4 Ti Rincon faeniah nie SH att pact Babrarpeas iat at eect ie Hike Satie a cue , Bettie tee Gene satiate 2 = it pegatetyeatan fee ; aia y sat EN deat vet nite ten ar eit Ey A ‘rs > AR) rt *) nis : ? ‘ et i Hy i tens feather ti canethas are at poate pee Hane uit 2 : Es snared inert? i het Sesh i Se hot rs th ih tant See : Pe ea ea iitid sr ea a s ty CNet sean If ie 1 . se rhe at eae ae tae Se pt Pte i ie 3 ee te iY Tae at tt ny staat he) Paty nN eae y eKo6ien semis BT1101 .R682 1921 Rogers, Clement Francis, 1866- Why men believe, the groundwork of _ apologetics. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/whymenbelievegroOOroge WHY MEN BELIEVE 7 a ae HEAT pe eee , bik evi) dara a's Lee | ca — y wy ' Wr: 4 Res Merete reat! be Eileey ree Lt ae ae . : SE SF Esta gd lee tC Pleven le iy oe a. ee diy © a NE IRR a As AD Io ee + + x e 4 A Sara tS & HY MEN BELIEVE The Groundwork of Apologetics FIVE LECTURES Var BY THE/BRAEV. CLEMENT F. ROGERS, M.A. PROFESSOR OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY, KING’S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ‘Conclusions have strong and invincible proofs as well in the school of Jesus Christ as anywhere.” Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V. ch, I xiii, $1. LONDON : SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. 1921 These Lectures were delivered as a course of public lectures at King’s College, University of London, in the Lent Term, 1921; and also, in a simpler form, as Christian Evidence lectures in Hyde Park in the autumn of the year 1919. CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND . . The need of going back to Psychology—the grounds of belief various—as man is complex. I. Study of Psychology needed for Apologetics— the child—development of emotions—of intel- lect—of will—the four-square man. Tl. Man a social being—in childhood—in youth—in adult life. III. Faith the activity of the whole man—belief on ‘authority—on emotional, logical, and moral grounds—increased by the influence of our fellows. IV. Belief in religion—based on emotional, rational, and moral grounds. ; CHAPTER II CHRISTIANITY AND ART—THE ARGUMENT FROM BEAUTY ° . . . The argument from Beauty strangely ignored—yet of great power. I. A valid ground of belief—quickening our sensi- bilities—a legitimate method of appeal. II. The theology of esthetic—the utilitarian theory —not borne out by history—not accounting for secondary effects—God the source of all beauty —the most rational explanation. Ill. Art inspired by Christianity—in the past—in the present—a democratic matter—of a piece with the Incarnation.” IV. Legitimate to surrender ourselves to the appeal of Art. CHAPTER III REASON AND FAITH —THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECT je A : = A difficulty for the Apologist—rationalist stress on the Reason—popular distrust of ideas. I. The function of intellect in belief—checking emotions—guiding actions—second in the field —its wider range and lasting power. Vv PAGE 23 42 vi CONTENTS Il. Christianity not shrinking from the intellectual test—apologetics varying in different ages—its limitations—the rationality of the world— religion equally subject to scientific treatment. III. The need of the world for Theology—influencing action—its value in emergencies—appealing most to the educated. IV. The need of recognising the limitations of the intellect—of insisting on thought. CHAPTER IV FAITH AND THE WILL—THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE : : A “ . ° Prominence to-day of Will Psychology—experience v. logic. I. Decision by moral standards—influenced by habits—by company—by the choice of sur- roundings—the need of action—practical v. theoretic belief—verification and proof. II. The attack of Determinism—‘‘ What has Chris- tianity done ?”’—in the past—what it is doing now. III. The practical test—dangerous if no others are applied—‘“‘ judgments of value ’’—danger of ignoring Logic and History—God as the Eternal Will—all good in communion with Christ. IV. The approach to God by doing the next duty— good work the best apology. CHAPTER V THE CLAIM OF AUTHORITY . . . . Reason and Authority—the individual and Society. I. Belief on authority—in Art—in Science—in Life —a, place for individual action. Il. The Psychology of the crowd—the authority of corporate emotion—of corporate thought—of corporate action—the Catholic Canon—author- ity of experts—the duty of criticism. Ill. The Church of spiritual experts—needed for progress—for breadth—for ali ages of man. IV. Active co-operation needed—in worship—dogma —action. INDEX ° . - e . . e . PAGE 60 81 101 WHY MEN BELIEVE CHAPTER I THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND Grande profundum est ipse homo, cujus etiam capillos tu, Domine, numeratos habes, et non minuuntur in te; et tamen capilli ejus magis numerabiles sunt, quam affectus ejus, et motus cordis ejus. (‘What a mystery is man himself, whose very hairs Thou numberest, O Lord, and they are never lost in Thy sight; yet it is easier to count up the hairs of his head than his feelings and movements of his heart.’’—Augustine, Confessions, Bk. IV. ch. xiv. § 22, tr. C. Bigg.) In the opening words of his famous Essay on the Human Understanding, the philosopher Locke tells us how he came to write it. ‘“* Five or six friends,” he says, ‘““meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found ourselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that rose on every side.” From another source we learn that the subject in question was “the principles of morality and revealed religion.” They got no further. They puzzled them- selves without coming any nearer to a resolution of those doubts which perplexed them, till they realised that the first thing to do was to ‘‘ examine our own abilities and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with.’ 1 1 Essay concerning the Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Fraser (Oxford, 1894). The Epistle to the Reader, Vol. I. p. 9. Cp. Butler, Fifteen Sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel, Preface, §12. Works, ed. J. H. Bernard (Macmillan, 1900), p. 4. ‘‘ There are two ways in which the subject of morals can be treated. One begins by inquiring into the abstract relations of things: the other from a matter of fact, namely, what the particular nature of man is, its several parts, their economy or constitution.” ] 2 WHY MEN BELIEVE Locke was a typical English thinker, and we English are fond of discussing religion. But we get very little further. Locke saw it was necessary to go back to human nature, to study psychology first. Before we can discuss with profit the principles of morality and religion, and why we hold them, we must realise why we hold any principles of any sort. Before Christian Evidences can have any convincing force, we must get clear to ourselves why we believe in anything, and why any evidence whatever is of value. It has been my experience in open-air propaganda that this question has rarely been asked. The query is often put summarily, “Why do you believe in Christianity ?’’ The real problem that has to be considered first is: ‘‘ Why do you believe in anything at all?” This is not. put explicitly, since, as a rule, men are not clear-minded enough to see that this is the ultimate question. Even Locke did not realise it till after he had ‘‘ puzzled himself awhile.” Men put forward crude contrasts of authority and reason. They talk of faith as if it meant believing something which is not true, or at least as believing without evidence. They identify it with acceptance of a creed. They fondly believe that men are convinced by a process of reasoning. They ask: ‘‘Can you believe in a. thing you don’t understand ? ”’ : So the immediate answer must bring men back to the fundamental matter. We do not believe in Christianity by argument :— ** A man convinced against his will Is of the same opinion still.” ? Reason—that is, reasoning—may confirm, but it cannot create faith. We believe in Christianity as we 1 So quoted by J. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent, ch. vi. §1 (5). Samuel Butler originally wrote :— *“* He that complies against his will Is of the same opinion still.” Hudibras, Pt. III. canto 2. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND 3 believe in anything else—in our political opinions, in our friends, in history or in science—for a mul- titude of reasons: because of home tradition, of heredity, of education, of friends, of experience, from the infection of enthusiasm (nearly every one is a socialist at a certain age), from peculiarity of tastes, from the attraction of moral beauty, by “ value judgments ” (because things seem of worth), by the contagion of crowds united in a common purpose, by the influence of words recommending or dissuading from a conclusion, by similarities and analogies, because we remember that we once went into a question and satisfied ourselves about it, by the force of mere repetition, whether of the reiterated assertion of advertisements or because we have said a thing so often that we come to think it must be true. We believe for any or some of these reasons, as they convince - in varying proportions and with alternating force; in _ other words, we believe for the so-called ‘‘ woman’s reason,” because we do. Men fail to understand the nature of faith—we may use the word now—because they have not asked what men in daily life actually do. They have not realised the manysidedness of men, nor why, as a fact, they do believe. They have not realised that “a,” if not “the,” proper study of mankind is man, They have not turned to psychology or thought of all the factors that make up consciousness, sensation, or emotions. What, for instance, is fear, or anger? They have not analysed the processes of thought, imagination, memory, the forms of sensation, sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, the nature of interest, the effort of the will, the power of reflecting on oneself being both subject and object at once, man’s several organs :— “ Heart, reins, eyes, ears, tongue, hands, feet; ”’ the subject-matter of his knowledge and expression of his activities :— 4 WHY MEN BELIEVE ‘The Law written in the Heart, Oracles of prophets, Melody of Psalms, Instruction of Proverbs, Experience of Histories, Service of Sacrifices,” + all that is so familiar in self and believed in in others, which we are so unable to explain, but so firmly trust, all that is summed up under the three headings of body, mind, and will, as man is regarded as feeling, thinking, and acting, with all the modifications and intensifications that come from the action and reaction of man on his fellow-men since, as we learned in under- graduate days from Aristotle, man is a social animal, never living to himself alone.? ‘“ What a mystery is man himself,” said St. Augus- tine, ‘‘ whose very hairs Thou numberest, O Lord, and they are never lost in Thy sight; yet it is easier to count up the hairs of his head than his feelings and movements of his heart.”’ 3 I So the great need of Apologetics is to start with psychology. Men are not much interested in argu- ments, but are greatiy interested in their fellow-men, - and still more interested in themselves. This is why books on Christian Evidences are so unattractive to the mass of readers. They generally begin with the arguments for Theism, and work on to the Christian revelation and its credentials. But that is not the order of experience. We begin with ourselves. It is not only Locke who has seen this. Pascal planned his work on Christianity (never, alas! carried through) by a study of “the chimera, man,” the “‘ king dethroned,”’ 4 and saw the first reason for its truth to be that it taught his royal nature as well as “the corruption of man’s 1 Bp. Andrewes, Devotions, The Sixth Day, Introduction. 2 Pol., Bk. 1. ch. ii. Eth. Nic., Bk. I. ch. vii. (ix.). 3 Confessions, Bk. IV. ch. xiv. § 22. 4 Pensées, ed. Brunschvieg, Nos. 398, 434, THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND 5 heart.’? 1 Modern education is said to have discovered the child. Where the teachers of the Renaissance thought of the curriculum, arranged it in balance and proportion, reckoned up what each element con- tributed; where the reformers of the last century thought of the teacher, the importance of his personality and the methods of his training; to-day, Child-study has made us note, as the first thing to be done, how the child itself learns, what it can do and what it cannot. ‘** My own experience,” writes Mr. A. C. Benson, “is that boys were always interested in any talk, call it ethical or religious, which based itself directly on their own actual experience.’ 2 In music we build on a foundation of folk-song, just as in art Addison sought its principles, not in poems, pictures or engravings, but first “ arraigning the sentiments and faculties of man to which art makes its appeal,” and just as Burke “‘ dealt boldly with his subject of the Sublime and Beautiful on the basis of the most scientific psychology that was within his reach,’ ? so Mr. Graham Wallas has given a new interest to Economics by teaching us to reckon with Human Nature in Politics. This is just what we want, too, in Apologetics. Our first task is to find out why people believe, and to do that we must see how man’s faculties develop, in proportion and out of proportion, as he grows from childhood to maturity, how he grows in feeling, thought and will. At the start all these are immature. The infant is dependent, at first absolutely, and then relatively. For many years after he has begun to run about the child instinctively clings to his mother. From the 1 Browning, “‘Gold Hair, A Story of Pornic”: Dramatis Persone, Works (Smith Elder, 1896), Vol. I. p. 571. 5 Cambridge Essays on Education, ed. A. ©. Benson, 1917, p- 3 7 Morley, Burke : English Men of Letters (Macmillan, 1879), p- 18 * Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (Constable, 1910). 6 WHY MEN BELIEVE first he is guided from outside. His life is directed by inherited instincts which teach him to feed when he is hungry, to ery when in pain, to touch what he wants to understand, to walk when he wishes to move. It runs in channels marked out by surroundings—the things he lives among, the language he hears, the house that shelters him, the food he eats, the manners he observes, the dress he wears, the climate, whether warm or cold, the social life, whether of country or of town, in which he grows up. He is led by example, at first guiding him unconsciously, and then deliberately set. He is directed by precept, of elders who watch and advise, of teachers who stand in the parent’s place, and this goes on right up to the time that he learns his trade or enters on the business of his life. | In other words, the child is guided by the experience of others, which he accepts and makes his own. It 1s his wisdom to submit, and this readiness to learn is the condition of progress. His feelings, thoughts, and will are all immature, but are as yet in proportion and balanced. All three are subject to authority. At puberty comes the great change. It brings the beginnings of a clearly marked individual life. There is a rapid development of character with distinct differentiation of sex. But the child develops irregularly, by fits and starts, as one growing part readjusts itself to the whole. The voice breaks. The boy passes through the ‘‘ awkward age.” He becomes moody, irresolute, impulsive. He develops all round, but most rapidly in his emotions. They grow at first irregularly and strongly, and then regularly with continued force from the age of seventeen or eighteen years on. They are unbalanced by any corresponding growth of reason or experience. The young lad, as it is said, ‘‘ must be led.”” But this same swell and flow of emotional life carries him over difficulties as the world is opening out and all is so new. He is won by affection. He responds to appeals. He shows THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND 7 immense enthusiasm for any cause that touches his heart. Presently the intellect begins to catch up his emotion. From about his eighteenth year it begins to loom larger and larger in his horizon. He becomes argu- mentative. He has long discussions by the study fireside or in walks lasting into the small hours of the night. He begins to read for himself, and devours whole libraries. He becomes sceptical, over-valuing argument, though generally custom and _ emotion, stronger than reasoning still, carry him over this period and make him keep up habits of the life which he has hitherto lived. He experiences the ‘“ sense of expansion and elevation that comes”? when a person for the first’ time hears the arguments and speculations of unbelievers, and feels what a very novel light they cast upon what he has hitherto held most sacred.} His intellect grows clear and keen, but he is without sufficient experience of life for it to give sound judg- ments. He talks in abstract terms and thinks by ready-made generalisations. He is taken in by phrases and falls an easy prey to clap-trap. But all the time he is making the things that he was taught his own, and is learning intellectual methods by which to criticise and to construct. s, Adult life follows, when he begins to work, and his will comes more and more into play. He is brought into contact with faets and gains experience of life. He is given responsibility, and learns to deal with, and to exercise authority over, others. He tests his theories and is apt to become impatient of talk. He is in danger of losing his ideals, of growing callous and commonplace, of coming to disbelieve in learning. But if he wins through all these stages without tampering with his faculties, without failure in 1 J. H. Newman, Ozford University Sermons, Sermon XIV., *“Wisdom as contrasted with Faith and with Bigotry,” § 14, third edition (Rivingtons, 1872), p. 284. 8 WHY MEN BELIEVE exercising them, then he comes out the foursquare man ‘ well squared to fortune’s blows,” + who will ‘bear the chances of life nobly, with perfect and com- plete harmony.” 2 He will have habits received from his forbears, though he will be still ready to learn from others and to enter the various realms of life, learning as a little child. He will have his feelings strong, generous, disciplined, and matured, making him always capable of enthusiasm for a cause. He will be a man of ideas, mentally active and constructively critical, ever ready to break new ground and to voyage through strange seas of thought. He will be a man of experience, one who judges by character, trustworthy, practical. Il But that is not all. Man is a social being, and we do not understand him till we realise this fact also. He is born from the first into a family where he depends on his parents. He has relationships with brothers and sisters, which are different in the case of each, and change as he changes in growth from infancy to man- hood. These are continually modifying and forming his character. He learns to talk the language of those about him. Their peculiarities are impressed on his nature. Their interests or indifferences stimulate or depress his activities. ven their gestures and poses are caught and reproduced by him. These influences, surrounding him from the beginning, last in their results till death. The value of a rich family life, the loss to only children, to orphans, to boys and girls bred in institutions, cannot be reckoned. As the child grows it would seem as if the history of the race were reproduced in him. The tribal instinct marked one of the first great advances of civilisation. 1 Dante, Paradiso, canto xvii. 24. “ Ben tetragono ai colpi di ventura.”’ 2 Aristotle, Hth. Nic., Bk. I. ch. x. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND 9 Animals had herded together for protection, but men found that division of labour was possible in tribes. So as the child begins to emerge from the family, the ‘“ gang instinct’ appears. It is fostered and directed in school life by games, by the institution of monitor- ship, by school tone and interests. It.is carried on in the after life, for which schooldays are the prepara- tion, in Universities and by associations. As society exists to uphold a standard of manners, so Universities serve to maintain a high ideal of learning by gathering together students to one city.1 As committees revive your belief in a cause by the contact with your fellows, so all associations for the furthering of science or the practice of art are effective because of this social nature of man’s being. — The “ gang instinct”? gives way to the altruistic instinct. In most cases this finds its first clear expression in the love of husband for wife and wife for husband, and then in their common self-devotion to their children. But it is also extended in many to service of the community. Men work for societies, and undertake public office, whether municipal or in connection with their trade, profession or craft. It is extended further by imagination to abstract causes, to patriotism, to humanity, to movements political or moral. Men live for music or poetry, ‘‘ preferring the children of Homer and Hesiod to ordinary human ones.” In all these cases it is the man who loses his life that finds it. Individual life is starved unless it goes out and lives in and for others. For see how we depend on others! To recognise the fact is the condition of growth from earliest youth. * H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1895), Vol. II. Pt. Il. p. 715. ‘There is a kind of knowledge, too, which can only be secured by personal inter- communication, a kind of intellectual cultivation which is only made possible by constant interchange of ideas with other minds, a kind of enthusiasm which is impossible in isolation.”’ 10 WHY MEN BELIEVE We depend on them for the necessities of food and clothing, for means of getting about, for books, for shops, for civil protection and government, for all that makes up personal life, as, for instance, for conversa- tion, in which, as Bishop Butler saw, it is of its very nature that the discourse be mutual,! while even mono- logues require a listener. Talking with another clears our thoughts, so that a man “ waxeth wiser than him- self; and that more by an Houre’s discourse than by a Daye’s meditation.” 2 We know how others stimulate us; how we do not do things till we have talked them over to others and so have committed ourselves to action. In the same way, for our sports, our music, our games, our dancing, we need other men. For intensity of personal life we must have them. This ‘“‘ communicating of a man’s self to friends works two contrarie Effects. For it redoubleth Joyes and cutteth Grief in Halfes.’”?? In our characters, too, when alone we become morbid, unbalanced, “either a beast or_a god.’ 4 Largeness of life comes from our being willing to depend on others, on being willing to be served by those whom we would also serve, and so raising round 1 Bp. Butler, Sermon IV., Upon the Government of the Tongue. ‘* Tf we consider conversation ‘as an entertainment, as somewhat | to unbend the mind—as a diversion from the cares, the business and the sorrows of life—it is of the very nature of it that the discourse be mutual.” 2 Bacon, Essay XX., vii., Of Friendship. “* Whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he mar- shalleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words; finally he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour’s discourse than by a day’s meditation.” 3 Ibid. 4 Aristotle, Politics, Bk. I. ch. ii. Cp. Burke, Present Dis- contents. ‘‘ I remember an old scholastic aphorism which says ‘that the man who lives wholly detached from others must be either an angel or a devil... When I see in any of these detached gentlemen of our times the angelic purity, power and beneficence, I shall admit them to be angels.” THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND 11 us a “ rampart of our fellows,” of ‘ gentle friends who make our cause their own.” 1 We depend on others for all the larger life that goes with organisation, for co-operative production in factories, and for the distribution of its results by commerce. Most forms of high art, such as, for instance, choral singing, or that of the theatre or opera, of architecture and town-planning, are corporate. In social life the intercourse of men with men builds up taste, and the agreement of judgment with judg- ment forms public opinion. It is a bad thing if we give way toa shrinking from society. Service is man’s truest activity, and service becomes possible after we have shown ourselves willing to be helped. In far the greater number of cases service implies subordination, but a second fiddle is necessary to the whole of an orchestra. It is by accepting the authority of others, not unwillingly as a slave, but of free deliberate choice, that the great majority live out their lives into the great whole. III Faith is an activity of the whole man, being, as he is, such as we have seen. This is so in all our beliefs, in the ground of all our actions. We believe because conviction comes to us through any one of these ? Browning, Paracelsus, Works, Vol. I. p. 24. Paracelsus, If I can serve mankind "Tis well; but there our intercourse must end. I never will be served by those I love. Festus. Look well to this; here is a plague-spot, here, Disguise it how you may.— Were I elect like you, I would encircle me with love and raise A rampart of my fellows; it should seem Impossible for me to fail, so watched By gentle friends who made my cause their own. 12 WHY MEN BELIEVE channels. We act from motives which spring from any or all the parts of our being. In no two men is the ground exactly the same. | We believe on authority. The authority may be unconsciously deferred to. We believe this way or that from our instincts, from inclinations inherited from our parents, from the influences of early years. By nature and training some men are individualists and others socialists. As the sentry in Jolanthe saw in his meditations :— . ** Every boy and every gal That’s born into this world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative.”’ } Even if this is modified in later years, the modification bears the stamp of the original opinion. In the most violent reaction the type remains. As the Government of France remained just as centralised after the Revolu- tion, so the character remains though the conclusion is reversed. We believe because of early or long- continued habits which influence later judgment. The indulged child, at the first always allowed to be sucking a *“‘ baby’s comforter,’ unrestrained in his desire for sweets as a boy, continually smoking as a lad, per- petually drinking as a man, becomes unable to believe that self-restraint is possible, and holds unshakably the belief that carnal vice is natural and inevitable. We absorb ideas from our surroundings, which, like the plagues of Egypt, ‘‘can of no side be avoided.” 2 It is not without results in national convictions that the language in which we speak and think is charged with 1 W.S. Gilbert, Jolanthe. Cp. W.R. Inge, Christian Mysticism, Bampton Lectures, 1899, p. 36. ‘‘ Coleridge has said that every one is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, and one might perhaps adapt the epigram by saying that every one is naturally either a mystic or a legalist.”’ 2 Wisdom xvii. 10 (Authorised Version). THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND 13 the phrases of Shakespeare and the words of the English Bible, or that French was purified by the lucid and profound genius of Pascal and has been tainted by the irreligion of her later philosophers and the indecency of her novelists, that German is exact, and thorough and clumsy, that Welsh is musical, and Italian is clear, as the thought of Italy is plastic. Our opinions are bound up with customs, the English Sunday, our ideal of home- life, our love for the country making our cities cen- trifugal as those abroad are centripetal, our traditions of “ things Englishmen don’t do.” Or our ideas are deliberately and consciously borrowed from the experience of others, as when we learn a trade, study music, or practise an art. ‘* This is the way to do it,” they say. We imitate them and find they are right. Our tastes are educated by authorities. We submit our judgment to experts, and are rewarded. Naturally we may prefer the ornamen- tation of a chocolate box to the pictures at the National Gallery, but we say, ‘‘ Men who know more about it say these are great pictures; there must be more in them.” We sit down before them and let their beauties sink in, and at last we come to see that they are the best. All this mass of influences on our beliefs comes from outside. It inevitably predisposes us to determinism. We are tempted to say, ‘‘ Man is the creature of circumstances.” But even where external authority is consciously accepted we feel that the conviction is passive and weak, that the faith is not very deep. Other grounds of faith call for more activity of the man. Most obviously is this the case with the emotions. We learn in proportion to the interest that we feel in our subject. The unbiassed mind that is quite indifferent never really reaches to the heart of things. The personal note comes in in all our con- victions. Friends influence us. Ideas are contagious. We believe a man in whom we have confidence; of 14 WHY MEN BELIEVE others we say: ‘‘ I don’t trust him somehow.” Manner tells more than argument. Some people are convinced, some put off, by a loud speaking and emphasis.t_ Mark Antony, by coming to bury Cesar, bends to his will the crowd where: praise might have cost him his life. Men fall in love by the prompting of their feelings, and the trust and venture is justified in the most important act of life.? In lower forms the appeal to the emotions is of power. People build their creeds on catchwords, and seem really to believe that the Bellman was right when he announced that what he said three times was true.® They buy because “all the advertisements speak so well of? a thing, and almost come to believe that pills are worth a guinea a box, or that somebody’s ‘* soap is the best,” because they have seen it stated so often. They frame political programmes on phrases, which have a double force, if alliterative. They are genuinely moved by the iniquity of “‘ tests for teachers,” though they would be quite ready to recognise that they are necessary for schoolmasters. Others are unable to resist an analogy, and where they see a similarity at once assume a connection. Mere novelty is often a reason for accepting a belief, while of course 1 Plato, Republic, Bk. VIII. § 568. Tyrants arising out of democracy will “make the round of the other states, gather together the populace, hire fine, loud, persuasive voices, and so draw over the Commonwealth to tyranny and democracy.”’ 2 Hooker, Hecclesiastical Polity, Bk. V. ch. Ixxiii. § 2. “ That kind of love which is the perfectest ground of wedlock is seldom able to yield any reason of itself.” 3 Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark. Cp.J.H. Newman, Oxford University Sermons (Longmans, 1898), Sermon VILI., ‘‘ Con- trast between Faith and Sight,” p. 112. “ The world overcomes us, not merely by appealing to our reason, or by exciting our passions, but by imposing on our imagination—the systems of men—by their persevering assertions gradually overcome those who set out by contradicting them. In all cases what is often and unhesitatingly asserted, at length finds credit with the mass of mankind.” THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND 15 the fact that a thing is old is a strong ground for receiving it as true.t Impressiveness of presentation gains assent. Poli- ticians know the value of meetings. Propagandists recognise the value of processions. Agitators bring the public to their side by organised demonstrations. If you can associate music with a cause you make it persuasive; “‘ Lillibulero”? and the ‘“ Marseillaise ” did more than tomes of political philosophy. Appeals to prejudice, to likes and dislikes, to distrust of your fellow-men, to class prejudice, to the cynicism that believes all men are humbugs, and that every man has his price, to the readiness of men to believe that they have a grievance, are the stock-in-trade of unscrupulous popular oratory. In its higher forms the appeal of beauty has often an irresistible force, whether the beauty is in external _things or in thoughts which, it may be, “lie too deep for tears,” or. when external things are the sacraments of ideas which clothe themselves in beautiful forms. Odious as are the tricks of oratory, there is a power legitimate to the art. Illustrations will often convince where the bare statement does not get home, since “ truth embodied in a tale ’’ will enter in at quite lowly doors. The appeal of moral beauty in all stories of heroism and devotion told of men of whom it was “not theirs to reason why,” all that in such stories strikes us at once as right and true, calls out our assent. As» Pascal said, ‘‘ The heart has its reasons which the mind does not know.” 2 Not that reason has no place, or that faith is in any * Cp. Clough, Poems (Macmillan, 1892), p. 93. *“* Old things need not therefore be true,’ Oh, brother men, nor yet the new; Ah ! still awhile the old thought retain, And yet consider it again.” 2 Pensées, ed. Brunschvieg, No. 277. ‘Le cour a ses raisons, que Ja raison ne connait point; on le sait en mille choses.” 16 WHY MEN BELIEVE way contrary to intelligence. The mind comes in to _ test, and especially it distrusts and tries emotion. The man who falls in love does quite right to ponder on the suitability of the lady to be his wife. Intellect ean restore balance, can remove difficulties, can clear prejudices out of the way. It can direct attention to the other sides of the question. It can corroborate a mere impulsive belief by pointing out other instances. Its effect, too, is greater with the lapse of time. It is less liable to variation. Logic tells in the long run, even against rooted prejudice, and all the more surely because thought co-operates with experience and the logic of reasoning is borne out by the logic of facts. But by itself reasoning can do very little. “ No case. Abuse the plaintiff’s attorney,” was the often- quoted advice of a man who understood human nature. Argument can easily defeat its own ends, since we distrust what we fear may be special pleading, and are inclined to think that if the arguments are many and strong the case must be weak to need so much support. Where it seems to succeed it is often far more by the art of well-reasoned thought that it tells, by the pleasure that lucid exposition gives, or by the enthusiasm of the arguer. Pure intellectual conviction at its very best is only conviction of a part of man, while the rest cries out: “‘ H pur si muove.” Nor is it suited to the mass of men. The educated are few, and intellectual faith is, and always will be, aristocratic. On the other hand, conviction comes to most men by experience. We believe in things because we have dealt with them, in methods because we have. found that they work. We boil an egg for three minutes and a half, not because we have a theoretic knowledge of the effects of heat on the chemical constituents of albumen, but' because we have done it before. In, intellectual matters it is the effort of the will, even more than the emotion of interest, that is necessary. To understand we need application, steady work, trained THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND 17 power of sustained attention, and patient habits of study, which are all activities of the will. Moral failure destroys the power of understanding. We are responsible for our beliefs. Our judgments are biassed by ill temper, by cynicism, by discontent, by pessimism, by carnal indulgence. Evil habits often result in a _ physical bar to clear understanding. They ruin health, energy, decision, till men are “ not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.” 1 We may see and feel truth and strength, but it is only hours of mortal moral strife that aright reveal “the only source of all our light and life.” ? Man’s fullest life is social. The power of these various reasons for assent is increased in force and in intensity when he acts not as an individual, but corporately. The effect on man of the presence of his fellow-men is to inhibit peculiarities and to leave free play for that which he has in common with them. Eccen- tricities are repressed. They find no response in his neighbours, while the great elemental, lasting, simple things, which he and they have alike, are given a free course. At the same time the contagion of crowds gives a new life to them, where, to the man who stands alone, they had come to seem bald, familiar, and worn. Emotionally we are stimulated and disciplined by feeling in concert. This gives their value to meetings, and its force to ceremonial. They silence the voice of self-consciousness, and make it easy and safe to give way to passion. Movements of indignation or of enthusiasm will sweep through a country. Associated keenness carries individuals over times of reaction and, like the 1 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 2 Clough, Poems, p. 84, ‘‘Qui Laborat, Orat.”’ **O only source of all our light and life, om as our truth, our strength, we see and feel, But whom the hours of mortal moral strife Alone aright reveal !”’ 18 WHY MEN BELIEVE flywheel of an engine, maintains a steady pressure of throbbing conviction that does not ebb and flow with varying moods. The pooled experience of human thought is stored up in scientific dogmas. Political parties have their programmes to unite their adherents in a common belief. The more clearly it is set forward, the less | weight do individual criticisms and partial reservations seem to have. In all sciences we rely on the intellectual labours of other men. There is no need to be for ever going over what has already been thrashed out by them. Instead we divide our labour and co-operate. Argu- ments for a cause that touches life in many parts converge from outlying districts of thought. They corroborate one another. Whichever way we look comes some new factor of evidence, and our convictions become increasingly firm as we learn first from one and then another. Bodies of men build up a tradition of experience, medical, artistic, or literary. In working with other men we gain firmness of resolution. The effect of Army life is to create unhesitating and united action. Co- operation in work is the great way of getting to know your fellows, and the more you know them the more their characters mingle with yours and guide and sway your actions. This is true of the present, but the force of the past is still greater. The tears and passions of days gone by are enshrined in poetry and music, which move us to-day in sympathy with what men have suffered and felt long ago, as we sing songs of “ old, unhappy, far-off things,” or move in still-living traditions. ‘‘ Ideals,” writes Dr. Rashdall in speaking of the Universities that we owe to the Middle Ages, ‘‘ pass into great historic forces by embodying themselves in institutions.’ } Tested experience leaves to each generation a legacy cf common sense which for most men is the absolute 1 Op, cit., Vol. I. p. 5. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND 19 guide of life. Moreover, the force of this authority of the past, coming from masses of conviction gained by varied means and on all sorts of ground, when it speaks with anything like a united voice, is well-nigh irresistible. But all this corporate authority is accepted and interpreted by each man as an individual. The Macrocosm is known to him only in his Microcosm, while each individual is but one. His feeling, thought, and will are limited in his single self. So arguments for belief are really inseparable. One influences another. Feeling helps thought and thought influences experience. Therefore evidence, except for abstract propositions, is always cumulative. ‘‘ The truth of common matters is to be judged by all the evidence taken together.” 1 IV Religion is a “‘common matter.” We believe with the whole man. We apprehend God as the Eternal Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, through our emotions, our intellect, and our moral sense; by feeling, by thought, and by will. We believe on grounds of emotion, by intuitions, because we have felt God’s presence in prayer, and such feelings are, at least, not necessarily a self-delusion. We believe on the appeal of beauty, whether the appeal is individual, through literature, as when we read the pages of the Bible; through preaching, when we are swayed by the power of the speaker’s voice; through the instrumentality of art that holds converse with us * Bp. Butler, Analogy, Part II. ch. vii. Cp. J. H. Newman, Oxford University Sermons, Sermon V., “ Personal Influence the Means of Propagating the Truth,” 3rd ed. (Rivingtons, 1872), p. 90. “Truth is vast and far-stretching viewed as a system; and viewed in its separate doctrines it depends on a combination of a number of various delicate and scattered evidences; hence it can scarcely be exhibited in a given number of sentences.” 20 WHY MEN BELIEVE without words; in the contemplation of Nature, when we feel “a presence that disturbs us with the joy of elevated hearts ’’; on the appeal of moral beauty when we read the lives of the saints who have dared and died for their faith, when we see them daring and living for-it all round us—we believe whenever the» heart ‘stands up and answers ‘I have felt.’ ’? We believe, too, on grounds of corporate emotion: when we sing hymns in harmony together; when we witness a ceremonial that is the expression of united worship; when we gather together in buildings the architecture of which chants the ‘frozen music” of Christian inspiration; when the sense of being a part of a con- gregation of fellow-Christians enlarges our hearts and brings us into a larger world; when with emotion so disciplined and stimulated we say, ‘‘ We feel sure that it is true”; when we are convinced that that which inspires such fine art cannot be false. Such emotional belief may be precarious. It may be liable to reaction. It needs to be tested by reason, But it is a legitimate ground of faith—nay, often even a condition of the power of the mind to see things as they really are, and a necessary preliminary to the practical action of the will. For we believe also because reason follows on, probing and establishing the faith that has been aroused by feeling. It comes answering questions and showing that our confidence is reasonable. It says, ‘* These experiences of mystics and of simple men in prayer must be explained.” It is not scientific merely to sweep them aside. It points out how the times when we believe were the times when we were most clear- minded and most stimulated to see, that they were the times when we were our best selves, the times we should choose to be judged by. It argues that the Theist’s theory of art is the most reasonable, namely, that God the absolute Beauty is there to be appre- hended. It provides a philosophy of Aisthetic, explaining why we love Nature, why Christianity can THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUND 21 inspire an architect to build a Gothic cathedral, or Bach to write his Passion Music. It interprets History, showing what Christianity has done, and testing the trustworthiness of its written records. It justifies practice of devotion, pointing out the inherent reason- ableness of sacramentalism and the practical value of habits which carry us over dull times when the imagina- tion, always working rhythmically, grows fatigued, and telling us that we are acting reasonably in bending the knee in prayer to bring back the sense of the presence of God. It points out analogies between religion and “ the constitution and course of Nature.” It builds up creeds and elaborates the whole terminology of scientific theology. It formulates dogmas as the common basis of the practical religion of action. But it is chiefly the witness of what Christianity does that convinces men. We believe it because it meets our needs. We take part in its worship because of our experience that it works. It gives men an adequate reason for association, and Y.M.C.A.’s succeed in doing things that others cannot do. We believe because we witness the failure of a merely critical or negative attitude, because of the obvious association of Chris- tianity with morals, as seen in actual sins of the world that rejects its authority as well as in the literary opposition to its teaching. We believe because our faith is the outcome of what we have deliberately chosen to live in at the dictates of our conscience with a conviction that grows firmer with advancing age, as the emotions of youth fade and intellectual debate changes to the reminiscence, ‘‘ I remember I argued it all out once, years ago.” 1 _ Belief, therefore, is of the whole man, and the belief in Christianity, as in other matters, is established by + Cp. Locke, Human Understanding, Bk. IV. ch. i. § 9. Cp. Pascal, Pensées, ed. Brunschvieg, No. 252. “Car d’en avoir toujours les preuves présentes, c’est trop d’affaire ” (For always to have proofs at hand is too much of a business), 22 WHY MEN BELIEVE authority. For authority means the tested and pooled experience of other experts, and this is accumulated in the Church, enshrined in her services, gathered up in her creed and embodied in her life. These are the four grounds on which we believe, Whether with Luria we simply say, ‘‘ We ' The Hibbert Journal, Vol. TV. Oct. 1909 : “‘ How Christianity Appeals to a Japanese Buddhist,” by M. Anesaki, Professor of the Philosophy of Religion in the Imperial University of Japan. 2 The exact words of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun were: “‘ I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Christopher’s sentiment that he believed that if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need net care who should make all the laws of a nation.” —An Account of a Conversation concerning a Right to Regulation of Governments (1655-1716). 3 “The Nature of Religion”: Selections from the Literature of Theism, by A. Caldecott and H. R. Mackintosh (Edinburgh, 1904), p. 260. See also the Introduction to Selection VII. p. 257. “The historical importance of Schleiermacher’s work, indeed, is in great measure due to the success with which he vindicated the independent reality of religion as distinct from knowledge and morals. Its seat, he argues passionately, is neither in reason, conscience, nor will; religion is feeling—the feeling of absolute dependence. It is the immediate consciousness of all that is finite as existing in and through the Infinite, of all that is temporal as existing in and through the Eternal.” CHRISTIANITY AND ART 25 feel Him nor by painful reason know,” ! or whether we deliberately turn to the heart in opposition to “freezing reason’s colder part,” and like a man in wrath let it stand up and answer “I have felt,” 2 we believe on grounds of emotion, for, as Pascal said, ‘“ It is the heart that feels God, and not reason. That is what faith is—God felt by the heart, not by the reason.” 8 We judge things by the test of whether they are beautiful or not. People often distrust such a criterion. They are afraid that their feelings will carry them away, and feelings must, of course, be watched. They must be checked by reflection. They must be tested by fact. But the same people will, without hesitation, disbelieve things because they are ugly, and they are right in so doing. Why should they not, therefore, as on one ground, at least, believe things because they are beautiful ? So things are recommended by their setting. By the art of oratory the claims of Christianity are set forth in persuasive words. The appeal of poetry and music has always been of power. Wesley won his way by his hymns, while the silent piety of the non-jurors _ failed to influence the eighteenth century, as it fails to interest us greatly to-day. Others than Wordsworth have felt as present in Nature something that is far more deeply interfused, and that disturbs them with the joy of elevated thoughts. ‘If I give you a rose you will not scorn its Creator,” wrote Tertullian 4 in confidence that men would agree with him, rather than with Marcion. The modern objection to miracles is, as has been pointed out; largely esthetic in its base, * Browning, Works (Smith Elder, 1896), p. 463. * Tennyson, In Memoriam, exxiv. 3 Pensées, ed. Brunschvieg, No. 278. ‘‘C’est le cceur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison. Voila ce que c’est la foi, Dieu sensible au cceur, non a la raison.”’ 4 Adv. Marcionem, 1.14. ‘ 26 WHY MEN BELIEVE since they seem to contradict the majesty and order of God’s working in the universe." For the influence of beauty is, surely, rather to quicken than to hypnotise. The reality is there, but it depends on us whether we have eyes or no eyes, and we receive but what we give. It is only with the sense thus stimulated that we see into the heart of things. This is true of production as well as of appre- ciation. ‘‘ A state of excitement,” wrote Keats, “is the only state for the best poetry.” ? It is true of human intercourse that— ** Love can never fail To warm another’s bosom, so the light Shine manifestly forth.” * Sympathy is necessary if we are to know others. It is true of beauty that it is a means of conveying truth that “art was given for that,” that— ‘* We’re so made that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.” * It is more than that. To many, at least, it is the only means of realising the whole truth :— ‘Tt is the glory and the good of art That art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth,” 1 0, J. Shebbeare, The Challenge of the Universe (8.P.C.K., 1918), p. 168. : 2 Quoted by C. F. E. Spurgeon, Poetry in the Light of War, Iinglish Association Pamphlet, No. 46, p. 11. 3 Dante, Purgatorio, canto xxii. 1. 10. ** Amore Acceso da virtt: sempre altro accese, Pur che la fiamma sua paresse fuore.”’ Cp. Augustine, De Cat. Rud., IV.: ‘“‘ Nulla est enim major ad _ amorem invitatio quam prevenire amando”’ (There is nothing which calls forth love more than to be first in loving), and Confessions, Bk. IV. ch. xiv.: “Ex amante alio accenditur alius”’ (From one lover the love of another is kindled). 4 Browning, Works, Vol. I. p. 522: Fra Lippo Lippi. CHRISTIANITY AND ART or when human speech is naught, that— “ Art may tell a truth Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.” ! So, to use the appeal of beauty to the emotions is legitimate in seeking to recommend a Faith. We may call to our aid the service of poetry and prose, remem- bering the long line of men from Justin Martyr onwards who have been converted by the literary appeal of the Scriptures. We may utilise the genius of great masters of style among theologians who make us feel how narrow the outsider’s outlook upon religion is. We may bring into play all the resources of architecture and painting. We may wed the divine sounds of voice and verse in music and employ them to pierce dead things (as they are able) with inbreathed sense. We may have recourse to pomp and ceremony, for “though it is superstitious to put our hopes in for- malities, it is pride to be unwilling to submit to them.” 2 We may, with Joubert, recognise that—- “the value of religious observances lies in the fact of its being public, in its outward show, its ring, its pomp, the clash of its sounds, and in its customs permeating all the details of public life and of that of the inner man,” and we may say boldly that— “chanting, and bells, and incense, and abstinence, and fast were ordained by a deep-based wisdom, and are things of value, that matter, that are necessary, that we cannot do without.” 3 + Browning, Works, Vol. II.: The Ring and the Book, xii. “The Book and the Ring,” II. 842, 859. ' 2 Pascal, Pensées, No. 249. ‘‘C’est étre superstitueux, de mettre son espérance dans les formalités; mais c’est étre superbe, de ne vouloir s’y soumettre.”’ ’ Joubert, Pensées (Paris : Perrin, 1909), Titre I. 107. “Ce qui rend le culte utile, c’est sa publicité, sa manifestation exté- rieure, son bruit, sa pompe, son fracas, et son observance universellement et visiblement insinuée dans tous les détails de C 28 WHY MEN BELIEVE As false beauty draws away from the truth, so the true beauty of holiness must be used to draw men back to it. ‘‘ Only Rousseau,” wrote Joubert again, ‘can detach you from religion, and only true religion can cure you of Rousseau.” ! This is the old argument of Augustine : ‘‘ Our hearts know no rest till they rest in Thee; 2 of George Herbert, that if goodness lead man not, yet weariness may toss him to God’s breast.® It is right to be led thither by emotions. It is right that we should seek to sway men by esthetic means. The responsibility is not that of using beauty, but of seeing that we are employing that which is beautiful in fact. II So, here, the intellect comes in. No man, it is true, ever fell in love by argument, but reason rightly says to the man inlove: ‘‘ Take care. Are you sure you are right? Is she the wife for you?” or, what matters more: ‘ Are you the man who can really make her happy?” Reason comes in, if not to freeze, at least to cool the glow of emotion by the cast of thought. It says: “‘ This may be beautiful, but is it true? This may be attractive, but will it work?” It asks of the things that stir our feelings: ‘‘ Are they deluding us? Are we really seeing deeper, or is our judgment being la vie publique et de la vie intérieure, c’est 14 seulement ce qui fait les fétes, les temps, et les véritables variétés de l’année. Aussi faut-il dire hardiment que les chants, les cloches, l’encens, le maigre, l’abstinence, ete., étaient des institutions profondément sages, et des choses utiles, importantes, nécessaires, indispens- ables.” 1 Joubert, Pensées, Titre XXIV. 50. ‘‘ Je parle auxdmes ten- dres, aux Ames ardentes, aux dmes élevées, aux Ames nées avec un de ces caractéres distinctifs de la religion, et je leur dis: Il n’y a que J. J. Rousseau qui puisse vous détacher de la religion, et il n’y a que la religion qui puisse vous guérir de J. J. Rousseau.” 2 Confessions, Bk. I. ch. i. 3 “The Gifts of God,” in The Golden Treasury, Bk. I. No. lxxiv. CHRISTIANITY AND ART 29 overborne? Are we growing sensitive to finer issues, or are things of sense clouding our minds? ” In other words we ask: ‘‘ What is the theology of all this? Are we justified in using these facts as arguments for belief in God? and if so, in what sort of God? Emotions have a recognised place in religion; is there a theology of the feelings also? ’? When these questions are put, we explain that in the forms and colours of art, in the rhythms and harmonies of music, in the life and movement of Nature, in the beauty and charm of human intercourse, in the pomp of ceremonial and ordered movement, we become conscious of God, who is the source of all beauty. We argue that as by the intellect we find out what is true, and by the conscience are aware of what is good, so by the feelings we know what is beautiful, and that by these three means of approach, thinking, willing, and feeling, man knows God, the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Righteous- ness, and the Perfect Beauty. Against this it is declared that the esthetic sense is due to natural causes: that the colour of flowers is owed to the fact that those which were brightly coloured attracted the bees, while those which were without remained unfertilised: that the song and plumage of birds were due to the choice of the female in mating, since those whose feathers were dull found no mate; that we admire the agile and lissom frame because activity and strength were associated with pleasant thoughts of victory and safety; that by the laws of survival of the fittest and by that of natural selection we inherited our ideas of beauty, which are really only ideas of usefulness.1 Well, possibly that accounts for certain elements in our «esthetic conceptions. There may be a strand of purely utilitarian sensuousness in our idea, say, of a beautiful face or figure. A certain part may, perhaps, * Cp. Darwin, Origin of Species, chs. vi. and xv. (Murray, sixth edition, 1875), pp. 159 and 414. 30 WHY MEN BELIEVE be traced to mere sexual attraction. Possibly man began to get his ideas of beauty from such simple origins, just as his first ideas of right and wrong came (we are told) from the categorical imperative of the laws of taboo. But, however evolved, the idea of beauty is there. However it began, we know what it is now, and things are to be judged, not by what they started from, but by where they have got to. The whole of the modern science of mathematics has been evolved by a faculty that in primitive man (we are informed) could not count above four, but we do not propose on that account to discredit the science and all that it does.t Why should we distrust our fully- . evolved and educated powers of seeing beauty, and- deny that there is anything in it outside ourselves to see? Moreover, even if the theory be true (as it well may be), | it only describes how the sense of beauty was first evolved; it does not tell us what it is, or explain it. It does not give us any reason why the female bird should have preferred beautiful colours, or why the majority of bees preferred (if they did notice and prefer) the harmonious blending of tints in the varied shapes and forms of flowers. Nor, if it did, would it tell us why these likes and dislikes should be passed on by the parent bird and bee to their young. The sense of beauty may have been awakened from purely domestic and utilitarian impulses in pre- historic times. ‘We cannot prove or refute the state- ment, for, from the nature of the case, there can be no evidence. But certainly, when we come to times of which records exist, we find that this is not, as a matter of fact, the way in which it has advanced. There is a history of art, and in it we can read how man 1 J. R. Mingworth, Personality, Human and Divine (Murray, 1894), p. 110. H. Rashdall, Theory of Good and Evil (Oxford, 1907), Vol. II. p. 357. Conscience and Christ (Duckworth, 1916), 10. Philosophy and Religion (Duckworth, 1909), p. 64. Cp. Aristotle, Politics, Vol. I. p.2. ‘The nature is theend. For what each thing is when fully developed we call its nature.” CHRISTIANITY AND ART 31 came to love and to create the higher forms of beauty. They are not the creation of popular taste, any more than righteousness is the will of the majority. It is true that. we “needs must love the highest when we see it,” * just as the conscience of man recognises what is right when it is shown to him, but beauty has-to be discovered first, and the mass of men have, and that hardly, to be made to open their eyes. This opening has been brought about by great men, and that with much labour and pain, by men deliberately seeking a higher end, and one which led them along a via dolorosa, a way of the cross. Further, the utilitarian explanation is quite in- adequate to account for secondary effects. It is just conceivable that the eye was evolved in man because the sharp-sighted were able to escape danger and hand on their abilities by heredity to their descendants, but the eye— 6 ‘not only sees, it shines and it speaks—and thus in turn becomes a means of emotional attraction and spiritual intercourse, fairer - than the sapphire, more expressive than the tongue,” 2 and it would be as absurd to argue that this was due to the fact that people with beautiful eyes and with power of using them got more eugenic husbands and wives, as it would be to argue that we should have been killed if we had been unable to appreciate the shapes of flowers or the colours of a sunset. The finest things esthetically have small ‘ survival value.’ 3 1 Tennyson, [dylls of the King, “ Guinevere,” ]. 654. Cp. Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum, Bk. VI. ch. iii. “For Plato said elegantly (though now it is grown into a commonplace) that virtue, if she could be seen, would move great love and affection.” * Illingworth, op. cit. p. 98. Cp. C. J. Shebbeare, The Challenge of the Universe (S.P.C.K., 1918), ch. x. 8 A. J. Balfour, Theism and Humanism (Hodder & Stoughton, 1905), p. 260. “ Wherever we find great intrinsic worth, there we are in a region where the direct effort of selection is negligible. The noblest things in speculation, in art, in morals, possess small survival value,” 32 WHY MEN BELIEVE Once more, beauty and purpose go together. It is not that art is utilitarian in its aims, so much as that useless art is bad art. As the unity of the world leads to a theistic theory of physics, so the unity of art and purpose lead to a theistic theory of esthetic. Beauty is, if you are speaking of man, a discovery of God by man, or, if you are talking theologically, it is a revelation to man of God. Beauty is revealed to us in three forms, in art, in nature, and in human life. Some would deny the existence of this absolute beauty. Tolstoy will have it that art is merely the language of emotion, the making explicit of what is lowest in our natures, of that which we share with the beasts. At best, he says, it is but a message of man to man. So, too, all Puritanism which emphasises the transcendence of God, and His separateness from man, tends to banish art, for to it art is an attempt to embody the beauty of God in forms moulded by the skill of man. Against _ such we may set Plato, who tells us how man learns to— ‘use the beauties of the earth as steps along which he mounts upwards, going from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty,| and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is.” ! The appeal of the beauty of Nature is more universal. It is found wherever man has not read his own ideas into her, and where he has not stepped in to mar her works. It is true that many of us see little of Nature that is ours because the world is too much with us, aa that thereby her plan is thwarted, so that we ave— ** reason to lament What man has made of man,” but still there are few who do not at least vaguely feel the presence in her of Him “ whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.” 1 Plato, Symposium, 210. CHRISTIANITY AND ART 33 It is sometimes asked : ‘‘ If God is the source of all that is beautiful in Nature, must He not be the source of all that is ugly also? Does not the same argument say that He is the Eternal Ugliness?”’ But it may be answered, though some things in Nature are more beautiful than others, since God dwells or works in them more intensely, there is nothing ugly in Nature itself. Hither it is read into what we see by our interpretation of it, by the ‘‘ pathetic fallacy ” 1 which calls the foam cruel and crawling, which shrinks before the arid wastes of the waterless desert, before the frozen ice-fields round the poles, or from the infinite silent spaces of the sky which made Pascal fear,? or because the imperfect or perverse will of man has interfered and scarred the mountain-side with slate quarries and blotted the land with slag heaps. There is nothing ugly about the desert or the ice-field unless we think of man being caught in them. Great artists have redeemed for us the torrents and rocks which our forefathers merely reyarded as ‘“ horrid,’ and man co-operating with God can improve on Nature and turn the wilderness into a garden, that “‘ purest of human pleasures.” Moreover, there is a bond between physical and moral beauty fitting in with the belief that the Absolute Beauty is one with the Absolute Good. ‘All beauty is akin,” writes Mr. C. F. E. Spurgeon— 1 Ruskin, Modern Painters, Pt. IV. ch. xii. § 4. “The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould Naked and shivering with his cup of gold.” This is very beautiful and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much having it put into our heads that it is anything else but a plain crocus? . . . The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. . . . They (the words) produce in us a falseness of our impressions of external things which I would generally characterise as the ‘‘ pathetic fallacy.” * Pensées, 206, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m/’efiraie,” 340 WHY MEN BELIEVE “and if we begin by loving the beauty of the dew, the blue smoke, the water’s dimpling laugh, we shall inevitably be led . on to love the beauty of endurance, courage, and truth, of sacrifice and high tragedy, the almost’ blinding beauty of pain. Plato covered this ground long ago, and no one even seems to have been able to add anything appreciable to what he said.” * And what Plato said was :— “‘ neither we, nor our guardians . . . can ever become ‘ musical ’ until we know the essential forms of temperance, courage, liberality, magnificence . . . in all their combinations, and can recognise them and their images wherever they are found, not slighting them either in small things or great, but believing them all to be within the sphere of one art and study.” 2 This interpretation of the fact of Beauty, that it is the revelation or discovery of God, seems to be demanded by philosophy. There is a unity of judg- ment about beauty. A converging body of opinion declares that certain men, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, are the masters. The good and great in art show a lasting power through the changing moods of men and ages. Though individuals differ as to details, and there is no accounting for tastes, yet all agree that there is such a thing as beauty, just as they all agree in the search for truth and right, though they often differ as to whether particular things are true and good. The differences of taste about which we are told we cannot dispute are, after all, no greater than we should expect when we consider how numerous men are, and how varied their abilities, as well as the infinite number and complex ramifications of beautiful things, all of which no one man can take in as a whole. The simplest and most rational explanation of this agreement in the search for beauty, and the belief of so many that they have in some part found it, is that it— or, rather, He—is there to be found. The practice of : 1 Poetry in the Light of War, p. 14. 2 Republic, Bk. III. § 402. CHRISTIANITY AND ART 35 art depends on faith in beauty. The belief that it does not exist in itself, or is of mere base and utilitarian nature, is bound to be depressing. If the world in the matter of aesthetics is a huge practical joke, it is hard to keep up our interest in at least the higher forms of art. They are full of sound and fury, but signify nothing. So, many men substitute art for religion or pursue it for its own sake. Many a man will go to concerts and soothe his religious feelings with music, because music, while giving a sense of the eternal, commits you to nothing. Others, like Faust, turn to Nature, and dig in their allotments on Sundays, and find there, as he did, the final word of Wisdom,! declaring with Candide that ‘‘ we must cultivate our garden.” Other superior persons, like Renan, would have religion, in. which they themselves do not believe, kept up for their inferiors, because of the comfort that its archi- tecture and its Scriptures bring to their feelings.® But art can only remain alive if associated with truth and goodness. This is demanded by otir conception of the ultimate unity of the three. The condition of our communion with beauty is that we should share it with our fellow-men. _In a world that is a mere Palace of Art, God “ plagues us with sore despair.” A world in which we had all at our disposal without 1 Goethe, Faust, Pt. II. Scene in the great outer Court of the Palace. | , 2 Voltaire, Candide, ed. André Morize (Hachette, 1913); last words. “‘‘Cela est bien dit,’ répondit Candide, ‘mais il faut cultiver ndétre jardin.’’’ Passages illustrating this sentiment are quoted from his letters of Nov. 11, 1748, Aug. 9, 1756, June 4, 1757, Jan. 9, 1759. 3 Etudes d’Histoire Religieuse (Paris, 1858); Preface, p. xvi. “What a delight for the man who is borne down by six days of toil to come on the seventh to rest upon his knees, to con- template the tall columns, a vault, arches, an altar; to listen to the chanting, to hear moral and consoling words!” Quoted and discussed in J. Morley’s Compromise (Macmillan, ed. 1901), p- 48. 36 WHY MEN BELIEVE fellow-men to share it with would be a world without Love, where we should be— “Left in God’s contempt apart With ghastly smooth life dead at heart, Tame in Earth’s paddock as her prize.” ! The belief that God is the source of all beauty, that He is apprehended by us through our emotions, in art, nature, and social life, fits in with what we know of human nature, as well as with the whole body of Christian theology, life, and worship. Ill As a matter of fact Christianity has produced and inspired art. The Gothic cathedrals of northern France, the Florentine painting of the Early Renais- sance, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Bach’s Passion Music, owe their origin and genius directly to the religion of the Gospel. Others owe their existence indirectly to it from having been produced in Christian countries, from having absorbed its moral purpose and having lived in its civilisation. Shakespeare could hardly have written his plays in the days of Paganism. It is true that in certain directions the art of ancient Greece has never been equalled, still less surpassed, but that is because it was limited in scope. It never attempted much beyond the representation of human life. ‘* To- day’s brief passion ” limited the artist’s range. Greater perfection is often reached in lower stages of evolution if higher possibilities are sacrificed. Birds can fly and elephants can carry, but man has sacrificed flight and strength to make the hand the instrument that uses the pen; the brush, and the violin. As the least in the Kingdom of Heaven was greater than the last of the line of prophets, so, as Browning pointed out, * Browning, Haster Day, xxxiii.. Works (Smith, Elder), Vol. I. p- 507, CHRISTIANITY AND ART 37 Christian art is less perfect because of its wider nature, because it aims at bringing the invisible full into play, and has time in store.t The argument for faith in Christianity drawn from the beauty it has called forth is a sound and legitimate one. It is not only to the past that we may turn for this conviction. If art depends on character, if genius has anything to do with taking pains, if great works owe anything to perseverance, then obviously Christi- anity is an important factor in art. Moreover, it gives a worthy subject matter. The futility and meaning- lessness of much modern art, the triviality of most novels, the cult of sordidness in much modern poetry, the emptiness of the mass of modern music, are to many a-crying witness of the need for Christian inspiration. For art is strengthened and even increased by associa- tion with reality. So Shakespeare :— “Oh, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.” ? And Keats :— ** Beauty is truth—truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” 8 Great art, if not invariably based, as some would say, on popular art, is at least closely associated with it. “It is out of the inspiration of the masses that great men arise. Religion is the great occasion for art in the lives of the people, and it gives an adequate motive for that association with one another which is necessary for its production on a great and corporate scale. The church is almost always the chief artistic interest in a village, invariably the chief that is available for all its people. The church choir is practically their only 1 Old Pictures in Florence, Works, Vol. I. p. 2691. 2 Sonnet LIV. 3 Ode toa Grecian Urn. Last lines. 38 WHY MEN BELIEVE possible attempt at combined harmony, the sermon all the oratory they hear, the reading of the Bible their sole knowledge of great literature, the hymns they sing their only acquaintance with poetry and verse. Art by its democratic appeal—for beauty touches men whose intellects are not trained to follow argument— naturally associates itself with the church, where all are united in one body. _ The Christian religion, above all others, provides a philosophy of art in its central doctrine of the Incarnation. The belief that the Eternal Word has revealed Himself in the Human Christ finds its extension in the revelation of the Eternal Beauty in the outward forms of art. It makes Puritanism impossible and redeems art from the degradation of minding only earthly things. We may love the world and all that is in it :— ‘White plates and cups, clean gleaming, Ringed with blue lines, and feathery faery dust; Wet roofs beneath the lamplight,”’ on through the whole catalogue (though it is more than a catalogue) down to— : ‘“‘ Oaks, and brown horse-chestnuts glossy new, And new-peeled sticks, and shining pools on grass; ” 1 but to stop there is rather childish at best (though charming in children), and such loves easily rot into coarse paganism if we rest in the creature rather than the creator. “The great beauty of poetry,” wrote Keats, “is that it makes every place interesting.” 2 That is true of Christianity also, and we may add that it is given also an interest in every man as one for whom Christ was born. * Rupert Brooke, quoted in C. F. E. Spurgeon’s Poetry in the Light of War, p. 12. * Ibid. CHRISTIANITY AND ART 39 IV So we may let ourselves go, and surrender ourselves to the appeal of music and the influence of archi- tecture. We may let our judgment be influenced by singing and ceremony. We may submit our feelings to the sway of rhetoric and the charm of literature. Pascal was perfectly right in advising men to act as if they believed, if they wished to get faith, to take holy water and have masses said.!_ It is as hopeless to expect to understand Christianity without mingling with the worshipping crowd, as it is to understand politics without associating yourself with those who are keenly working for their country’s good. It was seen centuries ago how the Christians of the East had held together by virtue of their dramatic worship. Wise old Bishop Butler urged his clergy to ‘‘ endeavour to beget a practical sense of religion upon men’s hearts ” by “ keeping up, as we are able, the form and face of religion with decency and reverence in such a degree as to bring the thought of religion often to their minds.”’ 2 + Pensées, ed. Brunschvieg, No. 233. ‘‘ Suivez la maniare par ot ils ont commencé: c’est en faisant tout comme sg’ils croyaient, en prenant de l’eau bénite, en faisant dire des messes, ete. Naturellement méme cela vous fera croire et vous abétira.”’ Cp. William James, Tert-Book of Psychology (Macmillan, 1905), p. 383. “There is no more valuable precept in moral education than this, as all who have experience know; if we wish to conquer undesirable tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward movements of those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate. . . . Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial compliment, and your heart must be frigid-indeed if it do not gradually thaw.” * Charge to the Clergy of Durham, in 1751, Works, ed. J. H. Bernard (Macmillan, 1900), Vol. I. p. 292. 40 WHY MEN BELIEVE For, as Hooker wrote— ‘“‘ religious and sacred days . . . are the splendour and outward dignity of our religion, forcible witnesses of ancient truth, pro- vocations to the exercise of piety, shadows of our endless felicity in heaven, on earth everlasting records and memorials wherein they which cannot be drawn to hearken unto that we teach, may not only by looking upon that we do, in a manner read what we believe.” } ‘If bad art alienates and deludes, we may fairly call in good art to attract and teach. Our only care must be to see that it is good and that what it teaches is true. ; We are justified in this on psychological grounds. For though it is human to err, though there is a real danger of our being carried away by our emotions, it is at the same time by the appeal to our emotions that we understand. “ Feeling tone” is necessary if we are to see into the heart of things. We do not learn to see much more in a yellow primrose by being told that it is a “* dicotyledonous exogen, with mono- petalous corolla and central placentation,’ 2 but by looking at banks of flowers in a copse on an April morning and letting Nature find her way into our heart. There are flashes flung from midnights that tell us 1 Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. V. ch. 1xxi. § 11. 2 'T. H. Huxley, Lay Sermons (Macmillan, 1880), p. 91. “I do not pretend that natural history knowledge, as such, can increase our sense of the beautiful on natural objects. I do not suppose that the dead soul of Peter Bell, of whom the great poet of nature says— ‘A primrose by the river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him,—- And it was nothing more,’ would have been a whit roused from its apathy by the informa- tion that the primrose is a Dicotyledonous Exogen, with a monopetalous corolla and central placentation. But natural history knowledge would lead us to seek the beauties of natural objects, instead of trusting to chance to force them on our attention.”’ : CHRISTIANITY AND ART Al more than long trains of reasoning, and, after all, interest is the best teacher. Kmotion is the practical force, too. ‘ Power in civilisation rests ultimately on knowledge which is conveyed through emotion, and not through the reasoning processes of the mind.” 1 It is by feeling that things get done. We believe practically because we feel. 1 B. Kidd, The Science of Power (Methuen, 1918), p. 250. rs CHAPTER III REASON AND FAITH The Place of the Intellect ‘“Ag for those matters which it is possible to seek out by subtle reasoning, such is my cast of mind that I am eagerly desirous of apprehending the truth, not only by believing, but also by understanding: it.”’—Augustine, Contra Academicos, III. xx. 43. Tue Christian Apologist is in a difficulty when dis- cussion turns on the question of the place of intellect in religion. On the one side, the main force of the attack is made on rationalistic grounds, and demands a reply in terms similar to those in which objections are put. Opponents choose their own _ position. They question the reasonableness of Christianity, and the answerer has to show that it will stand at the bar of reason. Intellectual difficulties are advanced, and the intellect has to remove them. But this purely logical side he feels to be but one— and that by no’means the chief—ground of his faith which he is thus forced to emphasise unduly. He has to talk as if clear proof, the accumulation of evidence, and notional assent, were all that were needed. If he emphasises other grounds of conviction he seems to be shirking the challenge. His answers have to be plain, argumentative, and definite, while he is very conscious that he seems to be cocksure. And all the while he is conscious that he is at a disadvantage, because this intellectual side of religion is not only less important in itself, but is also just that which the 42 9 REASON AND FAITH 43 great majority of his hearers are, from deficiency of education, least able to appreciate. On the other hand, the whole spirit of the age is, in England at least, set dead against clear thought in religion. He is met by a universal deprecation of dogmas and creeds. People who pride themselves on being rationalists in attacking religion decry not merely particular. articles of the creed, but all formulated beliefs. In the name of science, by which they mean Natural Science, they will have nothing to do with Theology, the science of the supernatural, and fail to see how they are contradicting themselves. It is part of the Englishman’s slowness to grasp ideas, and of his dislike of them when grasped, part of that— “inveterate national characteristic—a profound distrust, namely, of all general principles, a profound dislike both of much refer. ence to them and of any disposition to invest them with prac- tieal authority; and a silent but most pertinacious measurement of philosophic truth by political tests. ‘It is not at all easy, humanly speaking,’ says one who has tried the experiment, ‘ to wind an Englishman up to the level of dogma.’ ”’ 4 In the face of this unwillingness to think clearly the Apologist feels himself bound to insist on the necessity of giving to the mind, less important as it is, full scope for its activities in religion. I Therefore we shall do well to consider the function of intellect in belief, which, we saw, is so largely a matter of feeling, and is, we shall see, even more a matter of experience. In the first place, it checks and tests our emotions. It bids us reflect on them, lest we be carried away by the feelings that rise and swell in us and scem to fill our whole being. When they gather up our whole selves in a moment of conviction the mind sets itself * J. Morley, On Compromise (Macmillan, 1874), p. 4. D 4A WHY MEN BELIEVE to reflect, and gives us wider and longer views. When they blot out all but the present, it bids us look ahead. When they focus our whole attention, it says : “ Think of all that is involved,” or at least, “ look at both sides.’ It warns us of dangers; it asks, ‘‘ What about to-morrow?” It says, ‘‘ Are you sure? Are you not being influenced by a voice, by a manner, by a * per- sonality’?’? So it acts as a brake, sometimes, no doubt, hindering the easy and rapid attainment of our journey’s end by way of our inclinations, but more often saving us a toilsome uphill journey back after a descent that was at least not without risk. It guides our actions as well, anticipating them and suggesting them; and actions, as we have seen, and shall see again, often furnish our beliefs. It presents to us various alternatives between which the will has to choose. It forms moral judgments which induce habits that insensibly mould convictions. For force, without counsel, as Horace said, falls by its own weight.* As such it comes second in the field. Kxperience comes first, then science, as the result of reflection on experience. To quicken its action proverbs are found necessary which tell us to look before we leap. By the side of feeling or action reason seems cold and hesitating. ‘‘ All theory is grey,’ said Goethe, by the green and gold of the tree of life,? and wrote his drama of Faust to drive home the contrast. For the intellect deals with abstractions, and abstractions, except when the living things they are drawn from ae present to the passions, tend to become hard and ry.® But the things of the mind have a special power of their own, and they slowly reassert themselves. In the 1 Odes, Bk. III. iv. 6, 65. 2 Faust, Act II. scene vii. 3H. M. Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God ('T. & T. Clark, 1906), Vol. I. p. 103. ‘‘ Intellect works with a minimum of feeling on the ground of science because there we never deal with facts, but with abstractions we have made from them in order to bring them within the range of our scientific methods.” REASON AND FAITH 45 first place, they are not so subject to variation as are our feelings, nor are they so changeable as our wills. It is notorious that our emotions exhaust themselves, and that our impulses come and go. Even our actions are with difficulty dissociated from the stimulus that goes with doing something. A man can always carry a thing through if he sets himself doggedly to it, as Dr. Johnson said in the special case-of composition,! and tasks can be fulfilled even in hours of gloom ; but for the most part we do things by fits and starts, if only because in most cases we need to act once, immediately, and once for all. But the mind broods over matters. It can lay them aside and take them up again. It can cast and recast the framework of thoughts. It can leave them to mature. It deals with them subconsciously. It can take time. It embodies them in phrases. It makes notes. It stores them in books, and the written word remains. Ideas as abstract are less influenced by transitory maods or by passing events. They partake more of the un- changing and eternal. So it comes about that logic asserts itself in the long run. Its action may be delayed. Individuals may resist its power, but in time its persistence tells. | The intellect has, or at least may have, a wider range, and this also gives it power and permanence. It sees the connection of one point with another, and so continually reinforces its convictions. It notes parallels and collects instances. So gradually the stress ceases to be laid on single points which may give way, and becomes distributed over a number of estab- lished conclusions. It has its say in all matters, passing its judgment on emotions and deeds, and thereby calling them in to support its decisions, or * Boswell’s Life, Aug. 16, 1773. “ Somebody talked of happy moments of composition; and how a man can write at one time and not at another. ‘Nay,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.’”’ ARS WHY MEN BELIEVE discrediting their authority. Moreover, it has easy access to the minds of others. It can await the right occasion for communicating ideas, whereas feelings are roused at the moment and things must be done at once. Emotions, however much they may influence and inspire others, are felt by each man alone, and actions, however much done in co-operation and by association, leave each man to do his bit; but thoughts are shared easily, and those shared may be said with far more truth to be the same thoughts, though in the minds of two separate men. So intellectual motives to belief are acting con- tinually where not suspected. They influence us when off our guard, and so are all the more powerful and far-reaching because they are not thwarted or corrected by any act of the will. They act subconsciously, and so may be said not to rest by night or by day. II Christianity has never shrunk from the intellectual challenge—witness the whole science of Apologetics. The time-honoured ‘ proofs” for the existence of God, ontological, cosmological, teleological, and moral, have been taken over from pre-Christian philosophy, adapted, re-enforced, and recast from age to age, and still, as Kant said, ‘‘ deserve to be mentioned with respect ’;1 they still show a marvellous power of 1 Critique of Pure Reason: Transcendental Dialectic, Bk. I. ch. iv. Translation in Selections from the Literature of Theism, A. Caldecott and H. R. Mackintosh (T. & T. Clark, 1904), p- 213. “This argument always deserves to be mentioned with respect. It is the oldest, the clearest, and the most in conformity with the common reason of humanity. It animates the study of Nature, as itself derives its existence and draws even new strength from that source. It introduces aims and ends into a sphere in which our observation could not of itself have discovered them, and extends our knowledge of Nature by directing our attention to a unity, the principle of which hes beyond Nature. This knowledge of Nature again reacts upon REASON AND FAITH A7 adapting themselves to changed modes of thought and grow in strength by re-statement. Arguments for natural religion drawn from the world without, argu- ments for revealed religion, or, as we are now more inclined to call it, historical religion, drawn from the facts of the past, have never been wanting. Analogies of such religion to “ the constitution and course of nature’ have become standard classics. Popular writers have argued for signs of natural law in the spiritual world. Christianity as claiming to be based on a revelation in time has had to bring forth historical evidence for the truth of the events on which it is based. Arguments from prophecy and from miracles at one time were prominently put forward; now the stress is rather laid on the teaching and person of Christ. Criticism of the sources of this history has been neces- sary; and textual criticism that concerns itself with the ages of manuscripts and with the correctness of read- ings, and higher criticism which examines the evidence of authorship and genuineness, have been, in their more serious and sober forms, largely the work of Christian scholars. The study of Comparative Reli- gion, made possible by a more accurate knowledge of antiquity and a wider acquaintance with living creeds, emphasises the points of similarity, and still more those of contrast, between Christianity and other faiths. The results can be found in the many volumes of Apologetic literature that stand upon the shelves of our libraries, and in the popular handbooks designed ° to bring their conclusions before the ordinary man. Origen met the attacks of Celsus in the second century at Alexandria in words that seem singularly modern as he deals with the same objections that are brought forward by secularists in our parks and in almost this idea—its cause; and thus our belief in a Divine author of the universe rises to the power of an irresistible conviction. “For these reasons it would be utterly hopeless to rob this argument of the authority it has always enjoyed.” 48 WHY MEN BELIEVE the same words. Augustine, speaking from the midst of the old civilisation of the West, wrote his De Civitate Dei to refute those who declared that the decay of the empire was due to the forsaking of the gods of Rome, in words that emphasise both the difference of the old world and the unchanging nature of men. Scholastic philosophy, with its acute mental keenness weighing both sides of every question “‘ sic et non,” demanded a new setting forth of the intellectual justification of Christianity, and it was given by Aquinas in his Summa. The development of Natural Science turned men’s attention to the outside world, and controversy raged round the question of miracles, whether they were violations of natural law or signs of the power of God. In modern times scientific method has been applied to history and the whole question of biblical criticism has come to the fore. Whether the challenge has come from predominant ideas of philosophy, polities, natural science, or history, from secular ideals or from other religions, the Church has always been prepared to justify her position intel- lectually. .So far from being obscurantist, she has been, if anything, too confident in the powers of the mind. Pre-eminently was this the case in the so- called ages of faith, when she had hardly realised the limitations of the power of reasoning to arrive at truth, or the incompleteness of the truth so arrived at. But all along she has insisted on the need of thought, and declared heresy or wrong thought an evil, and agnosticism, if a mere refusal to think things out, a fault. The Church has not always realised the limitations of reason and argument as a ground of faith. To many men the intellectual side of Christianity has, except for a few years perhaps in early manhood, seemed a simple and easy matter. They have found the imagination and will fail rather than the reason. The real difficulty has been, they have felt, to realise all REASON AND FAITH 49 that is involved in their cold logical arguments, the real problem of faith that of carrying out in practical life what is so clearly proved to the intellect. As a matter of fact, they soon found out, argument does not convince. As Locke wrote :— “Common observation . . . has always found these artificial methods of reasoning more adapted to catch and entangle the mind than to instruct and inform the understanding. And hence it is that men, even when they are baffled and silenced in this - scholastic way, are seldom or never convinced, and so brought over to the conquering side; they perhaps acknowledge their adversary to be the more skilful disputant, but rest nevertheless persuaded of the truth on their side and go away, worsted as they are, with the same opinion they brought with them.” ! For it would seem that argument can do little more than remove objections, and only objections that are raised themselves by the intellect. Reason by itself, as Aristotle says, moves nothing.2 It can give con- viction, perhaps, but faith is more than conviction, It is an active quality, and it is only too easy to be intellectually convinced and yet find yourself powerless to do anything. Where argument ‘seems to do more we generally find on analysis that it is the keenness of the arguer that carries conviction, or, maybe, our delight in his humour or good temper, or, perhaps, the intellectual pleasure given by a clear, well-illustrated, logical sequence of thought, what George Eliot called ‘that exquisite kind of laughter which comes from the gratification of the reasoning faculties.” 3 Even where argument has its own power it only appeals to one part of man, to the head, and in most men that is the least important and authoritative part. In itself 1 Essay concerning the Human Understanding, Bk. IV. ch. xvii. § 4. * Lith. Nic., Bk. VI. ch. ii. § 5. * George Eliot’s Life, by J. W. Cross (Blackwood, 1885), Vol. I. p. 165. In this particular instance the laughter was provoked by Mr. Hennel’s “ Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity,” and convinced George Eliot of the untruth of Christianity in eleven days. Cp. R. H. Hutton, Modern Guides of English Thought in Jiatters of Faith (Macmillan, 1887), p. 269 50 WHY MEN BELIEVE it is weaker than the practical acting will, and in most men this inferiority is further emphasised by lack of education. It is the part, moreover, where there 1s most. difference between men. Though, as we saw, we can enter more into the thought of others and in a way in which we cannot into their feelings and decisions, yet, as a matter of fact, class divisions are mainly | those of education. They largely disappear when men are welded together by a common emotion, or when something is to be done. The mass of men are little influenced by abstract reasoning, either of their own or of others. Moreover, argument often defeats its own ends. Many men distrust it. They say that the arguer, if he makes out his case, is “ too clever by half.” They suspect that they are being tricked, that there is some fallacy that they cannot detect, and that he is using his abilities to mislead them. Again, when the reasons for belief are ample the very fact disposes them to distrust them. ‘‘ There must be something queer about it,” they say, ‘‘ if it wants such a lot of argument to support it.” The very strength of a case may nes, the cause of men’s rejecting it.” Again, there are limitations inherent in reasoning even in the best and keenest minds. Reason can only fully interpret the world as a matter for thought, and - can only lead us to one area of things eternal. “ Ortho- 1 Cf. M. Creighton, The English Natural Character, Romanes - Lecture (Oxford, 1896), p. 22. “The truth is that every English- man likes to express his own opinion, if he takes the trouble to make one. What becomes of his opinion is a matter of secondary importance; he gives it to his fellows for what it is worth, and he knows that they will not attach to it an undue importance.” 2 Cp. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. V. ch. vi. “Sensi autem illud genus hominum etiam veritatem habere suspectam et el nolle acquiescere si compto atque uberi sermone promeretur.” (I felt that another sort of people were suspicious even of truth, and refused to assent to it, if delivered in a smooth and copious discourse.) So Socrates was accused of “making the worse appear the better reasoning.” REASON AND FAITH 51 doxy or right opinion is,” as Wesley wrote, “‘ at best a very slender part of religion.” 1 “‘ In judging of the goodness of a man we do not ask,” said Augustine, ** what he believes or what he hopes, but what he cares about.”’ 2 So the more modern form of the appeal to the intellect is to a belief in the general rationality of the world, rather than to particular arguments from the course of nature. In doing so it unites with the appeal to the emotional and practical part of man. It declares that ‘“‘ the world’s no blot for us,” that it not only means intensely, but also means good. It points out that as a matter of fact, all natural, and other, sciences assume that the world is rational, that it will respond to our efforts to understand it. “The charm of the knowledge of Nature is our dis- covery therein of reason and order corresponding to our own ideas of reason and order.” ? This is not, it is true, by any means universally convincing in the order of inanimate things. Mill’s famous indictment of Nature,* re-popularised in modern times by Mr. Wells, Butler’s cautious warning that the moral government of the world is a scheme quite beyond our comprehension,°® all remind us of the danger to 1A Plain Account of the People called Methodists, Works (London, 1810), Vol. VI. p. 281. * Encheiridion, 117. “‘ Quum enim queritur, utrum quisque sit homo bonus, non queritur quid credat, aut speret, sed quid amet.” ° H. M. Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God (T. & T. Clark, 1906), Vol. I. p. 91. * Three Essays on Religion: Nature (Longmans, 1874), pp. 28-31. The passage beginning, “In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged and imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature’s everyday performances,” is too long to quote in full. as ® Analogy, Pt. I. ch. vii. ‘‘ Upon supposition that God exer- cises a moral government over the world, the analogy of His ~ natural government suggests and makes it quite credible that His moral government must be a scheme quite beyond our com- prehension; and this affords a general answer to all objections against the justice and goodness of it.” 52 WHY MEN BELIEVE our belief in the rationality of things if we confine our outlook to the material order,t but as we go higher up in the scale of things from material to moral the conviction increases, and the general assumption of modern Sciences was anticipated by the Science of Theology with its doctrine of one God creating all things in order by His Word, or Reason, or Power, or Deed,? Himself the Mind Eternal. So religion is not an exception to the rest of the order of the world. The things of God also respond to the intellect. Their meaning can be worked out in Theology. It can equally be made scientific if with less precision than is possible in the lower or “‘ exact ”’ sciences.- We must insist on this as against the popular objection to creeds, and as against the more argued-out depreciation of dogma. Our powers are ‘limited, but, recognising their limitations, we must be ready to submit our faith to the utmost searching out of the intellect, and give to our mind free leave to go as far as it can. | * Cp. H. Rashdall, The Theory of Goed and Evil (Oxford, 1907), Vol. Il. p. 265. ‘‘ On the supposition of universal mortality the contrast between the capacities of human nature and its actual destiny, between the immensity of man’s outlook and the limita- tions of his actual horizon, between the splendour of his ideals and the insignificance of his attainment, becomes such as to constitute, in @ mind which fairly faces it, a shock to our rational nature sufficient to destroy belief in the rationality of things, and to imperil confidence in the authority of Moral Reason as a guide to human life.” * Cp. the scene in Faust where the Doctor, setting himself to turn the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel into his own mother tongue, translates the Greek “ Logos”. in turn as ‘“‘ Word,” ““ Meaning,” ‘“‘ Power,” and finally “* Deed.” ° H. Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, Vol. II. p- 257. “It is for the rational interpretation of the moral consciousness that metaphysical and theological beliefs are required ; just as they are required for the rational interpretation of Science, though eminent men of Science may be innocent of all conscious metaphysical theory, or indulge in metaphysical speculations really fatal to their own Sciences.”’ . REASON AND FAITH 53 Ill But if religion needs to be subjected to the intellect, still more does the intellect of the world need the guidance of religion. If scientific theology is necessary for the Church, still more is it a necessity for the world. If it is not the chief need—and it is not that—it is a very real one. There is a certain tendency, apart from mere con- fusion of thought and mere prejudice against dogmas, even among thinking men to depreciate the intellect. It is pointed out that many men reach truth by intuition and not by strict logical processes. ‘‘ Even in the case of intellectual excellence,” wrote Newman, “it is considered the highest of gifts to possess an intuitive knowledge of the beautiful in art, or the effective in action, without reasoning or investigation.” } There is, as Pascal pointed out, an esprit de finesse (intuitive mind), as well as an esprit géométrique in man,” and Pascal himself won greater fame by his Pensées, which relied on the former, than by all his mathematical works, which were the outcome of the latter. Others, again, cry down even the intuitive use of the intellect in favour of Authority, speaking of the “ bankruptcy of science,’ and Brunetiére’s famous phrase would not have been so taken up and repeated had it not corresponded to a very real feeling in the hearts of men. There is a fine passage in Walter Bagehot’s Letters on the French Coup d Etat of 1851, in which he describes the French preachers of Paris challenging the ‘“ philosophers of the world” to try their results on mankind :—- “ Don’t go out into the highways and hedges—it is unnecessary. Ring the bell—call in the servants—-give them a course of lectures —cite Aristotle—review Descartes—panegyrise Plato—and see * Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (Rivingtons, 1872), p. 84. . * Pensées, ed. Brunschvieg, No. 1, 54 WHY MEN BELIEVE if the bonne will understand you. It is you that say ‘ Vox populi, Vox Dei’; but you see the people reject you; ” and continuing :— ‘No, if you would reason—if you would teach—if you would speculate, come to us. We have our premises ready; years upon years before you were born, intellects whom the best of you delight to magnify toiled to systematise the creed of ages; years upon years after you are dead, better heads than yours will find new matter there to define, to divide, to arrange. .. . You call, we are heard.” 4 Indeed, it is the commonplace of the historian that the hopes of the mid-Victorian scientists for the salvation of the world by chemistry classes and Mechanics’ Institutes have not altogether been fulfilled. But for all that the human intellect exists. It works most surely by logical methods and it is insatiably curious. Men will inquire into beliefs. It may be (and no doubt is) better to preach the Gospel, as the simple-minded Christian declares, than to put forward Christian Evidences, but they must be put forward if they are asked for, and they always are, and will be, asked for. “Is it not far better,” people ask, “to allow men to inquire into these matters of reli- gion?” But it really does not much matter, because whether we allow them or not they will do so. The human mind will inquire into all that comes before it. ° Men need a rational interpretation of all the facts of experience, of the’ world within as well as of the world without. You cannot limit science to the phenomena of the natural world; the human soul, the moral sense, the nature of beauty, the consciousness of, and the sense of communion with, God, the meaning of reality, all demand investigation by the mind. But, of course, the action of the mind cannot be isolated from the action of the rest of man. Though men are gloriously illogical and proverbially better 1 Interary Studies (Dent’s Everyman’s Library), Vol. IL. Letter IV. p. 305, REASON AND FAITH 55 than their creeds, still what we believe does influence what we do. In the long run convictions tell. The man who gives up the Christian faith may be spurred all the more to energy by the serious nature of his decision. The man who in all sincerity sets aside the ~ hallowed glory of a creed that once was his”? may “ work while it is yet day with intensified force because of the intensified meaning of the words ‘ the night cometh when no man can work’;” ! but even he, and still more the ordinary unbeliever, is always hampered by the sense of the futility of transitory things, by what J. S. Mill called the sense of “ not worth while,” ? that must constitute a heavy drag on the world’s progress when disbelief in the world to come is widespread. How little Christian practice can survive the decay of Christian belief on which it has been built can be Seen in this generation. Where thirty years ago people earnestly argued that Christian morals could be retained without the Christian creed, we now see that as a matter of fact repudiation of the marriage law goes with “‘ reduced Christianity,” and Bolshevism and Anarchy are definitely associated with a secularist creed. For community of belief gives community of purpose, and only a positive creed has sufficient co- ordinating power to make men work for a common purpose.® 1 G. J. Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, ed. C. Gore (Longmans, 1895), p. 28. * Three Essays on Religion (Longmans, 1874), Theism, Part V., “ General Result,” p. 250. ‘ But the benefit (of the legitimate and philosophically defensible hope of a future life) consists less in the presence of any specific hope, than in the enlargement of the general scale of the feelings; the loftier aspirations being no longer in the same degree checked and kept down by a sense of the insignificance of human life—by the disastrous feeling of ‘not worth while.’ ” ° Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents, Works (Rivingtons, 1852), Vol. III. p. 170. “They believed that 56 WHY MEN BELIEVE Intellect can be the banker of moral force and can accumulate capital of knowledge against sudden demands. It can get beforehand and settle questions by anticipation. It can consider all possibilities and form its conclusions, and then in the crisis leave the emotion and will free to do their duty. The man need not waste his energies thinking out the problem; that has been done before, and he is ready now to act, and to act on a plan. For in an emergency you must do something and do it at once. You have not time to sit down and argue out pros and cons. The world sadly needs men educated to lead their lives on prin- ciples, men who have thought out what they are here for, what is the purpose of their emotions and passions, what is their duty and their aim of life. Theology has a special value, too, because, as the scientific and intellectual presentation of religion, it appeals specially to those who have most power and are the greatest influence in the world, to the educated. This is not so clearly recognised in England, perhaps, where our best educated are sadly deficient in intel- lectual clearness, but it remains a fact that in religion we have sore need for clear thought, and we do largely fail in consequence with the clear thinking. Educa- tional movements have greater force than we are inclined to give them credit for. In the history of the Church they have told. The power which the Oxford Movement had in early days, owing to the fact that it was primarily a movement for reform in education, and for a higher conception of the relation of teacher and pupil, has been largely overlooked. For influences no men could act with effect who did not act in concert; that no men could act in concert who did not act with confidence ; and that no men could act with confidence who were not bound together by common opinions, common affections, and common interests.” 1 Mark Pattison, Essays (Oxford, 1889), Vol. II. xvii., REASON AND FAITH 57 percolate down from the leaders of thought, and the aim of the best in the lower ranks is always to imitate those above. . . IV We must, therefore, recognise the limitations of the intellect—the actual limitations from lack of educa- tion and from ordinary human weakness, and the inherent limitations from its very nature. It is partial in its operations. It only gives one view of the world. It finds God only as the Truth. By itself it leads to no action. Apart from the feelings, it is hard and cold. Mere arguments, if they convince, do not con- . vert; they merely, if we are to distinguish the terms, lead to belief and not to faith, to assent and not to conviction, Controversy is almost invariably unpleasant. At best it can do little more than remove difficulties them- selves created by the Reason. Where it succeeds it leaves whole areas of life untouched; it only touches and turns a part of man. There are other and more important sides of his being than Reason.} There are other and more necessary sides of religion than Theology. Virgil, the symbol of the natural reason or philosophy, could show Dante Hell and guide him in Purgatory, but only Beatrice, or Heavenly ———— Learning in the Church of England, p- 269. “At the first rise of the Tractarian. School above the horizon in 1833 . . . it was instinctively felt to be a revival of the spirit of learned research.” + Cp. J. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent (ch. x. 8§ 2, 3 (Burns, Oates & Co., 1870), p. 419. “If I am asked to convert others by it (a smart syllogism) I say plainly that I do not care to overcome their reason without touching their hearts, -I wish to deal not with controversialists, but with inquirers.”’ 58 WHY MEN BELIEVE Wisdom, could lead him through Paradise.! Intel- lectualism or Gnosticism in religion degrades it as well as narrows it. It leaves out whole areas of truth. It tends to ignore beauty and to leave morals out of count. It pares down religion to mere Theosophy. It sets up a false aristocracy by emphasising the side from which the masses by ignorance are shut out, whereas feelings are democratic as experienced, and actions as done, by all. Or else it lowers it by reducing it to the intelligence of the stupid. And all the while much that reason offers (and sometimes brings) can often be gained in other ways. “ All that Philosophy in its noblest form had promised to the Greeks,” wrote Dr. Déllinger—‘ repose of mind, regulation of the affections, stilling of the excited passions, moral perfection—Christians gained by prayer.” 2 But to recognise limitations is to recognise the value of what is limited. We want to insist on clearness and vigour of thought. We want to realise the neces- sity of thinking things out, and of not shrinking from the labour that it involves. Agnosticism is often due to honesty, to caution, to a refusal of a man to say that he believes where he does not. Much is a right suspense of judgment where the issues are so grave. But, on the other hand, much is due to mere mental and moral laziness, to a refusal to study, to 1 Inferno, canto'i. 1. 122. ** Alle qua’ poi se tu vorrai salire, Anima fia a cid di me pit degna; Con lei ti lascerd nel mio partire.”’ (“Into whose regions, if thou then desire To ascend, a spirit worthier than I Must lead thee, in whose charge, when I depart, Thou shalt be left.’’) See also canto ii. 270, and Purgatorio, canto xviii. 1. 46, and canto xxx. |. 49. 2 J. 1. von Déllinger, The First Age of the Church, tr. H. N. Oxenham (Allen & Co., 1887), Vol. II. p. 211. REASON AND FAITH 59 an indulged disinclination to take trouble to think. to a lack of purpose to sustain inquiry, to unwillingness to accept the responsibility of conviction. And much to deeper causes—to the clouding of the mind by indulgence, to the weakening of power by sins of lust, to perversion of the faculties by ill temper, to loss of judgment by suspicion. For’God is the Truth behind all the phenomena of the world, reached primarily by man in the exercise of what is called his reason or his mind, but reached by the man whose mind cannot work apart from his ' whole being in all its elements, CHAPTER IV FAITH AND THE WILL The Argument from Hexperience ‘* Religion is a practical thing.” Butler, Analogy, Pt. II. ch. viii. -TuE tendency of the day is to lay more stress on will than on intellect. This is seen in Natural Science, where the influence of Darwin has worked to draw our» attention from physical laws to the thought of selection and struggle, from things apparently at rest to things obviously alive. It is seen similarly in the study of man where “‘ the marked feature of recent study of mental phenomena is the great prominence into which -the Will-psychology has been forced in comparison with Intellect-psychology.”! It has been seen in olitics in the foiled attempt of Prussia to exert the “Will to Power.” It is a tendency to which English philosophy has always been particularly prone. So the Christian Apologist, dealing with men rather than books, soon becomes conscious of the futility of much of his ‘“‘ evidences.” He realises that it is not in material things alone that “the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury,’’ while ‘‘ in all labour there is ~ profit.” 2 He learns that argument effects little, though the people respect hard work in arguing and patience and courtesy in reply. He finds out that even in discussion he has continually to contrast argument with matters of fact, and to point out that, where logic and experience clash, experience always wins the day. He is told that it is wrong to believe without proof ; 1 A. Caldecott, The Philosophy of Religion in England and America (Methuen, 1901), p. 75. 2 Prov. xiv. 23. 60 FAITH AND THE WILL 61 he points out that the very people who urge this precept do so habitually themselves in the very way which they condemn. The proofs that appeal to men are such as apply to puddings, and they sympathise with the complaining husband who refuses to eat what is set before him, rather than with the wife who declares that he is quite wrong, as ‘“‘ the cookery-book says it is delicious.” It was said of Diogenes that when some one argued that there was no such thing as motion he got up and walked, and men continue to solve problems ambulando, “ by walking.” Like Tommy Traddles, they refuse to suppose that things are not there when they know they are, and can send a Mr. Dick with a Mrs. Heep tofetchthem.! They declare that “seeing is believing,” and meet an “impossible”? with ‘“ all I ean say is—I saw it.”? After the most conclusive and convincing arguments they say with Galileo, or with those who wrote legends about him, EF pur si muove. They believe still on the old grounds of experience and “common sense.” They act on their beliefs and find that they are justified. They believe things in the past, perhaps, because they have reasoned out their experiences; they believe things in the future because they intend to try their will on them. The attitude is the same in the man; the difference lies only in the conditions of the things.? * Dickens, David Copperfield, ch. lii. - ““What must be done,” said Traddles, “‘is this. First, the deed of relinquishment, that we have heard of, must be given over to me now—here.”’ “Suppose I haven’t got it,’”’ he interrupted. “But you have,” said Traddles; ‘‘ therefore, you know, we won’t suppose so.”’ * Cp. R. Browning, Natural Magic, Works, Vol. XIV. (Smith, Elder, 1889), p. 58. * W. James, Principles of Psychology (Macmillan, 1901), Vol. IT. p. 321. ‘* Will and Belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same psychological phenomenon.” 62 WHY MEN BELIEVE | I See how this is continually. Even of things in the past other considerations come in beyond those of mere reason in the narrower intellectual sense of accepting propositions; we decide largely by moral standards. We refuse to believe in a conclusion that offends our sense of right and wrong. Excellent reasons can be made out to justify religious persecution ; we simply do not believe them. We prefer to take it that there has been some false assumption at the beginning, or a flaw in the chain of argument.1 The real reason why we cannot accept some Old Testament miracles is that they strike us as immoral, and contra- dict our ideas of God. Exactly the same criterion makes us accept those of the life of Christ because they harmonise with what He was, and appeal to our moral sense, because, being what on grounds of judgment of character we believe Him to be, He was, we consider, naturally born in a way different from that of other men and could not be holden of death. We refuse to accept the teaching of an immoral man. We give little credit to any speculative school of Theosophy the exponents of which justify what decency revolts from. We do judge of creeds by their exponents, and in the long run (but only in the long run) do so rightly, because creed does influence character. Conversely, good men influence us aad recommend their creeds. ‘* Truth,” wrote Newman, “‘ has been upheld in the world not as a system, not by books, not by arguments, but by the personal influence of such men as are at once the teachers and the patterns of it.” ? 1 Cp. H. M. Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God (T. & T. Clark, 1906), Vol. I. p. 99. ‘‘ When a logical conclusion (as in the case of persecution) is plainly immoral, no genuinely sincere man cart fail to see that there must be a mistake somewhere, even if he cannot find it out.” 2 Oxford University Sermons (Longmans, 1898), Sermon V., ** Personal Influence,” p. 91. He continues: ‘‘ Men persuade FAITH AND THE WILL 63 Even the power of seeing clearly depends on external things. It is bound up with the health of the body and brain, which itself depends on habits controlled by the will. We cannot judge fairly when out of health. Sound judgment depends on our being normal, and that in turn depends on emotional control. If we indulge ourselves we get excited or depressed. Excite- ment or fatigue makes things look quite different, and we often need to go back deliberately to ordinary routine before committing ourselves.1. We have to exercise our willin choosing times for decision. ‘ Colours seen by candle-light will not seem the same by day, 4 We often have to put things aside for criticism later, for final decision on another day. ‘There are ups and downs in faith, and comings and goings in conviction.® We have to decide and deliberately elect to judge by what we knew to be our beliefs in our best times, when the mind was least warped, least sluggish, least dis- torted, least distracted by insistent temptation; and epee themselves, with little difficulty, to scoff at principles, to ridicule books, to make sport of the names of good men; but they cannot bear their presence; it is holiness embodied in personal form which they cannot steadily confront and bear down.”’ * Hume, A T'reatise of Human Nature, Bk. I., ‘ Of the Under- standing,” Pt. IV. § 7. ‘‘ Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds (of scepticism), Nature herself suffices to that purpose and cures me of this philosophic melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation and lively impression of my senses, which obliterates all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends, and when after three or four hours’ amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any further.” * E. B. Browning, The Lady’s Yes. Works (Smith, Elder, 1873) Vol. III. p. 136. * Thomas &-Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Bk. Il. ch. ix. “I never. found any so religious and devout, that he had not sometimes a withdrawing of grace or felt not some decrease of zeal,” - 64 WHY MEN BELIEVE - we decide by the moral judgment which passes sentence on our moods and says which of them was the best. We are influenced by the company we keep. Solitude : age ive us time to think; or it may warp and unbalance e have to decide which it has done, and accept or " reject its conclusions accordingly. We keep up our belief in a cause by attending committees of those who are working with us for its aims, and so catching the warmth of their enthusiasm. We keep our minds in tune for music by going to concerts. If we let ourselves go slack, both cause and art begin to fade out of our mind, and we believe in them less strongly. If we want to understand politics and sociology we must read books, no doubt, and talk with those who know, but it is not by listening to discussions or by glancing over the columns of a newspaper that we come to believe in a party or in a social creed, but by mixing with those who are at the work. We are influenced in our beliefs by the circumstances we have chosen as the setting of our lives. A man who has to choose his profession is at a parting of the ways. As he follows his calling his interest in it grows, even if it be an interest of dislike. The old alternatives that -bid for his attention grow faint and dim. We deliberately acquire a professional bias or a technical skill which alters our whole outlook on life and our complete range of convictions. We choose what we will interest ourselves in and give attention to; for attention depends on interest and on what we choose to think worth knowing. There are numbers of things that we do not believe in simply because we are not interested in them and have never considered them. We can all refuse to consider alternatives and objections if we choose.t We all, as a matter of fact, select 1 G. Lowes Dickinson, Religion: A Criticism and a Forecast (Brimley Johnson, 1906), p. 2. “If it be urged that it is not possible to believe a thing to be true because one desires to believe, 1 would reply that it is possible at least to decline to consider the matter.” FAITH AND THE WILL 65 what we shall have at least a chance of believing, even if only to the extent of ignoring our opponents’ argu- ments and opinions. Like Mr. Podsnap, we can refuse to admit them, and can sweep them away either with or without a peculiar flourish of the right arm and a flushed face. Our judgment is biassed, too, by what we may have neglected. Our powers of belief depend on habits of temper, of logical sincerity, of intellectual or moral energy. This is recognised in music and art. Aisthetic powers depend on habits of practice and discipline. Darwin in his old age is the typical example of how a man may lose whole ranges of susceptibilities. He lamented that he had lost all interest in poetry and music (though not in biographies and essays), and that his mind had become a ‘‘ kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of tacts,’ because he had omitted to ‘“‘ read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.” 2 But what Darwin forwent as a consequence of devotion to a great cause of science, other men lose as a result * Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ch. xi., ‘“ Podsnappery.” “ Mr. Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness—not to add a grand convenience—in this way of getting rid of dis- agreeables, which had done much towards establishing Mr. . Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr. Podsnap’s satisfaction. ‘I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it.’ Mr. Podsnap had ‘even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him (and conse- quently sheer away) with these words and a flushed face.”’ * The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (Murray, 1887), Vol. I. p. 100, quoted by C. Gore, Bampton Lectures, The Incarnation of the Son of God (Murray, 1891), p. 244, who writes (p. 37) : “What Darwin is speaking of in his own case is the atrophy of esthetic, rather than of moral, faculty. But... literary or classical studies, intense concentration on business, exaggerated athleticism, absorption in pleasures, higher or lower, each of these may preoccupy the whole man, making the Christ seem a remote figure, the crucifix an unmeaning and disagreeable object, the vocabulary of Christianity unnecessary and unreal.”’ 66 WHY MEN BELIEVE of self-indulgence. They lose the power of judging through envy of those better off than themselves, through cynicism that elects to dwell on the worst in men, through suspicion which refuses to take the opinion of experts on the ground that they are inter- ested,’ through passion that cannot reason quietly, through love of contradiction that opposes all evidence, through pessimism that lacks heart for faith either in men or things. Men ignore religion from the moment they are set free from restraint in boyhood, and complain that they cannot believe. They indulge themselves continually in things little and big, repudiating Confir- mation, which admits to the company of the faithful and the Means of Grace, letting the faculties of prayer grow atrophied, never examining their consciences to see the beginnings of faults, never frankly facing them and confessing that they have done wrong in the first steps downward to evil, and then, after years of self-indulgence and neglect of opportunities and helps, declare their conviction that sin is natural and chastity impossible because man is the creature of circumstances ! That the circumstances were of their own choosing they do not own. Beyond these convictions born of influences, chosen indeed by the will, but still external, are those which the will creates within. The belief which is deliberately chosen has every right to call itself a belief. There is a ~ belief of the practical reason as well as of the discursive. For faith is an active quality as well as one logical and emotional. When we say that we have faith in a man, we do not mean that we have weighed the argu- ments and have decided that we can believe what he says; still less do we mean that we believe that he exists. We mean that we are ready to trust him, to commit our future to his keeping, to do what he tells us to do. As Huxley saw, the belief in the order of ? It is noteworthy how anti-clericalism and anti-vaccination seem to go together. FAITH AND THE WILL 67 the world and in the laws of causation on which all Natural Science is based, is an act of faith. Faith in the laws of Logic makes clear thought possible. Faith in the Uniformity of Nature is the postulate of all practical undertakings, and it is quite arbitrary to deny a place to Faith in higher matters.2 Faith is the necessary factor in all advance. You must always have a working hypothesis. You can believe in a policy as well as in a creed, in a cause better than in a proposition. ‘ As the test of belief is willingness to act,” writes Mr. William James, ‘‘ we may say that Faith is the readiness to act in a Cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. It is, in fact, the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs.” 3 And in life you must act. You may always suspend your judgment. There is no moral harm in intellectual scepticism. You may keep an open mind indefinitely, so long as your suspense is not due to laziness or obstinacy, so long as you do not cease from mental *T. H. Huxley, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (Murray, 1887), Vol. II. p. 200. ‘The one act of faith in the convert to science is the confession of the universality of order and of the absolute validity, in all times and in all circumstances, of the law of causation. This confession is an act of faith, because, by the nature of the case, the truth of such propositions is not capable of proof.” : * Cp. William James, The Will to Believe (Longmans, 1903), p. 91. “The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude is strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day; but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only legitimate when used in the interests of one particular proposition—the proposition, namely, that the course of Nature is uniform. That Nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it... . With regard to all other possible truths, however, a number of our most influential contemporaries think that an attitude of faith is not only illogical, but shameful.” 3 Ibid., p. 90. 68 WHY MEN BELIEVE fight and say: ‘‘ Oh, I can’t be bothered.” But in practical affairs to doubt is to deny. Here there is no middle course. Not to be for is to be against, for you must do something on one side or the other. You must either act as if a thing were true or not true. The souls of those who had lived without praise or blame in the world, together with— — “ that ill band © Of Angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves Were only ’’— those Sinn Feiners of whom Virgil said— “Speak not of them, but look, And pass them by,” 4 were found by Dante within the gate where entering man must ‘‘all hope abandon.’ And even. genuine beliefs, if not acted upon, evaporate. Often though their imagination fails, people, when tried by this test, are found really to believe. The thought of immortality is rarely present to our minds. People are not, as a matter of fact, much influenced by the desire of a life in heaven hereafter, still less, as far as we can see, are they really much influenced by the fear of hell. Where students of religious psychology have «sent out questionnaires asking people: “ Do you desire to live after death? ”’ they have been sur- prised at the great number who own to being quite indifferent about it,? though it is only what they might have assumed from observation in their ordinary intercourse with men. It is not really surprising. Our 1 Inferno, canto iii. ll. 37, 51. ** Quel cattivo coro degli angeli che non furon ribelli, né fur fedeli a Dio, ma per se foro.” ‘Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa.” 2 See two interesting articles by F. C. 8. Schiller, ‘““ The Desire for Immortality” and ‘Ethics and Immortality,” in his Humanism (Macmillan, 1903), pp. 228-65. FAITH AND THE WILL 69 imagination must fail to picture existence under conditions of which we have, and can have, no know- ledge. As an abstract proposition Christians would confess their faith in the life of the world to come, and would be able to give good reasons for their belief, but for the most part it means little to them. But the moment the matter becomes a question of acting, and not of speculation, ‘they find they do really believe, and believe intensely. They find they are working for a future that they will in this life never see, for ends that need an eternity to perfect ; that they are refusing merely to eat and drink, because they do not believe that to-morrow they will, with death, cease to be: that they think every good thing is ‘‘ worth while,” 4 because all are in fact, and practically, viewed sub specte eternitatis ; and that they do believe, after all. So when all the feeling of confidence in the truth of _ their religion goes, as it does go at times, men often think that they are losing their faith.2- As age comes on it gets no easier to believe in Christianity (though it becomes increasingly more difficult to believe any- thing else), to believe, that is, with the warmth of feeling of earlier days. But such men are making the mistake of thinking that the feelings are a test of faith. That is not so. To feel less may be a sign of grace, a sign that feelings are no longer needed, as they were at the outstep of the march. A close analogy may be found in our perception of beauty. There are days when intellectually we are struck with the extraordinary loveliness of the country. We see it and appreciate it as we never did before. But now it makes no particular impression on us, as it would have done when we were younger. We are not particularly interested. It seems something outside us. There has * See J. S. Mill, above, p. 55. * Cp. Newman’s sermon on “The Religious Use of Excited Feelings,” Parochial Sermons, Sermon IX. (Rivingtons, 1840), Vol. I. p. 130. 70 WHY MEN BELIEVE passed away a glory from the earth. But if we were now called upon in our older age to decide on matters of esthetic judgment—that is, to do something—we should find that we were better judges, that we had a surer taste, and should not regret our earlier undisciplined and unassimilated feelings. So men are justified in acting without having necessarily clear intellectual convictions. You can always do things. As George Eliot pointed out to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby, theories of determinism do not prevent your taking a bath.t The way out of scepticism is, as Carlyle wrote, to “do the duty that lies nearest to you.” 2 Action will furnish belief, at least for the majority of men. Paseal’s advice to take holy water and act as if you believed did not merely refer to letting the sights and sounds of religion play upon you (though that too) in order to stir and con- vince the emotions.2 ‘‘ We need only act,” writes Mr. William James— “in cold blood, as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with belief that it will become real.” 4 And even if it does not, if we are sure that the actions are right we can do without a theory of them. “A 99 man,’’ wrote Bishop Butler, who certainly did not shirk intellectual difficulties, “‘ may be fully convinced of the truth of a matter, and upon the strongest reasons, and yet not be able to answer all the difficulties which may be raised upon it.” & Before we can live a life : feorge Eliot’s Life, by J. W. Cross (Blackwood, 1885), Vol. III. p. : 2 Sartor Resartus, Bk. II. ch. ix., ‘‘ The Everlasting Yea.” 3 Above, p. 39. 4 Principles of Psychology (Macmillan, 1901), Vol. II. p. 321. ® Charge to the Clergy of Durham, 1751, Works, ed. J. H. ne i (Macmillan’s English Theological Library, 1900), Vol. I. p- 290. ; FAITH AND THE WILL 71 with Christ it is not necessary to settle ‘“‘ this or that book’s date.” } . In other words, Faith is an active quality demanding verification rather than proof. ‘“‘ If we insist on proofs for everything we shall never come to action; to act 9 you must assume, and that assumption is Faith.” 2 II Hence the unreality of the attack on the Christian faith by Determinists. As Dr. Johnson said, ‘As to the doctrine of Necessity, no man believes it.” «All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.” “* We know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t.” ° Though there is a logical. justification for belief in free will, that is not why we believe in it. The difficulty is not a practical one; it is merely a stick to beat Christians with. The Secularists who use it would be equally ready to refute Calvinistic Christianity by an appeal to experience and com- mon sense. Its prevalence, where sincere, is due to the present day’s over-emphasis of Natural Science, that is, to a practical bias from the spirit of the age. Where a theory of Determinismis adopted it is generally, in the masses of men, due either to con- fused thought which cannot distinguish between free- dom and omnipotence, which thinks that if a man’s life is. limited it has no freedom at all, or else to a practical desire to find excuse for conduct deliberately chosen, though known to be wrong. As a theoretic difficulty it is met by an appeal to the consciousness of power and the sense of duty. That it will not prevail + T. C. Shairp, in The Treasury of Sacred Song, F. T. Palgrave (Oxford, 1889), p. 280. * J. H. Newman, The Grammar of Assent, ch. iv. § 3 (Burns, Oates & Co., 1870), p. 92. % Boswell’s Life, June 23, 1784; April 15, 1778; Oct. 10, 1769; ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1887), Vol. IV. p. 329; Vol. III. p- 291; Vol. IT. p. 82. 72 WHY MEN BELIEVE widely is due to man’s impuise to “ take life strivingly.” ! It is not in itself illogical or unthinkable. Intellectually it is met not so much by argument as by the con- viction that our ideas of right and wrong are not meaningless, that to label them “ epiphenomena ” does not at all explain them or prove that they are delusions, that we find it hard to believe that all the moral struggle that gives its interest to poetry, to drama; to language, society and life, does not really exist, by our own refusal to believe that the world as we know it is absurd.? _ Another, and more effective, objection is found in the question : ‘‘ After all these years what has Christianity done?” The answer is, of course, there ready. The objectors generally seem to forget that they are not the same people who have been living in the world for two thousand years, that each generation has to learn its own lessons afresh, and that the younger people are not, we elders find, so very ready to learn by the experience of others.2 Yet no one seems to ebject 1 William James, The Will to Believe (Longmans, 1903), p. 88. ‘“* Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behaviour is * all striving is vain,’ will never reign supreme, for the impulse_ to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.”’ . 2 Cp. Lotze, Microcosmus, Bk. Il. ch. v., “‘ Of the Feelings, Self-consciousness and the Will,” tr. E. Hamilton and E. E. C. Jones (T. & T. Clark, 1885), Vol. I. p. 263. ‘‘So long as we have this experience (of consciousness, feeling, effort) Materialism may prolong its existence and celebrate its triumphs within the schools, where so many ideas estranged from life find shelter, but its professors will belie their false creed in their living action. For they will continue to love and hate, to hope and fear,.to dream and study, and they will seek in vain to persuade _ us that this varied exercise of mental energies, which even a deliberate denial of the supersensible cannot destroy, is a product of their bodily organisation, or that the love of truth exhibited by some, the sensitive vanity betrayed by others, had its origin in their cerebral fibres.”’ 3 Amiel, Journal Intime, Oct. 4, 1873, tr. Mrs. Humphry Ward (Macmillan, 1885), Vol. II. p. 171. ‘“‘ Each man begins the world afresh, but not a single fault of the first man has been avoided by his successor of a thousand generations. Collective FAITH AND THE WILL 73 that education is useless and has ‘“ done nothing ”’ because there are still ignorant people, and the schools are continually teaching the same things over and over again. The objector seems to leave out of count the fact that if men repudiate Christianity, it can hardly be blamed for the consequences, any more than can a doctor if men refuse to take his medicines. Still, in spite of new generations, and of the refusal of men to accept it, Christianity has done much to which we can point. But to do so has little effect on men with no sense of history, who cannot compare the present with the past, with no concern for logic, who, after asking what our grammars called a “ rhetorical question ” two or three times, ‘‘ What has Christianity done? ”’ and interrupting the reply with “‘ You don’t answer my question. What has Christianity done?” walk away while the answer is being given. It has little effect with men who have no knowledge of the literature of the times that they contrast with Christian AES, and no acquaintance with other lands beyond that implied sometimes in the phrase, “‘ ’ve been there, so I know.” coupled with a determined prejudice against all the work of missions. Far stronger, if men can be got to open their eyes, is the evidence of all that Christianity is doing, the fact that the great mass of voluntary social work is being done by Christians and from.a Christian motive. True, it is often inadequate and patronising, but Christians form the great majority of those in the field. Others there are, no doubt, and many, but even they are largely inspired by Christian ideals. The force of this argument is largely a matter of observation, and observation, in great part, is a question of willing- ness to see. ; It is a further argument that, as a matter of fact, a ee eee ny en nee gee ioe oe nw a experience accumulates, but individual experience dies with the individual.” 74 WHY MEN BELIEVE it was Christianity that effected the change, and not Gnosticism or Arianism,! or any other form of quasi- Christianity. The change in the world dates from the appearance of Christ, and was bound up with the belief in Him as divine. The changes to-day are the outcome of the same belief, where ‘‘ reduced Christi- anity” and Unitarianism seem to fail as a Church or as a spiritual power, except, of course, in fiction. It proves itself a force as against mere ethical theories. Where the writing of moral essays makes children little prigs, or turns them into hypocrites, education, backed up by worship and a logical creed, has power to form character. Other motives seem almost invari- ably to fail in power to bind men together. The only two cohesive forces seem to be material interests and religion. : This contention is being ominously borne out by the actual moral change when Christianity is repudiated. Dr. Creighton wondered whether Christian ethics would survive severance from the faith that inspired them, as the men of his generation declared they could.” The present generation is witnessing the natural sequence of repudiation of the Christian law—notably that of marriage and all that goes with it—as the natural sequence of repudiation of Christian belief. Ill Belief based upon the practical test is only dangerous if no other tests are applied. The doctrine of Pragmatism—roughly the teaching that a thing is true because it works—is only sound, on the confession 1 For the spiritual failure of Unitarianism, in spite of its admirable social work, see Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Third Series. Religious Influences, Vol. VII. Summary (Maemillan, 1902), p. 145. 2 The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, by his wife | (Longmans, new edition, 1906), Vol. II. p. 191. Letter to Mr, Charles Roundel, July 21, 1896. FAITH AND THE WILL 75 of those who hold it, if long enough time is given to see if it really does work, and the process of testing is terribly expensive. Reason, or even instinct, can often save time by pointing out what is sure to happen, while the authority of experience makes it unnecessary to try the same experiment over again and again. Life is undoubtedly the thing that matters, but there is always the danger that we may come to believe that— ‘“‘Whate’er is best administered is best,”’ 2 which is far from being the case, and certainly many people whose lives are clearly in the right are quite wrong in their notions. In any case this practical test is based on the conviction which fortifies the soul— “That though I perish truth is so,” ? on the a priori assumption that truth is great and strong above all things, and on the postulate that we must not limit the time of proving to our own lives or even to this world. It depends, that is, on belief in God and in eternity. An equal danger lies in another form of belief based on the will, namely, that which rests faith on judgments of value. It is a strong argument for Christianity that it meets human needs, and this is a quite sound reason for believing in it, one that especially, perhaps, appeals to the modern mind. Speaking of Walter Pater’s words to Mrs. Humphry Ward about Christ’s saying, ‘‘Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are 1 Pope, H’ssay on Man, Epistle III. 2 Clough, Poems (Macmillan, 1878), p. 53:— “It fortifies my soul to know That, though I perish, Truth is so : That, howsoe’er I stray and range, Whate’er I do, Thou dost not change. I steadier step when I recall That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall.” 76 WHY MEN BELIEVE heavy laden,” that “‘ there is a mystery in it—some- thing supernatural,” } a reviewer in The Nation asks: ** What has the paraphernalia of historical evidence to do with a spiritual need?’’? True, it is not neces- sary for the simple-minded, but. numbers of complex- minded people are arguing that we can accept the spirit of Christianity while denying the facts on which it is based, an argument that cannot stand for any one who realises how mind and will unite in man. Again, this reliance on value-judgments ceases to be sound the moment it denies the value of dogmas and slights the use of analysis of what we believe and of its expression in clear, thought-out, logical forms. We may always expand and enlarge our dogmas, re-inter- preting them in the light of advancing knowledge, but the moment we begin to use words in an unnatural sense, reading into them something narrower than their original intention—as when men say that Christ was Son of God as all men are sons of God—or amending them by what are direct negatives—as when men say that “the third day He rose again from the dead ”’ means that He did not really rise again—then such attempts to keep the spirit and phraseology of ~ old valuable beliefs becomes simply ‘ntellectually dishonest. So the popular dislike of dogma and advocacy of undenominationalism is based largely on a desire to keep practices seen to be useful while holding them to be based on things which, if not actually untrue, are at least unimportant. But, as Anselm said long ago, “it is a sign of negligence if, after we are confirmed 1 A Writer’s Recollections, by Mrs. Humphry Ward (Collins, 1918), p. 121. 2 Nov. 2, 1918, p. 136.: 3 Readers of Faust will remember how Gretchen questions Faust as to his belief, and he answers in phrases which sound © to her “ beautiful and good and just like what the priest says, in church, though in somewhat different words.” The moral — sequel is well known. FAITH AND THE WILL 77 in the faith, we are not eager to understand what we believe.” 1 . It is natural that faith should be gained by “ the will to believe,” natural that there should be a response to an act of the will if the Eternal Will is there to be found out. If It is there, it is what we should expect that we should become conscious of It by co-operation with It. So the argument that God is found by obeying, that hours of mortal moral strife reveal Hin, is of a plece with the belief that He is found as the Eternal Beauty by our feelings, and as the Eternal Truth by our minds.? * A further consequence follows. If God is the absolute Right, and was incarnate in Jesus Christ, as _ we Christians believe, all good men, in so far as they are good, are Christians in communion with Christ. So Justin Martyr, early in the history of the Church, claimed that the philosophers and lawgivers of old spoke well in proportion as they had share in “ the Word which is Christ,” and declared that all they said rightly was the property of “us Christians.” ® In the Middle -Ages, too, Anselm gave his decision that, “since Christ is Truth and Justice, a man who dies for truth and justice dies for Christ.’?4 In this way 1 Cur Deus Homo, T. 2. > Cp. W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism, Bampton Lectures (Methuen, 1899), p. 32. “The moral sense cannot be a fixed code implanted in our consciousness, for then we could not explain either the variations of moral opinion, or the feeling of obligation (as distinguished from necessity) which impels us to obey it. It cannot be the product of the existing moral code of society, for then we could not explain either the genesis of that public opinion or the persistent revolt against its limitations which we find in the greatest minds. The only hypothesis which explains the facts is that in conscience we feel the motions of the universal Reason which strives to convert the human organism into an organ of itself, a belief which is expressed in religious language by saying that it is God who worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure.” * Apology, II. ch. xiii. 108. * Kadmer, Life of Anselm, Bk. I. ch. v. § 42. 78 WHY MEN BELIEVE many more men are Christians than realise it them- selves. This is not to say that Churchmanship and Theology do not matter. For the perfect man these have to be made up, and God has time in store. But intellect and feeling do not matter so much as the will in religion. It is recognised popularly that it was not the man that said, ‘“‘ I go, sir,’ that mattered most, but the man who went (though it was a pity that he was so ungracious); that laborare est orare, to work is to pray (though it is quite possible to do both); that “das Denken ist auch Gottesdienst,”’ ‘“ Thought also is worship ”’ (though that ought not to be an excuse for staying away from church); that he who, like Abou ben Adhem, is written among those who love their fellow-men will be found, on reflection, to top the list of those who love the Lord. It is recognised also by theologians. “ Interior consolation,’’ wrote Ruysbroeck— : ‘““ig of an inferior order to the act of love which renders service to the poor. Were you rapt in ecstasy like St. Peter or St. Paul, or whomsoever you will, and heard that some poor person was in want of a hot drink or of other assistance, I should advise you to awake for a moment from your ecstasy to go and prepare the food. Leave God for God: find Him, serve Him, in His members : you will lose nothing by the exchange.” ? IV The approach to God is made by doing the next duty, as Carlyle, we saw, reminded us. It is made, as Pascal advised, by associating ourselves with Christian life and worship. It is secured, as Augustine told us, and as any simple Methodist would repeat, by a surrender of the will, by ‘“‘ giving your heart to God.” 1 Reflections from the Mirror of a Mystic, p. 54. Quoted by BE. Herman in The Meaning and Value of Mysticism (James Clarke, 1916), p. 76. Cp. Longfellow’s Legend Beautiful. FAITH AND THE WILL 79 The will to believe is necessary. It is possible that in cases the wish may be, as it was to Prince Henry, father to the thought.1. But that does not necessarily mean that we are deceived, or even credulous, or that our beliefs are base-born. On the contrary, it is only those who are interested who find out, and in matters that concern us nearly we are not so ready to believe. Dr. Arnold points out that when the Romans heard the good news of the victory over Hasdrubal at the Metaurus, “they dared not lightly believe what they so much wished to be true.”’? The fact that we were born in a faith may be just the reason, as Pascal saw, why we stiffen ourselves against it, lest prejudice bias us and make us admire it more than it deserves.® If the Church is to convince the world it must be largely by the evidence of practical work. This is not to say that she will win the masses by “ doing things for them.” People are not generally very responsive to things done for them, though they do respond to demands made on them. The Church must come out and take part in the strivings and efforts of the people. Christians must accept the call 1 Henry IV., Pt. II. Act IV. scene v. * Quoted in Wilfrid Ward’s The Wish to Believe, Introduction, p. 7 (Kegan Paul, 1885). In the story which follows the school- master observes that the boys, when asking for a holiday, do not seem to be over-credulous, because they are so anxious that it will be granted. 3 Pensées, ed. Braunschvieg, No. 615. ‘‘Ona beau dire. II faut avouer que la religion chrétienne a quelque chose d’étonnant. “C'est parce que vous y étes né,’ dira-t-on. Tant s’en faut je me roidis contre, pour cette raison-la méme, de peur que cette prévention ne me suborne; mais quoique j’y suis né, je ne laisse pas de le trouver ainsi.” (‘‘ Whatever you may say, it must be admitted that the Christian religion has something astonish- ing init. Some will say, ‘ That is because you were born in it.’ Far from it; I stiffen myself against it for this very reason, for fear this prejudice bias me. But although I am born in it I cannot help finding it so.””—Tr. in Dent’s Temple Classics.) 80 WHY MEN BELIEVE to public duty as part of their faith. If they do this, not only will there never be wanting a supply of persons fitly qualified to serve God in State and Church, but the world will also see and know that the faith that finds God is an active quality of the will. CHAPTER V THE CLAIM OF AUTHORITY ‘Mais il est dangereux de se mettre hors la loi du genre humain, et de prétendre avoir raison contre tout le monde.”’— Amiel’s Journal, March 19, 1868. (But it is a dangerous thing to put yourself outside the law of the human race, and to claim to be in the right against the whole world.) TuERE is much talk in books of Apologetics, as well as in those that would contest the truth of Christianity, of the rival claims of reason and authority. The contrast is unfortunate. There is not necessarily any conflict between the two. The antithesis is a false one. They are not the two only grounds on which assent is demanded. As we have seen, there are other grounds for belief than reason, and grounds which often prove a surer basis. They have their authority, often ‘more commanding than that of logic. Reason itself has.an authority of its own; while authority as a ground of faith declares that it can make good the reasonable- ness of its claim. It is pointed out by the opponents of authority, that authority has to be submitted to by an act, if not of reason, at least of the individual. The fact is not contested even by the extremest advocates of the claims of authority. The Roman Catholic, who lays such store by the guidance and direction of his Church, admits quite readily that the act of submission to its rule must be by a man’s deciding to submit because he sees good reason to do so. It is granted by all who realise the value of external authority that it is of very little 81 82 WHY MEN BELIEVE use till accepted and assimilated. In education it is a recognised truth that to impose your superior know- ledge on a child is of small value unless he makes it his own, a process involving activity of his feelings, thought, and will. So, as we discuss the question, we realise that the issue really is between internal and external authority, between what the individual gains for himself and what he gets from his fellows, between the lessons learned by his own experience and those gathered from that of others. We realise that the former is generally called reason, because in exercising our reason we are more conscious of our individuality—our thoughts are our own while we more often feel in concert and act with others—though, as a matter of fact, our individual decisions are based on feelings and prejudices, on acts of will, modest or obstinate, quite as often as on thought-out, rational grounds. But each of us is one, and others are many. The real point at issue, therefore, is that of the individual and society. The problem that we meet in religion is just that which we come across in politics. The necessity of consent on the part of the governed, the right to rebel, the duty of submission, the obliga- tions of citizenship, all have their counterpart in the question of belief. When we realise this, at once the value of authority is seen; the value from sheer numbers, since the others are many and the individual one; the value from continuity, since society as a corporation never dies, but goes on accumulating experience and building up its fabric of assured results; the value from experts, since the individual is not likely to be an authority in more than one or two subjects while the field of knowledge is wide, so that the others in most matters have the authority. As one of the ablest pleaders for authority in modern times has said :— “‘ If we are to judge with equity between the rival claimants, we must not forget that it is Authority rather than Reason to THE CLAIM OF AUTHORITY 83 which, in the main, we owe, not religion only, but ethics and polities; that it is Authority which supplies us with the essential elements in the premises of science; that it is Authority rather than Reason which lays deep the foundations of social life; that it is Authority rather than Reason whith cements its superstructure. And though it may seem to savour of paradox, it is yet no exaggeration to say, that if we would find the quality in which we most notably excel the brute creation, we should look for it, not so much in our faculty of convincing and being convinced by the exercise of reasoning, as in our capacity for influencing and being influenced through the action of Authority.” ? In other words, it is the old truth that we must remember, that, as Aristotle said, man is a political animal, and that the man who elects to live alone is either a god or a beast. I When so put the value of authority is seen at once. But perhaps it is not realised to the full how large a part it plays in the world. In art, for instance, we do not naturally like the best, or even have the eyes to see it. Sharp contrasts of colour impress us, so that crude and startling combina- tions attract us at once. Marked rhythms and insistent melodies heard for the first time prove irresistible. The obvious and commonplace in literature call out our first admiration. So at our first visit most of us do not care for the pictures in the National Gallery. We begin by thinking that classical music is dull. We see nothing very wonderful in Shakespeare, after all. But if we are wise we distrust our own judgment. It is not likely that experts are unanimously wrong. We subject ourselves to their opinion. We say, “There must be something more in these pictures than I can see.”? We sit down before them, and their beauty slowly begins to penetrate into us. We want 1 A. J. Balfour, The Foundations of Belief (Longmans, 1895), p. 229, 84 WHY MEN BELIEVE to come and see them again. We find that we do not get tired of the copies of them on our walls. We still retain our preferences; but we readjust our standards. We care less for Raphael and more for Rembrandt. We learn to appreciate different styles. We come to understand the Florentine painters better, and also to admire the Venetian School more. We have put ourselves to school with authority, and we are rewarded. So, in music, we find that cheap and catchy tunes wear out. Soldiers soon ceased to sing “‘ Tipperary,” while folk-songs have lasted. Children like them in schools; they go down well at concerts, Just as we were told they would. We read that Bach is greater than Handel, and, in spite perhaps of early associations, we find that, after all, he is. If we do not think so at first, we take it for granted that musicians, the men who are trained and exercised in the matter, know better than we do. We submit to the authority of experts and are justified. We say that such men speak with authority, and call those who really know “ authorities on the subject.”’ We listen to the voice of what we might call the Churches of Music, or of Art, or of Literature, and find that they teach us to hear, or see, or understand. | Perhaps the value of authority is most clearly seen in Natural Science, in the realm where the assured results of learning are most easily stored. Its dis- coveries can be recorded with less uncertainty, and so we get that kind of advance which, as we saw, is always so striking in intellectual matters, because, where feelings must be experienced and character forged afresh by each generation, knowledge in its results can be more easily stored up and inherited. No one in any science proposes to ignore the work of all those who have gone before him. The mass of ascertained results we take on trust from others. That is the first condition of progress. Even where for the discipline THE CLAIM OF AUTHORITY 85 of education we put boys at school into the laboratory, and make them try again the elementary experiments for themselves, we select those experiments for them. We know what will happen, and choose both the material and the methods. We do not turn them loose into the world, as the first discoverers were turned, because it is good for them to find out things for themselves. We rely on the work of others, using good authorities. The whole mass of results is taken on trust from the corporate authority of men of science. If there is to be any specialisation, if any subdivision of labour, if any thorough work, we must accept whole areas of knowledge on trust. So, too, in life. In childhood we learn first from the authority of our parents. We go to schools and find our place under the corporate authority of masters, with the scheme and plan of work all mapped out. We cannot see at the time what the discipline of the classics is leading to. It needs a whole scheme running through several years of school and University life to get its results. But others know it, and put us through the course. In learning to play the piano we are told, “ This is the best way to strike the keys, this is the proper way to finger this passage.”’ It seems harder at first. We submit, and find that our master is right, for it is not a mere fad of his, but a weighed and tested piece of knowledge. The boy learning a trade is told, “ This is the right way to handle the tool or mind the machine,” and if he is a teachable boy he learns; if he thinks he knows all about it already he spoils his material and instruments, and never becomes skilled. More than that, all through our lives we are continually handing over what we learn to the authority of auto- matic action. Things done consciously and with Jabour become habits which we obey, and our very power of advance depends on the rapidity and sureness with which we can make the surrender. All through life we are continually learning without realising it ; 86 WHY MEN BELIEVE from fashion, whose authority is so imperious, and from those less variable forms of fashion which we call customs; from current language with its inheritance from literature; from usages of society, from national habits, from racial characteristics—in other words, from the accumulated experience of others. Over large areas, for masses of men, in endless ramifications of human life, conservatism is the necessary condition of progress. But all through this there remains the necessity for individual action. The very act of submission is a personal act, whether it be of tastes, of intellect, or of action. In all departments of life we have to become as little children to enter the various kingdoms,* but that means a strenuous self-expression, paying attention, working, assimilating, and seeing. We have got to learn to take advice, and that is as hard for every man as it was for Greedy Dick or Meddlesome Matty, who only learned by experience.” It depends on the individual being not so much willing to sink himself as ready to co-operate. It depends on his having faith in the policy of the whole, in his believing in its rationality, and in his feeling its beauty and worth. II To understand more of this we must study what has been called the Psychology of the Crowd. The term is perhaps a misnomer. We do not probably believe, except as a figure of speech, that a crowd has a soul 1 So Bacon. ‘“ Regnum Scientiz, ut regnum Ceeli, non nisi sub persona infantis intratur.” (‘Into the kingdom of know- ledge, as into the kingdom of heaven, whoso would enter, must become as a little child.) Quoted by Sir A. Quiller-Couch in his Lectures on the Art of Writing (Cambridge, 1918), p. 231. 2 Original Poems for Infant Minds, by several Young Persons (Jane and Anne Taylor and Adelaide O’ Keefe), 24th ed., 1830, Vol. II. p. 37. THE CLAIM OF AUTHORITY 87 which came into being when it gathered and ceased to be when it dispersed. Even the Christian, who believes that Christ is in the Church, and that men live and move and have their being and their fellowship with one another in Him, would not use the expression to describe Him to whom they believe that they owe the reality of their corporate life. It is rather that individuals are influenced by the presence of others. Some actions are checked because other men will not join in them. They make us conspicuous. We feel alone in doing them. We are repressed by the opinions and words of others. Other actions, on the contrary, are stimulated. Corporate doings, such as singing in chorus, are of greater interest than isolated efforts. We are led on by imitation, stirred by rivalry, excited by praise. The result is that what is peculiar to the individual is inhibited, and what is common to the majority is strengthened, and is found to have practical and powerful authority. The authority of corporate emotion is seen conspicu- ously in publie celebrations, in audiences at theatres and concerts, in revivalist religious meetings. It acts, however, continuously and unceasingly elsewhere. A lonely life is flat, even if not (as is often the case) un- natural and morbid. Men when ill are forbidden to see visitors for the sake of quiet, just as certain forms of food are forbidden in order to leave the body at rest, but in normal life we need to eat and are continually being swayed by the feeling of the presence of others. The experience of the past seems to pass into words and ceremonies which become charged with emotions which subdue us, and that with a dominating authority. Classic expressions have a ring in them that seems to sum up the passions and hopes and fears of generations, till things seem to have in them the sense of tears that touch men to the heart. The artistic conscious- ness of man has established forms of art out of its experience, in literature the novel, the essay, the 88 WHY MEN BELIEVE sonnet, the drama, the lyric, the ballad and the epic, answering to the different lasting moods of the mind; it elaborate modes of music, the sonata and the song; » it works out laws of harmony and creates the measures and steps of the dance. All these definite and classic forms of composition impose themselves on us in the arts with an authority that is valid—valid, but not necessarily sound—-just in proportion as psychologically it represents the common artistic sense of mankind. So, too, there is an authority in methods of thought. The rules of logic have established themselves in Western minds. The Oriental way of thinking is very different, but when the two come into contact with one another the method learned from Aristotle wins, because it better suits the human mind. The customs of speech have been worked out into rules of grammar which are not overthrown, because they are based on human practice, and enable us to think as others do and in common with them. The procedure of science by observation and experiment, by criticism and generalisation into laws, is of universal authority, because that is the way that the minds of men work. There are variations in different peoples. Languages have each their own characteristics. Methods of thought show different features among different nations, but behind all such are the great common characteristics which we must reckon with, and defer to, if we are to be understood by men. | There is also the authority of corporate action. There are things that satisfy the common will, and things that ‘‘men don’t do.’ We have to observe the conventions of society because they are essential to civilisation or lifein common. There are established customs of social life, a certain order in dinners, a reckoning of different ways of the week, sports and games played by understood rules, methods of political procedure, committees with agenda and minutes and chairmen, schools with methods of teaching, laws with THE CLAIM OF AUTHORITY 89 penalties of the courts—all these have established their authority (not necessarily therefore not to be questioned) because they have proved to work in the long run. It is on the recognition of these facts that all art, study, and life is based. To refuse to submit to authority is simply to narrow your life both theoreti- cally and practically. In proportion as things meet the needs of men we find the elements of permanence in them. For human nature does not change, and so the things that it wants last. Herein is the strength of conservatism. It is a sort of lineal democracy expressing the will and enshrining the experience of the people along the line of time throughout the ages, and not merely that of the chance majority found by taking a cross section of society at one moment of its evolution. Old things need not therefore be true, but, as Clough saw, neither need the new, and when the souls of two thousand years have stored up their hopes and fears in certain forms, those forms have an authority that is at least worth re-considering. In stable and isolated societies there is often a culture that city populations with all their changes and opportunities know nothing of. In former days—and we may hope that the war has not utterly destroyed it—there met at Ober-Ammergau streams of tradition in literature, with its odes, its dialogues, and its allegorism ; in drama, with its mise-en-scéne, its chorus, and its action; in music, with its singing, its harmony, and its playing; that represented the heritage in some cases of thousands of years, not only from Germany, whose tradition is_ short, but.from Judea, from Alexandria, from. Italy, and from Austria, from the Early Church, from the Middle Ages, and from the ‘Renaissance, that made the Passion Play the final form of one particular kind of art. The inheritance of the villagers, coming with such authority, was of unique value. eo ees In proportion as things meet the needs of men we get ihe element of universality in them. They are found 90 WHY MEN BELIEVE everywhere. For men do not change their nature when they cross the seas. Herein is the strength of imperialism. It is based on the assumption that we are all men and brothers. Certain things, we can reckon, are recognised as right wherever men find them. This is the basis of all international justice. Certain things are useful to all men. This is the basis of inter- national commerce. Certain things please all men. This is the basis of international art. Certain things are seen to be true. This is the basis of international science. Certain things are holy, honest, of good report. This is the ground on which missions go forth. ‘‘ A man’s a man for a’ that.” We can assume that men will respond to certain demands, that certain ideas will “catch on.” It is the great universal things that have an authority that is almost irresistible. In proportion as things meet the needs of men we get the element of general acceptance. Every one agrees astothem. Herein is the strength of democracy. What every one agrees about may not be right, but it is unquestioned. It is useless to make laws if the people do not intend to obey them. They are only effective when backed by public opinion. Things that cannot be made to appeal to the masses we are inclined to put aside as lacking authority. We dismiss them as fads. Eccentric cults and esoteric doctrines donot interest us, as a rule. They may be true. We do not wish to deny it, but at best they are only for the few. They do not matter. On the other hand, popular enthusiasms, waves of feeling, widespread superstitions, ineradicable instincts, count. They have to be reckoned with. We may dispute their claims, but we cannot deny the existence of their authority. So it comes about that the great imposing things are simple. They earn the title of classical. “ The stories of Robinson Crusoe, of the Odyssey and Greek Mythology, or Joseph and his brothers are so ealled,”’ writes Prof. Findlay, “‘ because they bear the stamp of THE CLAIM OF AUTHORITY 9] approval by the collected wisdom of many nations.” ! So it comes about that a man may find, “when long years have passed and he has had experience of life,” that— ; “tines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind and a charm which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival.’’ 2 . It is because they “‘ give utterance to the experience of Nature’s children in every clime.” They have authority in proportion as they fulfil the conditions of the Catholic Canon quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, always, everywhere, and by all. But it is not universally true that the voice of the people is the voice of God. It is not true, as Hartley declared, that “‘ the rule of life drawn from the practice and opinion of mankind corrects and improves itself perpetually, till at last it determines entirely for virtue and excludes all kinds and condition of vice.” * It is not universally acknowledged that “ it’s wiser being good than bad.” Bishop Butler’s wonder whether nations, as well as individuals, might not go mad, has at times ‘seemed to be justified. Popular taste is often wrong. The “‘ man in the street’ represents merely the average, and his opinions seem to be universally characterised by mediocrity. There is a certain inevitable vulgarity in the results of the popular will. For human nature is fallen. Explain it as you will, the fact remains. It is a matter of experience. The authority that we are willing to defer to is the authority of experts (or those whom we believe to be such), that of the opinion of men who know. And knowledge i J.J. Findlay, Principles of Class Teaching (Macmillan, 1911), - p. 156. Ps J. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent, ch. iv. §§ 2, 4 (Burns, Oates & Co., 1870), p. 75. 3 Observations on Man, Part II. ch. iii. § 1, Prop. 49. G 92 WHY MEN BELIEVE only comes by labour and by its inevitable companion suffering. To speak with real authority a man must have paid the price; and the same is true of bodies of men. Moreover there is a duty of criticising. A stand must often be made against the tyranny of the masses, whether those that have existed in the past or that exist in the present. Individual men are called upon to be martyrs. Socrates, whom the democracy of Athens put to death, Telemachus, who by his self-sacrifice put an end for ever to the gladia- torial shows, Luther (in his queer way), Galileo (in popular estimation at least), King Charles (on the one point of loyalty to the Church), and a whole host of unknown :— ** bravely dumb that did their deed and scorned to blot it with a name,” ! not to mention “ the name that once put on a semblance of mortality” *—all have played their part as men against the world. But it is not only individuals who are so called. ‘‘ When bad men combine,” said Burke, ‘‘ the good must associate,” ? and there is need. of corporate criticism of the spirit of the world. All the above succeeded because they had (or failed because they had not) a following. Christ did not merely die and rise again. He founded a Church. 1H. R. Lowell, Poems, All Saints. 2 Hazlitt, Persons One would Wish to have Seen, Works (Geo. Bell, 1902), Sketches and Essays, Winterslow Essay, II. p. 294, who describes Lamb as saying: “If Shakespeare was to come into the room we should all rise up to meet him; but if that Person was to come into it we should all fall down and try to kiss the hem of His garment.” 3 Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontent, Works (Rivingtons, 1852), Vol. III. p. 167. THE CLAIM OF AUTHORITY 93 III In religion, then, the authority of the Church is a ground of belief, just as in all other departments of life we trust the common experience of others who are qualified to speak. The voice of the Church represents the tested experience of spiritual experts, of men who have lived in communion with Christ (such is our claim), the Source of all beauty, truth, and goodness. To share the life of Christ involves, in theological language, ‘bearing His cross” and “ being crucified with Him.” The authority of the Church is guaranteed because it costs something to be a member of it. In proportion to the fulness of this communion with Christ is the authority of the Church infallible. But the work of the Church is not merely that of criticising the action of the world. At least, the soundest method of criticism is to do better yourself. The Church has a positive mission in the world, and a service to render it that the world can ill afford to do without. It is needed for progress, for breadth, and for effectiveness of life. Progress depends in spiritual things, as in material, on having a reserve of capital. Capital is, as our handbooks of Economics tell us, ‘‘ that part of wealth which is saved in order to assist future production.” } As society accumulates capital in money, so the Church stores up her spiritual gains and makes production easier, besides laying up a reserve against times of trial. It was our balance at this bank that upheld us during the war. At the fire at Salonica our soldiers, with their inheritance of a sense of readiness to do a good turn to others, at once, without hesitation, began _ to help the homeless instead of pillaging. In social work the efforts of philanthropists and reformers 1M. G. Fawcett, Political Hconomy for Beginners, ninth edition, revised and enlarged (Macmillan, 1904), ch. iii. p. 25, 94 WHY MEN BELIEVE depend for their success on there being such a store of moral force to rely on. Where there is strong family feeling, a spirit of self-reliance, pride in good work, honesty and _ straightforwardness, something can be done. There is a place in the world for great men. They are needed if we are to rise above mediocrity. They shame contentment with low ideals. Especially are men needed who can guide and inspire. ‘ When the best men stop trying the world sinks back like lead.” But, after all, their power depends on there being a response to their efforts broad-based on masses of men. The advance of one class is dangerous without a corre- sponding progress in the others, especially when there are no middle intervening ranks. There are opportu- nities only when the wealth of knowledge and of spiritual force is great and distributed, and its distribu- tion depends on the Christian attitude in the pos- sessors of this spiritual wealth. Where men act in the spirit of the kings of the Gentiles, as benefactors, exercising authority and lording it over them, then there is failure. When they have the spirit of Christ, not counting His highest prerogative a thing to be grasped at, but among His disciples as he that serveth, where the possession of spiritual capital is regarded as a trust to be used for, and shared with, those poorer than the possessor, there is general progress and advance. The spirit of suspicion, of distrusting a man merely because he is better informed or better endowed, is fatal to the progress of those who need to share his knowledge or moral force. Class jealousies at home and racial differences abroad, with .all their hindrance to the world’s going forward, can only be effectively met and overcome by welding all men into one body in the Church, with its “ treasure in heaven”’ laid up to be shared by all alike without diminution of its store. The Church is needed to broaden the narrow, starved lives of men. It is easy, no doubt, to point out the narrowness of Church matters as we see them all around THE CLAIM OF AUTHORITY 95 us to-day. Our mean*%buildings, with their colour- washed walls and gaudy, stained-glass windows, our booming organs and harsh-singing choir-boys, the bad elocution and feeble preaching of the clergy, the congregations mostly composed of women. The man who has been to church on a Sunday morning does not perhaps feel that public worship is very broadening. But the fact remains that he has been in what in most places is the one building in the village or town where any attempt is made to set men’s feet in a large room, the one structure (other than the public-house) in which there is any attempt at high art. He has taken part in what is for the majority their one attempt at serious music and poetry above the level of the gramophone and the music-hall ditty. He has joined in the only available living rite that unites him with the past. He has heard passages from the finest English literature. He has listened to a man at least trying to deal with big issues of life and duty. He has come out of his narrow individualism, and for an hour has shared a common life with others. All this was inadequately expressed, no doubt, but it was at least broader than lying in bed or sitting in his shirt- sleeves reading the police news in a Sunday paper, or even than working on his allotment or playing golf on the links. | Common worship offers the most conspicuous oppor- tunity for bringing a man out of himself, but the whole life of churchmanship is, or might be, the broadest education for man. In the communion of a corporate body one supplies what the other lacks. Each element of knowledge should be known in relation to other things and to the sum of knowledge, yet .no one of us can claim to take all knowledge for his province. Even a University concerns itself only with the sum of intellectual knowledge. The practical university for the mass of people who work is the Church, with its experience of duty and struggle, of life and death, of 96 WHY MEN BELIEVE victory over sin, of friendship and service, of art and beauty, of holiness and self-sacrifice—that is, of the things that matter. This knowledge can only be stored up and shared where there is voluntary subordi- nation of one to another for great ends, where men are ready to play second fiddle in the great orchestra, where the dignity is recognised of readily accepting a lower place. The acceptance of the authority of the Church is necessary for effectiveness in the things that count in life. It is needed by the child, since it at once gives it a start, and enables it to profit by the labours of those who have gone before. It is needed by the man, as giving him a broader world in which there is scope for self-expression and self-realisation, since true individuality is only to be found in society. It is needed by the old, to give external support to what they have in earlier years found to be true, to give them a position and prolong their value when they have gained experience and judgment in the hard school of life, but are beginning to be threatened with physical weariness and decay. The world cannot afford to do without the Church. IV If the Church is to do her work there must be active co-operation of all her members. Mere passive ac- quiescence is not faith, but laziness. There must be activity of artistic life, of mental energy, and of effective action. Each man must do his part willingly, and not as a matter of quasi-military discipline. The work of the laity is not merely to ‘‘ hunt, shoot, and entertain,’ while in ecclesiastical matters they just do what they are told.1. There must be individual initi- ative with a sense of good-will, interest and fellowship. 1 Cp. Wilfrid Ward, Life of Cardinal Newman (Longmans, 1912), Vol. Il. p. 147. Letter from Mgr. Talbot to Cardinal Manning. THE CLAIM OF AUTHORITY 97 The faith that we have been considering will come by taking part in the Christian life. The individual will decide, no doubt, on grounds of feeling, reason, and moral judgment, as we have analysed them above, but he will exercise his faith under authority, that is, with reference to his common life with others. Thereby he will find scope for the activities of the whole man, profiting by the faith of his fellows, emotional, rational, and practical. Corporate life makes belief effective by providing the atmosphere in which it can live, offering scope for, rather than producing, faith. An essential element of Christian life is that of common worship. This will be in forms guaranteed by authority, with housing of architecture and with use of all the elements of colour, music, movement, and literature that are natural to man. Liturgies are the outcome of corporate experience. Certain forms stand out in which, as a matter of fact, men have prayed: the Eucharist at the altar—it is not without reason that the custom of worshipping at the Mass on Sunday has come in the Roman Church to be regarded as an obligation—Choir Offices of psalms, readings and prayers, with their predominance of intellectual meditation—especially natural to corporate bodies and communities—and Litanies, with their alternations of varying petitions and fixed refrains answering at once to untutored human needs—these are the classic forms that have lasted.1 There is a place for private 1 “Ne suffit il pas déja de se boucher les oreilles dans une salle de danse, pour se croire dans un maison de fous? Pour celui qui a détruit en lui méme Jidée religieuse, Vensemble des cultes sur la terre doit produire un effet tout semblable. Mais il est dangereux de se mettre hors la loi du genre humain et de prétendre avoir raison contre tout le monde.’”’—Amiel’s Journal, March 19, 1868. (‘‘Is it not enough just to stop your ears in a ballroom to make you think you are in a madhouse ? To aman who has killed the idea of religion in himself the different forms of worship on the earth must produce just the same result. But it is dangerous to put yourself outside the law of the human race and to claim to be right against the whole world.”) 98 WHY MEN BELIEVE prayer, with its greater freedom and variety, perhaps even a need for its exercise in conjunction with public, but common prayer comes first. ‘‘As men,’ wrote Hooker— ‘““we are at our own choice, both for time, and place, and form, according to the exigencies of our own occasions in private ; but the service, which we do as members of a publie body, is public, and for that cause must needs be accounted by so much worthier ‘than the other, as a whole society of such condition exceedeth the worth of any one.” “There is little reason to believe,” says Dr. Rash- dall— “that on any large scale such habits of private devotion have survived, or ever will survive, the entire desuetude of public worship. Just as the internal Conscience is only created and educated by a powerful ‘ external conscience,’ so private Religion is created and educated by the external manifestations and social organisation of Religion.” 2 : | The element of dogma is an essential also of Christian life, since man has an intellect that needs to be sancti- fied. In accepting the tradition of the creeds a man is brought at once into an intellectual atmosphere larger than he could have created for himself. The fulness and logical coherence of Christian philosophy gives the sense of satisfaction that orthodoxy always brings, the feeling when theories have been tried and weighed and found not wanting. Having been built up in this way, Christian theology is full in content, and in interesting human content. But though a common ground of agreement is necessary for the common action of any body of men, the value of Christian thought is not merely to be found in the creeds of the past. There is need of corporate mental activity to-day, teaching and learning in turn. There is need of interchange of ideas and commerce in things 1 Keclesiastical Polity, Bk. V. ch. xxiv. § 1. * H. Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil (Oxford, 1907), Vol. IL. p. 300 note. THE CLAIM OF AUTHORITY 99 intellectual for mutual mental enrichment. There is work to be done in Universities, in libraries, and in Colleges and schools. There is a place for the activities of study circles, for a Christian journalism in the Press. To bea Christian a man must think out his philosophy, but must also be a missionary and take his part in spreading the truth.} Finally, there is need of action in the Christian life. A man must do something. Christianity involves membership of a body with traditions from the past, but also active in the present and with a task before it. The obligations of membership will always be decried as narrowing by a certain type of mind. It must cost something to be a Christian; that, as we saw, is the test by which the authority of the Church must be guaranteed. We only really share the lives of others when we suffer or work and ‘succeed with them, A sense of brotherhood in the Church will only grow strong in proportion as Christianity is regarded as an active thing. But if this seems to narrow the Church in numbers it makes its work far wider. In proportion as men realise the obligations of membership, so will they have that in them which will make them ready to respond to the call to public service. A Church composed of men desiring to serve, and not to dominate, not satisfied with the inner life of devotion and of its own affairs, will send them out continually to do their work in politics and government, in education and literature, in social work and philanthropy, in medicine and. in healing, in art and recreation, finding both a larger and wider life for themselves, and leaving a better and purer world behind them when their work is done. 1H. Rashdall, Philosophy and Religion (Duckworth, 1909), p. 148. ‘It is only in proportion as they become part of a system of religious teaching, and the possession of an organised religious community, that the ideas of philosophers really come home to multitudes of men, and shape the history of the world.” INDEX Addison, 5 Aisthetie sense, 29 Agnosticism, 58 - Amiel, 72, 81, 97 Andrewes, Bp., 3 Anesaki, M., 24 Apologetics, 46 Aristotle : ** man a social animal,” 4 ‘the foursquare man,” 8 ‘‘a beast or a god,” 10 4 “ the nature is the end,” 30 ‘reason by itself moves nothing,” 49 Art, a form of beauty, 32 and the Incarnation, 38 democratic appeal of, 37 for art’s sake, 35 Augustine pare and understand- ing, 42 love calls forth love, 26 love, not faith or hope, the test, 50 our hearts know no rest, 26 the mystery of man, 1, 4 Authority, 6, 12, 81-99 Bacon : ‘entry into the kingdom of knowledge,” 86 Of Friendship, 10 ‘the sight of virtue,”’ Bagehot, Walter, 53 Balfour, ar Bea “ authority,” 82 **gmall survival value of the noblest things,” 31 Beauty, 15, 21-41 Benson, Mr. A. C., 5. Blake, 17 Brooke, Rupert, 38 ol 101 Browning, E. B., 63 Browning, R. : Easter Day, 36 Luria, 24 . Natural Magic, 61 Old Pictures in Florence, 37 Paracelsus, 11 The Guardian Angel, 23 Burke : Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, 5 Present Discontents, 55, 92 Butler : Analogy— ‘religion a practical thing,’ 60 “truth judged by all the evidence taken together,” 19 ‘““the world a scheme beyond our comprehension,” 51 Charge to the Clergy of Durham: ‘‘keeping up the form and face of religion,’ 39 ‘‘conviction without being able to answer all diffi- culties,’ 70 Life ; ‘‘nations, as individuals, going mad,” 91 Sermons : Preface, 1 Sermon IV., Upon _ the Government of the Tongue, 1 Butler, Samuel: Hudibras, 2 Caldecott, A., 24, 60 Candide, 35 Capital, 93 Carlyle, 70 Carroll, Lewis, 14 Catholic Canon, 91 Christianity, what it has done, 73 102 Classic forms of worship, 97 Clough, A. H., 15, 17, 75 Common worship, 95, 97 Creighton, M., 50, 74 Crowd psychology, 86 Danie, 8, 26, 57, 68 Darwin, 29, 65 Determinists, 71 Dickens, 61, 65 Dogma, 43, 52, 98 Déllinger, J. I. von, 58 Eliot, George, 49, 70 Emotions, 6, 13, 20, 23-41 I:xperience, 16 Faust, 35, 44, 52 Faweettt, M. G., Political Economy for Beginners, 93 Feeling as a ground for belief, 24 Findlay, J. J., Principles of Class Teaching, 80 Fletcher of Saltoun, 24 Freedom of the Will, 71 ff. Gilbert, W. S., 12 soethe, 35, 44, 52 Gwatkin, H. M., 44, 62 Hartley, 91 Hazlitt, 92 Herbert, George, 28 Tooker : ‘* love—seldom able to yield any reason of itself,” 14 ‘* religious.and sacred days,” 40 ‘*“the service which wes do as members of a public body,” 98 Hume, 63 Huxley, 40, 66 Illingworth, 30, 31 Inmortality, 68 Incarnation, the, and Art, 38 Inge, W. R., 12 INDEX as James, William ;: “acting as if a thing were real,’’ 70 ‘outward movements of the dispositions we prefer to cultivate,” 39 “the impulse to take life strivingly,”’ 72 “the necessity of faith,” 67 ~ ‘*will and belief two names for the same psychological phenomenon,” 61 Johnson, Dr., 45, 71 Kant, 46 Keats, 26, 37, 38 Kidd, B., 41 Laity, place of, 96 Lamb, 92 Locke, 1, 21, 49 Lotze, 72 Lowell, 92 Lowes Dickinson, 64 Marriage, 14 Mathematics, 30 Membership, 99 Mill, re : ‘* indictment of nature,” 51 ‘the feeling of ‘not worth while,’ ” 55, 69 Morley, J., 35, 43 Natural selection, 29 Nature, 32, 51 Necessity, 71 Newman, J. H.: ‘*a man convinced against his will,” 2 ‘““converting by a smart syllogism,”’ 57 ‘‘ effects of first hearing the arguments of unbelievers,”’ ¥ — ‘intuitive knowledge,” 53 ‘lines, the birth of some chance morning,’ 91 INDEX 1038 Newman, J. H. (continued): ** nersonal influence,” 62 “truth depends on various and scattered evidences,” 19 ‘* the religious use of excited feelings,” 69 . “what is unhesitatingly asserted at length finds credit,” 14 Ober-Ammergau, 89 Oxford Movement, 56 Pascal : “always having proofs at hand,” 21 ‘* Pesprit de finesse,” 53 ‘man a king dethroned,” 4 *‘ opposition from the wish to believe,” 79 “ taking holy water,” 39, 70 “the eternal silences of space,” 33 ‘“‘the heart has its reasons,” 15 “the heart that feels God,” 25 Pater, Walter, 75 ** Pathetic fallacy,” 33 Pattison, Mark, 56 Plato : ‘‘democratic tyrants hiring . fine, loud, persuasive voices,’ 14 «the essence of Beauty,” 32, 34 Podsnap, Mr., 65 Pope, 75 Pragmatism, 74 Private devotion, 98 Psychology of the crowd, 86 Rashdall, Hastings : ** ideas effective in organised communities,” 99 ‘Rashdall, Hastings (continued) : “knowledge and _ personal intercommunication,” 9, 18 ‘origin of mathematical science,” 30 “private devotion public worship,” 98 “theological beliefs neces- sary to interpret moral consciousness,” 52 Reason, 7, 15, 42-59 Renan, 35 Roman Church, 24 Romanes, G. J., 55 Rousseau, 28 Ruskin, 33 Ruysbroeck, 78 and Schiller, F. C. 5., 68 Schleiermacher, 24 Shairp, T. C., 71 Shakespeare, Sonnet LIV., 37 Shebbeare, C. J., 26, 31 Sinn Feiners, 68 Spurgeon, C. I’. E., 33 ‘** Survival value,” 31 Suspicion, 94 Taylor, Jane and Anne, 86 Tennyson, 25, 31 Tertullian, .25 Theology, 52 Thomas & Kempis, 63 Tolstoi, 32 Ugliness in Nature, 33 Unitarianism, failure of, 55, 74 Voltaire, 35 Ward, Wilfrid, 79, 96 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 75 Wesley, 25, 51 Wordsworth, 25 BY THE SAME AUTHOR AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF PASTO- RAL THEOLOGY. (Clarendon Press, 7s. 6d, net.) BAPTISM AND CHRISTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY. (Clarendon Press, 5s. net.) PRINCIPLES OF PARISH WORK: An Essay in Pastoral Theology. (Longmans, Green & Cee 5S. net.) CIRCUMSTANCES OR CHARACTER? Studies in Social Work. (Methuen & Co., 35. 6d. net.) CHARITABLE RELIEF. (Longmans, Green & Co; 25. 6d. net.) THE CHRISTIAN’S CLAIM ABOUT JESUS OF NAZARETH: ‘Perfect God and Perfect Man.’’ (S.P.C.K., 9d. net.) PASTORAL THEOLOGY AND THE MODERN WORLD. (Oxford University Press, 45. 6d. net.) QUESTION TIME IN HYDE PARK: Series I, II, and III. (S.P.C.K., each 9¢. net.) SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY Ricwarp CiLAy & Sons, Limirep, ” PARIS GARDEN, STAMFORD ST., S.E, 1, iso AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK, . é e F 2 3 4 ‘ * P Date Due a ee ¥ =i : ek se | Sis. ei= reo 5 om ; rh an i 4: Vy, A Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Libra 1012 01012 4800 _ D tae B Ge ony jee , iiss) hi An j ae : ir ‘ ' i” x Heh ole Au ar 4 - ja” Dp ‘ Liaper PY Bes ; a ) , , fh i Ui 1) LL Ad ry ni © y te ; Al ar : p ¥ q way a Ay the, r ; ny iii i i 5 ‘ j I I y \e = - i . ¥ ee Ter ' Cap is ry we i * yi) ‘ ’ Py \ ’ ra "} oe , aie it | & q [o i 14. cay abs \ ; . 4 tAly y's ir ¥ i , iv a 1 me aD), Xa ae ae hah oa) | a : Me Ki , ! 4 - i) 7 1 ivy al . b 4 f q el ( ii i « a ae ry Sos ee Til att See? meee ele bane. 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