. Facts never stand in our experience thus barren and unappreciated--mere neutral _things_ that mean nothing and have no value. The botanist in us may a.n.a.lyze the flowers, but the poet in us estimates them. The penologist in us may take the Bertillon measurements of a boy, but the father in us best can tell how much, in spite of all his sin, that boy is worth. This power to estimate life's _values_ is the fountain from which spring our music, painting, and literature, our ideals and loves and purposes, our morals and religion. Without it no man can live in the real world at all.

If we would know, therefore, in what, at our highest alt.i.tudes, we tend to believe, we should ask _what it is that we value most, when we rise toward our best_. In our lowest hours what sordid, mercenary, beastly things men may prize each heart knows well. But ever as we approach our best the things that are worth most to us become elevated and refined. Our better moods open our eyes to a world where character is of more worth than all the rest beside, and through which moral purpose runs, to be served with sacrifice. We become aware of spiritual values in behalf of which at need physical existence must be willingly laid down; and words like honor, love, fidelity, and service in our hours of insight have halos over them that poorer moods cannot discern. Man at his best, that is to say, _believes in_ an invisible world of spiritual values, and he furnishes the final proof of his faith's reality by sacrificing to it all lesser things. The good, the true, the beautiful command him in his finer hours, and at their beck and call he lays down wealth and ease and earthly hopes to be their servant. Men really _do believe_ in the things for which they sacrifice and die.

In no more searching way can a man's faith be described than _in terms of the objects which thus he values most_. Wherever men find some consuming aim that is for them so supreme in worth that they sacrifice all else to win it, we speak of their att.i.tude as a religion. The "religion of science" describes the absolute devotion of investigators to scientific research as the highest good; the "religion of art"

describes the consuming pa.s.sion with which some value beauty. When we say of one that "money is his G.o.d" we mean that he estimates it as life's highest treasure, and when with Paul we speak of others, "whose G.o.d is the belly" (Phil. 3:19), we mean men whose sensual life is to them the thing worth most. _What men believe in, therefore, is most deeply seen not by any opinions which they profess, but by the things they prize._ Faith, as Ruskin said, is "that by which men act while they live; not that which they talk of when they die." Many a man uses pious affirmations of Christian faith, but it is easy to observe from his life that what he really believes in is money. Where a man's treasure is, as Jesus said, his heart is, and there his faith is, too.

Is there any doubt, then, what we most believe in when we are at our best? While in our lower alt.i.tudes it may be easy to believe that the physical is the ultimately real, in our upper alt.i.tudes we so value the spiritual world, that we tend with undeniable conviction to feel sure that it must be causal and eternal. Materialism is man's "night-view" of his life; but the "day-view" is religion. Tyndall the scientist was regarded by the Christians of his generation as the enemy of almost everything that they held dear. Let him, then, be witness for the truth which we have stated. "I have noticed," he said, speaking of materialism, "during years of self-observation, that it is not in hours of clearness and vigor that this doctrine commends itself to my mind."

The challenge, therefore, presented to every one of us by Christian faith is ultimately this: _Shall I believe the testimony of my better hours or of my worse?_ Many who deny the central affirmations of the Gospel put the object of their denial far away from them as though it were an external thing; they say that they deny the creed or the Bible or the doctrine about G.o.d. Such a description of a man's rejection of religious faith is utterly inadequate--the real object of his denial is inward. One may, indeed, discredit forms of doctrine and either be unsure about or altogether disbelieve many things that Christians hold, but when one makes a clean sweep of religion and banishes the central faiths of Christianity _he is denying the testimony of his own finest days_. From such rejection of faith one need not appeal to creed nor Bible, nor to anything that anybody ever said. Let the challenge strike inward to the man's own heart. From his denial of religious faith we may appeal to the hours that he has known and yet will know again, when the road rose under his feet and from a height he looked on wide horizons and knew that he was at his best. To those hours of clear insight, of keen thought, of love and great devotion, when he knew that the spiritual is the real and the eternal, we may appeal. They were his best. He _knows_ that they were his best. And as long as humanity lives upon the earth this conviction must underlie great living--that _we will not deny the validity of our own best hours_.

CHAPTER IX

Faith in the Earnest G.o.d

DAILY READINGS