Raha tise saben ya FHEVER: Hat iH HH Peed ae SA eat rot rye breath atenaten sind Kon OF PRINGE » DEC ee 1925 Bae 25 M257 NaCGaw Vu Olly Ar eh oa wee Now I know Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/nowiknowprimerofOOmacc i] 7 4 a NOW I KNOW THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK + BOSTON + CHICAGO - DALLAS ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limutrep LONDON + BOMBAY + CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lt. TORONTO NOW | KNOW _ A Primer of Faith UEC 17 1925 ‘Now I know in part; but then shall I Lain OGICAL eww know even as also I have been known.”’ —I Corinthians 13:12 BY JOHN ARCHIBALD MacCALLUM Pew Dork THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1924 All rights reserved CoprrigHt, 1924, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and printed. Published August, 1924. Printed in the United States of America by THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK. THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO MY WIFE IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION OF HER CRITICISM, SYMPATHY, ENCOURAGEMENT AND COMRADESHIP ts alae n oJ. “ans , ' pet . a PREFACE This book is a simple transcript from experience. It makes no attempt to systematize the doctrines of the Christian religion. While it deals with some of the great theological ideas, this is only because I believe I have worked them out in my own thought and made them a part of myself. Doubtless many truths essential to an adequate explanation of the Christian faith are omitted, but that is more the author’s misfortune than his fault. I have spoken only of what I know, and not of what the great of old or of the present have told me. True I have quoted, though sparingly, from the Bible and other sources, but my motive has been to express my thought more forcibly and bring out its reasonableness more clearly rather than to confirm my position by an appeal to authority. Whether we like it or not, the day of external authority is gone in the religion of the educated man. Never again will a reference to Genesis be accepted as proof that the earth is flat. When the leaders of the church fall back upon authority and attempt to tell men today what they must believe, they are making a fatal mistake. If the men of tomorrow are to be saved to Christianity, Chris- tianity must be made acceptable to them in the open market of ideas. I believe that this can be done, but only if Christianity is presented as a vitalizing experience rather than as a series of propositions which must be accepted without question. Doubtless I shall be charged with rationalism in trying to establish a concordat between my inherited faith on the one side, and my acceptance of the findings of science on 7 8 PREFACE the other. If I were to have choice forced upon me, how- ever, I would prefer to be called a rationalist rather than an apostle of irrationalism. The church that contradicts facts which are taught in every secondary school in the civilized world, and by implication in primary schools as well, will soon become a spent force and take a faded place in the catalogue of exhausted influences. But the real leaders in the church are aware that their Christian- ity forces no such sorry course upon them. These are turbulent days in the field of religious thought. Many young people are turning from the church because they believe that to be a Christian, it is necessary to acknowledge the authority of traditions which their reason has finally ejected from their conscious- ness. If I can help any of them to disengage the essential truth from the dogmatic forms in which it has been im- prisoned and reveal its possibilities as a vital force in their lives, I shall be happy. Having come to the House of Faith myself by the Road of Doubt, is it too much to hope that I may be able to pilot some of my youthful fellow travelers safely through the arid wastes of con- troversy, recrimination and denial to the mountain of the House of the Lord ? J. A. MacO. Philadelphia, April, 1924. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE PaWHAT L: KNows ABOUT :GoDy 0 OMA 13 Pisa BAT) DOK NOWs ABOUTACHRIST ys f chrsliauilta i: 21 III. WHat I Know Asovut THE Hoty Spirit... 27 IV. WHar I Know Aspour Man. ......... 34 Vee VVHATIL MNOW ABOUT OINWs haga) ci eled Nasi 42 VI. WHat I Know Axsovut THE INCARNATION. . . 52 VII. WHat I Know Axsout THE ATONEMENT. ... 61 VIII. WHat I Know Aspout REGENERATION .... 71 IX. WHat I Know Axpout SALVATION ...... 79 X. WHat I Know ABout THE CHRISTIAN... . 89 XI. WHat I Know Apovut THE CuRisTIAN’s Duty . 98 XII. Wuat I Know Axsovut THE CHRISTIAN’s Rewarp 110 XIU. War I Know Apout Praymr....: .. . 122 XIV. WHat I Know Axsout CHRISTIANITY. .... 136 XV. WHat I Know: ApouT THE CHURCH ..... 153 # 5 + q Sv ( ben « ; an fo ny ya ire . ‘RK Wes ey ALAt my ; e, "al . <7) ' a ,, vf Pa \ ‘ WA AEM Wier Mar Sh ss: ' WA. SRS NR “4, : { A bY "eh ; ! 4 : ‘ 4” , - . » ’ \ ‘ . i] P 1 f ’ i] - ‘ oyun .; 5 ' i) = , ; P= y b % i = : » tea ‘3 " a j 4 a | os t r 4 < \ 5 ys ‘a . " ? ¥ i < rs 4 " . " 4 Fe " ph = t fig A ra I 5 Pal ee My ’ ‘ 1 ) ‘ b , ; j \ t { | i , . ‘ F ; 4 ‘ 1 i ’ ti , f i, ? i " ? \ 1S: ry . Now y y a J j ‘ j } iy : fy9 Ld i hr’ s it i le 7 *g va f ‘ ry , } 5 Ah , 4 Ry B) a ripe i } Fi » ; ' 4 } { ‘e _ 7 1 ' " y a ‘ . ‘ Z r ’ ‘ o\ o % ’ i ; f , , :% Ms j { j < Re ‘ i rf T ( 7 4 . eo 4 nf - J ? id il» Af - ‘ r : ys i ” ‘ © ite NOW I KNOW 7 ie UA ei ie in 2 i y ee ar LP a oe ; WHAT I KNOW ABOUT GOD r God! How vast is the thought that lies behind the word! In its fullness the idea of God is beyond the reach of the mind of man. Yet we cannot do without either the thought or the word, which is but a flickering symbol of the thought. True, some deny that there is a God, but their very denial is an inverted belief in his existence. Apart from God we can neither explain ourselves nor the world. And so, with perfect assurance, I affirm that God 1s. This is the first thing I know about him. Even though my knowledge should stop here, I should have a solid foundation for the exercise of my faith. For while there would still be many other things I should wish to know, my heart would not be left in blank despair so long as I am sure that I owe my existence to a Being some of whose qualities must find a faint reflection in my poor self. For if I know that God exists, my knowledge cannot stop there. It is pushed forward logically another step. Whence did I come in making my “willy-nilly” appear- ance in the world? When I say “I,” I affirm my ex- istence. How is this existence to be explained? I feel, I think, I look up at the skies with their myriads of stars, and wonder how they came to be. It is a mystery, men tell me, beyond our finding out. Half baffled, I look into myself and find that I can follow in thought the move- ments of the stars and appreciate the beauty of river and mountain and shifting clouds. I can mark out the courses of the seasons, winter, spring, summer, and autumn. 13 14 Now I Know Again I am driven to one conclusion. God must have made the universe with its suns and stars. It is an ex- pression of himself, or in the phrase of Goethe, his living garment. To him who can read its deeper meaning it tells of the power, wisdom, beauty and love of its Maker. ABE To the mind as it strives to increase its reach we can set no boundaries. We are never sure in regard to any place at which it stops that it will stop there long. Know- ing as I do that God is, and that he is the creator of the world and of myself, I am impelled to move on and ask what is his character? What are the qualities of his nature? Is he good? This is no easy question. How do we know that God is not indifferent, capricious, cruel or malevolent? In fact there are moods in which we all think thus of God, for the soul has its weathers, and in hours of storm and darkness when hope fades and faith is depressed, it seems as though God takes a grim delight in driving his creatures out into the storm and dispossessing them of their joys. The Psalmist felt thus when he cried —“T am come in deep waters where the floods overflow me. I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried; mine eyes fail me while I wait for my God.” There is no denying that a strong brief can be prepared against the goodness of God. Why do the virtuous die and the wicked live on in their wickedness? Why does the light- ning strike the church and leave the house of evil mirth unscathed? Why does injustice so often triumph over justice ? In any attempt to answer these questions we must bear in mind that we see only in part. The entire field of the divine activity and purpose would have to be taken into account before a demonstrable conclusion could be reached, and that field is beyond our ken. Vast though the evil in the part we do see, however, it is more than balanced by the good. Why is my soul cast down and disquieted Wuat I Know Axsovut Gop 15 within me? Its state of upheaval is due to the good that is struggling for expression in and through me. I am discontented not because I am vexed, but because of my longing for better things. What is the source of this long- ing? It isa part of my nature, and as we have seen, that is rooted in God. By whatever methods or processes our moral standards have arisen, they always and everywhere trace back to God. Thus it follows that the good over- balances the evil even at this immature stage in the world’s development. Our fathers made the mistake of dividing people into two classes—saints and sinners. To them a man was either saved or unsaved, one or the other. But if I am saved in this sense, I am through growing and little or no incentive is left for strenuous action. The truth is, I am saved in part and unsaved in part. In varying degrees all men share this experience with me. Here is a sailor, for instance, rough in manner, coarse in grain, bestial in appetite. A crisis arises. He jumps overboard to save a child, risking his life or giving it perhaps for another, who had no claim upon him except that of a common humanity. “An impulse,” you say. Yes, but whence came an impulse which could transform that lewd drunk- ard of a few days ago into a hero? The secret of his heroism is the divine fire within him that even his worst debauchery could never fully quench. Because man par- takes of the divine nature, he is never satisfied for long with what he is or what he has done and therein lies the assurance that in the end the good will come to its own and is in fact gaining ground all the time. Movements for the better treatment of children, the emancipation of women, fresh advances in social and industrial justice, and an enlarged sense of neighborliness make it evident that the path of the human family is upward. ‘The springs of these movements are in God. I know that he is good, because I know that man is potentially good. 16 Now I Know III Again by force of logic I am driven to another affirma- tion about God. If he is, and is the creator, and is good, he must be a person. It is common for men to love beauty far beyond their power to create. But no man ever created a beauty which he did not love. God could not be the source of the beauty of the world and not be in love with it. The fact that he is the inspirer of my purer aims indicates that his nature shares these aims with ours. If this is true, then he must be in his infinite sphere of action what I am in my finite sphere, a person and not a mere force, or “power that makes for righteousness,” for no vague impersonal tendency could have blundered into the creation of the world and myself. Among many other qualities two essentials of personal- ity stand out. The first is awareness, the distinguishing of one’s self from other selves and other things. The second essential of personality is conscious will or pur- pose. Since the creature cannot surpass the creator, I am sure that God distinguishes himself from all other selves and that he has a purpose toward which he is steadfastly moving. His distinguishing of himself from me estab- lishes a definite relationship between us. Its nature has already been implied. I am his child. He is my Father. The Psalmist understood. “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.” Thus out of my experience the teaching of Jesus that God is the Father of all men is confirmed. Fatherhood in- volves interest and love. His watchful eye is ever upon me to reprove my selfish waywardness; to undergird my weakness, to quicken my finer sensibilities, to call to fruitful activity the noblest possibilities of my being. The recognition of this sublime relationship prompted the Psalmist to cry out in an exalted mood, ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name.” The fatherhood of God imposes definite obligations upon me toward other men and makes them all my neigh- Wuat I Know Asout Gop Ve bors whether they live near or far and no matter what their race, color or faith. Meantime, whatever my cir- cumstances, I am assured by it of a hearing at the Su- preme Court of the universe. Even though I am guilty of willful disregard of the divine law, because he is my Father, he will hear the cry of my penitent heart and in his mercy will comfort and forgive. IV In the midst of such reflections, however, the skeptic within me may rise and try to shake my faith. Like his prototype of old, suppose he asks maliciously, ‘‘Where is thy God?” In answer I can only say that he is every- where. ‘Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.” “But that is too vague,” says the skeptic, or obverse side of my believing mind, which is trying to control my thought. ‘It means so much that it means nothing. Where is the heavenly throne in this infinite universe of which you have been speaking in such grandiose terms ? How can God hear so many prayers at the same time, coming as they do from so many places ?”’ I confess that I cannot fully resolve the mystery. I see only dimly as through a darkened glass. But that God is everywhere is not more mysterious than that I am in so many places at the same time. It is an axiom of science that a thing is where it works. I go into a wireless tele- phone station and speak. What happens? Wherever there is a receiving mechanism within the thousands of square miles covered by the radius of that station, my voice may be heard. Where am I? Wherever my voice reaches and it may possibly be wherever my thought is, in London, Venice, the hills of Mars or the valleys of 18 Now I Know Neptune. If it is true that my mind’s active reach covers such wide ground, surely it imposes no impossible strain upon my faith to believe that God is everywhere and that if my heart is attuned to his infinite heart of love, I shall hear his voice and understand his will in so far as it relates to my own duty and welfare. That is all I need to know. I can not speak for those who have arrived at the con- viction that God is not needed to explain their own ex- istence and that of the universe. or me it is simpler, easier and immeasurably more satisfying to accept God as the final and only worthy explanation of the world. I would be just, and that makes me positive he is just, and his justice will not mock me or deceive me, but will lead me on through the encircling gloom of my ignorance and disappointment to the city with foundations which he is building of human souls that share his purposes and in their own dim way think his thoughts after him, striv- ing to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. I know that God is, that he is the creator of the world and me, and that he is good, that he is my Father, and that he is always with me, ‘‘closer than breathing, nearer than hands or feet.” Vv Thus far our discussion has dealt with what may be called the intellectual approach to God, based upon grounds suggested by reason. I cannot turn from this subject, however, without the admission that ultimately the sense of God is a matter of faith. For however con- vincing the preponderance of the arguments in support of the belief that God exists, absolute proof is beyond the power of our human reason. There is always some ground for the opposite conclusion, for God cannot be seen as a man is seen or heard as the wind is heard. We may say that God is speaking in the wind but that is not Wuat I Know Asout Gop 19 evidence to the doubter, for to him this sound is only a record of the play of physical forces. It is a matter of the kind of interpretation employed whether or not it points to God. The results in the way of interpretation depend upon the qualities of the interpreting mind. For this reason a healthy conviction of the reality of God requires the support of faith, rising with urgent pres- sure out of the hidden depths of the soul. Faith is a part of the deposit of the race experience in process of ac- cumulation through countless generations. And try as our conscious minds may to expel it as a shadow or a superstition, it refuses to be dislodged or to abdicate its directive power over our lives during the long stretches of time that our thought is otherwise engaged. ‘‘The heart has reasons that reason cannot understand.” From immemorial ages our forbears believed in gods. In process of time this belief moved on and out into the persuasion that there is but one God, who rules the world and is over all and through all and in all. This convic- tion is stored up in the reservoirs of race experience of which every man’s nature is a conduit. No man can escape from its pressure. It is always pushing our thought back to God. Now and then some rebel tries to startle us by the asser- tion that the modern mind cannot believe in God. Timid souls are frightened by such statements when they come from men of education who seem to speak with authority. But we need not fear. The racial instincts which prompt us to look upward will not give us rest until we find rest in the end to which faith always directs our souls. The ground swell of the ages moves against the skeptic. The deep within the heart of man ever responds in the end to the deep of the Eternal. Even those of us who remain dumb in the face of the barrage of doubts poured forth by the skeptic, no match at all for his superior intellectual agility, can still feel undismayed, for we know that he 1s 20 Now I Know wrong. The hopes and fears of our souls reach out un- satisfied until they reach God. Faith is the wellspring which nourishes a healthy mind and makes it fruitful. It is the dynamo where the power is generated by which we rise to holiness and become one with God. WHAT I KNOW ABOUT CHRIST I Christ! How familiar is the word throughout the modern world, both in itself and in the various settings of phrase in which it is placed: Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus, the Lord Jesus Christ, and more recent forms such as the Eternal Christ, and the Christ that is to be. Originally an adjec- tive it has come to be a noun and a synonym for Jesus. True, Jesus and Christ are indissolubly associated in the mind, for historically Jesus is the Christ, that is, the anointed one. But for practical purposes it is better to use the name Jesus for the man of Galilee who lived his life on earth, amid conditions and under limitations akin to those all men share. This enables us to reserve the name Christ for the divinely majestic and timeless personality which the historic Jesus has grown to be. He has set such forces in motion that he is almost universally recognized as supreme among the children of God, the Father’s Eternal Son. But what do I know of him? At least I can affirm that Jesus of Nazareth lived on earth about 1900 years ago. This may seem a meagre foundation upon which to build, but it gives me a point of departure. Few indeed of those who lived at a much more recent date have left any record of their experience or influence upon their genera- tion that would enable us to tell that they had ever lived at all. That Jesus, who was later called Christ, was born and grew up, worked and taught, healed and preached, loved, suffered, and died, is as well attested a fact as any in history. Various writings have been preserved in 21 22 Now I Know which the story of his life is set forth in sufficient detail. While he himself wrote no books, he made such an impres- sion on others that they were impelled to write down both the message he proclaimed and also an account of the influences it set in motion in a multitude of minds. These records also tell of his courage, sympathy, wisdom, fore- sight and love. Altogether they present such a picture of gracious and winsome manhood, actuated by the master passion of love for others, that reverent affection is kin- dled in my heart as I read the story. II When I examine the details of his earthly experience it gives me satisfaction to know that he passed through all the stages that every man must traverse, from a babe in his mother’s arms to the full power of his manhood. He increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man, grew physically, intellectually, socially and spiritually. He learned of God at his mother’s knee, and later in the village school connected with the synagogue in Nazareth, his knowledge expanded as he read the ancient scriptures and came to understand the work and motives of Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and other great men of his race. Then in the course of the years the obligations of life fell upon him and he went to work in the carpenter shop where doubtless he had spent many an hour as a child watching Joseph as with sure stroke he shaped yokes for the oxen of the neighboring husbandmen, or tables for the housewives of the village. He took his place at the bench and learned in the school of toil the practical lessons which work always teaches. But beyond his day’s task he saw the workers of the world. He learned to share their hopes and sympathize with them in their disappoint- ments. ‘The still sad music of humanity” was always with him, and as he pondered on the sins and sorrows and injustices of life, he grew in insight and in mental and Wuat I Know Azsovt Curist 93 spiritual power. The day came when the light of dis- covery broke and his creative spirit overflowed the shop and the village. Then he went out as a teacher and prophet to tell others the way of life that had opened out before him. Tift One Sabbath day in the village synagogue, under the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus declared himself as the chosen of God whose duty it was to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to announce deliver- ance to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty the bruised and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. Behind this declaration lay years of train- ing and meditation, in school and shop, and the stern dis- cipline of the wilderness, where he had thought through the problems of destiny. As always, his reward was the reward of the prophet. His townsmen drove him forth: his family doubted his sanity. But undismayed he continued to teach with the au- thority born of experience. He did not quote the scribes to verify his affirmations, but set forth the new-born truth as it came naked from his soul. Men listened to his words for the life that was in them. They felt his power. Here was a teacher different from any they had ever known. His language was the language of the people and not of the schools. His illustrations were taken from the homely facts of every day, the wind, the setting sun, the flowers, the sower sowing his seed, the plowman in the field, the women grinding at the mill, the shepherd tend- ing his sheep and finding that one was lost. The people hung upon his words because they understood him and felt that he understood them. And what was his theme ? God! He had no other subject. He told them God was their Father, and that he cared for them and would forgive them if they would only ask him. He told them of the purpose of God to give them life in this world and the 94. Now I Know world to come. The effect was wonderful. They grew in wisdom and understanding as they listened to him. I know Jesus as the supreme teacher of the ages. IV As he went about giving instruction and inspiration he often came upon the bruised and broken, the lame, the halt and blind. He met men and women suffering some distemper of the mind, and he suffered with them be- cause of his infinite tenderness of heart. And though his chief motive was to teach and make men better acquainted with God, where opportunity offered, he often felt con- strained to exercise his gift of healing by curing their bodily ills. Many indeed were the occasions when at his recreative touch of hand or heart smouldering faith burst into the blaze that brought health to those who had suf- fered so long that they had given up hope of recovery. Only incidentally was he the great physician. The mar- velous cures he wrought must not be allowed to obscure our vision of his fundamental purpose. Bodily health is good, but it is not the chief end of man. To know God is my destiny and some know him better through a shat- tered body than others through a well one. I know Jesus as the supreme physician of the ages for body, mind and soul. Vv In the New Testament record, Jesus is also spoken of as a prophet, and without doubt in him prophecy reached its zenith. There had been great prophets before him, Isaiah, Hosea, Micah, and Jeremiah, and no one did them greater honor than he. There have also been great prophets since, but he is easily first. Much damage has been done to our religion by a mistaken idea of the prophet’s work. His chief business is to interpret the time in which he lives and show his own generation the way out of its difficulties. The prophet is always a man Wuat I Know Azsoutr Curist 25 of rugged principle, who can tell as a matter of principle and not of calculation or second sight, the ultimate drift of the tendencies of his time. If true religion is on the wane and materialism on the increase, he is not deceived but warns his fellows to open their blind eyes to the doom they will bring upon their nation unless they cease from their worship of false gods and every man deal fairly with his brother. In so far as he is a prophet he detaches him- self from the local and the temporary interests and con- flicts and in speaking single mindedly in terms of princi- ple, he speaks to every age. Here Jesus stands pre- eminent. Scarcely a sentence of which we have record fell from his lips that is not as true to-day as when it was spoken. “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” “For with what judg- ment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again,” ‘‘The king- dom of God cometh not with observation.” “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” Such utterances are beacons today as much as they were then and will be in the indefinite future. JI know Jesus as supreme among the prophets of all the ages. ya These and other qualities of mind and heart which he possessed in a unique degree account for the impression that Jesus made upon his generation. Many became his disciples and others paid him almost equal tribute by be- coming his bitter enemies. They saw that his teaching would undermine their privileges, so they rejected him who was their greatest friend. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” ‘To win their affection and support he would have had to compromise with truth, but his first and only loyalty was to God. His Father’s business was always on his heart. Some understood him in part at least. They sat at his feet to learn of God and 26 Now I Know his kingdom. They left all and followed him. When he died for truth and right, with clearer insight they laid new hold upon his motive. They saw through his mis- sion as they had never seen when he was present with them, and their souls became flaming torches spreading his gospel everywhere, so that in death he was immeasur- ably stronger than in life. Whatever we may think of him, or however we may explain him, the fact remains that in righteous influence and personal power for good no one has ever lived who can be compared with him. Thus far I have been speaking of those human qual- ities which all normal men possess in some degree, but which were manifested in Jesus in such fullness that during his brief ministry as a teacher and prophet, the day soon came when he was recognized as the Eternal Son of God. Peter’s answer to his question, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” sprang from a recog- nition of his divine character. Intuitively Peter realized that in him the long hope of Israel for a Saviour had been fulfilled, and though afterward he may have wavered in his conviction at certain times and in certain moods, that conviction sustained him and the other disciples after the death of their Master and enabled them to lay the everlasting foundations of the church which was to bear his name. The explanation of this power to transform such frail men as Matthew, Peter, James and John from obscure, simple toilers to world figures is to be found in one fact alone, the complete identity of will and purpose between Jesus and the Father. ‘I and the Father are one.” “He who hath seen me hath seen the Father.” The God I know and worship is the God whom I see in Christ. In the glory of his purity, his consecration to duty, his sym- pathy, his sense of justice, his absolute righteousness, he is the revelation of God. In him the qualities of the divine take on conerete form. I know Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God. WHAT I KNOW ABOUT THE HOLY SPIRIT I As we pass from God and Christ to a consideration of the Holy Spirit, we find ourselves on much more difficult ground when it comes to furnishing outward evidence that will prove convincing to the doubting mind. While it is true that no man has seen God at any time, it is equally true that every man has seen a world which makes it not unreasonable to believe that God is its author. And while interpretations of Christ may vary from the friendly view that he is the Eternal Son of God to the snap judg- ment that he was an impractical dreamer, who set in motion forces he could not control, the fact of Christ is unquestioned by every normal mind. There is no evidence of the existence of the Holy Spirit so obvious to the observer, and indeed there is probably no element of the religious life which is more hazy or less clearly defined even among educated and devoted Christians. To most people “Holy Spirit” is a phrase, vague in content, which can neither be explained or un- derstood. While I feel no less confident of the existence of the Holy Spirit than of the existence of God, I confess that it will be difficult for me to set forth my knowledge to others with equal force, particularly to those whose tem- perament and training are widely different from mine. 1B! Yet I know unmistakably for myself that the Holy Spirit exists. The Holy Spirit is the medium in which I live. The cynic or the skeptic may point out that my life offers little outward evidence of vitalizing contact with this inexhaustible source of truth, beauty, goodness and wis- 27 28 Now I Know dom. The fact remains that were it not for this continuous ministry of inspiration, my life would be bereft. Nor is the Holy Spirit responsible for my failures. The law of eravitation always works whether or not men work with it. The Holy Spirit is likewise always at work in and round about me, and the fault is mine if I fail to respond. Some men speak as though they were the sole benefici- aries of the Spirit, but the truth is that all men stand on the same ground so far as the ministry of the Spirit is concerned. ‘The difference in the religious experiences of men is accounted for by their attitude, intimate or distant, toward the Spirit. Lack of interest in the values of the soul is the outward sign of an inward insensitive- ness to the Spirit. The ministry of the Holy Spirit is as constant as that of the sunlight. No man has any prior claims upon that ministry or any special privileges arising from it. The Holy Spirit is everywhere, free as the wind and wave, and ready for entrance at the signal of welcome into every heart, to inspire, to heal and to recreate. IIr The Holy Spirit may be defined as God in action, the creative urge issuing from the Father, in the form of an invitation to communion, and imparting the energy of the more abundant life to every one who will receive. The Spirit guides me into new experiences of truth, and be- comes the adventurous urge within my heart also which pushes me on into the future with confidence and hope. Thus far I have been speaking out of my personal ex- perience. Here alone is the fountain-head of that com- plete and final authority which gives rise in the mind to perfect peace, that direct contact with the sources of truth which enables me to say with ringing confidence, “I know.” By contrast, there is always room for doubt when we depend upon the testimony of others, no matter how competent they are. Our experience of their ex- Wuat I Know Axsout tHe Hoty Spririr 29 perience is second-hand and therefore not as vital as our own. This does not mean, however, that their experience is of no value to us. On the contrary, its corroborative value is priceless, for it gives an objective background to our own experiences. In addition it serves to enlarge our horizons and provide us immeasurably more data for the carrying on of our individual life experiment than if we had been left to our own resources. How poor I would be in thought and achievement were it not that back of me lies the collective experience of the race which we call history! Indirectly I can make this experience my own, by passing it through the crucible of my mind. How wonderfully it has served me in warning me against pitfalls into which others have fallen and showing me the bridge of truth that has been built across many a morass of error by the sacrifice and the effort of multitudes who have traversed the long and difficult road between me and that far off day when man left his cave and moved toward the dawn. Little did primitive man dream of the heights his posterity were to scale. No wandering tribes- man in his wildest imaginings had even a remote picture of a Galileo, a Shakespeare, a Lincoln, a Pasteur or an Edison. Yet potentially all these princes of achievement were in the mental womb of those first voyagers who struck their tents and moved out, not knowing whither they went. A wonderful faith sustained them and enabled them to continue in the face of crushing difficulties and perpetual disappointments. They were my fathers, and I can account for what has come of their adventure only by recourse to the in- dwelling of the Holy Spirit as the principle of expla- nation. They were strengthened and upheld by an inward dynamic of which they were probably unconscious, but it never failed them. That dynamic was the Spirit of God. He alone is the explanation and the cause of the upward and onward march of events. Sometimes they 30 Now I Know seem to take the backward trail, but this retrogression 1s more than made up in the next advance. The wind never controls the tide. Because I can see progress running like a golden stream through all the darkness of the ages behind, I have confidence that my sense of a comforting and sustaining Presence, the spirit of wisdom, truth and love within me, is an index of the supreme reality that will carry mankind safely through the undis- covered future ahead. It is a quality of our nature to aspire and hope. The instincts of the animal world imprison themselves in a stable round of monotony, but man is always ready to strike his tents and start again upon the march. With him the hope of a better country, “‘a continuing city,” is a never failing spur to action. Philosphers may debate the question whether the race has advanced or stood still, but I rest content in the belief that with all its areas of barrenness and failure openly acknowledged, life in our modern Christian civilization is immeasurably better than life in ancient Rome or Babylon. The Holy Spirit is God in history, the key to its tangled course. IV Are there evidences of the working of the Holy Spirit in the social life of our time? Yes! The Holy Spirit is the binder which holds mankind together. Even though the separating influences of class and racial hatreds make sad havoe in our social life, the Spirit is always at work like the stars in their courses, supplying the antidote. Suspicion is eaten away, and hate though it clings desper- ately to its seat is undermined by the slow but sure pro- cesses of the Spirit permeating the corporate life of men and now again transforming their animosities and alien- ations into better understandings and friendlier relations. The Holy Spirit is the vital principle in society. It does its work silently like the sun and is always trying its best to bear fruit. Sometimes periods of infertility in- Wuat I Know Azsovr tur Hotry Sprritr 31 tervene but in the end conditions yield to this silent power. The Spirit of God that dwells in man never consents to an armistice in its war with his evil passions. In the autumn the leaves take on rich colorings which are the prelude to their end. Soon they begin to fall. Frost, winds and rains hurry the process, and in a few weeks after the first touch of the autumnal artist, stripped branches only are left to face the driving hails and snows of winter. But the leaves of one tree defy the storms to do their worst. This is the scrub oak. After the rest of the forest has been laid bare, poplars, maples, elms and beeches, the scrub oak remains clothed as in the summer except that the green has turned to brown. Nature plans a new offensive and makes a fierce and sustained attack. The north winds bear down upon it freighted with snow and hail, but the brown leaves cling stubbornly to their stems. Then comes the spring. The snows melt and the grass begins to grow in the sunshine. The sap creeps upward through the boles of the trees, and moves steadily out along the branches. When it reaches the tips of the scrub oak to which the old leaves cling, they offer no further resistance but drop silently to their graves. What driving rain, snow and hail could not do is done by the gentle silent resurgence of life. So it is with the Holy Spirit. Our motives may be selfish, materialistic, barren, but the Spirit is always working within to break down our stubborn denials of truth and love, and lay the foundation for that fuller life which is to be “in a city with foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” The Holy Spirit is the su- preme unifying influence in all our human relations, the breath of God in man. Vv But the critic enters his caveat in the form of a question—what are the inter-relations between God and B32 Now I Know Christ and the Holy Spirit? Is each separate from the others? Are there three persons each with his own in- itiative and self-determination? If so, how can it be they always arrange to work in harmony, or which is the final arbiter of their actions? There is nothing to be gained by denying the relevancy of such questions and a host of others of like import that might be asked. We live in a world of mystery and at best the conclusions of the human mind are provisional. Nevertheless, on reflection the re- lations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not so baffling as they seem when first presented. We should remember that the word “person” used with the relations of the three members of the Godhead as a context has a different history and meaning from its meaning in pop- ular speech. If this were better known many an argument and many a doubt raised by the Trinity, itself a word which does not occur in the Bible, would never take place or be entertained. The Latin word persona is from the drama and means character, in the sense of the role that one is taking. Accordingly, God in three persons meant originally God in three aspects, manifestations or characters. God ap- pears in three characters: in himself in his absolute majesty, hidden, almighty, inflnite, the source of all our life, the fountain-head of all our being. He appears in Christ, the Son, the revelation of himself, the incarnation of truth, mercy, justice, love, courage, faith and hope, in terms which all may understand. He speaks also in the Creative Spirit, working in and through the universe, finding highest form in human life, and giving his fairest and most alluring promise in that ideal state which man has now more reason to believe he will one day reach than his rude ancestors had reason to believe such a civil- ization as ours would one day be attained. In the Holy Spirit he is working in and manifesting himself through the life of men on earth. Their struggles for justice, brotherhood and peace when reduced to the simplest terms Wuat I Know Asoutr tur Honty Sprreir 33 are the outworking of his indwelling spirit of wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, knowledge and the fear of the Lord. “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.” GLORY BE TO THE FATHER, AND TO THE BuNeaN DOP THE HOLY GHOST:AS TL WAS IN THE BEGINNING, IS NOW, AND EVER SHALL BE: WORLD WITHOUT END. AMEN. WHAT I KNOW ABOUT MAN. I Man: what is he? What am I? the Psalmist asked in classic words as he contrasted the immensity of the heavy- ens with his own frail self. ‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him ?” It is evident that we cannot think of man apart from God or God apart from man. Each is an aspect of the other. What can I say of myself? This seems a foolish question at first—there is so much that I seem to know of my own powers and plans and place in the scheme of things. But not far along in my explorations as I begin to dig in, this knowledge begins to become more and more shadowy. Long before the analysis is complete, I realize how little there is of which I can be absolutely sure, and the fading of the certitudes formerly taken for granted threatens to undermine the foundations completely upon which I have rested with such confidence. At my mother’s knee I was taught to look out upon a real world made according to a definite plan by a divine artificer. God gave me ears to hear, eyes to see and a tongue to speak. I was told that I was his child and that if I would be wise, good and obedient to his laws, I should have a place in his favor both in this world and in the next. ‘For ever and ever!’ How the phrase haunts me still. It was so freighted with tragic and awesome meaning. I hoped almost against hope, and prayed that I might escape the burning lake in the nether world into which all bad people are pushed after the manner de- 34 Wuat I Know Asout Man 35 picted in Angelo’s Last Judgment. On the other hand my idea of God was not so alluring as to hold out the promise of much joy should I be so fortunate as to spend eternity in his presence. Then came increasing knowledge that made me begin to realize that life is not so simple as I had been led to believe. First the historian pushed the curtains of the past back far beyond the time at which I had been told that “heaven and earth rose out of chaos.” The geol- ogist informed me that this planet was ages in the making. The astronomer told of stars and distances that reveal the earth as a mere fleck of dust swinging on a leash in the void. The biologist broke the news that all the lower animals are my poor relations and that in the upward climb of man from his lowly origins many of their qual- ities have been retained, thus accounting for the ape and tiger in me. Another teacher, the psychologist, showed me how complex my personality is. The story runs like this: The mind is composed of a network of mental elements associated in various systems. Sometimes these work to- gether in harmony, but at other times they engage in serious conflicts. St. Paul referred to this in his con- fession, *“‘For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” At times unruly mem- bers of the kingdom of the mind force unwise and dis- astrous decisions, because of the stubbornness and _ pas- sion with which they assert their wishes. When the good within me loses control, yielding sovereignty for the moment to some base impulse, I act in a way that brings me shame. This gives the pessimist ground for his assertions that man is vain, self-centered, unre- strained, driven by destructive passions. He stands ready, the pessimist continues, to expose himself to vile contagion for a momentary pleasure. Immediate desire wins with him over future good, and he is too wayward and foolish to be capable of avoiding self-destruction in war. 36 Now I Know Thus the psychologist broke down my inherited idea that it is always simple and easy to choose the straight and narrow path. In my subconscious mind, far below the surface of my ordinary interests, he told me, a Mr. Hyde is lurking in the darkness, waiting always for a chance to overthrow the good man I would be. John Newton, the Puritan divine, knew the difficulties in- volved in righteous action. Seeing a drunkard reeling past he said, “There goes John Newton but for the grace of God.” Still another teacher was the sociologist, who also handed me a primer and made me spell out the lessons he assigned. He showed me that the environment in which we live is the soil in which the soul is planted. When the soil is bad, the crop is likely to be bad. Thus multitudes never have a chance. They are warped and deformed in body and soul by the flood of evil influences that roll over them in their formative years. Growing up in the street, vulgarity, vice and even crime form the air they breathe. They are hardly more to blame for their failure than a sickly plant struggling against weeds in an impoverished garden is to blame for its condition. Thus the simple world of childhood became bafflingly complex, and for a time in this vortex of opposing currents it seemed that all certainties were forever gone. IT In this confusion as I tried to inventory what was left, I found myself able to say, “I know that I exist. I think; I am a person because I am aware of myself as an integer and not a fraction of other men or of the world.” Whatever the truth may be about the distances in space and time connected with the making of the universe and the origin of man, one thing at least was certain, I was alive, a con- scious being, set in a world of wonderful interest with multitudes of men much like myself, whose minds seemed Wuat I Know Azsout Man 37 to work in the same manner as mine, at least in dealing with material things. Though we might differ about ab- stract ideas such as the nature of justice or beauty, we agreed that 2+-2=4, or that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, which confirmed my assur- ance of the reality of my existence in an ordered and not a topsy-turvy world. III Nature is a word often used. It has many meanings or aspects, but in brief it stands for the sum total of the forces that shape the universe. Winds and tides, sunlight and showers, grass, trees, flowers, the lion in the jungle, and the cattle on the hills are all works of nature. So is man. I was born and I shall die, along with the flower of the field or the bird of the air. I must keep in vital connection with the reservoir of energy in mother nature no less than the tree or the elephant. My kinship with the lving world about me is attested in a thousand ways. Though I am rooted in nature with these other works, nature rises higher in me than in them. There is a power within me which lifts me above them and gives me control over them at many points. Irresistible though they are when blindly combated, they can be wooed to change their course and do my bidding. I can harness tides and winds, though I can neither stop nor start them with my puny strength. I can turn a stream from its native course. I can analyze the materials of which my own body as a child of na- ture is built, and also describe those which enter into the making of the most distant of the stars. Daily I am compelling her to yield me new secrets. I have directed her creative energy into the formation of new plants and flowers and bred improved grain and cattle which supply my needs better than her own creations. There is none other of her creatures save man who thus can turn her power into channels of his own choosing. 38 Now I Know Man is not flattering himself when he affirms that he is the “roof and crown of things.” IV That is not all. The best of the story has not yet been told. Whatever my relation to nature, I know that I am a child of God, and nature itself is but a manifestation of his power and purpose. I derive the strength to control my natural appetites and passions from him. In my rela- tions to my fellows I strive to be just and merciful and pure. Though I often fail grievously, I have a right to have my capacity judged by what I aim to be, especially when the achievements of chosen men show that my ideal is not impossible. Besides, the shame I feel when I do wrong proves the nobility of my origin. Whence this sense of justice, this love of truth, this desire for a merci- ful heart, except it came from God? There are those who affirm that these and other virtues are mere functions of a material nervous system, but I know that they are wrong because the lower can never explain the higher. The body never explains the soul. Only God explains man. Whatever of goodness, justice, reason, faith and love is in me came from him. The fact that I have these qualities even in embryo is a proof of my divine origin. Vv Nor is my experience of myself yet exhausted. “I am a part of all that I have met.” Into the fabric of my being all the achievements of which I have ever heard are woven, and all the impressions made upon my mind by the won- ders of the world. My spirit thrills to hear of wrongs righted, of valorous and chivalrous deeds in defense of the weak, of pioneers in thought and action who braved the terrors of unknown worlds because of their love of truth. Isaiah, Paul, Bruno, Huss, Knox, Cromwell, Lincoln, Emerson, Livingstone, daring souls like these form the hierarchy that holds my fealty and in sitting at their feet Wuat I Know Azsout Man 39 I take on in some degree the color and texture of their souls. I hold communion with the great thinkers of the ages. Why should I be lonely when I can listen to Socrates discussing with the gifted youth of Athens the deeper problems of destiny, or follow Copernicus in his exploration of the heavens, or Cook and Magellan through hitherto undiscovered seas? If Dante, Shakespeare, Mil- ton and Goethe are my friends, why should I be distressed if my neighbor seems to slight me? Daily I hold converse with them, and as I hear their messages I become in part a vehicle of their wisdom. In me they live again. VI Sometimes I chafe because of the limitations imposed upon me by my body; it moves so slowly and anchors me to such a narrow radius. But a little reflection shows that this restriction is more apparent than real. Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage: Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage; If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free, Angels alone that soar above Enjoy such liberty.’ My soul recognizes no barriers of time or space. I ride on the wings of the morning in my thought and play on the crest of the waves in tropic oceans or with Peary or Stef- annson walk the shifting ice floes that carpet arctic seas. Neither cold nor heat affect my journeyings as I move through space, piercing and passing beyond the Milky Way on swifter chariot than ever Phoebus drove, or leap- ing from Betelgeuse to Lyra and back to the Pleiades. The universe is my home, the world my front yard. One moment I am on the loftiest summit of the Himalayas, and the next on the wide bosom of the Amazon, or riding on an eagle’s back. My body alone is tied to a point in * Richard Lovelace. 40 Now I Know space. My mind moves at will anywhere within the orbit of the finite. The body is not bounded by its skin; Its effluence, like a gentle cloud of scent, Is wide into the air diffused, and, blent With elements unseen, its way doth win To ether frontiers, where take origin Far subtler systems, nobler regions meant To be the area and the instrument Of operations ever to begin Anew and never end. Thus every man Wears as his robe the garment of the sky— So close his union with the cosmic plan, So perfectly he pierces low and high— Reaching as far in space as creature can, And co-extending with immensity.’ Again the explanation is my kinship with God. Be cause he lives in me I live in him, and follow him as a child as he does his work and tends his flowers in the mystic gardens of infinity. Therein les the incomparable dignity of my manhood. Vil “He knew what was in man.” So the sacred record tells us of him whose communion with God and identity of purpose with him were far more intimate than anyone else has ever known. So complete was this communion and identity that he could say, “I and the Father are one.” Not least of his claims to spiritual sovereignty was this rec- ognition of the worth of man. The tendency to underrate his own dignity and worth has always been one of man’s gravest faults. Doubtless many of his sins are due to this tendency to self-disparagement, for where little is ex- pected little is evoked. ‘Only a man” is a much used derogatory phrase, and one that we should always avoid, as it tends to deny our divine origin and makes light of our priceless inheritance. We become oblivious to the miracle of human life because we are only superficially * John Charles Earle. (By permission of Messrs. Burns, Oates & Washbourne, Ltd.) Wuat I Know Azsoutr Man 41 familiar with ourselves and other men. That the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat are trans- muted into the vision of Isaiah, the dynamic thought of St. Paul, the motive of Francis Xavier, the imagination of Shakespeare, the observation of Darwin, the melody of Beethoven, the invention of Edison is a miracle second only to the universe itself. I know that the personality of man is of infinite value because of these divine qual- ities with which God has so generously endowed him. He is the work of God’s own hands, the climax of ages of divine endeavor, and most precious in his Maker’s sight. WHAT I KNOW ABOUT SIN it The very word sin seemed to bite and burn, blister and inflame and leave a festering wound, in the impression- able years, when I was beginning to learn the meaning of life. All around me sin had left its scars upon the so- cial fabric. The drunkard, the leper and the abandoned woman were its victims; the prison and the mad-house its monuments. I learned early not to make the mistake of looking for sin only outside of myself. I had been told that my own nature was sinful and prone to evil, and I was not old in years before the truth of this statement was confirmed in my own experience. I found that sometimes when I would do good, evil was present with me, and that the virtue of any moment might vanish suddenly and give place to sinful passions. Philosophers may try to explain sin away, but it still remains, and functions in the lust, selfishness, cruelty, the vice, misery and crime which blight the careers of multitudes in every generation, and poison the life stream of the race. II Yet we are told that men are not worrying any more about their sins. Then so much the worse for men! In its most restricted meaning, sin is a missing of the mark, a failure to realize my best. When the day arrives that I am content to be less than God intended me to be, my state will be bad indeed. Doubtless myriads of men are in that condition. They have no over-weening desire for other than material things. Their minds are car- nal and their prayers rarely embrace anything above the 42 Wuat I Know Asovur Sixn_. 43 interests and values of this world. Although in respect to many things worry and discontent are bad, if an ep- idemic of spiritual anguish over their sins should sweep over the world, until men universally cried for salvation, it would accomplish a world of good. Surely we all have sins that we have every reason to worry over. We have not made such a success of living together in this world that we have much ground for satisfaction. We still settle our international disputes by the sword, and kill and maim our fellow men by the millions. We sacrifice children in multitudes to the god of cheap pro- duction, the modern Moloch, while in pharisaical self- righteousness we denounce the ancient heathen for the sacrifices they made to their deities with a purer motive than commercial profit. We shut in prisons which are cesspools of vice and crime thousands of boys whom we have neglected in the streets. Schooled and hardened as criminals, we turn them out to prey upon society without making any attempt to eure them of their evil intentions. When we catch them in the crimes we expect them to commit, we sentence them again to prison for years. We are ruled by the mob spirit. We are afraid to speak out lest we hurt our own interests. We rob the government. We honor men who have never rendered honest service to the community. We spend immeasur- ably more on our selfish pleasures than in furthering the religion in which we profess to believe. Compare the numbers employed in raising, manufacturing and selling tobacco with the number of missionaries we send to foreign fields. Our interest in advancing the King- dom of God is mild in comparison with our interest in increasing our own worldly position. If this seems too strong language, test it by trying to focus public atten- tion upon some glaring injustice suffered by the Negro or any other weak group in society. These are our social 44. Now I Know sins. They are reflected in the weaknesses we all share, and even in the best of men are evident to him who has the insight to analyze character. Because I am a man I know that I am a sinner. Tit But what is sin? So far as definitions go it would be a hard task to improve upon the statement of the Shorter Catechism—‘“Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.” The trouble is, however, that definitions often raise more ghosts than they lay. In this case our definition simply pushes us back into another zone of darkness, for we are forced to ask—“‘What is the law of God?” ‘That is easy,” some one may answer. “The Ten Commandments constitute the law.” But even though we agree that all duty is covered in principle in the Decalogue, we are still faced with the necessity of interpreting and applying the com- mandments to any and every set of circumstances in which we find ourselves. ‘Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.” Profound differences of opinion have arisen between men equally loyal to this law. Some farmers allow their crops to be spoiled by rain rather than take them in on the Sabbath, while others have no such scruples. In short, the remainder of the Old and all the New Testament may be regarded as explanations, expositions and restatements in positive terms of the whole duty of man which is implicit in the Commandments. But this does not make the law of God easy to determine. The path of duty is never simple except in the more ele- mental relations of hfe. In Protestant theology the Bible is the final seat of authority. But this clearly defined principle has not saved us from friction and end- less divisions in its applications. Our spiritual fore- fathers did not see that the line of truth in the Bible is Wuat I Know Asovurt Srn 45 not self-evident. Every sect is a monument to their error. Men get out of the Bible what they bring to it, especially when their primary motive is to search for support for their doctrines rather than to learn the truth. Hence the definition of sin I have cited is not specific enough. We need to know more about the law of God before we can get much profit out of the position that sin is a violation of that law. IV There are other difficulties also in this definition. Transgression of any law may be either unconscious or deliberate. It may arise from ignorance or from defi- ance. Before we can put a just assessment upon an offence against the laws of man or God we must know the motive. The Shorter Catechism does not take this fact into account. Most of the traditional thinking of the church upon the nature and consequences of sin does not take it into account. Men have found this out and one reason for a less acute sense of sin in our time is due to this failure of the church. Intuitively men recognize that no just judge will condemn them as severely for sins of ignorance as for open rebellion against the law. The assertion that they are equally deserving of punishment, tends to break down the sense of guilt they would other- wise feel. To brand all men as rebels in the heavenly commonwealth who are equally reprobate before God may be good technical theology, but it is not true in spirit. It is often said that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but in everyday practice and in ordinary com- mon sense ignorance is regarded as a mitigating circum- stance by any wise court. The driver of a motor car who disregards a traffic signal is subject to arrest, but if he can show the officer in charge that he misread the signal, mercy will usually be shown to him. If, how- ever, he wantonly defies the law, he will be dealt with 46 Now I Know more severely. Such factors are taken into account by every fair tribunal. Vv A vast body of new knowledge has thrown much light upon the complicated nature of sin in recent times, ren- dering our task of defining it more difficult than it seemed to our forbears. Most of our current theological definitions are not of our making but were framed by men who lived in a static world. They did not take the movement of life into account. ‘New occasions teach new duties.” For ages, chattel slavery was not regarded as a sin, but there came a day when men saw that it was a grievous offence against God because it was a wanton violation of human personality. The same is true of child labor, and of the liquor traffic. Always under the discipline of response to such truth as he has, the con- science of man tends to become more sensitive. While we talk of the good old days, every true reader of history knows that bad as our own times are, and great though our sins, things are better now than ever before. If anyone doubts this statement let him make a comparative study of public and private morality a hun- dred or two hundred years ago in England or America with that of our own day. It is safe to say that his verdict will be strongly in our favor. Our standards are undoubtedly higher. This shows conclusively that sin is a relative term. It differs in meaning from age to age. With each increment of growth in righteousness, acts become branded as sinful that were previously accepted as in har- mony with the prevailing moral standards. A striking illustration of this principle is seen in the emancipation of woman. She is fast winning complete recognition as a person rather than property, which was her status al- most up to this generation, although the older idea still survives in some degree in law, the church and popular opinion. Wuat I Know Azsourt Sin 47 Vi Again, as the part played by environment in the shap- ing of character is becoming more and more clearly recognized, its bearing upon our problem is seen to be revolutionary. Here are two boys growing up in a mod- ern city. The one has a good home and his parents take every care to guard him against ills of body and of mind, and to nurture his best powers. He has the advantage of the most skilled physicians and teachers. The other boy is the son of a widow in an alley. While his mother goes out to clean offices, he has to be left to the cruel nurture of the streets. From his tenderest years, the game of outwitting the policeman goes on before his eyes. Vice and crime form a definite part of the air he breathes in the neighborhood of his home. If the mother loses in the contest between the environment and herself for her boy, it is small wonder. The natural thing is for the one boy to become a respectable citizen and the other an enemy of society. When good seed is planted in poor soil, a poor crop is certain. This is always true of wheat and sometimes true of men. Environment, therefore, must be given a large place in making a diagnosis of sin from now on and in view of the many hidden factors it introduces we shall, if we are wise, be slow in passing judgment upon our fellows. These considerations may have been in the mind of Jesus when he said, “Judge not that ye be not judged,” and “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” The French proverb that ‘“‘to know all is to pardon all,” may exaggerate, but who knows enough about the determining influences in which any life has grown, to justify him in condemning another? What- ever action we have to take for the protection of society against criminals, we should never condemn them in bit- terness and self-righteousness, remembering that with what measure we mete, it will be measured to us again. 4.8 Now I Know Vil One further difficulty remains in dealing with sin in the light of modern knowledge. Personality is not so simple as it seemed to the makers of our inherited theology. Our consciousness to which we are attending at any moment is but a small fraction of what we are. We are the sum of all our yesterdays and of all the yes- terdays of the race. In our animal inheritance we are heirs of a past tremendous in its content and meaning. Often that inheritance tips the scale in determining our actions. The life history of the individual repeats the life history of the race. This is true physically, and it is also true mentally and spiritually. That most people do not realize it and do not take it into account is due to the fact that the condensation of time involved is so ereat that it is difficult to believe. It takes practice to recognize in the growing child and youth the stages through which man has come in his long climb toward God. This racial inheritance, with all the blind passion and latent memory which it carries along with it, is a part of personality, the foundation upon which it rests. Nor- mally it is kept under fair control, but in times of stress, such as delirium, hypnosis or insanity, the animal in the soul breaks his leash. We are pushed aside and it seizes the reins of personality. Results are similar to those in the ancient myth, when Phoebus abdicated his right to drive the chariot of the sun and Phaeton trying to take his father’s place brought disaster to himself, his parent and the world. Below the threshold of our waking life or conscious- ness lie stored all the experiences through which we have ever passed. No occurrence was too trivial for registra- tion there. If it be true that the very hairs of our head are numbered, it is more true that every hope, fear, thought, dream and wish that ever flashed through our minds is cared for in that mysterious abyss we call the Wuat I Know Asovurtr Srtn 49 sub-conscious self. Every influence we have ever felt is pigeon-holed there, as is also every impression we have ever received. Although most of these experiences are beyond all ordinary recall, that does not mean they are unimportant. On the contrary, they exercise determin- ing influences upon our conscious thinking and action. No man can be understood until we know the degree in which he can keep his sub-consciousness in hand. When we are surprised by an unusual and apparently contradic- tory act, such as an outburst of sensuality or temper, by a person whom we have held in high esteem, in our wonder how he could have so belied his nature, we say that it is unlike him to act in such a way. But in truth such action rang the curtain up on a hidden aspect of his real self. Multitudes of people who exhibit various forms of weakness we label sinful, act under compulsions due to wounds given their psychic life in childhood which they cannot control. They probably have no conscious memory of these injurious experiences, but these failures to adjust themselves to the moral and social order are due to the fact that they are constantly fighting in the dark “not against flesh and blood.” Much insight into the workings of the mind has only recently come to light, so that it is no indication of intellectual conceit to say that we have a wider and higher outlook than that of the men who wrote the great confessions of the church. They also show how futile and unjust it is to try to standardize sins and sinners. It would not be more foolish to blame a man suffering from typhoid fever for being unable to do his share in digging a trench, than it is to censure many an erring soul mercilessly for his apparent violations of the moral law. His sin may rep- resent a defeat after he has put up a heroic battle against great odds rather than a wanton disobedience and its right treatment may require all the sympathy, patience and wisdom the most expert physician of the soul can bring to bear upon the case. 50 Now I Know VIII When these considerations are taken into account it is evident that men can no longer give way to the abandonment of remorse and guilt which caused them so much suffering in bygone generations. If I am in part what my inheritance has made me, since I had no con- trol over that inheritance, common sense will prevent me from feeling as discredited as though the entire re- sponsibility for my condition rested upon myself. If in addition to my inheritance my environment in my early formative years indelibly marked my character and subjected it to an evil strain or warp, my feeling of guilt will not be so overwhelmingly crushing. This is the situation in which we stand to-day. One cannot imagine a modern congregation being moved with such fear and repentance as the hearers of Jonathan Edwards at Northampton when he preached his famous sermon— “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.” Men know that they are sinners, but they do not believe that their deplorable condition is entirely due to themselves. In- stinctively they are disposed to plead the doctrine of con- tributory negligence against the vast invisible tide of destiny for making them what they are. It is safe to affirm that the old intolerable sense of guilt born of the belief that the sinner had committed a series of offences against God, too terrible for forgiveness, will never again become characteristic of the Christian outlook. Psychology has undermined our trust in that version of sin and guilt and it can never be restored. IX While I have pointed out the danger of dogmatic judg- ment upon sin and sinners, and have shown why the sense of sin is less intolerable today than formerly, this does not alter the primary fact that sin is the great scourge of the race. It never sleeps at its work of de- feating man’s fairest promise. We have explained how Wuat I Know Asovur Sin 51 majestic man is by nature, how sublime his powers, sharing, as he does, the very nature of God whose thoughts he thinks again. The Peak is high and flush’d At his highest with sunrise fire; The Peak is high, and the stars are high, And the thought of a man is higher. But in man’s eminence lies his gravest danger. The animals do not sin. The possibility and dangers of sin are the conditions of our spiritual liberty. An Eden from which there could have been no possibility of ex- pulsion, would have been an Eden in which no credit was due its untempted and untemptable inhabitants. Without the possibility of vice there can be no virtue. Sin is a coefficient of responsibility. Every power of man can be used for good or ill. The motor car is a chariot of mercy as the physician uses it to hasten on his errand of relief to the fevered bedside; it is a vehicle of crime to the bandit who uses it to escape. What is sin? It is too complex for definition, but we can say that selfishness is always at the bottom of it. If I am using my talents to make use of others for my own profit and pleasure alone, I am transgressing the most fundamental of all God’s laws. The more faith- fully we strive to be unselfish, the less of sin is there in us. And while we can never escape entirely the errors due to ignorance and those deflections from the path of righteousness due to obscure and unknown causes, if we avail ourselves of the help offered to us, we can free our- selves in surprising measure from the deadly clutch of sin. But this is to anticipate. WHAT I KNOW ABOUT THE INCARNATION I Among the many experiences of our younger days was our introduction to the mysteries of grammar. Our teacher in that subject used to set us a difficult task, in requiring us to separate nouns into their two classes. We were told that some nouns were concrete and some were abstract, and we had to determine to which group any given word belonged. At the outset it was baffling. Even before we had the key, however, we often guessed the answer without knowing the reason. But there came a day, by that subtle alchemy which takes place in the brain, as it ponders upon any problem within its reach, when a flood of light illuminated the problem which had hitherto been so confusing. In our first joy from this revelation, and the sense of wisdom it gave us, we felt that the teacher might exhaust the dictionary without causing us to stumble or hesitate in deciding in which list any given word should be placed. For we had learned that a concrete noun is a symbol for something that can be handled, measured and defined. Here is a box. It is real, for I can see it, feel it, name its color, and by means of a rule, give its exact dimen- sions. I can also tell of what material it is made, whether the workmanship is good or bad and I can give some idea of the use for which it has been manufactured. For prac- tical purposes this is all that is necessary for me to know, though there are many things about the box which are still beyond the utmost fringes of our knowledge. I do not know the number of electrons and ions its material contains, nor where the tree grew out of which it has been formed, nor the men who cut it down, nor those who 52 Wuat I Know Axsovut tHe INCARNATION 53 transported it to the river upon which it was floated to the mill. Nor do I know the men who sawed it into boards or loaded it upon the train that carried it to the city where it became a box, nor can I compute the number of hands that took part in its making before it was com- pleted. Yet I can safely affirm that my experience with boxes, in spite of such limitations, justifies me in assum- ing that I have a working knowledge of them. In the case of abstract nouns, the solution was not so easy. Here there is nothing that can be touched or measured, as they do not represent things. ‘They are symbols of qualities and they always subject the mind to a greater strain in the handling than concrete realities. Truth, justice, love, virtue, vice, wisdom, light and dark- ness are abstractions. It is a very difficult task to define them or describe them. In fact it is almost impossible to do so satisfactorily. If we make the attempt we soon find ourselves floundering in a quagmire of confusion. The moment we finish building a verbal fence around such an idea as truth, we learn that we have left a hole through which the essence of our thought can leak away. Even the philosophers fail in the definitions which they make, or at any rate, they do not satisfy us for we feel lost as we try to follow the trails of their reasoning. Here common sense comes to our aid, and establishes a working principle for our minds to use. I do not know what truth is any more than Pilate, whose historic ques- tion was anything but foolish. But I recognize some things as true or truths. That two and two are four is not subject to debate, nor is the affirmation that man is mortal, so far as his life on this planet is concerned. Both of these propositions are confirmed in my experi- ence, and I am convinced that they harmonize and agree with reality. By the same method I learn the meaning of love. I cannot define it but I can point to a little child rushing in her grief to her mother, and throwing her arms about 54 Now I Know her neck. That is an instance of love, as is also the reciprocal attitude of the mother to the child. Beauty is another quality that defies subjugation by words how- ever neatly woven. If I hold a rose in my hand, how- ever, and say—‘“this is beautiful,” a child will under- stand my meaning and also follow my thought when I say “beautiful” and point to the clouds around the set- ting sun breaking the white light that has crossed the immeasurable distances of space into the splendors of the rainbow. II Different though concrete and abstract symbols may be, there is one underlying similarity between them. They are alike in that they are both after-consequences of an idea. Before the box of which I have spoken came into being, it existed as a picture in some mind or group of minds. The same is true of the ship upon the sea, the motor car upon the street, a book or house or anything that man has made. If this is true of those objects which owe their shape to man’s creative touch, surely it im- poses no strain upon our faith to infer that this universe of which our earth is but an infinitesimal particle, is an after consequence of an idea in which the processional of the stars took their proper place, and all the order, beauty and precision of our own and other worlds, as revealed by microscope and telescope and other aids to knowledge. To whose mind did the idea belong that took concrete form on so infinite a scale? There is only one answer. The universe has its origin in the mind of God. The system of nature, animate and inanimate, is the projec- tion of his mind. Man also is an expression of God’s thought upon the loftiest plane we know. In the light of the facts within our reach, it is impos- sible to tell how long man has lived upon the earth. Scholars vary widely in their opinions, from 25,000 to 500,000 years. But we know that man has never been Wuat I Know Axsovut tue INCARNATION 55 satisfied with himself. There is no difference of opinion on that point. All through the countless generations, he has been seeking a better city. And while at his best, he has lived nobly and given expression to sublime ideals, it is evident that the creative purpose never rested content with his highest achievement. The noblest faith and aspiration of psalmist and prophet still remain an ideal rather than an achievement. To do justice, to love mercy and walk humbly with God as a motive of life cannot be surpassed in theory, but it does not prove its vitality until it has found or made “a local habitation and a name” for itself in terms of character and conduct. Men living on a low ethical and spiritual level would agree that right- eousness, mercy, truth and love are desirable qualities and should be practiced. Disagreement arises when it be- comes necessary to gain their consent to put them in action. nw S Such considerations afford us the key to an under- standing of the incarnation. To realize the divine pur- pose for man, it was not enough that he should know theoretically the necessity of loving his fellow men, of being kind, generous and good in all his dealings with them; of having faith, purity of heart, moral courage, self-control and every other virtue. Many have even falsely believed themselves in possession of these qual- ities for their lives gave no indication of superior worth to their neighbors. So it was that in the fulness of time, a child was born who was to be known under the double title, Son of Man and Son of God. He was to incor- porate in his person and character all those divine qualities which hitherto had either been floating about in ordinary men’s minds as abstractions, or ideals, or had only found meagre expression in lawgivers and prophets. There has been no valid occasion since for dispute as to what God’s purpuse is for man. It is definitely and 56 Now I Know finally set forth in Christ. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” The divine ideal is a social order in which every member of the commonwealth will be a vehicle of Christ’s spirit and a reincarnation of his purpose: “till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” If we would learn what love for mankind is, there is no excuse left for idle arguments or disputes. Christ is love for mankind. All his teaching is an exposition of him- self, a commentary upon himself. If we wish to learn with certainty our persona: or national duty toward other races and nations in distress or in darkness, the parable of the Good Samaritan indicates the one door of action open to us. If we would learn the right attitude to adopt toward the man or woman who has lost all self-respect we have the key to the answer in the words, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” If some poor broken soul wandering in the far country of passion and disillusionment comes to us asking the way of life, we have only to refer him to the parable of the Prodigal Son. How simple and definite all this is! We do not need to confuse the questioner by referring him to any creed or formula. All that is required of him is the will to arise and go to his Father, who will meet him while still he is a great way off, and give him a royal welcome. Thus, every honest question concerning faith and conduct finds a clear answer in Christ. IV The preceding argument leads up to the explanation of one of the most pregnant of recorded utterances. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we be- held his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.” Upon the principle enunciated in those words, the entire Christian fabric rests. The dynamic of the gospel lies in the twofold Wuat L Know Axsovut THE INCARNATION 57 presentation of that Word, first and most important in terms of personal embodiment, and secondly in words that are spirit and life. It is futile for critics of Christianity to point out that in the Old Testament and other litera- tures, a parallel for every statement of Jesus may be found, and that there is nothing distinctively original in his teaching. For there is a world of difference in carry- ing power between the two. The essential distinction be- tween him and other teachers lies not in the content of their respective messages. He not only spoke the truth; he was the Truth. I can preach and tell men to be pure, honest, bold and merciful and just, but in my most egotistical moods, I dare not claim that they would be safe in following my example. Christ is the Son of God with power because he is the perfect embodiment of the truth of God which he proclaims. The essence of that truth is love. Jesus came into a world full of suspicion, fear, injustice and hatred, and he offered a cure for every one of its ills. That cure was the recognition in theory and practice of brotherhood, since all men are the children of the same Father. Where there is such recognition, love banishes evil affections from the heart and takes their place. Huis gospel of love ex- tended even to one’s enemies. ‘He came unto his own, and his own received him not,” but this rejection did not affect his love for he knew that they did not understand what they were losing. If they had understood what he came to impart, they would have hailed his coming with joy. No matter how deep his reason for disappointment or provocation, in his relations with men, Jesus was always the embodiment of love. Never did he speak severely or censoriously of a sinner, or of sins save one offence. Nor was this a sin of the flesh as we should naturally expect. On the contrary, he was popularly looked upon as a friend of publicans and other sinners of the more flagrant type. ‘The people he castigated without mercy 58 Now I Know were those who did not believe they were sinners at all, the orthodox respectable leaders of Jewish society. To find a parallel in our own day, this was as if a modern pastor were to censure the officers and leading supporters of his own church. What drew these stern rebukes of Jesus upon them was not the natural sinfulness they shared with all others, but the effrontery of blind men insisting upon acting as the religious pilots of their na- tion. They were so conspiciously deficient in humility and mercy that they felt qualified to sit in judgment on every body else. It did not so much as occur to them that this could be wrong. If we knew all that went on in Palestine in that time, we should realize better the sensation caused by the first telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan or that of the Pharisee and the Pub- lican. ‘The only sin that love cannot forgive is the blind lack of insight that goes with lack of love, and Jesus poured out his wrath only upon those who exhibited this fatal defect of character. Vv Thus the love of God for his children made in his image reaches its zenith in the incarnation of that love in Christ. ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Love is the matrix in which all the other virtues originate. Love is the mainspring of faith. Because he loved so deeply, Jesus gained the insight called “faith” into the goodness of God and the salvability of the human soul, no matter how unpromising its present condition. Thus Jesus looks upon the prodigal in the far country, who feels that he has lost all claim upon the forgiveness of his father, or the recognition of his friends, with different eyes. His insight of love enables him to believe that such a man can be redeemed. Establish contact between him and this insight of love and, needless to say, this new Wuat I Know Asovut tur IncARNATION 59 insight exerts a tremendous leverage upon the submerged goodness of the sinner, which tends to lift him out of his evil state. The “creed of creeds” is the ministry of Jesus when he was upon the earth. This is the only creed to which we must subscribe if we would enter into the kingdom of God. The form of our subscription is important. To be valid it must not consist of saying, “I believe,” but of signing a life-long contract to undertake by his grace to be in our due degree what he was in order that what we say and do may be a help and not a hindrance to the best welfare of others. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” vi However, we have not yet traced the incarnation to its logical conclusion. The physical body of Jesus was only the temporary dwelling place of his eternal spirit. He has not been with his disciples, in fleshly form, since his earthly ministry ended. But this does not mean that the functions of the incarnation were confined in time to the days he spent upon the earth. If that were true, it would have only a theoretical value for us. The incarnation is not an isolated event in history, but a ceaseless process of ever widening inflence. In so far as the spirit and temper of the incarnation are in any one of us, to that extent we, too, are the vehicles of God’s love. This is the true interpretation of the great parable in which he reveals his relationship to us: ‘‘I am the vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit.” There is an organic connection between Christ and his friends. The life that is in him flows into them imparting to them increased health and power and returns from them to him not only unexhausted but in larger measure than it came. As the branches share the nature and the life of the vine, so the humblest Christian shares the char- 60 Now I Know acter of Christ, and bears fruits in deeds of mercy and of love like those which he wrought under Syrian skies when he made the blind to see, the lame to walk and the dull to understand. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” WHAT I KNOW ABOUT THE ATONEMENT. I The Atonement is one of the central doctrines of his- toric Christianity. At certain periods, in fact, it has been considered by common consent the cardinal doctrine. Yet the majority of theologians and religious leaders find an increasing difficulty today in stating this doctrine in terms acceptable to the modern mind. Many preachers admit frankly that they find no place in which it fits into their thought, and therefore avoid it altogether. Now nothing is to be gained by speaking scornfully of the mental attitude of our times. That neither modifies it nor accounts for it. Every age has its thought forms which arise and reign we know not exactly how or why but they are as much a determining part of our environ- ment as the air we breathe. Our theological doctrines must be restated in accordance with these changes or they will be left behind as certainly as the powdered wigs of early Victorian days. While the word “atonement”’ is not used in the revised version of the New Testament, the idea which underlies it finds frequent expression both in the gospels and the epistles. There is, however, no single or uniform theory of the atoning work of Christ in the New Testament. The objective of atonement is to throw a bridge of reconcili- ation across the gulf created by a wrong or injury. It has been commonly thought that doing or suffering something which is accepted as an equivalent is the only method of reaching this objective. In historic Christian thought, the atonement meant the satisfaction made by Christ for the wrongs done to God by the sins of man- kind. The form which that satisfaction took has been explained in a variety of different ways through the his- 61 62 Now I Know tory of the church. It would be a difficult task to state in terms that could be understood by the average church member the various theories of the atonement which have been held at different times or have striven for the mastery at the same time. Men have debated in- terminably over these conflicting theories and on several occasions the church has been divided by them. Some of these explanations have become obviously grotesque today. For ten centuries the prevailing theory of the atonement was that the death of Christ was the price paid to the Devil for the release of mankind, since by the sin of Adam and Eve, all their descendants be- came his property. Later the explanation given was that since man’s disobedience constituted an offense against the infinite God and so required an infinite com- pensation to satisfy his injury, sacrifice of the infinite Christ appeased his anger. These different theories go by various names, substitutionary, satisfaction, penal, governmental, moral influence and their several varia- tions and subdivisions. The mind of today has diffi- culty in grasping the distinctions which differentiate them because we have left behind the background of experi- ence out of which they grew. Beneath them all, how- ever, lies the recognition of sin as universal and the idea that the sinner himself is unable to make reparation for his offense and guilt. According to all these explana- tions, the work of Christ was to atone for man’s sin and thus to reconcile him to God. II The apostle Paul has a luminous phrase in his first letter to the Corinthians which may well serve to relate the underlying truth in Christ’s atoning work to our immediate experience. For while, as we have seen, the explanation of a doctrine changes with our changing experiences, its essential truth is unchanging. Thus Paul’s statement to the Corinthians that they had been Wuat I Know Azsovut tHE ATONEMENT 63 “bought with a price,” is as true of us as it was of them. But while this is so, it is evident that the full signifi- cance of the idea he was aiming to convey was much easier for them to grasp than it is for us. It required few or no explanations or amplifications for them, be- cause they were familiar with the practice of emanci- pation. Slavery was an established institution in the ancient world. Many of the first members of the church were slaves who had been captured in war or otherwise condemned to bondage. Naturally they dreamed of liberation, which was rarely accomplished in any other way than by purchase, though sometimes a favored slave was manumitted by his owner. The Corinthians understood Paul perfectly when, to describe their status as Christians, he told them that they had been bought with a price. They had been the bond servants of sin, as surely as any slave was the puppet of his master’s will. From this bondage Christ had freed them, so that now whether outwardly they were bond or free, in spirit they were the emancipated chil- dren of God. The law of sin and death no longer bound them. Their souls were liberated from the pas- sions and the discouragements which hitherto had worked their undoing. In that ancient world the slave and the poor had few rights. This reacted upon them disastrously and broke down their self-respect. ‘They had no proof of their native worth, until they heard the gospel mes- sage with its assurance that before God, they were the equals of their masters, and might even be their superi- ors. It is difficult to realize the tremendous meaning of this revelation. Men who had hitherto lived in a con- stant state of depression were seized with a sense of their immortal worth, and in accordance with a psychol- ogical law which is now well known, rose to the dignity of the new part they were to play. To Christ they owed their liberation, and to him their gratitude went out in 64. Now I Know spontaneous and zealous efforts to share their freedom with others. We need not concern ourselves overmuch as to the exact method by which this transformation was achieved. The plain fact is the all important thing and the certainty that it was due to the work of Christ, both in his life and death. For it is too narrow an idea of his sacrificing love to restrict it to the cross. We have a brief glimpse of what he renounced in the story of the temptation. All that this world has to give was his for the taking, position, wealth, power and fame. He knew that inherent in him was the strength to win any earthly prize upon which he set his heart. But he repudiated every suggestion that he should devote himself to any personal or mate- rial end, and went out as the herald of the gospel that love is insight and insight is emancipation. Instead of wealth he chose poverty; instead of honor, reprobation ; instead of popular approval, condemnation; instead of life, death. He associated with the poor and lowly and became their friends, when he might have lived among the rich and great. He stood out as a champion of new truth against the ancient orthodoxies. He freed religion from the shackles of form and ceremony and special privilege, asserting that the Samaritan who does a kindly human act is a better man than a priest of the true faith who fails to take advantage of his chance to do so. He broke away from the rigid Sabbath law, and asserted that the Sabbath was made for man. He must have felt that men in general would see the humiliation involved in his poverty, yet he accepted it without a murmur for the sake of the cause so dear to his heart. And at the last the cumulative effect of his life of love failed in its eman- cipating work of unsealing the blind eyes of his enemies, and his end was what his friends feared and he himself anticipated, the cross. Thus his death cannot be dissociated from his life. Throughout his ministry he was the “Man of Sorrows,” Wuat I Know Azsout tHE ATONEMENT 65 not for himself but for the intense loneliness due to the rejection of his offer of the love that meant insight and emancipation. Apart from what he previously did and was, his death would not have sacrificial value in any high degree. The price that he paid for our salvation be- gan in the wilderness and was completed on Calvary. III What Christ did for the early Christians he has also done for us, though we are apt to overlook our immediate indebtedness to him. What do I owe him? I could never answer that question in full, much less make ade- quate return to him. An accident befalls me on the street. J am among strangers when I am struck down by a passing car but I am not left to suffer by the way- side. Many good Samaritans begin at once to minister to me. I am carried to a hospital and there I receive surgical treatment. Kind nurses do their best to soothe my pain. If my case is difficult, the ablest physician available is called in consultation, even though I have not a dollar to my name. Nor is this because I am a Christian. I may be a Jew, a Mohammedan, or an atheist, so far as my benefactors know. Because I am a man, a child of God, the hand of Christ reaches out to me in my need and distress, through these various agents of his ministry. Throughout the extent of Christian civ- ilization every man, whatever his color, race or faith, is thus directly indebted to him. The modern hospital is Christ at work in his ministry of healing. Nor are my material obligations to him exhausted by such care. On the contrary that is largely incidental. Christ’s spirit is the very life of the social fabric in which I live and of which I am a part. The ordered liberty which enables me to carry out my projects and develop my interests with reasonable certainty is due to influences which have their origin in the gospel he preached and the hfe he lived. While the present social order has many 66 Now I Know defects, it is immeasurably better than social disorder. Its strength and stability are in direct proportion to the truth, justice and love derived from Christ and built into it by its more devoted members. But valuable though these material blessings are, my greatest indebtedness to him is spiritual. He lived for me, suffered for me and died for me, that he might win my love and through that love of mine for him confer eternal life upon me. By this victory over temptation he assures me that I too can conquer. By his absolute devotion to the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, he insists that the highest blessedness of which my soul is capable is to be obtained, not by gaining earthly prizes, but by a like devotion to the abiding values of the spirit. By his loyalty to what is true, rather than to inherited beliefs which have done their work, he inspires me to sincerity. By his sacrificing love for those who rejected the gift of love he offered, he teaches me to rise above petulance and ingratitude, and strengthens me to go on in the proclamation of his love to men, even though those to whom I address it pay no attention to me. But above all, he teaches me to live with the horizon of eternity in view. How strange in the light of the brevity of life on earth, that we should spend so much of our energy in gathering treasures that we must leave behind when our day is done! We are like children playing on the shore of the ocean, building houses of sand which will be swept away in a few hours as the tide comes in. My answering love for him enables his love for me to interpenetrate my nature and give me perspec- tive. This qualifies me to realize that time is but the prelude of eternity, and death the portal of infinity. Alike in his teaching, example and witness through the lives of those in whom he has lived, I owe him my knowledge, as yet only vaguely understood, that my worth depends not upon what I shall leave behind me when I leave this Wuat I Know Axsovutr tue ATONEMENT 67 world, but upon what I shall take with me. Were it not for what he has done for me I should still be living in the narrow prison house of the material. He has opened the windows of my soul upon God. He has given me by his sacrificing love rich and deep insight into hope, faith and love and the other heavenly qual- ities. Thus in so far as I accept the gifts he offers me, and walk in the road that he has laid out, I am released from the bondage of darkness and sin. The more I respond to his sacrificing love, the more I partake of his nature and the more his nature can and does interpenetrate mine. In this wise, he is destined to become the Emancipator, the Master, the Saviour, of the world. His death furnished driving power to his life of sacri- ficing love and the grave could not hold the Divine Deliverer. “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” IV No transaction in which free personalities engage can yield its maximum profit if it be one-sided. This holds true even in our dealings with God himself. While he stands ready to give us more life, we are in no condition to take unless our stewardship of his previous largesses has led to the increase and refinement of our powers by its faithful traffic with every influence calculated to bring out their nobler qualities. In all his dealings with us, whether directly or indirectly through his various agents, our heavenly Father recognizes and respects the reciprocalness of the relationship. For our good, rather than his, although his good is also ours, he demands grace for grace, a return in kind from us for every gift he bestows upon us by his grace. Full recognition of this truth will reveal that the sacrificing love of Christ, by which I have learned to know God and have been reconciled to him, imposes definite responsibilities upon 68 Now I Know me. Through its enlargement of my life, my obligations are increased. If I am freed from the limitations and burden of my ignorance and sin, that emancipation re- quires my enlistment in the crusade which will free others who have not yet taken advantage of their same privilege. This has always been recognized by alert and devoted beneficiaries of Christ’s atoning work. My con- dition of freedom and opportunity to-day is due to a long line of spiritual ancestors who acted as his agents and sacrificed themselves as Christ’s men in their contest against the powers of darkness and fought some of my battles for me before I came upon the scene. Wycliffe and Tyndale, in their struggle to give the Bible to the common people, Giordano Bruno, dying in sacrificial fire for the right to proclaim the truth as he saw it, Coper- nicus suffering denunciation and persecution in order to give a more adequate and comprehensive explanation of the movement of the heavens, together with a host of others known and unknown, are links in the living chain that reaches back through the centuries and binds me to Christ. When Patrick Hamilton died at the stake in St. An- drews, he kindled a flaming passion for justice and truth in the heart of John Knox. I am similarly indebted to the Pilgrims who braved the dangers of a hostile ocean and endured every hardship to worship God according to their convictions. The men who gave their lives in thousands to save this nation from disruption, were in their own way and according to the measure of their worth making atonement for the sin of human greed, carrying forward the work of Christ in the process and mediating his sacrifice. The same is true of the millions of young men who died in the Great War to make a better world. One and all, the hosts of those who have worked and suffered to shake off the strangle-hold of error and superstition have been purchasing with a price the release of unborn generations. Wuat I Know Asovut tut ATONEMENT 69 This truth tends to make me the careful custodian of the values they have won for me. What was their motive ? What was the motive of Christ in working and suffering for me? Surely no man is vain enough to say and think that those who labored so strenuously to push aside the curtains of ignorance and sin and buy his freedom at the cost of their blood or life, made their sublime renunciations merely to give him the opportunity to live in easy free- dom. Nevertheless, multitudes who have been born to a great inheritance live the lives of spiritual spendthrifts. They would appropriate the privileges bought for them at so great a cost and do little or nothing in return. Because that cannot be done, they fritter their lives away in pur- suit of trivial and fleeting interests. When the halls of Oxford during the Great War were empty and her sons drilling for the conflict or already dying on the fields of Flanders, Professor Gilbert Murray uttered a great lament. Looking upon the wild riot of profiteering and spending in which the youth of England who were still at home were engaged, he said that they were not worthy of the sacrifice of her gifted sons. That those whose lives were protected by the blood of these young men, should be wantoning in sheer indifference to all that had been done for them, almost broke his heart. But that one-sidedness has always been the way of man in his stupidity and blindness. It was so when Christ was giving himself in his ministry and upon the cross. The world will never find peace until the atonement as an active principle which was supremely demonstrated on Calvary shall be reciprocated and become a universal motive of conduct. Once I have achieved the freedom made possible for me by the sacrificing love of Christ, my emancipation will be evidenced by the efforts I make to liberate others from the prison house of a fleshly mind. Thus the atonement is not an isolated event in history. It is the undying heart of the whole process of living here and hereafter. While its supreme manifestation 70 Now I Know is in Christ, it also finds expression in every consecrated life. All progress depends upon this principle. In so far as I reciprocate the sacrificing love of Christ that freed me, I advance the kingdom of God; in so far as I fall short of doing it, I retard or impair that advance. Because Christ is the vine and I a branch, I share with him in my own limited way his great experiences, pur- poses and achievements. The atonement unites my frail person to his infinitude of divine love. He bore my sins and shortcomings “in his own body on the tree,” that I in turn, animated by his spirit, should give myself in sacrificing love to the great task of reconciling my ignorant and sinful fellows to the everliving God who is the Father of us all. This was what Irenaeus meant when he said, “he became what we are, that he might make us what he is.” WHAT I KNOW ABOUT REGENERATION I Regeneration has a technical and rather formidable sound. The word has largely passed out of use in modern life, even in the pulpit, which usually clings to forms of speech long after they have disappeared elsewhere. Yet the idea which this word aims to express can never drop out of our speech since the corresponding experience is an essential factor in spiritual growth. Reduced to its simplest terms it means to be born again. The answer of Jesus to Nicodemus states a law as wide in its sweep as the plan of God for the life of man. He who would realize his destiny must be born from above. This raises two important questions, how and why? As to the first, birth is always a mystery. None can adequately explain his own coming into the world. When did I begin to exist? How did a few particles of matter, which in one aspect may be described in chemical terms, become the dwelling place of life and mind? The wisest of men cannot tell me. Yet here I am, and if I ama competent witness there was a day but a few years ago when I was not. I have no recollection beyond a certain date in early childhood, to say nothing of any time prior to the hour my parents have told me I first saw the light. Since I am unable, therefore, to explain my first or physical birth, it is not surprising that I cannot explain my second or spiritual birth. That bit of ignorance, however, is no sufficient reason for doubting its reality. I know that my nature has changed. There was a time when my outlook upon the world and its problems was altogether different. Since then I have grown in char- acter. I am not boasting when I say that I have more 71 12, Now I Know wisdom, poise, self-control, knowledge, goodness and faith than I once possessed. How it came about that I turned from the old paths and chose those in which I now delight to walk, I cannot tell. That inability does not lessen the importance of the fact of the change. There must have been a day in the past when a power from outside myself entered my life and became a guiding principle within me; or, putting the same truth in another way, when I developed an inward spiritual directivity. In answer to the second question none can deny the necessity for a rebirth in every man. Here is a child old enough for school. Shall the decision be left to his own inclinations whether to go or not to go? A parent would have to be sub-normal in intelligence to give him the choice. Every child requires constant pressure from above, particularly in his earlier and more formative years, or the powers within him would never develop in the right direction. His walk, manners, speech, and disposition have to be watched carefully to guard against the evil tendencies that will be sure to crop out, if his energies are to be kept flowing in the right direction. And after the best has been done for him and he has passed with apparent safety through the semi-barbarism of youth, his parents know there is no certainty that he may not yet become the victim of a rash or evil impulse. The carnal mind, the native selfishness, the path of least re- sistance are enmity against God. Hence the necessity of an experience which shall result in the release of the energies of the old Adam in us upon a higher plane, the sense of renewal, the process of trans-valuation by which old things pass away and all become new. IT Since it is a universe in which we live, we may be confident that a law which we discover working in any department of life, will, upon close scrutiny, be found at work in every other department, even though it may be Wuat I Know Azsout REGENERATION ffs: almost unrecognizable in some cases. Regeneration is no exception to this rule. It works as definitely in the mind as in the soul. A friend of mine after he had spent the earlier years of his life in business decided that he would study medicine. At first he found his studies very hard as his mind had grown rusty through long disuse but eventually he got along well except in chemistry. As the second year was coming to its close, it looked as though he was to be beaten. It seemed a slavish task to try to memorize a multitude of formulas, but strive as he would, he saw no reason or principle which united them in a system. Even with the help of a tutor, he could scarcely hope to grope through what seemed to him to be a jungle of disconnected facts. Late one night, poring over a text book, there came a sudden illumination. All at once his mind was put into possession of the secret which bound in a unitary system the diverse facts which were so elusive and fugitive when he depended upon his memory to hold them. From that moment he felt an assurance as strong as his previous doubt and, to his own delight and the surprise of his teachers, he leaped to a front place in his class. The famous essayist Hazlitt had a similar experience. As a young man he had a great love for books and little or no fondness for pictures. But one day he discovered an exhibition of old Italian Masters which had been sent from Paris for sale in London. Its effect upon him is best described in his own words: I was staggered when I saw the works there col- lected, and looked at them with wondering and long- ing eyes. A mist passed away from my sight; the scales fell off. A new sense came upon me, a new heaven and a new earth stood before me... . From that time I lived in a world of pictures. Battles, sieges, speeches in Parliament seemed mere idle noise and fury, ‘signifying nothing’ compared with 74. Now I Know those mighty works that spoke to me in the eternal silence of thought. Henry Adams had a striking experience of the same nature while a student in Berlin in the early days of his long continued quest of an education. Up to this time he had believed Beethoven a bore and that his opinion was shared by every one except musicians. One day while sitting at his table in a beer garden, he was sur- prised to notice that his mind followed the movement of the symphony the orchestra was playing. He could not have been more astonished had he suddenly read a new language. A prison wall that barred his senses in one great region of life suddenly fell of its own accord, with- out so much as his knowing how it happened. From that day on, his appreciation of music increased, though many years were to pass before he was able to enjoy the “Gotterdamerung.” Til Doubtless everyone who has attained to some degree of mastery in any of the arts or crafts has had the same kind of experience. Some one eventful day he awak- ened to a sense of power hitherto unknown. Yet how- ever swift its coming, such an access of ability is never to be disjoined from the past experience of the person. tts explanation lies in part in his previous activities. The man to whom the secrets of chemistry were sud- denly unveiled, would never have had this revelation were it not for the sustained hours of toil in which he laboriously laid the foundations for his later structure of knowledge of that science. For years Hazlitt had lived in an artistic atmosphere, and Henry Adams had long been hearing music. Such facts suggest the conditions preliminary to the spiritual experience of regeneration. For while regenera- tion 1s something we can not do for ourselves, it can not be done for us unless we prepare the way. In the first place Wrat L Know Asout REGENERATION 15 a man must be actually conscious of his need of renewal. “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” Then in the second place repentance must be followed and supported by faith. Otherwise sorrow for sin is only idle grief which burns itself out in worse than fruitless emotion. Faith is belief in and surrender of the self to the beneficent con- trol of the power of God incarnate in Christ. Where faith in its double aspect is an active principle of the soul, the ground is prepared and ready for the trans- formation wrought by regeneration. Then it is that God enters with the creative strength that produces the new birth. Hitherto suppressed capacities are given scope. The strengthened will is focused upon higher goals.