The Sources of Religious Insight Part 7

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One of the least encouraging features of recent discussion is the prominence and popularity of those philosophical opinions which are always proclaiming their "concrete" and "practical" character, while ignoring the most vital and concrete feature of all voluntary life.

For the very essence of the will is that, at every moment of action, it decides absolute issues, because it does irrevocable deeds, and therefore, if intelligent at all, is guided by opinions that are as absolutely true or false as their intended workings are irrevocable. I repeat: If you want to know what an absolute truth is, and what an absolute falsity, do anything whatever, and then try to undo your deed. You will find that the opinion which should counsel you to regard it as capable of being undone gives you simply and absolutely false coaching as to any game of life whatever. Every effort to undo your deed is a blunder. Every opinion that you can undo is a trivial and absolutely false absurdity. Just such triviality and absurdity belong to the thesis that absolute truth is an unpractical and inaccessible abstraction.

VII

If, with such a view of the nature of absolute truth, we turn back to estimate the sense in which our opinions about the world as a whole can be true or false, we now see that our account both of the insight of the reason, and of the nature of the world, {159} has become enriched by this whole a.n.a.lysis of the nature of opinion. _Opinions about the universe are counsels as to how to adjust your deeds to the purposes and requirements which a survey of the whole of the life whereto your life belongs shows to be the genuinely rational purposes and requirements._ Every such opinion then, whether true or false, is an effort to adjust your will and your conduct to the intents of a supreme will which decides values, establishes the rule of life, estimates purposes in the light of complete insight. That is, the insight to which your opinions appeal is indeed the insight of a real being who values, estimates, establishes, decides, as concretely as you do, and who is therefore not only all-wise, but possessed of a will. Your search for salvation is a seeking to adjust yourself to this supreme will. That such a will is real is as true as it is true that any opinion whatever which you can form with regard to the real world is either true or false. However ignorant you are, you are, then, in constant touch with the master of life; for you are constantly doing irrevocable deeds whose final value, whose actual and total success or failure, can only be real, or be known, from the point of view of the insight that faces the whole of real life, and with reference to the purposes of the will whose expression is the entire universe.

If, however, you say, with the pragmatists: "There is no whole world, there is no complete view, there is no will that wills the world; for all {160} is temporal, and time flows, and novelties constantly appear, and the world is just now incomplete, and therefore there is nothing eternal," then my answer is perfectly definite. Of course there is, _just at this point of time,_ no complete world. Of course, every new deed introduces novelties into the temporal world. But, on the other hand, even to a.s.sert this is to a.s.sert _that the future, and in fact all the future, in all its individual detail, belongs to reality, and forms part of its wholeness._ To admit this is to admit that the true insight, and the divine will, require, and get, _the endless whole of future time, as well as of past time, before them in one, not timeless, but time-inclusive survey, which embraces the whole of real life._ And just such a survey, and just such a life, not timeless, but time-inclusive, const.i.tute the eternal, which is real, not apart from time, and from our lives, but in, and through and above all our individual lives. The divine will wills in us and in all this world, with its endless past and its endless future, at once. The divine insight is not lifeless. It includes and surveys all life. All is temporal in its ceaseless flow and in its sequence of individual deeds. All is eternal in the unity of its meaning.

To a.s.sert this, I insist, is not to deny our freedom and our initiative. The divine will wills me, precisely in so far as it wills that, in each of my individual deeds, I should then and there express my own unique, and in so far free, choice. And to a.s.sert, as I do, that the divine will wills all "at once" {161} is not to a.s.sert that it wills all _at any one moment of time,_ but only that the divine will is expressed in the totality of its deeds that are done in all moments of time.

But this, you will say, is still philosophy, not what the plain man needs for his religion. The question remains: Through what source of insight are we able to adjust our daily lives to this divine wisdom and to this divine will? I answer: Through a source of insight which is accessible to the plainest and simplest reasonable and sincere human being. Yet this source of insight, not yet expressly named in our study, includes in a beautiful and spiritual unity the true sense of our individual experience, of our social experience, of our reason, and of our will, and gives us at length a genuine religion. This new source we are to study in our next lecture.

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V

THE RELIGION OF LOYALTY

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{165} V

THE RELIGION OF LOYALTY

Our first two lectures dealt with sources of religious insight well known to all of you, however unsatisfactory you may have found them.

Our third and fourth lectures have led us into philosophical discussions which many of you will have found neither satisfactory nor familiar. And so, in imagination, I can hear you declaring that, if the foregoing sources of insight are indeed all that we have, religious truth seems still very far away. "The saints," I hear you saying, "may comfort us when they tell us of their personal and private intuitions; but they perplex us with the conflicting variety of their experiences. The social enthusiasts undertake to show us the way to salvation through love; but the world of men in which they bid us seek the divine is a world that is by nature as much in need of salvation as we ourselves are. The sages point to the starry heaven of reason which, as they insist, overarches us; but this heaven seems cold; and its stars appear far away from our needy life. And if, replying to this very objection, and, incidentally, replying also to the doctrine of the pragmatists, {166} somebody insists that this heavenly world of the reason is also an expression of the living divine will, we still remember that our deepest need is to see how the divine will may be done on earth as it is in heaven. And this is what we have not yet learned to see. The foregoing sources then appear to leave us, after all, with no vital and positive religion."

I

Thus some of you may at this point express your discontent. If you do, I find this discontent justified. If the foregoing lectures had indeed exhausted the account of the accessible sources of religious insight, we should be hopeless of finding any religion that could satisfy at once the individual need for salvation, the social requirement that we should seek for salvation through union with our brethren, the rational demand for a coherent view of truth, and the aim of the will to conform itself to the laws of the master of life with whom we need to be united. In other words, all of the foregoing sources of insight, considered as separate sources, present to us problems which they do not solve, and leave the real nature of the saving process clouded by mists of ignorance. What we most need at this point is some source of insight which shall show how to unite the lessons that the preceding sources have furnished. The present lecture must be devoted to an account of such a source. I should be quite {167} helpless to engage in this new undertaking were it not for the fact that the spiritual life of humanity's best servants and friends has long since shown us how to overcome the difficulties by which our present inquiry is, at this point, beset. These friends and servants of mankind have used, in fact, that source of insight which I mentioned in the closing words of the last lecture, a source by means of which the results and the moving principles of individual experience, of social experience, of reason, and of will are brought into a certain creative unity to which the n.o.blest spiritual attainments of our world are due. We shall return, therefore, in this lecture, from speculation to life; and our guides will be, not the philosophers, nor yet the geniuses of the inarticulate religious intuitions, but those who, while they indeed possess intuitions and thoughts, also actually live in the spirit.

Nevertheless, for our purpose, the foregoing method of approaching our topic has been, I hope, justified. We wish to know the sources and to see what each is worth. We must therefore consider each source in its distinction from the others. Then only can we see what brings them together in the higher religious life. We must reflect where religion itself wins its way without reflection. Had we begun our study where this lecture begins, with the effort to understand at once this new source of insight, we should have been less able than we now are to discern the motives that enter into its {168} const.i.tution and to appreciate its accomplishments. We have had to emphasise difficulties in order to prepare the way for our study of that source of insight which, in the history of humanity's struggles toward the light, has best enabled men to triumph over these difficulties.

This new source has come into the lives of men in intimate connection with their efforts to solve the problem not merely of religion, in our present sense of the word, but also of duty. I shall therefore first have to tell you how the problem of duty is distinguished from the problem of religion. Then I shall show you how the effort to solve each of these problems has thrown light upon the other.

Duty and religion have, in the minds of all of you, close relations.

Both have to do with our ideals, with our needs, with the conforming of our lives to our ideals, and with the attainment of some sort of good. Yet you also well know that these relations of duty and of morality on the one hand, of religion and of salvation on the other, are not relations easy to define with entire clearness. Some men in our age, as you know, tell you that they are unable, in their present state of mind, to get much help from religion. And some men who insist that the religious problems have for them no solution whatever, are ardently and sincerely dutiful in spirit. On the other hand, there are those who, in their own minds, are so sure of salvation that they actually make light of the call of duty, or at least {169} see little that is saving in the thought of duty. In the opinion of very many, no effort to lead a dutiful life can lead to salvation unless some sort of divine grace, which is a free gift from above, intervenes to accomplish the saving process. Meanwhile, there are those who declare not only that the dutiful life tends of itself to lead to salvation, but that the persistent doing of our duty is precisely the whole of what const.i.tutes salvation.

You will readily see that the plan of these lectures forbids any direct study of the Pauline doctrine regarding the relation of faith to works, of divine grace to human dutifulness. The mere mention of St. Paul, however, side by side with the reminder that, at many times in history, and especially to-day, there are those for whom, despite Paul's teaching as to the vanity of mere works, there is no religion but the religion of duty, will serve to show that serious questions are here involved, and that the true relations between religion and morality are by no means self-evident.

Let me briefly distinguish between the religious interest and the moral interest. Then we may be able to recognise how closely they are related, and yet how far, under certain conditions, they may drift apart, and how sharply they may sometimes come to be opposed.

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II

There is an obvious contrast between the points of view from which morality and religion consider the problem of life. Whatever may be your views as to what your duty is, it is plain that the moral interest centres about this idea of duty. That is, the moral interest seeks to define right deeds and to insist that they shall be done. It estimates the rightness of deeds with reference to some ideal of life.

But however it conceives this ideal, it makes its main appeal to the active individual. It says: "Do this." The religious interest, on the other hand, centres about the sense of need, or, if it is successful in finding this need satisfied, it centres about the knowledge of that which has delivered the needy from their danger. It appeals for help, or waits patiently for the Lord, or rejoices in the presence of salvation. It therefore may a.s.sume any one of many different att.i.tudes toward the problem of duty. It may seek salvation through deeds, or again it may not, in the minds of some men, appeal to the active nature in any vigorous way whatever. Some religious moods are pa.s.sive, contemplative, receptive, adoring rather than strenuous. It is therefore quite consistent with the existence of a religious interest to feel suspicious of the dutiful restlessness of many ardent souls.

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

{171} Such is sometimes the comforting, sometimes the warning word that seems to many to express the religious interest.

This general contrast between the two interests a.s.sumes many special forms when we consider how moralists--that is, teachers who especially emphasise the call of duty--may stand related to the two postulates upon which, as we have seen, the higher religions base their appeal.

Religion, in our sense of the word, depends upon a.s.serting: (1) That there is some one highest end of existence, some goal of life, some chief good; and (2) That, by nature, man is in great danger of completely failing to attain this good, so that he needs to be saved from this danger.

Now the first of these two postulates religion has frequently, although not always, shared with the moralists, that is, with those who devote themselves to teaching us how to act rightly. Aristotle, for instance, based his ethical doctrine (one of the most influential books in the history of morals) upon the postulate that there is a highest good. Many others who have discussed or have preached morality, have a.s.serted that all obligations are subject to one ultimate obligation, which is the requirement to act with reference to the highest good. Yet this agreement as to the highest good turns out to be not quite universal when one compares the opinions of the teachers of religion, on the one hand, and of the moralists on the other. Popular and traditional morality often takes the form of a little h.o.a.rd of {172} maxims about right acts--maxims whose relations to one another, and to any one highest goal of life, remain obscure.

Each maxim is supposed to define a duty. Of course it also tells us how to win some special good or how to avoid some particular evil. But what this special duty has to do with winning any one highest good is not thus made explicit. And since many who make traditional morality prominent in their minds and lives are unaware of the deeper spirit that indeed, as I hold, underlies every serious endeavour, these persons simply remain unconscious that their morality has any religious motive or that they are dealing with the problem of salvation. Even some professional teachers of duty are mere legalists who do not succeed in reducing the law which they teach to any rational unity. And for such people the postulate which religion makes the head of the corner is rather a stumbling-stone. They doubt or question whether there is any highest good whatever or any pearl of great price. Yet they ill.u.s.trate the essential feature of morality by insisting that certain deeds must be done.

But, however it may be with the first of the religious postulates, it is the second (the postulate that we are naturally in very great danger of missing the true goal of life) which leaves open the greater room for differences of interest as between the religious teachers and the teachers of duty. Suppose that we are in agreement in holding that there is a highest {173} good. Nevertheless, the question: How far is man naturally in danger of missing this supreme goal? is a question which, since we are all fallible mortals, leaves room for many varieties of opinion. How I myself view the matter, I told you in our first lecture. And to me the religious need seems an insistent and clear need. But many moralists are partisans of duty as a subst.i.tute for religion. And they are often much more optimistic regarding human nature than I am. In their opinion the goal can be reached, or at least steadily approached, by simple dutifulness in conduct, without any aid from other motives that should tend to our salvation.

There is, then, a pearl of great price. But--so such teachers hold--why sell all that you have to buy that pearl, when by nature you are able to win it through a reasonable effort? Dutifulness is the name for the spirit that leads to such an effort. And dutifulness, say these teachers, is as natural as any other normal function. "No general catastrophe threatens our destiny," they insist. "Why not do right? That is in your own personal power and is sufficient for your deepest need. You need cry out for no aid from above. You can be saved if you choose. There is no dark problem of salvation."

To such optimists the intensely religious often respond with that strange horror and, repugnance which only very close agreement can make possible. Near spiritual kin can war together with a bitterness that mutual strangers cannot share. In this case, {174} as you see, the goal is the same for both parties to the controversy. Both want to reach some highest good. The cheerful optimists simply feel sure of being able to reach, through action, what the earnestly devout are pa.s.sionately seeking by the aid of faith. Yet each side may regard the other with a deep sense of sacred aversion. "Fanatic!" cries the partisan of duty to his religious brother. "Mere moralist," retorts the other, and feels that no ill name could carry more well-founded opprobrium. The issue involved is indeed both delicate and momentous.

The same issue may become only graver in its intensity when, in a given case, a religious man and a moralist agree as to _both_ of the main postulates of religion, so that for both there is a highest good to seek and a great peril to avoid. For now the question arises: What way leads to salvation?

Suppose that the answer to this question seems, at any point in the development of human insight, simply doubtful. Suppose mystery overhangs the further path that lies before both the religious inquirer and the moralist. In such a case the religious interest meets at least a temporary defeat. The religious inquirer must acknowledge that he is baffled. But just this defeat of the religious interest often seems to be the moralist's opportunity. "You cannot discover your needed superhuman truths," he then says. "You cannot touch heaven. You remain but a man. But at all events you can {175} do a man's work, however hard that work is, however opposed it is to your natural sloth and degradation, however great the danger of perdition.

Perhaps n.o.body knows the way of salvation. But a man can know and can daily do each day's duty. He does not know how to attain the goal. But he knows what the goal is, and it is better to die striving for the goal than to live idly gazing up into heaven." In such a case, even if the moralist fully recognises the depth of our need of salvation, and the greatness of the danger, still the strenuous pursuit of duty often seems to him to be a necessary subst.i.tute for religion. And then the moralist may regard his own position as the only one that befits a truth-loving man; and the religious interests, which appear to fix the attention upon remote and hopeless mysteries, may seem to him hindrances to the devoted moral life. Against all dangers and doubts he hurls his "everlasting No." His only solution lies in strenuousness. He is far from the Father's house. He knows not even whether there is any father or any home of the spirit. But he proposes to face the truth as it is, and to die as a warrior dies, fighting for duty.

But of course quite a different outcome is, for many minds, the true lesson of life. The religious man may come to feel sure that the way of salvation is indeed known to him; but it may seem to him a way that is opened not through the efforts of moral individuals, but only through the workings {176} of some divine power that, of its own moving, elects to save mankind. In this case the cla.s.sic doctrine that grace alone saves, and that, without such grace, works are but vanity, is, in one form or another, emphasised by religious teachers in their controversies with the moralists. The history of Christianity ill.u.s.trates several types of doctrine according to which divine grace is necessary to salvation, so that mere morality not only cannot save, but of itself even tends to insure perdition. And in the history of Northern Buddhism there appear teachings closely a.n.a.logous to these evangelical forms of Christianity. So the religious interests here in question are very human and wide-spread. Whoever thus views the way of salvation can in fact appeal to vast bodies of religious experience, both individual and social, to support his opposition against those who see in the strenuous life the only honest mode of dealing with our problem. Whoever has once felt, under any circ.u.mstances, his helplessness to do right knows what such religious experience of the need of grace means. Hence it is easy to see how the earnest followers of a religion may condemn those moralists who agree with them both as to the need and as to the dangers of the natural man. In fact the two parties may condemn each other all the more because both accept the two postulates upon which the quest for salvation is based.

Yet even these are not the only forms in which this tragic conflict amongst brethren often appears. {177} I must mention still another form. Suppose that, in the opinion of the followers of some religion, not only the knowledge of the way of salvation is open, but also the attainment of the goal, the entering into rest, the fruition, is, for the saints or for the enlightened, an actual experience. There is, then, such a thing as a complete winning of the highest good. So the faithful may teach. Hereupon the moralists may adopt the phrase which James frequently used in opposing those who seemed to themselves to be in actual touch with some absolute Being. The only use of the opinion of such people, James in substance said, is that it gives them a sort of "moral holiday." For James, quite erroneously, as I think, supposed that whoever believed the highest good to be in any way realised in the actual world, was thereby consciously released from the call of duty, and need only say:

"G.o.d's in his heaven, All's right with the world."

In such a world, namely, there would be, as James supposed, nothing for a righteous man to do. The alternative that perhaps the only way whereby G.o.d can be in his heaven, or all right with the world, is the way that essentially includes the doing of strenuous deeds by righteous men, James persistently ignored, near as such an alternative was to the spirit of his own pragmatism.

Nevertheless, it is true that there have indeed {178} been, amongst the religiously minded, many who have conceived the highest good merely in the form of some restful communion with the master of life, merely as tranquillity in the presence of G.o.d, or merely as a contemplative delight in some sort of beauty. And it is true that some of these have said: "The saints, or at all events the enlightened, even in the present life, do enter into this rest. And for them there is indeed nothing left to do." To such, of course, the moralists may reply: "You enlightened ones seem to think yourselves ent.i.tled to a 'moral holiday.' We strenuous souls reject your idleness as unworthy of a man. Your religion is a barren aestheticism, and is so whether it takes the outward form of an ascetic and unworldly contemplation or a.s.sumes the behaviour of a company of highly cultivated pleasure-seekers who delight in art merely for art's sake and know nothing of duty." To such believers in salvation through mere attainment of peace, James's criticism rightly applies. In these lectures, as I ask you to note, I have never defined salvation in such terms. Salvation includes triumph and peace, but peace only in and through the power of the spirit and the life of strenuous activity.

But such partisans of the religion of spiritual idleness as I have mentioned may nevertheless return the moralist's scorn with scorn. If they are advocates of art for art's sake, of mere beauty as the highest good, they find the restlessness of the {179} moralists hectic or barbarous. If they are mystical quietists, they regard mere moralism as the struggling of a soul that is not saved. If moral endeavour were the last word, they insist, we should all of us be in the Hades of Sisyphus. And no doubt their scorn, even if ill-founded, deserves consideration. For even the most one-sided emphasis upon any aspect of spiritual truth is instructive, if only your eyes are open.

Such are some of the ways in which, in the course of human history, the religiously minded and the moralists have been divided. To sum up: Certain of the lovers of religion have, upon occasion, condemned moralists, sometimes as legalists who do not know that there is any highest good, sometimes as vain optimists who ignore the danger of perdition, sometimes as despisers of divine grace, sometimes as the barbarous troublers of spiritual peace. Certain moralists, in their turn, and according as they ignore or accept the postulates upon which the religious interest is based, have condemned the devout, sometimes as the slanderers of our healthy human nature, sometimes as seekers in the void for a light that does not shine, sometimes as slavish souls who hope to get from grace gifts that they have not the courage to earn for themselves, sometimes as idlers too fond of "moral holidays."

And, as moralists, their common cry has been, ever since the times of Amos: "Woe unto those who are at ease in Zion."

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We have reviewed, then, some of these conflicts. I hope that you see upon what general issue they all alike turn. The moralists are essentially the partisans of action. They seek a good. But their great postulate is that there is something right for us to do. Therefore the issue is that between our need of something not ourselves to save us and our power to win a greater or lesser good through our own moral activity. Whoever so exclusively emphasises the fact that the divine is not of our making, and that its ways are not our ways, and that its good is something beyond our power to create or attain of ourselves--whoever, I say, so exclusively emphasises these things that he makes light of our efforts to attain the good somewhere comes into conflict with moralists. Whoever, as moralist, so exclusively appeals to our own energies that he seems to hold that our duty would be just as much our duty, "If we were alone upon the earth and the G.o.ds blind," somewhere meets the religious opponent who mocks his pride, or despises his restlessness, or laments his contempt for the divine grace.

Now these conflicts are, I insist, no merely speculative controversies. They play a great part in history. They have darkened countless lives. And they grow out of motives deep in human nature.

What is here most important for us is that they point us toward our new source of insight. What a narrower way of living can divide, a deeper and {181} truer mode of living can unite. Our problem a.s.sumes a new form. Is there any mode of living that is just _both_ to the moral and to the religious motives? Is there any way of reconciling our need, of a grace that shall save with the call of the moral life that we shall be strenuous in the pursuit of our duty?